The crisis at Tana spread. If Zanibeck was irked by the Venetians, he was more deeply so by the Genoese at Caffa, which had become a direct colony outside the khan’s control, taxing other foreign merchants as it pleased. Zanibeck decided to wipe the troublesome Italians from his domain. He descended on Caffa with a large army. It led to a rare moment of Genoese and Venetian co-operation. The Venetians were granted tax-free concessions and they stood shoulder to shoulder behind the city’s impressive defences. Over the icy winter of 1343, the Mongol army bombarded the city’s walls, but the advantage of the sea was with the Genoese. In February 1344 a fleet raised the siege; the Mongols retreated, leaving fifteen thousand dead. The following year Zanibeck was back, more determined than ever to expel the Genoese.
The two rival republics agreed on a joint trade embargo in all the realms of the Mongols. In 1344, the Venetian senate forbade ‘all commerce with the regions ruled by Zanibeck, including Caffa’. The decree was read out on the steps of the Rialto to ensure that the message was clearly understood, with the threat of heavy fines and the forfeit of half the cargo. At the same time, with the agreement of the Genoese, they sent conciliatory ambassadors back to Saray to attempt to resolve the crisis. It was in vain. The only response was the whipping flight of Tatar arrows over the city walls, the tensioning creak and thunder of catapults. The siege of Caffa went on into 1346.
By the 1340s the Black Sea had become the warehouse of the world. The rolling siege of Caffa and the destruction of Tana brought trade to a standstill, like ice freezing the winter sea. The effects were felt throughout the hungry cities of the Mediterranean basin. There was famine in the eastern Mediterranean – lack of wheat, salt, fish in Byzantium; shortage of wheat in Venice and a rocketing of prices in luxury goods: silk and spices doubled throughout Europe. It was these effects that made the Black Sea so crucial and the competition between the maritime republics so fierce. The returns encouraged the merchants to endure all the difficulties of trade on the edge of the steppe. Coupled with the ongoing papal embargo on the Mamluks, world trade was grinding to a halt. There was now no outlet in the East for the manufactured goods of Italy and the Low Countries. In 1344 the Venetians made an anguished appeal to the pope:
… at this time … the trade with Tana and the Black Sea can be seen to be lost or obstructed. From these regions our merchants have been accustomed to derive the greatest gain and profit, since it was the source of all trade both in exporting our [wares] and importing them. And now our merchants know not where to go and cannot keep employed.
The pope began to permit a gentle relaxation of trade with Egypt and Syria; it was start of a process that would gradually switch the spice trade back to the Mediterranean basin.
But in Caffa the siege took an unexpected turn. The Tatars outside the wall started to die. According to the only contemporary account:
Disease seized and struck down the whole Tatar army. Every day unknown thousands perished … they died as soon as the symptoms appeared on their bodies, the result of coagulating humours in their groins and armpits followed by putrid fever. All medical advice and help was useless. The Tatars, exhausted, astonished and completely demoralised by the appalling catastrophe and virulent disease, realised that there was no hope of avoiding death … and ordered the corpses to be loaded into their catapults and flung into Caffa, so that the enemy might be wiped out by the terrible stench. It appears that huge piles of dead were hurled inside, and the Christians could neither hide, flee nor escape from these corpses, which they tried to dump in the sea, as many as they could. The air soon became completely infected and the water supply was poisoned by rotting corpses.
It is unlikely that the Black Death was transmitted from just this single event, but it was soon carried west on merchant ships. Only four out of eight Genoese galleys sailing the Black Sea in 1347 made it back to the city; on the others all the crew died and the ships vanished. The plague was in Constantinople in December; it reached Venice some time around January 1348, almost simultaneously with a series of portentous earthquakes which set all the church bells ringing and sucked the water out of the Grand Canal. By March plague had Venice in its grip; by May, as the weather warmed up, it was out of control. No city on earth was more densely populated. It now faced catastrophe. According to the Venetian chronicler Lorenzo de Monacis, the plague exceeded all proportions:
[It] raged so fiercely that squares, porticoes, tombs, and all the holy places were crammed with corpses. At night many were buried in the public streets, some under the floors of their own homes; many died unconfessed; corpses rotted in abandoned houses … fathers, sons, brothers, neighbours and friends abandoned each other … not only would doctors not visit anyone, they fled from the sick … the same terror seized the priests and clerics … there was no rational thought about the crisis … the whole city was a tomb.
It became necessary to take the bodies away at public expense on special ships, called pontoons, which rowed through the city, dragging the corpses from the abandoned houses, taking them … to islands outside the city and dumping them in heaps in long, wide pits, dug for the purpose with huge effort. Many of those on the pontoons and in the pits were still breathing and died [of suffocation]; meanwhile most of the oarsmen caught the plague. Precious furniture, money, gold and silver left lying about in the abandoned houses were not stolen by thieves – extraordinary lethargy or terror infected everyone; none seized by the plague survived seven hours; pregnant women did not escape it: for many, the foetus was expelled with their innards. The plague cut down women and men, old and young in equal measure. Once it struck a house, none left alive.
During the summer of 1348 the black-draped pontoons punted slowly through the foetid canals. The terrible cry rose up: ‘Dead bodies! Dead bodies!’ Every house was compelled by punitive edicts to bring out its corpses. Extraordinary measures were put in place to try to stem the death rate. A special health committee was convened; ships suspected of being infected were burned; all trade ground to a halt; the sale of wine was prohibited, taverns closed; criminals were let out of prison for lack of warders. The Rialto, the docks, the busy canals fell silent. Venice was gripped in gloom. Out on the distant islands of the lagoon the dead went on being tipped into pits – a layer of earth, then a layer of bodies, then another layer of earth – ‘just like lasagne’ as one Florentine writer unnervingly put it.
By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist. The survivors were literally treading on the dead. For centuries, unwary fishermen stepping ashore on certain deserted islands deep in the lagoon scrunched on the whitening bones of the hastily buried victims. The Black Death radically altered the outlook of Venetian merchants. For 150 years, Venice had advanced on a rising tide of European prosperity, growing wealth and booming populations. Maritime ventures, characterised by an optimistic culture of risk-taking, had brought rich returns. But it was the rampant materialism, the expansion of trade routes, the commercial connections across vast distances that had brought not only silk, spices, ivory and pearls, grain and fish, but also the plague bacillus from inner Asia. It was the Italian maritime republics who were charged with carrying death to Europe; the consequences were taken to be divine judgement for cupidity and sin. The contemporary chronicler Gabriele de Mussis set out the charge in an imaginary dialogue between God and the merchants:
‘Genoa, confess what you have done … Venice, Tuscany and the whole of Italy, say what you did.’
‘We Genoese and Venetians are responsible for revealing God’s judgement. Painfully, we set sail to our cities and entered our homes … and alas, we carried with us the darts of death, and at the very moment that our families hugged and kissed us, even as we were speaking we were compelled to spread poison from our mouths.’
By the end of 1350, as a by-product of the Black Sea trade, probably half of Europe’s population had died. The figure in the Mediterranean basin w
as perhaps as high as seventy-five per cent in places. The Black Death jolted a whole continent into new ways of thinking and acting, wrenching it away from a communal medieval past. Venice, whose materialistic drive had affronted Petrarch, was the harbinger of multiple new worlds, identities and mindsets. Afterwards the mercantile mood of Italy would itself darken. Melancholy tinged the bright prospects for wealth and trade: ‘Nothing is more certain than death,’ became the popular sentiment, ‘nor is anything more uncertain than the hour of it.’ Merchants became more risk-averse, more conservative, more aware of sudden reversals of fortune; in the stock phrase of maritime enterprise, fortuna maris, the fortune of the sea, made men increasingly cautious. Henceforth Venice was patrolling the plague frontiers of Europe.
But the competition in the Black Sea went on regardless. The trade boycott was breached by both parties. In 1347, the Venetians overtly broke ranks and acquired new concessions from Zanibeck to trade at Tana. Genoa, determined that ‘there shall be no sailing to Tana’, prepared to retaliate. Its proud declaration that Venetian voyaging in the Black Sea was ever only with the express permission of Genoa made new wars inevitable. They would take both players to the brink of ruin.
The Flag of St Titus
1348–1368
The Black Sea remained an unresolved problem, which plague had done nothing to ease. It merely reduced the available manpower and the protagonists’ naval capabilities. Within a year of losing two thirds of their populations, Genoa and Venice were at war again. In the aftermath, the contest moved back to the Bosphorus, the choke point that controlled access to the markets of central Asia. War returned again to the sea walls of Constantinople, a repeated point of destiny in Venice’s maritime adventure.
By the late 1340s it was clear that the reconstituted Byzantine Empire had never recovered from the trauma of the Fourth Crusade. Racked by civil war, harassed by the inexorable advance of the Turks across the Anatolian land mass, totally incapable of managing its maritime frontiers, the city had no means of controlling the predatory instincts of Venice and Genoa. The two republics became kingmakers, backing differing factions in the city’s internal power struggles. In this respect, the Genoese were far better placed. From their strongly fortified trading town at Galata with its sheltered harbour, just across the water from the city, they were uniquely positioned to squeeze the Greek emperor. Constantinople was entirely dependent on Genoese ships for access to the wheat of the Black Sea, and Galata had stolen much of the city’s trade. By 1350 its customs revenues were seven times those of Constantinople. The entwined snakes of Constantine’s column had become parasites threatening to overwhelm the host body. Constantinople found itself helplessly entangled in the running fight between the two cities for commercial dominance. War advanced remorselessly to its doorstep;
The Genoese acted with impunity. In 1348 they mounted an attack on the city; the following year, when the Byzantines attempted to construct a new fleet they destroyed it in the Golden Horn; they helped themselves to strategic Byzantine bases along the coast of Asia Minor; in 1350, they occupied a castle on the Bosphorus which gave them absolute control over the entrance to the Black Sea. When they seized Venetian ships at Caffa, war with Venice became inevitable.
The third Genoese war, which started in 1350, was in most respects scarcely distinct from its predecessors; a chaotic, wide-ranging and visceral maritime brawl, involving hit-and-run tactics, piracy, raids on bases and islands and pitched sea battles. The difference lay in the size of the fleets. The Black Death had devastated the manpower resources of both cities; seafarers had been particularly badly affected. In 1294, Venice had manned some seventy galleys in a matter of months; in 1350 it was hard pushed to fill the rowing benches of thirty-five. Already a small step-change was starting to take place in attitudes among the ordinary citizens towards the sea-going life. The plague had left its survivors better off. They had inherited considerable wealth and the scarcity of labour forced up the asking price. A rift was also opening up between the classes which would become dramatic in fleet matters a generation later. The ordinary seamen began to feel they were not sharing the same risks and conditions as their aristocratic commanders. When it came to conscription, there were complaints that whereas the captains fed on good bread, the oarsmen subsisted on indigestible millet. As a result many of the conscripted men preferred to hire substitutes from among the colonial subjects of Greece and the Dalmatian coast. The solidarity, the discipline, the sense of shared life among the citizens was starting to fray, with long-term consequences for Venetian sea power.
However, if the fleets were now smaller, the contests grew in bitterness. With each returning cycle of war, Venetian–Genoese hatred increased; and in 1352 the two maritime powers were to fight a battle off the walls of Constantinople which would pass down in Venetian memory as one of the nastiest they ever experienced.
*
In 1351 Venice signed a pact with the Byzantine emperor, John V, for the express purpose of expelling Genoa from the Bosphorus and releasing its throttling grip on the Black Sea. To compensate for its shrunken fleet, the Venetians also enrolled the support of the king of Aragon, in faraway Spain, who had his own reasons for discomfiting the Genoese. He contributed a Catalan force of thirty galleys, twelve of which Venice paid for out of its own pocket. The Venetian command passed to its most experienced admiral, Nicolo Pisani. He was well matched by the Genoese commander, Paganino Doria, scion of a noble maritime family, in a rivalry which would be handed down through the generations. There were initially months of skirmishing in which the protagonists kept missing each other; at one point Pisani, chased back to Negroponte with an inferior force, scuttled his galleys in the harbour rather than risk a fight. Doria was forced to withdraw. Pisani refloated his ships and sailed on.
Early in 1352, a joint Venetian, Byzantine and Catalan fleet finally hunted down their rivals in the mouth of the Bosphorus. On Monday 13 February the two fleets prepared for battle off the city walls of Constantinople. Here the Fourth Crusade had launched its first assault on the city 150 years earlier under very different conditions. It was afternoon when the two fleets finally closed, the depth of winter, bitterly cold, the weather blustery, the sea chopped into fury by a strong wind blowing up from the south and the Bosphorus current running against it with a powerful surge.
Ship-handling was extremely difficult. There were only a few hours of daylight left. In these conditions Pisani considered it wise to hold off for a fresh day, but the Catalan admiral was convinced of easy victory. Sword in hand, he declared he would fight and gave the trumpet call for the attack. Pisani had little option but to follow him in. As they raised anchor, the wind increased its velocity; the sea began to mount into castling peaks and vertiginous troughs. It became impossible to bear down on the Genoese fleet in any kind of order. Doria drew his ships back into the mouth of a sheltered creek, and the allied vessels, propelled by the force of the gale, shot past unable to engage; with huge difficulty they turned about, the rowers straining at the oars, to make a second attempt.
Galley wars
A hundred ships were now wedged into the neck of the Bosphorus at a point only a mile wide. Bucking and rearing, with neither side able to organise its lines, they attempted to engage. The strait was jammed with ships, colliding, crashing into each other, driven ashore by the force of the wind. Rather than a sea battle, it was a series of incoherent micro-fights, small groups of five, six, seven ships tearing at each other blindly in the wind. Night fell abruptly over the violent sea. Confusion increased. It became impossible to tell friend from foe. Venetian ships tried to board each other; Genoese rained arrows down on their own vessels; men fell overboard; galleys lost their steering systems; their oars were shattered in the impact of the battle; vessels floated away rudderless on the current. Once fire caught a ship it blazed like tinder in the fierce gale and was swept away flaring and guttering into the dark. The wind, the biting cold, the splintering of wood, the confused cries, the men s
taggering along their decks, trying to fight, driven forward by an appalling madness: it looked like a version of hell. There was no strategy or control. Outcomes were decided by luck. Locked together, ships crashed onto the coast; their crews leaped ashore and continued to batter and stab at each other so that in places the sea battle became a land battle. The men from seven Catalan galleys just ran away; the Greeks, perhaps more wisely, hardly engaged at all and retreated into the Golden Horn. Men fought to the death with demented fury. They killed their own side as often as the other.
Dawn broke on a scene of devastation. Empty hulls floated on the water or lay wrecked on the shore; the sea was littered with corpses, spars, the detritus of battle. No one could tell who had won. Both sides claimed the victory. The casualties were huge. Franciscan friars from Galata tried to arrange a prisoner exchange. When they visited the Venetian fleet, they found so few captives that they decided not to return, fearing that when the Genoese learned of their losses they would slaughter their own prisoners out of hand.
Yet in the aftermath advantage remained with Genoa. The Venetian and Catalan fleet withdrew, unable to sustain the assault on Galata. And the Genoese now had military aid from the Ottoman sultan, Orhan. The Byzantines had no choice but to sign a peace treaty with Genoa, under the terms of which Greek ships should have no entry to the Black Sea without Genoese permission. In addition, the Genoese were confirmed in their possession of Galata, which they now fortified more strongly as a sovereign colony. Byzantium was being slowly strangled, not only by the avid maritime republics, but also by the advancing Ottoman Turks. For Venice, the strategic consequences were severe. What they learned from the Battle of the Bosphorus was that without a strategic fall-back point at the approaches to the Black Sea they would never be able to exercise any concerted pressure on the trade to the furthest East. They cast an acquisitive eye over the small island of Tenedos, strategically positioned at the mouth of the Dardanelles.
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