It was a classic Venetian trick, that. Classical, including the sense of bygone, greater days. The times when the Venetians were genuinely a power in the Mediterranean rather than just a major player among several were long past. Every year, still, the doge symbolically married the sea. But the joke about him being cuckolded by the Turk was almost a century old by now.
“Monsignor,” the doge said.
“Your Grace,” Mazzare replied, making the formal bow. Not being Venetian, he had no right to address him as plain old Messer il Doge, without salutation. And in these years of declining power and waning influence, of shortened profits and rising costs, the Venetians clung to every little artifice of power and petty trick of haughtiness they could. Method acting in reverse, you might call it. They acted like haughty patricians granting audience to unlettered barbarians, in the hope—fond hope, really—that their audience would come to believe in the reality of it.
Especially, Mazzare thought, after that four-story stair climb.
“It will, we are sure, be a pleasure to receive your formal embassy. The Gran Consiglio meets in three days’ time. Doubtless one of our secretaries will deliver your invitation tomorrow. We look forward to increase in trade and friendship with all who would truly be our friends.”
Mazzare resisted an impulse to add warm praise for sunlight, motherhood and apple pie, or whatever dessert the Venetians favored. Doge Erizzo, it seemed, spouted meaningless hot air like a hairdryer, at least in public. The meeting earlier had consisted largely of a similar speech. Mazzare looked past the doge at the halo of attendants around; he could put names to some of the faces, but not all, and they seemed to be arrayed to give truth to the polite fiction that the doge was first among these equals.
Francisco Nasi had told him not to trouble himself about what stood behind the doge, though. He was to deal with the doge as if he were really the Renaissance prince he assumed the styles and airs of, and further to assume that every senator he met was one of the Ten. Every single one, bar a few misfits, reported to at least one of them.
Mazzare satisfied himself that he could not in fact pick out any obvious members of Venice’s shadowy ruling council—no tattoos on foreheads, alas—and reflected on Nasi’s advice. The Ten were the real government of Venice, when they could agree. Certainly there was not one item of Senate business that that anonymous, unrecorded body would not have carved up in detail before the Senate met to vote on it, with the result that every vote of the Senate was nearly unanimous. There would always be three or four dissenting votes, of course. Venice, as everywhere, had its leavening of misfits and the occasional downright lunatic among its governing classes. The Ten was one of the many compromises and anomalies by which the Most Serene Republic of Venice actually worked. It was an oligarchy, true enough, but one which allowed for democratic decision-making among the oligarchs themselves.
The doge might even be one of the Ten himself. Since the Ten was not officially part of the Venetian constitution, there was room for more than a modicum of doubt about who was saying what in its councils.
But, as Nasi had said, from the outside at least, the doge was a prince. Sometimes, it paid to focus on the illusion and ignore the reality. Nasi had then proceeded, with malice aforethought, to use words and phrases like interface and interaction metaphor. Mazzare was sure that Nasi made those things up just to enliven dull briefings, after having been mightily amused by twentieth-century management-speak as recorded in the few MBA texts Grantville had had. The man’s sense of humor was oblique and bizarre. Both Jones and Mazzare had laughed about his account of the ducal promises that governed the doge’s role in Venice’s government. The one about his being obliged to buy five ducks for every adult male patrician in the city as a New Year’s present had especially entertained them.
At the time, Mazzare and Jones had assumed the story was one of Nasi’s embroideries—until they’d arrived in Venice and discovered that it was actually true.