for his life-long attempts to revive the crusading spirit and movement; with this object he wrote his great work, the Secreta (or Liber Secretorum) Fidelium Crucis, otherwise called Historia Hierosolymitana, Liber de expeditione Terrae Sanctae, and Opus Terrae Sanctae, the last being perhaps the proper title of the whole treatise as completed in three parts or “books.” This work has much to say of trade and trade-routes as well as of political and other history; and through its accompanying maps and plans it occupies an important place in the development of Cartography. It was begun in March 1306, and finished (in its earliest form) in January 1307, when it was offered to Pope Clement V. as a manual for true Crusaders who desired the reconquest of the Holy Land. To this original Liber Secretorum Sanuto added largely; two other “ books ” were composed between December 1312 and September 1321, when the entire work was presented by the author to Pope John XXII., together with a map of the world, a map of Palestine, a chart of the Mediterranean, Black Sea and west European coasts, and plans of Jerusalem, Antioch and Acre. A copy was also offered to the king of France, to whom Sanuto desired to commit the military and political leadership of the new crusade. Marino himself tells us that he had spent the best part of his life in Romania, the lands of the Eastern empire; of the Morea he had especially intimate knowledge; he had also visited Cyprus, Rhodes, parts of the Syrian, Cilician and Egyptian coasts, France, Flanders and north Germany, both west and east of Denmark. He had been in Acre, Alexandria, Constantinople, Avignon, Bruges and Sluys, as well as (apparently) in Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald and Stettin. Among his friends and correspondents were Guglielmo Bernardi de Furvo, a Venetian nobleman who had travelled extensively in Moslem and Mongol lands (to Tabriz, Bagdad, Damascus and Cairo), Bishop Jerome of Katia, in the Crimea, who in 1312 had been sent to reinforce the Catholic mission in China, and perhaps Peter, the English-born bishop of Sevastopolis or Sukhum Kalé in western Caucasia, who makes an appeal for aid to the prelates of England in 1330. Marino Sanuto’s ancestor, Marco, had founded the greatness of his family after the Fourth Crusade as duke of the Archipelago and conqueror of Naxos, Paros, &c. (from 1207); and his descendant wrote with a personal interest in the question of crushing Moslem power in the Levant.
The crusading plans of the Secreta are double: first, Egypt and the Moslem world on the side towards Europe (Syria, Asia Minor, the Barbary States, Granada, &c.) are to be ruined by the absolute stoppage of all Christian trade with the same. By such an interdict Sanuto hopes that Egypt, dependent on its European and other imports of metals, provisions, weapons, timber, pitch and slaves, would be fatally weakened, and the way thus prepared for the second part of the campaign—the armed attack of the crusading fleet and army on the Nile delta. With the aid of the Mongol Tatars of Asia, natural allies of western Christendom, and of the Nubian Christians, the conquest of the Delta and of all Egypt was to be followed by that of Palestine, invaded and held from Egypt. Sanuto deprecates any other route for the crusade, and unfolds his plan of campaign, his bases of supply, his sources for the supply of good seamen, with great detail. Not only Mediterranean seaports, but the lakes of North Italy and central Europe, and the Hanseatic ports, are enumerated as nurseries of crusading mariners and marine skill. Finally, after the conquest of Egypt, Marino designs the establishment of a Christian fleet in the Indian Ocean to dominate and subjugate its coasts and islands. He also gives a sketch of the trade-routes crossing Persia and Egypt, as well as of the course of Indian trade from Coromandel and Gujarat to Ormuz and the Persian Gulf, and to Aden and the Nile. The maps and plans which illustrate the Secreta are probably (in the main, at least) the work of the great portolano-draughtsman Pietro Vesconte: practically the whole of this map-work corresponds with what Vesconte has left under his own name; much of it is indistinguishable. Among the plans that of Acre is of peculiar interest, being the most complete representation known of the great crusading fortress on the eve of its destruction, with the quarters of all its contingents of defenders (Templars, &c.) indicated. The chart of the Mediterranean and Euxine and of the Atlantic coasts of Europe is composed of five map-sheets, which together form a good example of the earliest scientific design or portolano; in the world-map a portolano of the Mediterranean world is combined with work of pre-portolan type in remoter regions. Here the shore-lines of the countries well known to Italian mariners, from Flanders to Azov, are well laid down; the Caspian and the north German and Scandinavian coasts appear with an evident, though far slighter, relation to practical knowledge; and some idea is shown of the great continental rivers of the north, such as the Don, Volga, Vistula, Oxus and Syr Daria. Africa, away from the Mediterranean, is conventional, with its south-east projected, after the manner of Idrisi, so as to face Indian Asia, and with a western Nile traversing the continent to the Atlantic. Chinese and Indian Asia show little trace of the new knowledge which had been imparted by European pioneers from the, Polos’ time, and which appears so strikingly in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. Sanuto’s Palestine map is remarkable for its space-defining network of lines, which roughly answer to a kind of scheme of latitude and longitude, though properly speaking they are not scientific at all. Of the Secreta, twenty-three MSS. exist, of which the chief are: (1) Florence, Riccardian Library, No. 237, 162 fols. (Secreta and Letters), with maps and plans on fols. 141, v.-144, r.; (2) London, British Museum, Addt. MSS., 27,376, 178 fols. with maps, &c. on fols. 180, v.-190, r.; (3) Paris, National Library, MSS. Lat. 4939, with maps, &c. on fols. 9, r.-11, r. 27, 98-99. All these are of the 14th century. The Secreta has only once been printed entire, by Bongars, in Gesta Dei per Francos, vol. ii. pp. 1-288 (Hanover, 1611).
See also Friedrich Kunstmann, “Studien über Marino Sanudo den älteren, mit einem Anhange seiner ungedruekten Briefe” in Abhandlungen der historisch. Classe der Königl. Bayerisch. Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. vii. pp. 695-819 (Munich, 1855); Foscarini, Letteratura Veneziana; Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. v.; Postansque, De Marino Sanuto (Montpellier, 1856); C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 309-319, 391-392, 520-521, 549, 555. (C. R. B.)
SANUTO (or Sanudo), MARINO, the younger (1466–1533),
Venetian historian, was the son of the senator, Leonardo Sanuto,
and was born on the 22nd of May 1466. Left an orphan at the age
of eight, he lost his fortune owing to the bad management of his
guardian, and was for many years hampered by want of means.
In 1483 he accompanied his cousin Mario, who was one of the three
sindici inquisitori deputed to hear appeals from the decisions of
the rettori, on a tour through Istria and the mainland provinces,
and he wrote a minute account of his experiences in his diary.
Wherever he went he sought out learned men, examined libraries,
and copied inscriptions. The result of this journey was the
publication of his Itinerario in terra ferma and a collection of
Latin inscriptions. Sanuto was elected a member of the Maggior
Consiglio when only twenty years old (the legal age was twenty-five)
solely on account of his merit, and he became a senator in
1498; he noted down everything that was said and done in
those assemblies and obtained permission to examine the secret
archives of the state. He collected a fine library, which was
especially rich in MSS. and chronicles both Venetian and foreign,
including the famous Altino chronicle, the basis of early Venetian
history, and became the friend of all the learned men of the day,
Aldo Mannzio dedicating to him his editions of the works of
Angelo Poliziano and of the poems of Ovid. It was a great grief
to Sanuto when Andrea Navagero was appointed the official
historian to continue the history of the republic from the point
where Marco Antonio Sabellico left off, and a still greater mortification
when, Navagero having died in 1529 without executing his
task, Pietro Bembo was appointed to succeed him. Finally in 1531 the value of his work was recognized by the senate, which granted him a pension of 150 gold ducats per annum. He died in 1533.
His chief works are the following: Itinerario in terra ferma, published by M. Rawdon Brown in 1847; I commentarii della guerra di Ferrara, an account of the war between the Venetians and Ercole d’Este, published in Venice in 1829; La Spedizione di Carlo VIII. (MS. in the Louvre); Le Vite dei Dogi, published in vol, xxii. of Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (1733); the Diarii, his most important work, which cover the period from the 1st of January 1496 to September 1533, and fill 58 volumes. The publication of these records was begun by Rinaldo Fulin, in collaboration with Federigo Stefani, Guglielmo Berchet, and Niccolo Barozzi; the last volume was published in Venice in 1903. Owing to the relations of the Venetian republic with the whole of Europe and the East it is practically a universal chronicle, and is an invaluable source of information for all writers on that period.
Bibliography.—M. Rawdon Brown, Ragguagli sulla vita e sulle opere di Marina Sanuto (3 vols., Venice, 1837–1838); G. Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. vi, pt. ii.; Fulin, Marin Sanudo (Turin, 1880); Ricotti, I Diarii di Marin Sanudo (Turin, 1880); and Giuseppe de Leva, Marin Sanudo (Venice, 1888).
SAN VICENTE, the capital of the department of San Vicente, Salvador; 30 m. E. of San Salvador, on the river Acahuapa, a left-hand tributary of the Lempa. Pop. (1905) about 18,000.
