And not only had the famous leader himself come at the one moment of all others when he was most needed, perhaps in his whole life; he came as a victor, bringing prizes and spoil of inestimable value. He had laid waste the Genoese coast, almost to the city itself; he had intercepted Genoese convoys of grain off Apulia, he had harassed the enemy’s commerce in the East, and he had captured, off Rhodes, a huge vessel of theirs with five hundred thousand pieces of gold.
All this he told the Doge on board the latter’s galley. He had been twice wounded and was not yet recovered, but nothing could diminish his energy nor damp his ardour; at his own request he was stationed at the post of greatest danger, opposite Brondolo, and though the Genoese made a supreme effort to destroy the barriers and get their ships out during a gale, in which some of Zeno’s ships dragged their anchors, he drove them triumphantly back into their prison, and blockaded them more securely than ever. In this action he was nearly killed again. An arrow pierced his throat when the gale had driven him under one of the Genoese forts. Lest he should bleed to death he would not pluck out the missile, but remained on deck to save his ship; till, stumbling in the dusk, he fell down an open hatch. He was lifted up senseless, the arrow was withdrawn, and he was half suffocated by his own blood; but his senses revived, and he had himself turned upon his face, so that the blood might run freely out and allow him to breathe. To such a man it seemed as if nothing short of sudden death outright could be fatal; he refused to leave his ship, and in a marvellously short space of time he was about his duty again as if nothing had happened.
Meanwhile Pisani pushed the siege and bombarded Chioggia. In his force there were numbers of German and English mercenaries, who came to blows and killed each other by the score; but an English captain named William Gold had authority enough to quell the disorder, and the regular fighting went on.
Pisani continued to bombard Brondolo. The beginnings of artillery were unwieldy in the extreme, it being thought that the main object should be to throw a missile of great size and weight, even at long intervals, rather than to discharge much smaller ammunition with precise aim. One of Pisani’s mortars is said to have thrown a marble ball weighing two hundred pounds, and the smallest siege mortars projected masses of one hundred and forty pounds. To clean, load, and once fire one of these clumsy howitzers was often the work of a whole day; but if by any chance the shot took effect, the result was formidable. A single ball from Pisani’s great bombard knocked down the church tower of Brondolo with a considerable piece of the ramparts close by, burying Pietro Doria and his nephew under the ruins.