Researching 12th Century Venice ~ San Marco’s bell tower

Okay, here’s a tidbit of information I found to share with you about the bell tower of the Church of San Marco (in Italian: campinile di San Marco) According to A Brief History of Venice, by Elizabeth Horodowich, by 1150 this bell tower was serving as a lighthouse of sorts to help guide ships into the harbor. I have not as yet read specifically how it was lit. Presumably by torches, but how many, where positioned, etc? If anyone knows, please share in a comment. (And include your source, as well.)

Church bells throughout Europe rang to help monks and nuns know the hours of prayer, and became a way for common people to also keep track of time. The bells in the tower of San Marco, however, were unique and served quite different purposes. There were five bells altogether, each with its own name.

The largest bell was called la marangona. This bell rang at the beginning and end of each workday, summoning laborers to work and telling them when it was time to go home.

(La marangona, largest of the 5 bells in San Marco's bell tower)

La nona (2nd largest bell) rang at the ninth hour. This would have been midday, or around 3 PM, on our present clocks. This remained the case on the European continent until the 14th century, with England being an exception. Later this hour shifted to around 12 PM and became the basis for our modern word, noon.

La trottiera (3rd largest) summoned the magistrates of Venice to “rush or ‘trot’ their horses” (see Horodowich) to the Doge’s palace. (We all know that Doge is the Venetian word for Duke, right?)

A bell called the pregadi (4th largest) announced meetings of the Venetian senate.

The smallest bell, and the most sinister one, was called la renghiera or la maleficio. This bell announced an execution was about to take place.

(San Marco's bell tower the way it looks today, 

NOT the way it looked in the 12th century)

When recreating San Marco’s bell tower in the 12th century, keep in mind that it did not look like the bell tower there today. The present look of the tower was designed by Bartolomeo Bon in 1514. I have not been able to discover what the earlier tower looks like, if anyone knows. (Again, if you have any additional information or sources, please share in a comment.)

Sources used:

A Brief History of Venice:, by Elizabeth Horodowich

The Bells of Venice (website)

Court Will Begin at Half-way Terce (website)

For the bell sizes: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanile_di_San_Marco (I used Google Translate to translate information on the bell sizes into English.)

Researching 12th Century Venice - Introduction

There have been (and continue to be) many times during my research efforts on my current unnamed work-in-progress when I asked myself, “What possessed you to set a historical novel in medieval Venice?”

The answers seemed simple when I chose the time period:

(1) I wanted to write a sort of prequel to my medieval romance, Courting Cassandry. (“Sort of” because Gerolt, the hero of Courting Cassandry, is a secondary character in this WIP, not the central hero.)

(2) In Courting Cassandry, I mentioned that Gerolt had visited (among other places) Venice when he was nineteen years old and I thought Venice would be an easy city to research, because it’s so famous. (This was the biggest error in my thinking, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

(3) And I thought setting a book in Italy would be a fun way to honor my Italian ancestors, even though none of them came from Venice specifically, so far as I know.

However, to my consternation, I have found researching 12th Century Venice (the year 1170 specifically) to be maddeningly frustrating. There is a wealth of information on Venetian politics and Venetian trade, neither of which my story centers on other than in a tangential way. But trying to discover day-to-day-life type information has me all too many days banging my head against the wall. There are fascinating bits of information I could use if I could set my story just a few years later, but I’m locked into the year 1170 by the age of my character Gerolt in Courting Cassandry, which has been published for over 6 months and can’t be changed now.

(miniature of Venice, "The Travels of Marco Polo", c.1400 (Bodleian Library - 

too late for my time period of course)

Day-to-day-life information is widely available for the Renaissance, and somewhat more available a few years and decades after 1170, but for my particular year it is proving to be sparse. I have a sense that there may be records available which have simply not been translated into English, but since I can’t read Italian, they’re no help to me. Information on subjects such as food, dress, housing, what did the women do all day, how were children raised, etc., can be easily found for England, France, and even to some extent Germany, but not for Italy. To complicate matters, Italy was not a united country in the Middle Ages, it was made up of independent city-states, so that one cannot absolutely extrapolate that, say, the rules of inheritance in one city or the way women were limited or not limited in another was also the case in Venice.

I am, however, gradually finding bits and pieces to help me set my story with what I hope will be some degree of authenticity for my chosen year. I am going to share with you what I do succeed in finding as I research, in the hopes it might be useful to some other struggling writer who wants to set a story in 12th century Venice. As I do so, if any of you know of any additional resources beyond those that I share (available in English, please) or have any further information on any of the topics I cover, I would be ecstatically happy if you shared your knowledge in the comments!