SANUDO or SANUTO, Marino

(1466-1533)

Marino Sanudo wrote of events in his own life and in his native city of Venice, where he also served in various public offices. Like many other well­born Venetian youths, Sanudo received an excellent classical education. In his Lives of the Doges (c. 1520) he relied heavily on his early training, comparing Venice to Rome and hailing a doge of recent memory as "the new Augustus." His loyalty to his city led him to note in 1509, after Venice's crushing defeat at Agnadello, that he would have asked even the Ottoman sultan for help against its foes. He believed that certain powerful unnamed enemies thwarted his own political ambitions; his outspokenness or his relatively modest means may equally have barred his path. Though it is as yet untranslated from the Italian, Sanudo's fifty-eight-volume Diarii covering the years from 1496 to 1533 is an essential source for understanding cultural and religious attitudes in Venice, Venetian policies on the mainland, and the particular challenges faced by the Venetian elite during several of the city's more turbulent decades.

Bibliography

D. S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580, 1970.

R. Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, 1980.

Alison Williams Lewin