Small wonder that (as a later traveller observed) the Venetians were proud of their great rule, and when a son was born to a Venetian were wont to say among themselves, ‘A Signor is born into the world.’

Is it not true to say that Venice was the proudest city on earth, la noble cite que l’en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou siecle?[6] Life was a fair and splendid thing for those merchant princes, who held the gorgeous East in fee in the year of grace 1268.  In that year traders in great stone counting-houses, lapped by the waters of the canals, were checking, book in hand, their sacks of cloves, mace and nutmegs, cinnamon and ginger from the Indies, ebony chessmen from Indo China, ambergris from Madagascar, and musk from Tibet.  In that year the dealers in jewels were setting prices upon diamonds from Golconda, rubies and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, and pearls from the fisheries of Ceylon; and the silk merchants were stacking up bales of silk and muslin and brocade from Bagdad and Yezd and Malabar and China.  In that year young gallants on the Rialto (scented gallants, but each, like Shakespeare’s Antonio, with a ship venturing into port somewhere in the Levant) rubbed elbows with men of all nations, heard travellers’ tales of all lands, and at dawn slipped along the canals in gondolas (not black in those days, but painted and hung with silk), saluting the morning with songs; and the red-haired ladies of Venice whom centuries later Titian loved to paint, went trailing up and down the marble steps of their palaces, with all the brocades of Persia on their backs and all the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten their little hands.

It was in that year, too, that one Martino da Canale, a clerk in the customs house, began to busy himself (like Chaucer after him) less with his accounts than with writing in the delectable French language (’por ce que lengue franceise cort parmi le monde, et est la plus delitable a lire et a oir que nule autre’) a chronicle of Venice.  It is of the water, watery, Canale’s chronicle, like Ariel’s dirge; he has indeed, ’that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.’  Here is nothing indeed, of ’the surge and thunder of the Odyssey’, but the lovely words sparkle like the sun on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, ’Li tens estoit clers et biaus ... et lors quant il furent en mer, li mariniers drecerent les voiles au vent, et lesserent core a ploine voiles les mes parmi la mer a la force dou vent’;[7] for so much of the history of Venice was enacted upon deck.  It is a passing proud chronicle, too, for Canale was, and well he knew it, a citizen of no mean city.