So they advance carelessly—­

  “On they come!  But lo their blunder! 
    When our lads start up anon,
  Breaking out like unchained lions,
    With a roar, ‘Fall on!  Fall on!’"[8]

After relating the battle and the thoroughness of the victory, ending in the conflagration of five-and-twenty captured galleys, the poet concludes by an admonition to the enemy to moderate his pride and curb his arrogant tongue, harping on the obnoxious epithet porci leproxi, which seems to have galled the Genoese.[9] He concludes:—­

  “Nor can I at all remember
    Ever to have heard the story
  Of a fight wherein the Victors
    Reaped so rich a meed of glory!"[10]

The community of Genoa decreed that the victory should be commemorated by the annual presentation of a golden pall to the monastery of St. German’s, the saint on whose feast (28th May) it had been won.[11]

The startling news was received at Venice with wrath and grief, for the flower of their navy had perished, and all energies were bent at once to raise an overwhelming force.[12] The Pope (Boniface VIII.) interfered as arbiter, calling for plenipotentiaries from both sides.  But spirits were too much inflamed, and this mediation came to nought.

Further outrages on both sides occurred in 1296.  The Genoese residences at Pera were fired, their great alum works on the coast of Anatolia were devastated, and Caffa was stormed and sacked; whilst on the other hand a number of the Venetians at Constantinople were massacred by the Genoese, and Marco Bembo, their Bailo, was flung from a house-top.  Amid such events the fire of enmity between the cities waxed hotter and hotter.

[Sidenote:  Lamba Doria’s Expedition to the Adriatic.]

33.  In 1298 the Genoese made elaborate preparations for a great blow at the enemy, and fitted out a powerful fleet which they placed under the command of LAMBA DORIA, a younger brother of Uberto of that illustrious house, under whom he had served fourteen years before in the great rout of the Pisans at Meloria.

The rendezvous of the fleet was in the Gulf of Spezia, as we learn from the same pithy Genoese poet who celebrated Ayas.  This time the Genoese were bent on bearding St. Mark’s Lion in his own den; and after touching at Messina they steered straight for the Adriatic:—­

  “Now, as astern Otranto bears,
    Pull with a will! and, please the Lord,
    Let them who bragged, with fire and sword,
  To waste our homesteads, look to theirs!"[13]

On their entering the gulf a great storm dispersed the fleet The admiral with twenty of his galleys got into port at Antivari on the Albanian coast, and next day was rejoined by fifty-eight more, with which he scoured the Dalmatian shore, plundering all Venetian property.  Some sixteen of his galleys were still missing when he reached the island of Curzola, or Scurzola as the more popular name seems to have been, the Black Corcyra of the Ancients—­the chief town of which, a rich and flourishing place, the Genoese took and burned.[14] Thus they were engaged when word came that the Venetian fleet was in sight.