It is true that the figures of the great conspirators are very prominent in the picture we evoke of those times; yet beside them stand great captains, law-givers, and artists, and the background is filled with a most interesting population devoted in turn to labour and pleasure, to commerce and to war, and full of the pride of a life of its own. The germs of corruption are already manifest, but they will not develop until a later time, when the beautiful lady, Venice, less young indeed, but imbued with a charm more subtle, descends to the slow enjoyment of the fruits of her victories, and loses herself in the intoxication of a perpetual carnival. Historically speaking, the fourteenth century in Venice begins two or three years before 1300, since the year 1297 is separated from those which preceded it by a far greater distance than it is from the beginning of the fifteenth century, owing to the profound changes brought about in the government and life of the city by the closure of the Great Council. The history of the century in which the Republic reached the culminating point of her strength and development begins quite naturally with a glance at this memorable law and its consequence. The famous measure which, officially at least, changed the already ancient commonwealth of Venice into a government which, though aristocratic, still proposed to be republican, was not the work of a day any more than it was the creation of any one doge. It was not a revolution, but rather the result of a slow, inevitable evolution, peaceful in character, of which the first beginnings can barely be traced, far back in history, in the struggles of rival factions of the aristocracy. So far as factions are concerned, none but those of the nobles ever had any influence on Venetian history, for the parties that existed amongst the people never engaged in politics, and while they bore one another many a traditional grudge that had its origin in the early jealousies of the settlers, we never find them mixing in conspiracies against the government or breaking out in sedition and rioting. Even the mutual hatred of Niccolotti and Castellani disappeared completely as soon as the need of public defence called out the genuine patriotism of both. In brief, the following is the story of the ‘Serrata,’ the closing of the Great Council for the exclusion of the people, a measure without parallel, except, perhaps, in the legislation of Rome. [Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 90, 341._] According to a statute which regulated the election and the offices of the Great Council in 1172, and which was perhaps instituted in that year, the Council was composed of a variable number of members, originally four hundred and eighty, and never more than five hundred, who were elected every year without any distinction of class from the principal citizens, and undoubtedly, in the great majority, from the aristocracy.