For the earliest celebration of the nuptials there was need of no golden Bucintoro, no feast of red wine and chestnuts, no damask roses in a silver cup, not so much as a ring to seal the bond. For it was no vaunt of sovereignty; it was a humble oblation, a prayer to the Creator that His creature might be calm and tranquil to all who travelled over it, an oblation to the creature that it might be pleased to assist the gracious and pacific work of its Creator. The regal ceremony of later times was inaugurated by the Doge Pietro Orseolo II who, having largely increased the sea dominion of Venice and made himself lord of the Adriatic, welded his achievement into the fabric of the state by the ceremony of the espousal. The ring was not introduced till the year 1177, when Pope Alexander III, being present at the festival, bestowed it on the Doge, as token of the papal sanction of the ceremony, with the words, “Receive it as pledge of the sovereignty that you and your successors shall maintain over the sea.” But the true importance of the festival, whether in its primitive form or in its later elaboration, is the development of Venetian policy which it signified--a development which, for the purposes of this chapter, will best be considered in relation to events separated by nearly two centuries, but united in their acknowledgment of the growing importance of Venice on the waters. The first is Pietro Orseolo’s Dalmatian campaign, followed in 1001 by the secret visit of the German Emperor Otho III, and the second the famous concordat of Pope Alexander III and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, concluded under the auspices of Venetian statecraft in 1177.