Now it came to pass that when the young Emperor Otho III., mystic, fiery, enthusiastic, heard of all this success, he felt a very great longing to visit Pietro Orseolo and to see the wonderful water-city of which all the world was beginning to talk; and he secretly told his wishes to his privy councillors, but they would not hear of such a thing, and he, being very young, would not act openly against their advice. Yet he persisted in his intention, while he held his peace.
So at last, on a warm and moonlight night in the year 998, a boat manned by eight men silently approached the little island of San Servolo, not far from the city; and two men stepped out upon the shore and went up and knocked at the door of a half-ruined building, once a monastery of Benedictines. A man of imposing stature opened and let them in; but soon three fishermen came out by the same way and got into a skiff that lay waiting hard by, with two of their companions, for the larger boat had disappeared; and they pulled over to the city.
Then in the moonlight the skiff was quietly rowed all about the city, stopping here and there, wherever there was something worthy to be seen; and if any of the belated townsfolk noticed the little boat and its crew, no one guessed that it bore the young Emperor Otho himself, and the Doge, and the Secretary, Paul the Deacon, who himself tells the tale of the nocturnal visit. Having succeeded once, the Emperor came again, less secretly, and spent days in the Doge’s palace, but still he preferred not to be openly known, so that he might be the more free to go about the city. There was a romantic strain in his short life, in his intense enthusiasm, in his profound belief in a divine right to reign; there was a faint foreshadowing of a stronger Emperor who is come in our own day to claim what he claimed, and to do, perhaps, what he could not do. With the strenuous reaching out after higher things Otho felt youth’s longing to know, in an age when it was possible for one man to master all the knowledge of his time, and it was surely this desire that most of all brought him over to Venice that first time. Doubtless, too, because Venice was counted with the East, his advisers foresaw trouble in a too open friendship between him and the Doge. But his early death ended such danger, if it ever existed, and all that remains is the story of his wanderings by night, in fisherman’s dress, through the still and moonlit waterways of the young city.