The Venetian Empire

by Jan Morris

  When the Venetians first came to Crete they seized all the churches, tried to ban the Greek language in church rituals, threw out the Greek bishops and made the Orthodox clergy subject to their own Latin prelates. The three towns were allowed only one Orthodox church apiece. But the fervour did not last. In some parts of the empire the antipathies were sustained to the end, but in Crete, if only theologically, the Venetians mellowed.

  For one thing their attempts to squeeze out Orthodoxy abysmally failed, the people resolutely declining to shift their loyalties. For another the Venetian settlers became increasingly Hellenized themselves. Many of them married into Orthodox families, and many joined the Greek church. At the same time some of the Cretan nobles, though they remained Orthodox in faith, became increasingly Latinized in style, bringing the two classes of landed gentry ever closer together. Gradually attitudes were tempered. By 1403 we find the Captain of Iraklion, the military commander of the capital, actually taking Greek lessons, and in the countryside churches were now sometimes dedicated to both rites, the Latins worshipping in one half, the Greeks in the other. By the sixteenth century the tables were turned entirely: all the country priests were Orthodox again, and the only Catholics were in the Venetian quarters of the towns.

  Orthodoxy flowered, and with it art. The exquisite painted churches of Crete are almost all protégés of Venice. Tucked away in unexpected valleys, perched gaily on hillocks, sprawled in the middle of villages, with their amalgam of landscape, sweet architecture and dazzling colour they form almost an art form in themselves. Outside they are domed, whitewashed and innocent: inside they glow with the grandeur of their Byzantine frescoes, given a particular dimension, a rustic frankness, which is unique to Crete. In colours bright but often peeling, in images striking but often defaced by time or bigotry, all the Christian ideas are given expression – the grand cycle of the Christian story, nativity to ascension, the terrible conceptions of heaven and hell, miracles and resurrections, angels and archangels, saints, martyrs, massacres and second comings – all are lavished upon these little country churches, as though a huge sacred book has been torn into fragments and scattered through the island.

  The artists were often refugees. When the Greek emperors returned to Constantinople in 1261 there was a revival of Byzantine art and craftsmanship: when the city fell again in 1453, this time irrevocably to the Muslims, it was ironically to Venetian Crete, where the indigenes struggled so restlessly for their independence, that many of the best artists, writers, artisans and scholars brought their gifts. The Great Island, secure if scarcely happy under the protection of Venice, became for a time the cultural centre of the whole Greek world: Venice, which had helped to destroy Byzantium, now cherished its survivors. The refugees who came to Crete were mostly destitute and often terrified:

  Where are you from, ship, where have you come from?

  I come from the curse and the heavy dark,

  From the stormy hail and lightning, the dizzy wind,

  I come from the City burnt by the thunderbolt.

  Learned and gifted men as they often were, they were coming to an island where the Greek population was largely illiterate, where there were few schools and no universities. But the presence of Venice ensured an element of educated sympathy, and so they flourished there, whatever the palikares might think, under the banner of St Mark.

  Many of the Greek scholars and their pupils moved on from Crete to the imperial capital, and so made Venice in its turn the chief repository of classical learning. The great Aldine Press, which printed the whole catalogue of Greek classical literature, depended upon Cretan scholars, editors and craftsmen. A Cretan in Venice established the Kalergis Press, and published the celebrated Etymologia Magnum, a Greek dictionary of seminal importance. Cretan icon-painters founded their own Venetian guild: Cretans established the Scuola di S. Niccoló dei Greci in Venice, with its own church. The painter Michael Damaskinos, who went from Crete to Venice in 1574, created a whole new manner of icon painting, combining Venetian techniques of chiaroscuro with the ancient Byzantine traditions.

  The Cretan painter Domenico Theotokopoulos went further still to synthesize the arts of east and west. He migrated to Venice in his youth; studied with Titian, and presently went on to Rome and Spain: and strangely blending his Cretan background with the skills and styles he had learned upon his travels, became known to the world as El Greco.

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  The Venetians transformed the face of Crete, during their four centuries upon the island. Not only did they change its landscapes, by denuding them of their great cypress forests, but they built in every corner of it. Even in the deepest recesses of the Samaria Gorge, one of the geographical wonders of Europe, a gloomy defile ten miles long, 1,800 feet deep and sometimes only ten feet wide, silent but for the sheep-bells, the clatter of falling stones and the shrieks of raucous birds – even in the depths of this unnerving phenomenon there stands, deserted now except for the passing trekkers, the Venetian hamlet of Santa Maria which gave the declivity its name.

  Some of their monuments are great fun, oddly enough, and bring a rare touch of gaiety to the sombre Cretan scene. Fountains especially splash their greetings with an anomalous brio. In the village square at Spili, near the south coast, nineteen curly-maned stone lions spout their water into the village fountain with the authentic fizz of the baroque, all the more exhilarating in that rocky and goitresque environment. In the Orthodox monastery of Vrondisi, high on the flank of a bare mountain, a fountain is presided over with lovely incongruity by a now headless couple from the Garden of Eden, a plump but accommodating Eve, a skinny but virile Adam. In Rethimnon the Arimondi fountain has Corinthian columns and three lions’ heads, and is a delightful plashy structure in the middle of town, where old ladies still go to collect water in buckets in the morning, and the sound of the running water agreeably alleviates the traffic din; while in the very centre of the old Venetian capital, in Venezilou Square, stands the exuberant fountain which Duke Francesco Morosini built in 1628, supported by grimacing lions, covered all over with mythological reliefs, and supplied with water by its own aqueduct, twelve miles long, from the mountain slopes behind the town.

  Arkhadi, the most famous monastery in all Crete, is another blithe surprise from Venetian times. It was blown up by the Abbot and his monks during a revolution in 1866, to prevent its capture by the Turks, and is now a national monument, a Valhalla of the palikares: it still has a slightly detonated feel, standing alone on a bare plateau, attended by an ossuary of heroes and a few funerary cypresses. But though it looks gloomy from the outside, when you enter its central doorway, passing through its deep shadows into the courtyard, a marvellous fantasy awaits you: for there in the middle of a fairly ramshackle yard stands a church so gay and entertaining, so elaborate of invention, that it might easily stand, an undiscovered prodigy, in one of the lesser-known squares of Venice itself. Arkhadi was built in 1657, almost at the end of the Venetian empire in Crete, and with its merry mélange of fancies classical and baroque, forms the happiest monument of all to the Venetian presence – a structure altogether Italianate, dedicated from the start to the rituals of Greekness.

  These are only grace-notes, though. The great walls, the castle towers, the keeps and the barrack blocks – alas, these are truer reflections of the long occupation. The three towns of Crete are all recognizably Venetian still, and are all instinct with the nervous inhibitions of the regime. The best of them is Khania, in the west. It is one of the most delightful towns in Greece, but retains its slightly neurotic air. Behind the town the bare ridges of the White Mountains, often snow-covered, stand in threatening mystery, and the houses of the town seem to cluster around the little harbour for comfort, as though they wish they could embark. Stout sheds of the old Venetian arsenal line the waterfront still, disguised now as fish restaurants; a Venetian lighthouse guards the harbour entrance; the bollards of the mole, which look from a distance like charred or petrified tree-stumps, are actually capt
ured guns embedded there by the Venetians. The city walls are robust, and emblazoned ever and again with the lion of St Mark, but if you look down from them into the heart of the little town, you will see that they are only an outer protection for the Venetians who lived there: for in the middle of the place, with its own convenient water-gate to the harbour and the get-away ships, there stands an inner fort, the Castello, where the town Rector lived, and his chief officials, and where the local archives were kept. It is elevated slightly above the general level of the town, is pretty now with window boxes and indolent with pampered pets, but gives an ineradicable impression still of an elite embattled against all contingencies, nullus parvus est census qui magnus est animus, it says to this day on the façade of the Venetian loggia, in the heart of it – ‘He is not poor in wealth who is great of soul.’

  The most compelling Venetian structure of all, I think, is a small fortress called Frangocastello, which stands on a desolate tract of shore on the southern coast. It is less desolate than it used to be indeed, now that the tourist trade is bringing surfaced roads and seaside chalets to the remotest corners of Crete, but it is still a chill and comfortless place, especially in the winter. At this point, where a narrow shaly plain separates the mountains from the sea, a dramatic gorge opens to split the highland mass in two, like an earthquake fault, or the effect of some stupendous lightning: directly in front, silhouetted on the empty shore, stands the castle.

  This was always an especially violent part of Crete. Its inhabitants, the Sfakiots, were among the most troublesome of all the islanders, brigands and rebels almost to a man, given to piracy at sea, unremitting vendetta on land. Cut off by high mountains from the Venetian towns in the north, the coastline was also vulnerable to the corsairs of Genoa, the Turks and the Barbary emirs, who frequently stormed ashore here to seize slaves for their galleys or their harems. Frangocastello was built at the anxious request of the Venetian colonists of the district, and must have been an undesirable billet from the start.

  It is not a very beautiful work, except for its honey colour, but it is immensely suggestive. It stands at the water’s edge heavy, square and uncompromising on a bleak expanse of turf, like a tidal meadow. Its outer walls are sturdy still, and emboldened by a sculptured lion, but inside all is empty ruin. The ground is muddy after rain, hard as wood in the hot dry summer. Through the shattered windows you can see, across the flatland, that grim gash in the hills behind. It is a sinister spot, and is attended by a famous superstition. It is said that once a year, on 17 May, a host of dead warriors is to be seen on the turf outside Frangocastello – in the small hours, when the dew is shimmering and cobwebby on the grass. Some are on foot, some are on horseback, and they are led by a huge spectral palikare, shimmering sword in hand. The Cretans call them the dhrosoulites – the dew shades. They are the ghosts of liberty, or alternatively of revenge.

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  The time came, of course, when the Turks demanded Crete. The time came to most Venetian colonies, sooner or later. By the end of the sixteenth century the island was showing every symptom of imperial degeneracy. The worst of the rebellions were over, it is true, but only from sheer exhaustion, and the place was in a cruel condition. The old feudal system had more or less collapsed. The peasants lived miserably, ‘the women dressed in rags’, as one Venetian inspector reported, ‘the children naked, the men half-naked’. Press-gangs constantly raided the villages to carry men off for the galleys. Already many Cretans were defecting to the Turkish service, and in 1597 a group of Rethimnon citizens actually invited the Turks to intervene.

  For by then the Turks were looming large over the Great Island. They were the masters of the Arab world. They had occupied the Balkans from Constantinople to northern Hungary, and stood at the gates of Vienna: they had even turned the flank of Venice itself, and sent their advance forces into the plain of Friuli, between the lagoons and the Dolomites – the smoke of their camp fires was seen from the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco. The Aegean was almost all theirs, and so was Cyprus. But they had been thwarted in their attempts to gain complete sea-control of the Mediterranean. In 1537 they had failed to take Corfu. In 1565 they had been driven away from Malta. In 1571 they were beaten by the Christian fleet in the great sea-battle of Lepanto. They came to see the island of Crete, lying there massively athwart the sea-routes from Constantinople, as a maddening obstacle to their success, and in 1645, after years of hit-and-run raiding, they attacked it in force.

  The Venetian Republic was enfeebled and outclassed by then, but still it took the Ottoman fleets and armies, first to last, almost a quarter of a century to drive the Venetians out of Crete. The island was the last big Christian stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean, and so the struggle became, as it were, a contest of champions, between the warriors of Mohammed and the knights of Christ. All Europe watched the spectacle in fascination, and the Turks threw their armies into the island with a fanatic disregard of losses, and an implacable resolve. As for the Venetians themselves, their record of government in Crete was not much to boast about, but at least when the great crisis came their fighting spirit rallied. The long defence of the island acquired an epic quality. The siege of Iraklion was one of the longest in history, and went into the Venetian language as an image of intransigent resistance – una vera guerra di Candia, a regular war of Crete.

  Sieges are sieges always, and the dogged defence of Iraklion, as it is remembered by the Venetian historians, has much in common with Troy, Lucknow, the Alamo, or even Leningrad. The same heroics are recorded, the same horrors – the roasting of rats and the stewing of dogs, the unremitting bombardments, the bestial living in ruined houses or holes in the ground. Here, as always, the women are pictured by the epicists passing ammunition or selflessly tending the wounded. Here, as usual, tattered flag flies upon half-demolished battlement, attended by commander with drawn sword among his smoke-blackened, heavily-bandaged but still indomitable soldiery.

  What makes the siege of Iraklion different from the others is the fact that it lasted for twenty-two years. A whole generation was born and grew up during the siege of Iraklion. The whole of European history moved on. Commanders came and went, soldiers grew grey in the service of St Mark, drummer-boys matured into sergeant-majors, veterans died of sheer old age. Observers came out from Europe to analyse the progress of military techniques. Kings died, governments rose and fell, dynasties were established, frontiers shifted, and still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

  They had easily taken the other Cretan ∗∗∗towns. The defenders of Khania soon made use of that conve∗∗∗nient water-gate, while Rethimnon, the most powerfully fo∗∗∗rtified of the three and reputedly the strongest town in the Venetian empire, fell in just three days. The Venetians threw everything, though, into the defence of Iraklion. They appointed one of their most impressive fighting nobles, Francesco Morosini, to the command of the town; the admiral with the cat and the red outfit, he was the son of the Duke of Crete who had erected that jolly fountain in the central square. They raided Turkish islands in the Aegean, as distractions, and tried to force the Dardanelles to attack Constantinople itself. They fell upon Turkish convoys making for Crete. They instituted taxes in Venice specifically to pay for the defence of the town, and even sold membership of the nobility to help finance the struggle. Through it all the Venetian fleet kept the supply lines open from the lagoons: but still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

  They appealed to the rest of Christendom, and the Kings of Sweden and Savoy, the Elector of Bavaria, the Prince-Bishop of Fürstenberg, the Emperor Leopold and the Knights of St John all sent contingents to help. The Protector Cromwell of England would have sent soldiers too, if the Levant Company had not persuaded him otherwise in the interests of commerce. In 1669 7,000 Frenchmen arrived, led by the swaggering Dukes of Beaufort and Noailles, ‘mightily satisfied with themselves’. Bells pealed to greet them when they ran the blockade of the city, guns were fired in the harbour, red banners of welcome were displayed upon
the ramparts. They made one gallant sortie from the Gate of St George, lost the Duke of Beaufort in a panicky retreat, refused to attack again unless the Venetians went first, and after two months sailed home to France again. Still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

  By the autumn of 1669 there were less than 3,000 Venetians fit to fight within the city. Some 30,000 had been killed or wounded. They had made ninety-six sorties over the years, used 53,000 tons of powder, fired 276,000 cannon-balls. The foreign volunteers, party by party, sailed for home: the Knights of St John were the last to go, ‘and I lose more by their departure’, said Morosini, ‘than by that of all the others’. At last, on 5 September 1669, the city was surrendered to the Turks. The Venetians were given twelve days to leave the city, after ruling it for 459 years.

  A strange hush fell over Iraklion, an eye-witness tells us, after so many years of carnage. The soldiers could leave their pickets at last, and the enemies met without malice, ‘speaking to each other about the accidents and adventures of the war, as though there had never been differences between them…’ Almost the entire community of Iraklion left the city. Only some priests, a few Greeks and three Jews elected to remain. The Turkish army entered through the wrecked walls of the St Andreas bastion, in the west, and as they did so the last of the Venetian soldiers, 2,500 sick and ragged men, marched down to the harbour and boarded the galleys for home.

  Under the treaty that followed the Turks allowed the Venetians to retain sovereignty over the three islands which they had fortified so long before off the northern coast of Crete. It was only in 1715, the year Tinos fell, that the Republic surrendered these last strongholds, and their castles still stand. Gramvousa is remote and inaccessible in the north-west. Soudha guards the entrance to Soudha Bay and the warships of the western alliance still steam beneath its ramparts to their base beneath the mountains. Spinalonga is in the east, in the land-locked and fiord-like bay of Elounda.