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Simultaneously, the arrest was ordered of all the major suspects now known to be taking part in the conspiracy. Ten of the principal conspirators were quickly condemned to death and pushed from the windows of the Doge’s Palace with a rope around their neck, where their bodies were left dangling in a row as a public example. Others were given lengthy prison sentences. However, according to a contemporary chronicler, ‘Many were acquitted and set free.’
    The fate of Marin Falier was not so easily decided. In order to try him, the Council of Ten called for the formation of a zonta * seconding twenty respected senior nobles to their number, a measure that was allowed by the constitution in times of extreme danger to the Republic. When confronted by his accusers, Marin Falier immediately confessed to his leadership of the plot, and on 17 April was condemned to death. He would be executed early on the morning of the following day. According to Petrarch (relying upon inside information from his friends in Venice), Falier was ‘dragged in servile fashion’ from his chambers to the top of the grand staircase leading down to the inner courtyard of the palace (the very place where just six months earlier he had been proclaimed doge). Here he was stripped of his insignia, in particular the corno , the distinctive hat worn by the doge as his symbol of office, with its characteristic single round horn ( corno ) at the back. He was then beheaded with a single blow of the executioner’s sword, whereupon he ‘fell down a headless corpse, and stained with his blood the doors of the church and the entrance of his palace, and the marble stairs often made glorious by solemn feasts or the spoils of enemies’.
    Petrarch was in no doubt as to the significance of what had happened:
    The sensation caused by this event is so great that, if one considers the form of government and the customs of that city, and what a revolutionary change the death of one man portends, a greater has hardly shown itself in our days in Italy.
    The failure of the plot, and Falier’s execution, were in fact significant in affirming the strength of the nobility’s well-established grip on the Republic’s system of government, a reminder that the oligarchy and its councils could be threatened by no individual, no matter how strong they might seem.
    After Falier’s beheading, the doors of the Doge’s Palace were thrown open, so that all those gathered outside could see for themselves what had taken place, and his body was then ‘displayed to the people’. Falier’s remains were then carried off, to be placed in an unmarked grave. In a later frieze that depicted portraits of the historical succession of doges, the place occupied by Falier was ordered to be painted over with a black veil bearing the inscription in Latin: ‘Here is the place of Marin Falier, beheaded for his crimes.’
    Such is the legend that has come down to us, many parts of which are undeniably true. However, certain elements of this story remain open to question. For instance, there is little evidence to support the veracity of the incident at the Carnival banquet, and Steno’s subsequent insulting verse. Records indicate that dogaressa Aloica (née Gradenigo – like the Dandolo, one of the most distinguished families of the era) was probably over fifty years old at the time, making her a matronly figure hardly appropriate for Steno’s ribald verse, which only surfaces in written records more than a century later. Michele Steno would in fact one day become doge himself – an unlikely circumstance if he had made enemies of the Gradenigo family. Others, such as Petrarch, have questioned why a man of Falier’s undoubted popularity and advanced years should have sought to establish himself as a supreme ruler so late in life, especially when he had no children to succeed him.
    The indications are that this was a time of extreme social tension in the city. The arrogance of the nobles had made