by Jan Morris
A storm was gathering, but never mind, in their scattered fiefs and colonies the Venetians generally managed to make the best of things. Balls and festivities, we are told, greeted admirals and ambassadors when they toured the islands, ‘at which there was no lack of polished and gracious ladies’, and even as the power of the Turks spread westward across the Aegean, life among the colonists proceeded much as before.
Let us go back to Naxos now, and follow those families of the Kastro on their summer migration to the countryside, for in Naxos more than anywhere one can still see how the Venetians and their clients lived, in the heyday of their Aegean dominion. It is a surprisingly tropical kind of island – it lies on the same degree of latitude as Algiers – and this gives it a suggestively colonial feel. There are palm trees about, and prickly pears. The high wind-barriers of bamboo which protect the coastal fields and pastures are oddly reminiscent of sugar-cane and slave-plantation. And the lush valley of the Tragea which lies athwart the island is a true oasis, its declivity filled with rich green olive trees like groves of dates, its old tower-houses like fortresses in Oman and Aden. The scattered hamlets are almost lost in the green of it, and on a high peak far above, looking seawards towards Turks and pirates, landwards towards rebellion, the Venetian fortress called Apano Kastro stands in vigilant dereliction.
Venetian remains are scattered all over this idyllic countryside. The most suggestive of them, I think, are the fortified monasteries, six of them in all, for there not merely an empire, but a faith stands to arms. There is one on the escarpment immediately behind the Chora, painted white and inhabited only by a clutch of nuns, which looks astonishingly like some defiant frontier stronghold east of Suez, stamped about by sentries and pebbled with regimental crests. There is another, at the head of its own valley on the eastern coast, which though all in ruins now seems to bristle with the bellicosity of its Latin monks in this Orthodox landscape, its battlemented walls blocking the head of the gulley as though ready still to shower it with arrows or flood it with boiling oil.
But the most evocative of the memorials are the country houses. These are fortified too, and are mostly tower-houses, called pirgoi by the Greeks, heavily merlonated in the Venetian manner, and rising solid and thick-walled above their olive groves. Many of them, though, remain genial and gentlemanly despite their battlements, and speak seductively of hedonist days, and licentious nights, in the duchy long ago. One such country house, surrounded by its properties, lies in its own fold in the hills ten or twelve miles behind Naxos, and there is nowhere better in the Aegean to dream a few hours away in the sage-brush of the hillside, or beside the sedgy stream that runs along the bottom of the valley, imagining the Venetian imperialists at their ease.
Behind the house Apano Kastro stands upon its peaks, and beyond rises the mass of Mount Zas, at 3,000 feet or so the highest mountain in the Cyclades. Set against so grand a backcloth, the house seems to lie gratefully in its hollow. It is a ruin now, inhabited only by cattle and scrabbling hens, but it retains its poise delightfully. It is built of roughly dressed stone, and is drawn, so to speak, with a gifted but bucolic hand – a simple house, but stylish too, like a good country wine. Its tower is low and unaggressive, though conventionally battlemented, and a little terrace, almost like a private piazzetta, gives to its front door a nicely ceremonial look. Above the door there lingers the ghost of an escutcheon, undecipherable now, and inside a faint air of squiredom survives. Ruined rooms still show their fine proportions, and shattered casements look out across the muddy farmyard to feudal hectares beyond.
Orchards attend this fortunate house – lemons, oranges, almonds, apples. Gnarled fig trees grapple with its garden walls. Lizards twitch about the place. Across the valley doves still fly around the family pigeoncote, and on a ridge a little way behind the house a small family chapel, its plaster peeling, its walls a little askew, flickers with the candles kept alight, year after year, by the descendants of the serfs.
But while those pirgoi mellowed in the sunshine, Mohammed went back to Khalkis, and this time he brought an army of 100,000 men, with twenty-one guns, using 45-pound charges to fire balls 26 inches across, and a fleet so vast that it looked, so one Venetian galley captain thought, ‘like a pine forest on the sea’. There ensued a great Venetian tragedy – 250 years after the Fourth Crusade, a terrible token of things to come.
For as the fall of Singapore was to the British in 1941, the fall of Euboea was to the Venetians in 1470 – the first grim warning that empires never last. The island was the cornerstone of Venice’s position in the Aegean, and its loss to the Muslims would be a mortification to all Christendom: yet its fall seems to have been ordained and inevitable. Everybody knew what was about to happen. The Sultan had made his reconnaissance. The huge Turkish fleet was made ready in Constantinople. The Ottoman army was embarked. The tragedy assembled itself slowly, inexorably, but nobody came to help. ‘The princes of Christendom,’ we are told, ‘looked on as if in a theatre.’
On 15 June 1470, the Turkish fleet appeared off Khalkis, and landed an army on the island shore just outside the city. Three days later a second force appeared over the mainland hills, led by the Sultan himself, and wound its way down the hillside to the shore of the Euripos. Mohammed did not try to take the castle over the channel, behind its open drawbridge, but instead threw two bridges of boats across the strait, north and south, and so got his whole force on to the island. Khalkis was surrounded. There were 2,500 souls inside the city, at least 100,000 encamped outside, but when the Sultan summoned the city to surrender, promising its inhabitants exemption from all taxes for ten years, he got a tart response. The Bailie, Paolo Erizzo, replied that he proposed to burn the Turkish fleet and root up all the Turkish tents, while the men of the garrison told the Sultan to go and eat pork. The bombardment began that evening, and 3,000 Greeks rounded up in the countryside around were slaughtered below the walls of the city, pour encourager les autres.
The Venetians were hardly less savage in their resistance. When they discovered a traitor in the city, a captain of artillery who had been giving intelligence to the Turks, they hung him by one foot in the town piazza before cutting his body into pieces and firing it out of guns into the Turkish camp. The information he had sent the enemy was then exploited to lure them into especially strongly defended sectors of the defence, where they were massacred. Successive Turkish assaults were beaten off, the morale of the defenders was high, and on 11 July the city seemed to be saved when the lookouts reported that a fleet of seventy-one Venetian warships was approaching down the strait from the north.
This was the fleet of Admiral Niccolò da Canale, Captain-General of the Sea, sailing in from Crete, and when he heard of its arrival the Sultan, so it is said, burst into tears of thwarted rage. If Canale broke the boat-bridges, the Turkish army would be isolated on the island. But inexplicably Canale anchored his ships six miles north of the Euripos, and there he stayed. He ignored all signals from the garrison. He refused requests from his own officers to ram the bridges. Perhaps, like all navigators, he was baffled by the tides of the channel: perhaps he was just frightened, or indecisive; whatever the reason, he hesitated too long, and next day the Turks, hardly believing their luck, took the city of Khalkis.
They had filled the moat with rubbish and corpses, and across this stinking causeway stormed the landward walls. The garrison still fought desperately back. Barricades were erected street by street. From the rooftops women threw pots, pans and boiling water on the Turks below. Hour by hour, nevertheless, the Turks forced their way into the central piazza, and by noon on 12 July the fighting had ended. Canale, seeing the Turkish flag rise above the walls, sailed away to sea: every male person in the city over eight years old was butchered; the women and small children were enslaved. The Sultan himself rode through the streets, sword in hand, looking for skulkers, and the heads of the slaughtered garrison were piled in a huge bleeding heap in front of the Patriarch’s palace.
Erizzo t
he Bailie, with a group of women and children, had escaped from the town by a tunnel, and taken refuge in the tower on the Euripos bridge, hoping that Canale would at least send a ship to take them off. He was soon forced out of it. His companions were summarily executed. He himself was promised that his head would be spared, and so it was, for the Turks placed him upon planks and sawed him in half. The smoking city lay desolate at the water’s edge, and the Sultan, leaving a garrison behind, departed for Constantinople again. The Turkish fleet, too, loaded with spoils and captives, soon sailed for the Dardanelles. Canale’s ships did not interfere with its withdrawal, but escorted it on its homeward voyage, so the Turkish admiral sarcastically reported, with every courtesy. ‘You can tell the Doge,’ said the Grand Vizier to the Venetian envoy in Constantinople, ‘that he can leave off marrying the sea. It is our turn now.’
Not much is left of Venetian Khalkis. The tower on the bridge was wantonly destroyed when a new swing bridge was built in the nineteenth century: only its base survives, with a tall tide indicator mounted on it. The famous walls of the city, upon which the Sultan looked down that day from the ridge above, still stood in Victorian times, when John Murray’s Handbook to Greece reported that the streets behind them were littered with the cannon-balls of the siege, but gradually collapsed, subsided or were demolished over the years. One by one the winged lions disappeared from the ramparts, as Venetian rule gave way to Turkish, Turkish to Greek, slowly the shape of the place was blurred, and in 1940 the Germans, dive-bombing the shipping in the harbour, where the Venetian warships used to lie, and herding the retreating British army to the water’s edge as the Turks had forced their captives to the galleys, destroyed what was left of the old fortifications, and erased all but the bitter memory of Negroponte.
Venice was appalled at the news from Khalkis, the worst that had ever reached the Republic. ‘Our grandeur was abased,’ wrote a contemporary historian, ‘our pride was extinguished.’ The Captain-General of the Sea was sent home in chains to stand trial for his timidity: he was banished from Venice for ever, and his back-pay was forfeited to ransom some of the more important captives carried away to Constantinople.
Poor Canale! If he was scarcely a Nelsonic sailor, he was a man of culture and discrimination, a scholar, an experienced diplomat. In this he was not unusual among the admirals of the Venetian fleet. The Venetian system of oligarchic responsibility meant that while the Republic’s sea-commanders were always noblemen, they were not always professional seamen, and although this led sometimes to humiliation, it produced also, over the centuries, some very remarkable captains to lead the flotillas of Venice through the eastern seas. Let us, while we recover from the horrors of Khalkis, and try to forget the disjuncture of poor Erizzo on his planks, take a look at a few of them.
Another eminent amateur was Antonio Grimani, Captain-General later in the fifteenth century. He was a highly successful financier and a skilled negotiator, the father of a Cardinal and a great man in Venice, but like Canale, no genius as an admiral. Having lost a particularly crucial engagement against the Turks, he too was sent home in irons (one of them fastened to his leg, as a special favour, by his own son). In Venice he was greeted as a traitor, lampooned in popular ballads as ‘the ruin of the Christians’, and exiled for life to the Dalmatian island of Cres, but he arranged matters better than Canale. He escaped to Rome, and so cannily organized his reconciliation with Venice that in 1521 he was elected to the Dogeship, eighty-five years old, and officially described, so many years after his disgrace at sea, as serene, excellent, virtuous, worthy, and giving great hope for the welfare and preservation of the state.
Vettore Pisani, on the other hand, Captain-General during the fourteenth-century wars against Genoa, was everybody’s idea of a sea-dog, beloved of his men, contemptuous of authority, always ready for a fight. He was ‘the chief and father of all the seamen of Venice’. Arrested and charged after a defeat at Pola, in Istria, in 1379, he was spending six months in the dungeons when the Genoese took Chioggia, at the southern edge of the lagoon, and threatened Venice herself. The seamen of Venice declined to fight without him, and 400 men arriving from the lagoon towns specifically to serve under him threw down their banners and went home again – using, so their chronicler says, language too dreadful to record. So they let Pisani out. ‘Viva Messer Vettore!’ cried the adoring crowd as he emerged from the prisons, but he stopped them. ‘Enough of that, my sons,’ he said, ‘shout instead Viva the Good Evangelist San Marco!’ – and so he went to sea again, and rallied the fleet, and beat the Genoese, and saved Venice, and died in action like the hero he was.
His great peer and contemporary was Carlo Zeno, a very different character. Intellectual, statesman, fighting man, a knowledgeable scientist, a devoted classical scholar, a buccaneer and a showman, Zeno played a multitude of roles in a life full of excitement. We see him as a theological student at Padua, a young curé at Patras in Greece, a merchant on the Golden Horn, Bailie of Euboea. We see him as the most dazzling of galley commanders: burning Genoese ships all over the eastern Mediterranean, sending whole cargoes of loot to be auctioned in Crete, seizing in Rhodes harbour the greatest prize of all, the Richignona, the largest Genoese ship afloat, with a cargo worth half-a-million ducats and a complement of 160 rich and highly ransomable merchants.
Finally we see him, in the theatrical way he loved, appearing with his fleet before Chioggia just in time to join Pisani in the salvation of Venice from the Genoese. Zeno was imprisoned for conspiracy once, and once failed by only a handful of votes to become Doge of the Republic. He was scarred all over from his innumerable sea-battles, but he kept his eyesight until the end, never wearing spectacles in his life. They buried him, as was proper, near the Arsenal that built his ships for him, and somewhere there, lost under new dockyard buildings down the years, his grand old bones still rot.
Vittore Cappello, in the fifteenth century, was so disturbed by a series of reverses in Grecian waters that he was not seen to smile for five months, and died of a broken heart. Benedetto Pesaro, in the sixteenth century, kept a mistress on board his flagship until he was well into his seventies, and habitually beheaded insubordinate officers of his fleet, while his kinsman Jacopo Pesaro was not only an admiral, but Bishop of Paphos too. Cristofero da Canale wrote a book about naval administration in the form of an elaborate imaginary dialogue and took his four-year-old son to sea with him, claiming to have weaned him on ship’s biscuit. Francesco Morosini, whom we shall meet again, dressed always in red from top to toe and never went into action without his cat beside him on the poop.
Such were the remarkable characters who commanded the fleets of Venice. They lost battles almost as often as they won them, they could be cowardly as well as heroic, venal as well as high-minded. Few of them, though, sound ordinary men, and it must have made pulses beat a little faster, brought history itself a little closer, when one of these magnificos swept into harbour beneath his gold-embroidered standard, and stepped ashore upon the modest waterfront of Mykonos or Kea.
But even the admirals could not hold the Aegean for Venice. The loss of Euboea did not mean, as Cassandras forecast at the time, the loss of the whole empire, Cyclades to Istria, but it did deprive Venice of her chief base in the Aegean, and one by one the other islands fell to the Turks.
It was a slow and awful process, extended over 200 years. Sometimes the squeeze was squalid – the demand for protection money, for example, collected by implacable Turkish captains island by island. More often it was horrific. For generations the Aegean was terrorized by Turkish raiders: ports were repeatedly burned, islanders were seized in their thousands for slavery or concubinage, whole populations had to shut themselves up each night within fortress walls. The terrible corsair Khayr ad-Din, ‘Barbarossa’, when he raided an island, killed all the Catholics for a start. He then slaughtered all the old Greeks, took the young men as galley-slaves and packed away the boys to Constantinople. Finally, making the women dance before him, he chose the
best-looking for his harem, sharing out the rest among his men according to rank, until the ugliest and oldest of them all were handed over to the soldiery.
The Aegean islands were the most exposed outposts of Christianity against the advance of Islam, but by the sixteenth century Venice was clearly powerless to save them, and the other powers of Europe would do nothing to help. Duke Giovanni IV of Naxos appealed directly to the Pope, the Emperor Charles V, Ferdinand King of the Romans, François I of France ‘and all the other Christian kings and princes’, but it did no good, and he became virtually a puppet of the Turks.
Desolation crept over the islands, and the more remote of them were almost empty of life. There were virtually no men at all, reported a fifteenth-century traveller, on the island of Sifnos; at Serifos the people lived ‘like brutes’, terrified night and day of Turkish raiders; the islanders of Syros lived only on carobs and goat flesh, while at Ios the farmers did not dare to leave the castle ramparts until old women had crept out in the dawn to make sure there were no Turks about. The lights faded in the pirgoi, the choirs no longer sang in the little island cathedrals, and one by one, almost organically, by assault or default the Venetian possessions of the Aegean dropped into the hands of the Turk.
By the last years of the seventeenth century everything was lost, except only the island of Tinos in the Cyclades. The Greek islanders had often betrayed their Catholic masters to the Turks, but this was one place where many of them had been converted to Catholicism themselves – other Greeks called it ‘the Pope’s island’. They were intensely loyal to the Signory, and so it was that when Euboea had been Turkish for 250 years, when the Duchy of the Archipelago was no more than a romantic memory, little Tinos, all 200 square miles of it, still bravely flew the flag.