Cold Winter, Hot monied-partisans; Sanudo Diaries: November 27, 1517

There was a famine in 1527. The following winter came early and got cold that year too.

Sanudo Diaries: "November 26, 1527 (46:326) It was very cold in the morning and began to snow rather heavily, but then the snow stopped and the wind died down.... 

Item: the extreme cold of the last few days caused the deaths of several tramps and galleymen staying under the porticoes in Piazza San Marco and at Rialto, who were also starving." p. 326.

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A year after the time Sanudo was complaining about how the city of Venice was accepting loans in exchange for public office, a practice that had been going on in truth for some time, one former state treasurer, ...

Editor's note: 'Zuan Emo was accused of stealing as much as 28,000 ducats of state funds.  Charged with sedition, being a tyrant' "... and the 'worst administrator committing public and private theft' (23:88-89), he was banished to Crete. Thereupon his father, Zorzi Emo, began an intensive campaign over the next six years, offering monetary compensation, volunteering to resign his procuratorship, and making tearful speeches and urgent pleas (he wore a beard in mourning for his absent son) in the attempt to get his son's sentence lifted or commuted (24:585, 633). Each entry in the diaries outlines the offers made, such as this one, one year after the original crime surfaced and the ban was declared:" pp. 146-7.

Sanudo Diaries: "November 27-28, 1517 (25:112, 113-4)  After dinner there was a meeting of the Council of Ten with the zonta. The relatives of ser Zuan Emo tried to negotiate a deal, believing that the heads of the Ten wished to consider his pardon, as ... one of the heads promised to do in the last Council of Ten meeting. However, there was no time and nothing was done ---.

[The next day] the bill, or rather pardon, of ser Zuan Emo, son of ser Zorzi, knight and procurator, was read .... He is in exile, and his father is petitioning in his name to loan our Signoria 6,000 ducats in cash for two years... or else to give the Signoria 2,000 ducats outright so that he may have his banishment lifted and he allowed to return home. There are other clauses involving the payment of whatever money he took from the Signoria, and his father will give surety of this in the amount of 8,000 ducats."

nedits: The editors say the entreaties continued until a bill was passed that such entreaties should also be fined. Zuan Emo came back and was receiving visitors at San Zuan Polo, called San Zanipolo today. A new decree went out saying church priors who were hiding outlaws could themselves be fined and banished. But the year after that amnesty was proposed. And by the end of the next year, 1523, he had moved back into his home (35:202) and in December, Zuan Emo had resumed his seat in the Great Council (35:302). pp. 147-8

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November 27, in 1508 was also the day Sanudo's wife 'Cecilia died after an illness of forty-nine days. May God grant her rest and peace'. That's all he says (7:672-73). They had been married under four years. p. 39,

all quotes, editor's notes, from  Venice, Cita Excellentissima, Selection from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo translated by Linda L Carroll,  editors: Patricia H LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008