When at last the friends of the dead came to carry away the body, the frenzied relict was always found stretched upon the threshold of the house, to prevent the funeral from passing, and had to be dragged out of the way by main force. The body having been carried out of the house at last, the whole family followed it to the parish church with screams and howls, and kept up the same terrific noise during the chanting of the whole funeral service. This insane custom was so deeply rooted amongst the people that centuries elapsed before the Church could put it down, and only threats of excommunication sufficed to prevent the unseemly interruption of the Office for the Dead. Those who have lived in the far East, and especially in India, are familiar with such sights. No one who has heard the lamentations of hired mourners at an Asiatic funeral is likely to forget the impression he received; but it is hard to understand such doings amongst the Venetians of the fourteenth century, and that the poor sometimes even went so far as to expose their dead in the streets during several days, in order to excite the compassion and solicit the alms of those who passed by.
[Sidenote: _Schupper, Manuale della Storia del Diritto._]
It is quite certain that slavery was not only common but almost universal in Venice until the fifteenth century at least. The custom of keeping household slaves was indeed general throughout Italy in the Middle Ages, but it was nowhere so deep-rooted as in Venice. Church and State laboured in vain to put down the traffic and to discourage the purchase of slaves. In the year 960 the Doge Pier Candiano IV. threatened with very severe punishments all those who should either engage in or encourage the slave trade. And at the same time the patriarch declared himself as follows: ‘Moreover, we and our brother bishops will excommunicate all those who shall be proved guilty before the tribunals of the state; they shall be deprived of the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist; they shall not be allowed to enter any church; and if they do not repent, they shall burn everlastingly with Judas, who sold our Lord Jesus Christ.’
The civil and ecclesiastic authorities could not have expressed themselves in stronger language, but it is clear that their edicts could not be enforced, for slavery continued to flourish during four centuries after that time. We have not even the satisfaction of telling ourselves that it was at last put down by a noble impulse of humanity, since the most superficial examination proves to us that slavery did not begin to diminish in Venice until the general depravity of women had brought them down to the moral level of slaves. That very depravity was itself in great part produced by the presence of an immense number of Eastern female slaves, absolutely without any moral sense, and having no object whatever in life except to extract favours from their masters by making themselves the willing instruments of every passion and of every vice. They possessed many means of accomplishing this end, and in particular a great many of them claimed the secret knowledge of philtres, which would not only heal every malady, but which could instantly satisfy their masters’ thirst for love or revenge. They pretended, by means of incantations, to destroy by degrees the life of an enemy who could not be safely stabbed or otherwise violently put to death; and in a vast number of cases the victim actually died, if not by supernatural means, by subtle poisons administered to him by some slave of his own in collusion with the witch. Often, too, men and women went suddenly raving mad from poison thus secretly administered, and remained permanently insane. This crime was so common that it had a name of its own, and was called ‘Erbaria.’
