Up to that time the complicity of the Doge was not known, but the immediate arrest of two other conspirators discovered the full danger of the situation. The Ten were equal to the emergency. The chief police officials and heads of the wards were sent for and asked to take good men and true, and arrest the leading conspirators. Armed forces were summoned from Chioggia. All means of egress from the palace were guarded; the bell-ringer forbidden to stir. On the dawn of the 16th the Ten summoned a _Zonta_ of twenty of the wisest, best and most ancient of the nobles of Venice to join them in trying the Doge. He made no attempt to defend himself and was sentenced to death. On the 17th, the biretta removed, stripped of his ducal robes and clothed in a black gown, he was led to the spot on the landing of the staircase[39] in the courtyard where seven months before he had sworn to defend the Constitution. At one stroke his head was severed from his body. A _capo_ of the Ten then went to the arcade of the palace over the Piazza and showed the executioner’s bloody sword to the assembled people, crying: “The great judgment has been done on the traitor.” The gates were opened and the people rushed in to see the body. At night all that remained of Marin Faliero was placed in a boat with eight lighted torches and carried to burial at S. Zanipolo. No record of the sentence is found in the acts of the Ten. On the unfilled space where the minutes should be entered are the words _Ñ. S[=c]batur_, “Let it not be written.” A year later his portrait was blotted out and the place covered with a black veil with the inscription: _Hic est locus Marini Faletro decapitati pro criminibus._ Meanwhile the leaders of the plot as they were captured were hanged in a row, with iron gags in their mouths, from the columns of the palace. St Isidore’s Day, April 16th, was made a public festival and as late as 1520 Sanudo saw carried in procession the white damask cloth bespattered with blood which was used at the execution. [Illustration: THE PALAZZI GIUSTINIANI AND FOSCARI]