Daughter of Venice

This book offers proof that history is not stranger, but more inventive than fiction.What mere poet could have created Caterina Corner?Like Venice itself, she bridged East and West, land and sea, Greek and Latin, the swashbuckling imperialism of the medieval stato da mar and the cultivated leisure of the High Renaissance.In 1472, she journeyed to the island of Cyprus, but 200 miles west of Damascus, though 1,300 east of Venice.Four years earlier, she had been married by proxy to the last Lusignan king, Jacques II (r.1464-73), the descendant of Frankish crusaders who held lands from Jerusalem to Armenia and had acquired the island by purchase in the twelfth century.Within ten months of her arrival, she gave birth to a son, born to reign as Jacques III.But the child soon died, and so had his father, some thirteen months before.In 1474, just twenty years old, Caterina Corner ruled as the widowed and childless foreign queen of the strategically vital island of Cyprus, propped up by Venetian admirals while the Ottoman threat loomed on the one hand, a Mamluk threat on the other, and a host of opportunists plotted to unseat her.At last, in 1489, persuaded by the emissary Venice had dispatched-Zorzi Corner, her own brother-reluctantly, she abdicated.Her unwilling surrender of the crown was read by the world as a noble act of renunciation.So Caterina Corner now journeyed west, to the metropolis that had recently won for itself a stato da terra.Reunited with her family, Caterina Corner devoted herself to consolidating her wealth, the spoils of her imperial adventure, and promoting the interests of the Corner family-above all its patriarch, her brother Zorzi, who years after her death, while planning his sister's grandiloquent memorialization and the advancement of the Corner clan, fecund in cardinals and doges, was still extracting from Cyprus the payments owed the ousted queen.Meanwhile, while she still lived, Caterina was an oddity in Venice: a queen in a republic!That oddity was captured in Gentile Bellini's portrayal of the Miracle of the True Cross at the Ponte San Lorenzo (1500)-like Caterina herself, adventitiously, the relic had come from Cyprus-explored at length by Hurlburt.Lined up along the side of the canal to observe the miraculous rescue are eleven identically postured women, accoutered in diaphanous linen and precious pearls: Caterina Corner and her attendants.Their conspicuous and ponderous presence underscores the incongruity of Corner's role in Venice: a foreigner yet a native, a queen and yet a participant in a peak moment of civic ritual

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