Marino Sanudo

(1466 - 1536)

Orphaned and left destitute at the age of eight, Marino Sanudo, whose father had been a senator, was elected to Venice’s Great Council in 1486 and to the senate in 1498. On January 1, 1496, the thirty-year-old Sanudo, who had unrealized hopes of becoming Venice’s official historian, began to keep a diary. By the time he stopped writing it in 1533, he had filled more than forty thousand handwritten pages with firsthand accounts, letters, original documents, and digressions on various topics of the day. The published edition, released between 1879 and 1903, comprises fifty-eight volumes.