Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  There were fault lines within the city between Greek Orthodox and Venetian Catholics, and between rich and poor, that Dandolo—no La Valette—was unable to mend. “I saw but little charity where I ought to have found it,” lamented Calepio, who delivered two mule loads of food and wine to the soldiers on the front line “to stir the hearts of the rich and great…but I found few to imitate me.” The aristocratic leaders took to abandoning the defenses at nightfall and returning to their houses, which led to murmuring among the men.

  The decisive moment came on August 15. The inspirational bishop of Paphos at last persuaded Dandolo to permit a sortie to spike the Ottoman guns. It went badly awry. Some of the undisciplined Greeks took to looting the enemy camp, then Dandolo forbade the cavalry to ride out in support of the operation. The core of professional Venetian soldiers was cut to bits.

  Lala Mustapha tried repeatedly with a mixture of promises and threats to persuade Nicosia to surrender. By August 30, he was confident that the rescue fleet would not come. He made one more attempt, but the Venetians, fueled by a deep patriotism, refused to concede. “Everyone shall know again at this crisis,” ringingly declared the Venetian aristocrat Count Giacomo, “by our brilliant deeds, by our very blood, how loyal we are; how we would rather die by the edge of the sword than change our masters.” The vassal Greeks were probably less excited by these sentiments, but the example of Malta was firmly in everyone’s mind. When signal fires were lit on the distant hills, men, women, and children ran to the walls and jeered at the Ottomans, reminding them of their failure before the walls of Birgu five years earlier. The authorities in outlying areas had ordered the fires to raise the morale inside the city, though they knew no relief was in sight. Dandolo took to protecting himself with an armed bodyguard against the ill will of the people.

  While the siege of Nicosia was entering its last desperate phase, three hundred fifty miles away on Crete the allied fleet was acting out its own pitiful tragedy of bickering and deceit. The Spanish and papal fleet finally rendezvoused with Zane at Souda Bay on northern Crete on August 30. The Venetian commander had lost perhaps twenty thousand men to disease and had been scrabbling for replacements around the islands. The Christians now had a sizeable fleet—205 sails as against 150 of their opponents’—but there was no consensus of how to proceed and no agreed chain of command. On September 1, Colonna called a council of war on his flagship. The commanders talked for thirteen days. Doria was unimpressed by the condition of the Venetian fleet and accused Zane of concealing its true state; during the fleet review Zane had drawn up all his ships in the harbor and shifted his men from ship to ship as each was inspected, to disguise the truth about his depleted force. Doria argued it was too late now to attack Cyprus and roundly declared that he had no intention of letting Venice “acquire honour with my goods.” He demanded that the Venetians should promise security of two hundred thousand ducats for his private galleys, should they be lost in the venture. The Venetians refused and insisted on a relief of Cyprus: Nicosia was still holding out, and Zane had orders to make for Cyprus and destroy the Ottoman fleet; it was imperative that they make the attempt. Doria continued to object. Zane wrote back to Venice describing Doria’s obstructive attitude: “Though he pretends he is willing to fight the enemy, he does not wish to do so at all, and never ceases to make difficulties.” Further intelligence was dispatched to determine the situation on Cyprus. As time and willpower dribbled away, Colonna became increasingly desperate to achieve something, anything. Finally on the night of September 17 the whole fleet weighed anchor with a view to unsettling the Turks by a strike on the island of Rhodes in their rear.

  MEANWHILE PIYALE HAD DISPATCHED scouts to determine the intentions of the Christian fleet. Helpful Cretans informed him that the Christians were hopelessly bogged down and unlikely to achieve anything. Piyale duly detached sixteen thousand men from the galleys to join Lala Mustapha’s final assault. At dawn on September 9 they closed in for the kill, spurred on by the pasha’s promise of lavish rewards for the first men into the city.

  The Ottomans concentrated their attack at four points. The inexperienced Greek levies were terrified by the pandemonium of the first assault and ran away almost at once. It was left largely to the Venetians to hold back the tide. Bells clanged throughout the city summoning men to the walls. Calepio came upon the bishop of Paphos, “who had on a breastplate…[and] made me put on him arm pieces and a helmet, and went to join his men.” For two hours they held back the Ottomans but “our men were cut in pieces, and the little fosses of the shelter were choked with corpses.” Calepio saw the men being shot down one by one: “The Coadjutor fell killed by a musket ball; Messer Bernardo Bollani fell, and lay awhile under the corpses, but was picked up and went down to the gate. Nicolo Sinclitico withdrew at last with a wound on the face, likewise his brother Geronimo. Thomas Visconti, their brother, died; Colonel Palazzo died on the spot; the Governor Roncome died in his house; and (to be brief) after two hours’ continuous fighting nearly all were left dead.” Among the defenders still holding their ground, there was confusion and fury. The chief gunner at one of the bastions, now short of powder, rounded violently on his field commanders: “You dogs, enemies of God, of yourselves and the realm, do you not see that the enemy is gaining ground? Why have we no powder that we may drive them out? As long as I had powder to batter their flanks, they made no way. The devil take you. Have we eaten the powder? Have we swallowed the balls? Your saving for St Mark will, I can see, lose us the day.” But by this time Dandolo was nowhere to be seen. He had abandoned his post and fallen back on the palace.

  There was confused fighting in the streets “but with no kind of order” as the Ottomans poured in. A large number of Greek priests were killed outside their church. Calepio and another priest tried to rally the fleeing Greek levies: “we took a great cross and exhorted them as earnestly as possible…but though we spent two hours haranguing them, it did little good.” Some tried to slip through the embrasures of the walls; others opened the gates in an attempt to escape. “Many were killed by the Turkish cavalry, others were made prisoners, and a few escaped.”

  Around the palace in the central square, the defenders grouped for a last stand. By this time there were Venetians more intent on killing Dandolo than the Turks. The nobleman Andrea Pesaro sought out Dandolo and tried to cut him down. Crying “here I say, we have the traitor,” he raised his word but was felled by the commander’s bodyguard. Dandolo wanted to arrange an organized surrender but it was futile. Those who laid down their arms were just slain in the onrush. Fighting yard by yard, the last survivors held out for a while in the upper rooms of the palace, hurling Turks out of the windows, until they themselves were reduced to a mound of corpses. Dandolo dressed himself in his crimson velvet robe in the hope of being spared as an important person. He was beheaded anyway. “Then,” according to Calepio, “a drunken Greek hoisted over the palace the Turkish standard, pulling down that of St Mark.”

  Finally the guns stopped firing and the din subsided, “but the change was a sad and mournful one.” All that could be heard was the wailing of the women and children separated from their families and driven off into slavery. Calepio recorded terrible snapshots of collective and personal grief: “The victors kept cutting off the heads of old women; many of them as they marched along, to prove their swords, split open the heads of old women who had already surrendered…. Among the slain were Lodovico Podochatoro and Lucretia Calepia, my mother, whose head they cut off on her serving maid’s lap.” The day after the capture of the city, the prisoners and plunder were put up for sale. It was said that no such quantity of loot had been taken from a city since the fall of Constantinople.

  LALA MUSTAPHA SENT TO KYRENIA on the north coast a Venetian captain in chains with two severed heads attached to his saddlebow. To the commander at Famagusta, Marc’Antonio Bragadin, he dispatched Dandolo’s head in a dish.

  On the evening of September 21 the Christian fleet was sheltering from a
storm off the Ottoman coast when scout ships returned with the news they had been dreading: Nicosia had fallen. The following day, on the poop deck of Colonna’s flagship, the Christian relief effort played out its last act. The majority of the commanders were for turning back; Zane at last and reluctantly conceded. The bedraggled fleet sailed home, not without the bickering continuing on and off. Doria wished to wash his hands of the fleet and hurry back alone, mindful of the lateness of the season and his trumping instruction to keep his ships safe at all costs. In this at least he showed good judgment. In early October the fleet was hit by gales. Thirteen galleys foundered off Crete, though Doria, probably a better seaman, lost none. Typhus hit the galleys again; Colonna’s vessel was damaged by lightning, and more ships went down. By the end of the year both Colonna and Doria would be publicizing their own partisan accounts of the fiasco. If the pope was dispirited, the Venetian senate was appalled; Zane would end his days in prison, a broken man, while Philip, who was as responsible as anyone for the humiliating failure, promoted Doria to the rank of general.

  On Cyprus, the Venetian fortress at Kyrenia promptly surrendered when the captured officer rode clanking into the courtyard with the heads attached to his saddle. But at Famagusta, Marc’Antonio Bragadin buried Dandolo’s head with honor and sent Lala Mustapha a ringing reply: “I have seen your letter. I have also received the head of the lord lieutenant of Nicosia, and I tell you herewith that even if you have easily taken the city of Nicosia, with your own blood you will have to purchase this city, which with God’s help will give you so much to do you will always regret having encamped here.”

  The Ottoman army marched on to surround Famagusta. With it, Lala Mustapha sent booty and the pick of the young men and women taken from Nicosia. These captives were loaded onto a galleon belonging to Sokollu and two other vessels as presents for Selim. On October 3, off Famagusta, an explosion in the galleon’s magazine ripped all three ships apart and rocked the defender’s walls. Legend had it that it was an act of deliberate destruction by the daughter of an Italian noblewoman, determined not to be taken alive.

  CHAPTER 17

  Famagusta

  January to July 1571

  RAIN FELL BLEAKLY on the Venetian lagoon during the winter of 1570–1571. The weather was wretched, the price of grain high, the fleet in tatters. There was still typhus in the galleys, and the ships’ priests, fearful of contagion, were leaving the men to die unconfessed. The war was hurting Venice badly. Money was short, but the republic dared not stand down her fleet for fear the men would simply melt away.

  Within the city, blame for the debacle of 1570 was hurled back and forth. An anonymous pamphlet, The Notable Errors Committed by the Venetian Signoria in Their Resolution and Administration of the War Against the Turk, excoriated the authorities for naïveté, bad judgment, poor appointments. The author held them responsible for “the loss of Nicosia, the death or imprisonment of 56,000 persons, as well as the loss of more than 300 pieces of artillery and of almost the entire island except for the walled enclosure of Famagusta.” The ignominious fall of Nicosia seemed to mark another chapter in the unhalted decline of the republic’s fortunes. Now the fate of Famagusta hung finely in the balance. “God knows whether Famagusta will be strong enough to hold out for so long a time against the forces of the Turk,” wrote the French cardinal de Rambouillet to Charles IX. It was a view widely shared in Venice. Five hundred miles east, Selim was in Edirne, already preparing for the new campaigning season; after the rich pickings at Nicosia, volunteers thronged to the cause.

  The pope was distraught. He personally blamed the expeditionary failure on Doria’s refusal “to render the Venetians more satisfactory service.” In Rome, the new year opened badly with one of those natural occurrences that unsteadied people. On January 3, during a violent storm, a bolt of lightning struck the campanile of Saint Peter’s and caused extensive damage. More seriously, negotiations for the formal constitution of a Holy League seemed bogged down in the winter mud.

  Talks had started brightly enough in July 1570 with Philip’s representatives and those of Venice meeting in Rome under the auspices of the pope. There was initial jousting about terms of reference and costs—the Spanish wanted the league to be directed generally against all heretics and infidels; the Venetians, who had no intention of fighting Protestants in the Low Countries, countered that the term “the Turk” would be sufficient. The papal negotiators proposed using the league of 1537 as a template for the arrangement, and it appeared by September that all the major issues had been discussed; talks then had to be suspended while the Spanish negotiators trundled back to Madrid. By October, Philip, despite reservations, was ready to sign—at which point the Venetians started to quibble; they changed their team and demanded to negotiate everything again from scratch, point by point. There followed months of stop-start negotiations, wrangling, and distortion. For Pius, driven by Christian zeal, it was like herding geese into a pen.

  The process was a clear reflection of the forces that destroyed the parallel naval expedition: bad faith, hidden agendas, mutual lack of confidence, conflicting objectives. Philip, the Catholic King, wanted the kudos of heading the league as temporal leader of the Christian world; his strategic interests extended no farther east than Sicily. In fact the fall of Cyprus had some advantages in that it reduced the power of Venice. Philip wanted to direct the league to a defense of the Western Mediterranean and the recapture of Tunis; he was also keenly interested in money. The dangled papal subsidies were crucial to Spanish participation. The Venetians demanded an offensive operation to secure Cyprus and gave not a thought for Tunis, while both parties were secretly appalled by Pius’s vision that the league’s ultimate objective must be the recapture of the Holy Land.

  The Venetians remembered the league of 1537 with distaste and played a complex double game. Whilst strenuously denying it, they conducted on-off negotiations with Sokollu during the hammering out of the deal—and even after it was signed—for an ending of the war. Their representative in Istanbul, Marc’Antonio Barbaro, while ostensibly under house arrest for the duration of the war, was in constant contact with the chief vizier. The republic used the threat of a deal with the sultan as a pressure for better terms from the league, and vice versa. “I have no doubt,” wrote an observant cardinal at the negotiations, “that if [the sultan] should offer these lords some sort of accord, and the league is not quickly settled, they will accept it, even though it means simply surrendering Cyprus to him.” In fact the Venetians were bargaining hard with Sokollu for the retention of Famagusta, even as the Turks prepared to capture it. And the chief vizier had his own ruthless game of power politics to play; he had not wanted the Cyprus war, but now that it was under way, he was determined that his bitter rivals in the divan—Lala Mustapha and Piyale—should not gain military glory at his expense. If he could wheedle Famagusta from the Venetians by diplomacy, he could still spike their guns.

  FAMAGUSTA, “THE CITY SUNK IN THE SAND” the Greeks called it, was the easternmost outpost of the Venetian sea empire. The lion of Saint Mark, carved in stone on the sea gate, glared unblinkingly into the brilliant sunlight; his flag rustled in the salt wind, above the palm trees and the Crusader chapels and the church of Saint Nicholas, a gothic fantasy modeled on the cathedral at Rheims, somehow beached on a tropical shore.

  The Venetians had fortified the place heavily in the years before Lala Mustapha came. The two-mile perimeter, shaped like a rhombus, presented a formidable obstacle for the pasha. “A very fair stronghold, and the strongest and greatest on the island,” an English visitor called it in 1553—five gates, fifteen bastions, a deeply excavated dry ditch, walls fifty feet high and fifteen feet thick—and the terrain was low-lying and malarial, not a place for an army to linger. The pasha was keen for a quick result.

  As soon as he arrived in late September, Lala Mustapha tried to persuade the Venetians to give up without a fight. He paraded heads and live captives in front of the walls, and forged le
tters to the Venetian ambassador in Istanbul, requesting Bragadin’s permission to surrender. From the start he received a flinty response. Bragadin, like the hapless Dandolo, was a scion of one of the great families of Venice, but a stouter patriot. Matters at Famagusta were put on a very different footing from those at Nicosia. There was strong internal discipline; the soldiers were paid; food distribution was systematic and fair; accordingly to the patriotic Venetian accounts, “as long as there was a drachm of food, Bragadin distributed it; and where there was none, there remained his goodwill.” Despite a huge discrepancy of forces—eighty thousand to eight thousand—morale was high. The Greek population and their priests participated wholeheartedly in the defense, and Bragadin was wise enough to leave practical military command to the inspirational Astorre Baglione, who was adored by his men.