The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  When the news of these risings, and of many others which followed them, reached Venice, it caused something akin to panic. All the terra firma west of the Mincio river was effectively lost. The new frontier must be defended at any price; armed militias raised among the local peasantry were the only hope. The local French commander, General Balland, was informed of Venice’s intentions, it being emphasised to him that the measures proposed were to be purely defensive, directed not against the French but against rebellious citizens of the Republic. What nobody seems to have foreseen was that these peasants–there were probably at least 10,000 of them–finding themselves for the first time with weapons in their hands, might not be over-conscientious in the manner of using them. They had no quarrel with the Italian rebels; they did, on the other hand, have plenty of outstanding scores to settle with the French, whose foraging parties regularly made free with their crops, their livestock and, as often as not, their wives and daughters into the bargain. It was not long before the serious sniping began. Balland’s reprisals were swift and savage, but they had no effect. By early April every pretence of civility between French and Italians was gone.

  Napoleon, on the road to Vienna, had been kept fully informed of the worsening situation. Already on 10 April he had dictated an ultimatum to the Doge, to be delivered in person by his aide-de-camp General Andoche Junot. Junot arrived in Venice on the evening of Good Friday, the 14th, and demanded an audience with the Doge early the following morning. The reply was polite but firm. Holy Saturday was a day traditionally set aside for religious observances, and neither then nor on Easter Sunday itself could any government business be transacted. The Doge and his full Collegio192 would however be happy to receive the General early on Monday morning. But Junot was not interested in religious observances and said so. His orders were to see the Doge within twenty-four hours, and he intended to obey them. If he were not accorded an audience within that time, he would leave and Venice would have to take the consequences. They would not, he suggested, be pleasant.

  Thus, when the Collegio reluctantly received him early on the Saturday morning, its dignity was already bruised. Ignoring the seat to which he was shown, on the Doge’s right hand, the General remained standing; then, without preliminary, he pulled Bonaparte’s letter from his pocket and began to read:

  Judenberg, 20 Germinal, year V

  All the mainland of the Most Serene Republic is in arms. On every side, the rallying-cry of the peasants whom you have armed is ‘Death to the French!’ They have already claimed as their victims several hundred soldiers of the Army of Italy. In vain do you try to shuffle off responsibility for the militias that you have brought into being. Do you think that just because I am in the heart of Germany I am powerless to ensure respect for the foremost people of the universe? Do you expect the legions of Italy to tolerate the massacres that you have stirred up? The blood of my brothers-in-arms shall be avenged, and there is not one French battalion that, if charged with such a duty, would not feel the doubling of its courage, the trebling of its powers.

  The Venetian Senate has answered the generosity we have always shown with the blackest perfidy…Is it to be war, or peace? If you do not take immediate measures to disperse these militias, if you do not arrest and deliver up to me those responsible for the recent murders, war is declared.

  The Turk is not at your gates. No enemy threatens you. You have deliberately fabricated pretexts in order to pretend to justify a rally of the people against my army. It shall be dissolved within twenty-four hours.

  We are no longer in the reign of Charles VIII. If, against the clearly stated wishes of the French government, you impel me to wage war, do not think that the French soldiers will follow the example of your own militias, ravaging the countryside of the innocent and unfortunate inhabitants of the terra firma. I shall protect those people, and the day will come when they shall bless the crimes that obliged the army of France to deliver them from your tyranny.

  BONAPARTE

  In the shocked silence that followed, Junot flung the letter on the table in front of him, turned on his heel and strode from the room.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, continued his march. His manner with his men was, as always, cheerful and confident; in his heart, however, there must have been a growing anxiety–on two counts. The first was strategic. His army was now poorly supplied, dangerously strung out in narrow mountain valleys where there was little hope of forage–let alone pillage–with a hostile population around it and a formidable Austrian army awaiting it in front. The second, to him, was more serious still. His army formed only one prong of the French attack. There was also the Army of the Rhine, commanded by his brilliant young contemporary and chief rival Lazare Hoche, which was now advancing eastwards through Germany at terrifying speed and threatening to reach Vienna before him. This was a possibility that he refused to contemplate. He, and no one else, must be the conqueror of the Habsburg Empire; his whole future career depended on it. He could not allow Hoche to steal his triumph.

  He was wrestling with these two problems when suddenly–and to him almost miraculously–the imperial government panicked and sued for an armistice. It must have been difficult to conceal his delight: his signature on such a document would stop Hoche in his tracks. Thus it came about that on 18 April 1797, at the castle of Eckenwald just outside Leoben, a provisional peace was signed between Napoleon Bonaparte, acting in the name of the French Directory–although in fact he had never bothered to consult it–and the Austrian Empire. By its terms (details of which remained secret until they were confirmed six months later at Campo Formio) Austria was to renounce all claims to Belgium and to Lombardy, in return for which she would receive Istria, Dalmatia and all the Venetian terra firma bounded by the Oglio, the Po and the Adriatic. Venice was to be compensated–most inadequately–by the formerly papal territories of Romagna, Ferrara and Bologna.

  Bonaparte, it need hardly be said, had no conceivable right to dispose in such a way of the territory of a neutral state. He would probably have argued that Venice was a neutral state no longer; still, there was no escaping the fact that the laws of international diplomacy did not look kindly on arbitrary settlements of this kind. However hollow Venice’s professed neutrality might be, she would still have to be shaken out of it, and if, during the process, she could be made to appear in an unfavourable or even aggressive light, so much the better. Now, thanks to the complete demoralisation of her government, she offered Bonaparte a perfect opportunity.

  We can have nothing but sympathy for Francesco Donà and Lunardo Giustinian, the two Venetian envoys sent off to Bonaparte with the reply to his letter and instructions to placate him as best they could. Even the physical aspect of their task was disagreeable enough. Napoleon was famous for the speed at which he travelled, and for two middle-aged Venetians those gruelling days and nights spent trying to catch up with him, the endless jolting over some of the worst mountain roads in Europe only occasionally interrupted by a few hours’ rest snatched at some verminous and foul-smelling inn, must have been a nightmare. Nor can their spirits have been improved by the prospect of the stormy scenes that they knew lay ahead of them when they finally ran their quarry to earth. And even that was not all: in every town and village at which they stopped, the same rumours besieged their ears. France had made peace with Austria, and on the altar of that peace Venice was to be sacrificed.

  The pursuit lasted over a week; it was not until 21 April, at Graz, that the two exhausted deputies finally drew up before the French camp. Bonaparte received them courteously enough, and listened in silence to their protestations of friendship. Then, suddenly, his mood changed. Striding back and forth across the room, he launched into a searing diatribe against Venice, her government and her people, accusing them of perfidy, hypocrisy, incompetence, injustice, ‘medieval barbarities’ and–most serious of all in his eyes–hostility to himself and to France. He demanded the immediate release of all political prisoners–threatening, if this were not done, to
break open the prisons himself. What, he continued, of all the Frenchmen whom the Venetians had murdered? His soldiers were determined to have their revenge, and he would not deny it to them. Any government unable to restrain its own subjects was an imbecile government and had no right to survive. He ended with those terrible words that were soon to echo in the heart of every Venetian: ‘Io sarò un Attila per lo stato veneto’–‘I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice.’

  When the two envoys returned to Venice with their report, Doge Lodovico Manin and his colleagues saw that the Republic was doomed. War was imminent; further negotiation was impossible; the terra firma was as good as lost. The only hope of saving the city itself from destruction lay in capitulation to the conqueror’s demands, and these demands were terrible indeed: nothing less than the abdication of the entire government and the abandonment of a constitution that had lasted more than a thousand years–the suicide, in fact, of the state.

  On Friday, 12 May 1797, the Great Council of Venice met for the last time. Many of its members having already fled the city, it fell short–by sixty-three–of its constitutional quorum of 600, but the time for such niceties was past. The Doge was just completing his opening speech when the sound of firing was heard outside the palace. At once, all was in confusion. To those present, such sounds could mean one thing only: the popular uprising that they had so long dreaded had begun. Their only hope of survival was to escape from the palace while there was still time. Within minutes, the true source of the firing had been established: some of the Dalmatian troops, who were being removed from Venice on Bonaparte’s orders, had symbolically discharged their muskets into the air as a parting salute to the city. But the panic had begun; reassurances were useless. Leaving their all-too-distinctive robes of office behind them, the remaining legislators of the Venetian Republic slipped discreetly out of the palace by the side entrances. The Serenissima was no more.

  Lodovico Manin himself made no attempt to flee. In the sudden stillness that followed the break-up of the meeting, he slowly gathered up his papers and withdrew to his private apartments. There he removed his corno–that curiously shaped cap which was the principal symbol of his office–and handed it to his valet. ‘Take this,’ he said, ‘I shall not be needing it again.’

  From the inauguration of the first Doge in 726 to the resignation of the last in 1797, the Venetian Republic had lasted 1,071 years–only half a century less than the Empire of Byzantium. For much of that time Venice had been the acknowledged mistress of the Mediterranean–politically, constitutionally, commercially, artistically and architecturally a wonder of the world. How pleasant it would be to record a less ignominious end, with her people showing, as their Republic began to totter, some spark of that endurance and courage that they had shown often enough in defending their colonies against the Turks–or that their own grandchildren were to show against the Austrians half a century later. One would not have asked for–and certainly not have expected–a heroic resistance such as had been seen on the walls of Constantinople in 1453: merely a flash of the old Venetian spirit, which would have allowed the Serenissima to pass into history with some semblance of honour. But even that was lacking. The last tragedy of Venice was not her death; it was the manner in which she died.

  Thus it was that when the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed on 17 October, Austria received even more than she had expected at Leoben: not just the Venetian terra firma, but the city itself. Napoleon Bonaparte, however, was well pleased. He had always believed–probably rightly–that he could master Italy so long as it remained divided. Already in December 1796 he had formed his Cispadane Republic193 out of the merger of the duchies of Reggio and Modena and the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara. The following June he had established his Ligurian Republic with its capital in Genoa, and in July his Cisalpine Republic based on Milan. As for Venice, he himself had never set foot there and had no desire to; he saw it–quite erroneously–in his mind’s eye as a brutally repressive police state, its dungeons bursting with political prisoners. Meanwhile, there was peace all over continental Europe. Only England remained an enemy. It was England, now, that must be invaded and destroyed. The Directory agreed, appointing Bonaparte Commander-in-Chief of the Army of England, but after the best part of a year’s consideration he reluctantly decided against the project. The expense would be too great, the necessary manpower unavailable; above all, the French navy was in a deplorable state, no match for the British and with no commander who could hold a candle to Hood, Rodney or St Vincent–still less to Nelson.

  The alternative was Egypt. As early as July 1797 the Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord,194 had proposed an Egyptian expedition, and seven months later had produced a long memorandum on the subject. Inevitably this contained a section deploring the cruelty of the local beys and pressing the necessity of delivering the Egyptian people from the oppression that it had so long endured; more worthy of attention was the suggestion that with an army of 20–25,000, which would land at Alexandria and occupy Cairo, a further expedition could be launched against India–possibly through a hastily dug Suez Canal. On 2 March 1798 the Directory gave its formal approval. Not only would the proposal keep the army employed and their terrifying young general at a safe distance from Paris; it also offered an opportunity to take over the British role in India, while providing France with an important new colony in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, if a little more problematically, it would achieve a major diversion of English sea power to the east, which might make the delayed invasion possible after all.

  Napoleon, it need hardly be said, accepted the command with enthusiasm. Since his childhood he had been fascinated by the Orient, and he was determined that the expedition should have objectives other than the purely political and military. To this end he recruited no less than 167 savants to accompany it, including scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, architects, painters and draughtsmen. Egypt had preserved her ancient mysteries for too long; she was a fruit more than ready for the plucking. The country had been effectively under the Mamelukes since 1250. In 1517 it had been conquered by the Turks and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, part of which, technically, it still remained; by the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the Mameluke beys were once again in control. A French invasion would doubtless evoke an indignant protest from the Sultan in Constantinople, but his empire, though not yet known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was a decadent and demoralised shadow of its former self and unlikely to represent much of a threat. Unfortunately there were other risks a good deal more serious. The 300 French transport ships were poorly armed, their crews practically untrained. True, they had a naval escort of twenty-seven ships of the line195 and frigates, but Nelson was already known to be cruising in the Mediterranean. Were he to intercept them, their chances of escape–and those of the 31,000 men aboard them–would be negligible.

  The fleet sailed in four separate divisions, the largest from Toulon, the other three from Marseille, Genoa and Civitavecchia just north of Rome. Napoleon himself left Toulon in his flagship L’Orient on 19 May 1798. His first objective was Malta. The island had been in the possession of the Order of the Knights of St John since 1530. The Knights had conscientiously maintained their hospital and had heroically withstood the dreadful Turkish siege of 1565, but as fighters for Christendom they had grown soft. When Bonaparte reached the island on 9 June and sent messengers ashore to the Grand Master, a German named Ferdinand Hompesch, to demand the admission of all his ships into the harbour to take on water, he received a reply stating that, according to the regulations of the Order, states that were at war with other Christian countries might send in only four vessels at a time. A message was returned swiftly from L’Orient: ‘General Bonaparte is resolved to obtain by force that which ought to have been accorded to him by virtue of the principles of hospitality, the fundamental rule of your order.’

  At dawn on 10 June the assault on the island began. The 550 Knights–nearl
y half of them were French, and many more too old to fight–resisted for only two days. On the morning of the 12th they requested a truce; that same night a delegation came on board the flagship. The Order would give up its sovereignty over Malta and Gozo, so long as the French government used its good offices to find Grand Master Hompesch some small principality to which he could retire, together with a pension of 300,000 francs to enable him to live in a style that befitted his rank. Napoleon accepted, and immediately set to work on a programme of reform. In less than a week he managed to convert the island into something tolerably like a French département. The people were ordered to wear the red, white and blue cockade; slavery–such as it was–was abolished; 600 Turks and 1,400 Moors were to be repatriated; the number of monasteries was reduced and the power of the clergy drastically restricted. All gold and silver was to be removed from the churches, and all the treasure from the palace of the Knights–which included the famous silver service regularly used by the Order to feed the sick in the hospital–melted down into 3,500 pounds of bullion for Napoleon’s war chest. Three thousand French soldiers under General Claude Vaubois were left behind to provide a garrison, and within a week of its arrival the fleet was ready to continue its journey. On the 19th, Napoleon himself set sail.

  France, however, was not to keep the unhappy island for long. In 1800, enraged by the behaviour of Vaubois, who had even tried to impose French as the official language and who now proposed to auction the entire contents of the Carmelite church in Mdina, the Maltese–led by their clergy–rose in revolt, hurling the French commander of militia out of a window. Vaubois quickly ordered all his men to Valletta, where he locked the city gates. Thenceforth the French found themselves under siege. Meanwhile, the Maltese appealed to the British navy for help, and several ships arrived to blockade any French vessels that might attempt to relieve their garrison. These were followed shortly afterwards by 1,500 British troops. Vaubois held out heroically, until–thanks to the blockade–he had only three days’ rations left. He was then allowed an honourable surrender and safe repatriation for the garrison, taking with him–to the further fury of the Maltese, who were not consulted–much of the treasure that his men had looted during their stay.