Cross the Ponte Santa Fosca on any given afternoon and you’ll fight your way through a crowd as big as any in Venice, and walk past a bronze figure in the campo beyond no one seems to notice. A shame. Fra Paolo Sarpi, whose statue this is, was one of the more intriguing people this city produced, and a few yards from where his monument stands he was almost savagely murdered by none other than the assassins of the Pope.

On the evening of 5 October 1607, a few yards from where he now stands in bronze, five men with stiletto knives tried to murder him and very nearly succeeded.

Sarpi was a Servite friar, a scholar, a mathematician, a correspondent of Galileo’s — and, crucially, the Venetian Republic’s chief theological adviser during its stand-off with Pope Paul V. Venice had annoyed Rome by trying two priests in a civil court and trying to restrict the Church’s right to buy up property tax-free, which doesn’t sound like the stuff of assassination plots until you remember how much temporal power was riding on the outcome.

The Pope excommunicated the entire city. Venice, in effect, shrugged. Sarpi was the man who gave the Republic the legal and theological cover, arguing that the state’s authority was separate from — and in secular matters senior to — the Church’s. It’s a distinction so ordinary to us now that it’s hard to see why it was once worth killing someone over. In 1607, things were very different. This was an all-powerful state up against a smaller republic determined to defend its independence.

The Pope’s men made their attempt as Sarpi was walking home to his convent near Santa Fosca after an evening at the Doge’s palace. He was ambushed on the bridge, stabbed three times in the face and neck, one blade lodging so deep in his cheekbone that it had to be cut out. He should have died. He didn’t. When the surgeon asked him about the ragged, deliberate wound, Sarpi is supposed to have made a dry joke that has outlived almost everything else he wrote: agnosco stylum Curiae Romanae — “I recognise the style of the Roman Curia,” stylus and stiletto being, conveniently, the same word in Latin.

The assassins escaped. Sarpi carried the scars for the rest of his life and kept working, eventually writing his great history of the Council of Trent, unsparing about the Church that had tried to have him killed twice.

None of that is on a plaque anyone reads as they pass by today. The statue itself, put up in 1892, gives you his name and nothing else — just PAOLO SARPI, cut into white stone. Sarpi spent his final sixteen years half-expecting a second attempt on his life and wore a coat of mail under his habit just in case. Which raises the question… if the Commandments say, ‘You shall not kill’ what was the Pope doing sending out assassins?

If you pass Paolo Sarpi in Venice don’t just sit at his feet munching pizza. He was quite a chap.