Sanudo Digest: mid September

These pieces should at least be mentioned. They aren't connected technically by anything more than calendric proximity and Sanudo's authorship. But to me, this week looks like a tabloid's contents. Crime stories, stories of blasphemous witchcraft; a careful reading over laws for deciding how the executive power of the doge might decide capital punishments in the City; the electoral fraud case of 1496; fighting the war against the Emperor; as the war winds down, discussing refunding of the University at Padua; finding a resolution for the mess produced forcing the merger of convents.

It's all interesting. But mostly unrelated. Strong whiffs of how the state and City handled things, decisively and some dithering and deliberation. Each of those above mentioned stories get ample coverage in the selections and context provided by our editors. So I don't have to.

But offhand, one of the nuns that came to testify in 1521 against the merger was 106, according to Sanudo who is also careful enough to mention how much the salaries for the university professors in Pisa were and how many that voted for funding. He could see those fires of that war on land when he climbed up in the campanile in Venice. Fires set by the forces of emperor Maximillian I and the French in the longlasting Italian Wars.
Two years later, the new French king Francis I, would (in 1515) aid the Venetians in taking back Marignano. He would work out a deal, with the new pope Leo X, the nephew of Lorenzo de'Medici who said he wanted a crusade against the menacing Turk.
Largely depending on the efforts of appeals by their families, three  convicted thieves escaped death by hanging and instead, each had one eye gouged out and one hand cut off.
On the 17th of September, 1521,the Council, after heavy deliberation, finally decided that three patricians - three more elite men - would join the patriarch to decide the fate of the Conventual nuns.

And it goes on and on and on.
For reference:

Sep 11, 1518: tale of witches and demons, pp 408-11

Sep 13, 18, 29, 1496: case of electoral fraud, pp 138-9

Sep 13, 1515: fighting the war at home, getting the vote, pp 12-13; Marignano p 189

Sep 13, 1517: Sanudo gives best speech ever, p 15-16

Sept 14, 1499: what M Sanudo did as savi ai ordeni, pp 9

Sep 14, 1520: doling justice, pp 144-5

Sep 15, 1517: discussing reopening of University at Padua as war winds, p 452

Sep 17, 1521: a resolution to the convent mess, p 391

___________________________________________

All pagination 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