On the evening of the fifth of November 1450 an atrocious murder was committed, and the fact that the victim, the noble Ermolao Donato, had been one of the heads of the Ten during Jacopo’s trial, and that he was killed just after he had left the ducal palace, cast suspicion upon the younger Foscari. It was not until two months later that a formal accusation was laid against him and he was arrested. There was certainly strong evidence to prove the crime. Foscari had long made no secret about his hatred of the murdered man; a servant of Jacopo’s had been seen hanging about the palace as if waiting for some one just before Donato had come out; and a good many minor pieces of testimony were adduced.
There is not the slightest truth in the story that Jacopo Loredan ever held the Foscari family responsible for the death of his father, who was probably poisoned by Visconti, nor that he entered the crime as a debt in his ledger, and wrote ‘paid’ opposite the entry when the elder Foscari was deposed. Yet it is true that a sort of feud had long existed between the two families, that Pietro Loredan had been the unsuccessful candidate when Foscari had been elected, and that Jacopo Loredan now took an active part in the proceedings against Jacopo Foscari.
The trial was not in any way a secret one. The evidence was only circumstantial, and even under torture Jacopo confessed nothing. In modern England or America he would not have been tortured, but he would in all probability have been hanged for the murder. The Ten must have felt the difficulty in which they were placed, and they met it by condemning him to exile in Crete, not allowing his wife and children to accompany him. Foscari was then taken from the ducal palace and placed on board a ship, which conveyed him to his destination. He remained in Crete unmolested during five years.
Here, again, dramatists and writers of fiction have invented an extraordinary tale. It is narrated that Jacopo, being unable to bear the loneliness of exile, deliberately wrote a letter, in which he appealed for help, to Francesco Sforza, then Duke of Milan, intending that the missive should fall into the hands of the Ten, in order that the Council might have him brought back to Venice to be tried; and we are asked to believe that he risked the agonies of torture for the sake of once more seeing his own people. What actually happened seems to be that Jacopo had become intimate in his exile with certain Genoese, through whom he attempted to establish a correspondence with Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, in the hope that the Sultan would send a galley on which he might escape from Crete. If he had succeeded, the Turkish vessel would certainly not have brought him to Venetian waters.