City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  At this critical moment the Venetians were affected by the same indecision as had overtaken Doria early in the siege. ‘The common opinion was that the Venetians could then have taken Chioggia, if they had attacked it at once; but they did not risk it.’ In a neat symmetry, they preferred to starve it into submission, squeezing the passes and waterways towards Padua ‘so that not a letter or a single thing might go from Chioggia to Padua, and that the Genoese, being unable to escape, would use up all their supplies’. The failure to capitalise on the rout at the bridge had an unexpected effect within the town. It actually improved Genoese morale. They expelled the Venetian women and children to eke out supplies and sat down to wait. The contest dragged on through the spring. The lord of Padua continued to besiege the key Venetian city of Treviso; down the coast at Manfredonia the slowly approaching Genoese relief fleet captured an entire Venetian grain convoy; a Venetian spy, dressed as a German, was discovered and tortured to reveal the Republic’s war plans. The pope went on pressing for peace.

  The hope in Chioggia now rested on a Genoese naval rescue and the lord of Padua. Despite Venetian efforts, supplies still managed to make their way downriver. In a daring pass, when the river was full, forty barges were floated downstream loaded with food, weapons and gunpowder. They forced their way past a feeble river guard and made it into the town. The Venetians responded by blocking all the approaching waterways with palisades and doubling their armed boats. When the supply boats tried to return they were met with fierce resistance and had to turn back. The marshland and waterways behind Chioggia became the terrain for amphibious warfare: boatloads of men fighting in the rivers; infantry floundering through canals; ambushes among the sedge. The Genoese held a string of fortified water mills, which the Venetians assaulted. On 22 April they launched a major attack on a mill but were pushed back, ‘and because of this victory those in the mill greatly rejoiced and lit fires, by which those in Chioggia learned what had happened’. The following day battle was rejoined. The Venetians again attacked the mill, while the Genoese despatched eighty boats from the town to destroy the palisades and reopen the waterway to Padua. Warned of the approach, the Venetians suspended the attack on the mill; going stealthily through the cover of the reeds they ambushed the Genoese breakout, ‘and with wild shouts and the firing of many bombards and arrows they began a fierce battle’. The boat crews abandoned their vessels and fled through the reed beds and dry channels. Only six boats got away. It was an ill-omened day for Genoa: 23 April was the feast day of St George. Henceforward no further supplies could reach the beleaguered town.

  Despite continued minor successful counterattacks, the pressure on Chioggia was now unrelenting. The Venetians could sense that the end was near. The old doge, who had been in temporary camp on the Pellestrina lido for four winter months, had written to the standing war committee on 22 April, pleading age and infirmity and requesting to be allowed to return. The Venetians, as unbending to state servants as to enemies, politely refused. Contarini was the ‘life blood, the security, the morale’ of the whole enterprise. He remained at the siege. And no concessions were given to the hated enemy. Supplies inside Chioggia were running low. There was discord between the Genoese and their allies, many of whom wanted to lay down their weapons and depart. The Venetians roundly declared they would hang anyone whom they caught leaving the town. They wanted to starve Chioggia as fast as possible, before a Genoese relief fleet could appear. Inside, ammunition was giving out. The defenders were reduced to eating rats, cats, crabs, mice, seaweed. The water, lifted from badly made cisterns, was foul. They stared anxiously out to sea. It remained a blank.

  Desperate negotiations ensued. The defenders agreed to surrender so long as they were allowed to go free. Venice refused: surrender would be unconditional and a deadline fixed – after that date, everyone captured would be hanged. The deadline passed. The Genoese kept watching the sea. On 6 June, ‘at the hour of terce’, Maruffo’s fleet was sighted. People climbed on the house roofs, crying, shouting, waving flags. The Genoese admiral fired a shot challenging Pisani to battle; the invitation was refused. Every day Maruffo reappeared with the same challenge. Eventually Pisani sailed out and chased the Genoese several miles down the coast. From the rooftops, the defenders watched with unspeakable pain the flag of St George recede.

  *

  The guns had fallen silent in Chioggia. The powder was used up. The defence was at its last gasp. Venetian and Genoese officers began parleying over the walls. The pope’s legates again tried to arrange a truce, but the Venetians folded their arms. Maruffo returned from Zara on 15 June with an augmented fleet, yet again dangling his galleys off Chioggia. A last effort was made to break out. Makeshift boats were constructed from any available wood – crates, beds, house timbers. A message was sent to Maruffo to send his ships off the lido for a rescue attempt. It failed hopelessly; the ramshackle craft were impeded by the ring of palisades in the canals. They were intercepted, captured and sunk. Maruffo withdrew. On 17 June, the Genoese released their prisoners and sent three ambassadors to Zeno’s camp. They made one final attempt to wriggle free, trying to cut a side deal with the mercenary troops: Chioggia could be sacked in return for a safe conduct. The mercenaries had to be appeased with the right to sack the town anyway as long as all the prisoners were given up. One dissenting condottiere was hanged between the two columns to keep the hired men in line.

  On 21 June, a deputation to the doge’s camp was forced to accept unconditional surrender. The following day the commander, Spinola, hoisted the flag of St George for the last time; the impotent Genoese fleet sailed up yet again. Spinola ordered the flag to be struck as a signal of surrender. Maruffo replied with a smoke signal, begging the defenders to hold out just a little longer. There was no reply. ‘They understood that it was all over at Chioggia. They returned [to harbour] completely downhearted.’

  On 24 June, the doge entered the shattered town; after ten months the banner of St Mark was raised over Chioggia once more, and the defenders, haggard, hollow-eyed, cadaverous, more dead than alive, staggered out to surrender. The victors carefully sorted their prisoners; they used a shibboleth to separate the Paduans, Hungarians and mercenaries from the Genoese. Asked to pronounce the word capra (goat), the Genoese could only accurately reproduce their dialect version, crapa. Four thousand Genoese were marched off to makeshift prison camps where many died; those who could say capra were freed.

  On 30 June 1380 the doge was finally allowed to return to Venice. He made his entry in the Bucintoro, ornately dressed and decorated for the occasion. It was rowed by a hundred captured oarsmen and followed by seventeen dejected Genoese galleys, their flags trailing in humiliating defeat. They were the sole remnant of the fleet that had set out to bridle the horses of St Mark. Accompanied by Pisani, the Golden Boat returned in triumph to the city among a swarm of small craft, the clanging of bells, the firing of guns, the boom and thunder of victorious noise. So thick was the throng of jubilant people that it was almost impossible to force a way through the crowd for the ducal procession to St Mark’s, where the thanksgiving for the deliverance of Venice was celebrated with a solemn mass.

  *

  For the Venetians there was a saddening afternote. Pisani died six weeks later, chasing the remnant of Maruffo’s fleet across the Adriatic. After being at sea almost continuously for over two years, he succumbed to wounds and fever on 15 August at Manfredonia. The people of the city were grief-stricken. No Venetian admiral was ever loved so much or mourned so deeply. He was the subject of popular clamour to the last; his funeral procession to the Church of St Anthony inspired an explosion of popular emotions. A band of sailors shouldered their way through the crowd and hijacked the bier, shouting, ‘We his children are carrying our brave captain to our father St Anthony!’

  But when peace came at the Treaty of Turin the following year, it was less a victory than the avoidance of defeat. Venice regained her land territory in the Trevigiano, but the Dalmatian coast remained in
Hungarian hands. Restored at Constantinople, Venice was again excluded from the Sea of Azov. Competition between the two republics would continue as before. And the almost forgotten island of Tenedos, which had sparked the whole conflict, was demilitarised. Its fortress was demolished, the Greek population forcibly resettled on Crete. It was a solution that would please no one but the Turks, who now used the abandoned harbour as a base for piracy.

  Venice had outlasted Genoa less through military supremacy than through the durability of her institutions, the social cohesion of her people and their patriotic adherence to the flag of St Mark. After the humiliation of Chioggia, Genoa imploded. Ten successive doges were deposed in five years; in 1394 the city handed itself to the French kings. For Venice such surrender was unthinkable. It would prefer to drown in its own lagoon. By the sixteenth century, when Veronese added a painting to the ducal palace of the doge’s triumphant return, the meaning of Chioggia was clearer. On the rebound of almost catastrophic defeat, Venice would eventually win the contest for Mediterranean trade. The enmity would remain but the Genoese contention was progressively enfeebled.

  Effigy of Pisani from his tomb

  There were other consequences for both republics still over the horizon, like a storm brewing far out to sea. The Genoese–Venetian wars repeatedly stalled papal plans to scotch the growing Ottoman threat. By 1362 the Ottomans had virtually encircled Constantinople; in 1371 they shattered the Serbs; by the end of the fourteenth century their territories stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates.

  Stato da Mar

  1381–1425

  Venice had been taken to the limit by the slogging contest in its own lagoon. For two years all trade ceased. The fleet was ruined, the treasury emptied; naval supremacy of the Adriatic was formally gifted away to Hungary in the treaty of 1381. The Genoese wars, plague, Cretan rebellion and papal trade bans had made the fourteenth century a testing time. Yet the Republic had survived. And in the wake of Chioggia the city was able to stage an extraordinary recovery. In the half-century after 1381, the Stato da Mar underwent a burst of colonial expansion that would carry the Republic to the height of maritime prosperity and imperial power. Venice returned to astonish the world.

  On the turn of the fifteenth century the eastern Mediterranean was a mosaic of small states and competing interests. The Byzantine Empire continued to decline; the kings of Hungary were losing their grip on the Balkans; the Ottomans were pushing west in their place; the opportunist Catalans, who had been a scourge of the eastern sea, were starting to withdraw. Elsewhere Genoa, Pisa, Florence and Naples, along with an assortment of adventurers and freebooters, held a string of islands, ports and forts. As Hungary’s hold on the Adriatic weakened and the Ottomans drew ever nearer, many of the small cities on the Dalmatian coast that had once struggled so hard against Venice came to seek its protection. When the Ottomans in their turn were thrown into turmoil by civil war, the Republic prospered. Between 1380 and 1420 Venice doubled its land holdings – and almost as importantly its population. Many of these acquisitions were in mainland Italy, but it was the strengthening of its maritime empire that enabled Venice to cement its position as the dominant power in the sea and the axis of world trade.

  The methods it used to annex new possessions were highly flexible: a mixture of patient diplomacy and short sharp applications of military force. Where the city had obtained an empire by job lot after 1204, these new acquisitions were piecemeal. Ambassadors were despatched to guarantee the safety of a Greek port or a Dalmatian island; an absentee landlord could be tempted to sell up for ready cash; a couple of armed galleys might persuade an embattled Catalan adventurer it was time to go home or swing a factional dispute in a Croatian port; a wavering Venetian heiress might be ‘encouraged’ to marry a suitable Venetian lord or to bestow her inheritance directly on the Republic. If its techniques were patient and variable, the Republic’s underlying policy was frighteningly consistent: to obtain, at the lowest cost, desirable forts, ports and defensive zones for the honour and profit of the city. ‘Our agenda in the maritime parts’, the senate declared in 1441 like a corporation setting out its strategic plan, ‘considers our state and the conservation of our city and commerce.’

  Sometimes cities submitted to Venice voluntarily to avoid unwelcome pressures from the Ottomans or Genoese. In each case Venice ran the slide rule of cost–benefit analysis over the application, like merchants eyeing the goods. Did the city have a secure harbour? Good water sources for provisioning ships? An agricultural hinterland? A compliant population? What were its defences like? Did it control a strategic strait? And negatively, what would be the loss if it fell to a hostile power? Cattaro, on the Dalmatian coast, made six requests to submit before the Republic agreed. Patras applied seven times. On each occasion the senators listened gravely and shook their heads. When it came to outright purchase they waited for the stock to fall. Ladislas of Hungary offered his claim to Dalmatia in 1408 for three hundred thousand florins. The following year, with his cities in revolt, Venice sealed it for one hundred thousand. And sometimes the choice was money or compulsion; the carrot and the stick were applied in equal measure. By patience, bargaining, intimidation and outright force, Venice extended the Stato da Mar.

  One by one the red-roofed ports, green islands and miniature cities of Dalmatia and the Albanian coast dropped, almost effortlessly, into its hands: Sebenico and Brazza, Trau and Spalato, the islands of Lesina and Curzola, famous for shipbuilding and sailors, ‘as bright and clean as a beautiful jewel’. The key to the whole system was Zara, over which Venice had struggled to maintain its dominance for four hundred years. Now it submitted to Venice by free will, with cries of ‘Long live St Mark!’ To be quite certain, its troublesome noble families were moved to Venice, then offered positions in other cities along the coast. Once again the doge could style himself lord of Dalmatia. Only Ragusa, proudly independent, escaped permanently the embrace of St Mark.

  The value of this coast was inestimable. Venetian galley fleets could thread their way up the sheltered channels of its coast; protected by its chain of islands from the Adriatic’s unpredictable winds – the sirocco, the bora and the maestrale – they could put in at its secure harbours. The Republic’s ships would be built from Dalmatian pine and rowed or sailed by Dalmatian crews. Manpower was as important as wood, and the maritime skills of the eastern shore of the Adriatic would be at the disposal of Venice for as long as the Republic lasted.

  If Zara was important, the acquisition of Corfu was more so. They bought the island from the king of Naples in 1386 for thirty thousand ducats and with the ready acceptance of its populace, ‘considering the tempest of the times and the instability of human affairs’. Corfu was the missing link in a chain of bases. The island – which Villehardouin had found ‘very rich and plenteous’ when the crusaders stopped there in 1203 – occupied an emotional place in the city’s history. Here the Venetians had lost thousands of men in sea battles against the Normans in the eleventh century; they were gifted it in 1204, held it briefly, then lost it again. Its position, guarding the mouth of the Adriatic, also provided critical oversight of the east–west traffic between Italy and Greece. Across the straits, Venice acquired the Albanian port of Durazzo, rich in running water and green forests, and Butrinto just ten miles away. This triangle of bases controlled the Albanian coast and the seaway to Venice.

  The fortress of Corfu

  Corfu itself, verdant, mountainous, watered by the winter rains, became the command centre of Venice’s naval system and its choice posting. They called it ‘Our Door’ and stationed a permanent galley fleet in its secure port under the captain of the Gulf; in times of danger his authority would be trumped by the all-powerful captain of the sea, whose arrival was announced with belligerent banners and the blare of trumpets. All passing Venetian ships were mandated to make a four-hour stopover at Corfu to exchange news. They came gladly, seeing the outline of the great island floating up out of the calm sea, like a first apprehen
sion of Venice itself. Corfu provided fresh water and the delights of port. The prostitutes of the town were renowned, both for their favours and the ‘French disease’; and sailors on the homeward run, being pious as well as frail, also stopped further up the coast at the shrine of Our Lady of Kassiopi to give thanks for the voyage.

  The Ionian islands south from Corfu were added in this new wave of empire: verdant Santa Maura, craggy Kefallonia, and ‘Zante, fior di Levante’ (Flower of the Levant) in the Italian rhyme. Lepanto, a strategic port tucked into the Gulf of Corinth and potentially attractive to the Ottomans, was taken by despatching the captain of the Gulf with five galleys and emphatic orders to storm or buy the place. Faced with the choice of decapitation or a safe conduct and 1,500 ducats a year, its Albanian lord went quietly.

  The gold rush of new acquisitions stretched round the entire coast of Greece. Zonchio, a well-protected harbour close to Modon, was bought in 1414; Naplion and Argos in the Gulf of Argos came by bribery; Salonica begged for protection from the Turks in 1423. Shrewd in their moves and cognisant of their manpower shortages, untempted by feudal ambition and landed titles in a landscape that yielded so little, the senate refused the submission of inland Attica. What mattered and only mattered was the sea.