by Jan Morris
The Lüneburg lieutenant’s later career is lost to history, but alas, his accurate trajectory upon the holy hill was to prove the one Venetian accomplishment in Greece that the world would always remember.
Ionian White and Gold
Tittle-tattle place – importance of Corfu – the
system – circumspection – signs of Venice –
gypsies – Jews – images and values
Most Venetian imperial chapters end with explosions – shrieks too, drums, and recriminations. As we sail up the northwest coast of Greece, though, out of Methoni’s spectacular bay, past the hill-top castle of Navarino, through the battle-waters of Lepanto, along the harsh high shore of Epirus, we approach the one great Venetian possession which was acquired painlessly, beat off all foreign assaults, and remained a more or less loyal subject of the Serenissima until the Republic itself faded away from sheer decrepitude. The Greek island of Corfu is made for pleasure or escape – ‘a very small tittle-tattle place’, Edward Lear once called it – and by the restless standards of the Stato da Mar, a pleasant enough refuge it was during the four centuries of Venetian sovereignty. The climate was agreeable, the peasantry was docile, the local gentry flexibly adapted to Venetian ways, and by general consent Corfu was the most desirable station of the Venetian colonial service.
In Corfu the Venetians, at least in the earlier years of their dominion, were at their most statesmanlike. In the islands of the Aegean, in Crete and Cyprus and the Grecian fortress-ports, they seem always to be mere successors in the train of history: they look back to Roman or Byzantine forebears, they blend often enough vaguely into the mists of paganism, their admirals lost in the company of the gods, their legends merged in yet more insubstantial myth. When they go, they are replaced by the blank and unlettered presence of the Turks, like night descending. It is on the island of Corfu that we first feel them to be forebears, trustees, one day to hand over responsibility to successors in their own kind.
I was rummaging one day in an antique shop in Corfu Town, the capital of the island, when I came across a curious local coin, grimy with a century’s handling and slightly squashed around the rim. Polishing this unprepossessing object on the seat of my trousers, and helped by the spit and handkerchief of the shopkeeper, I discovered it to be inscribed with two majestic devices. On the one side it bore the emblem of St Mark. On the other there appeared the winged lion’s direct successor in the iconography of imperialism, Britannia, holding a trident, a laurel leaf and a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack. The Turks, when they inherited a colony, obliterated everything Venetian; at least the British, recognizing the noble style of their predecessors, had the courtesy to acknowledge a line of descent.
The Venetians were allotted Corfu at the division of the Byzantine empire, but they failed to keep it for long and it fell into the successive hands of the Despots of Epirus, the King of Sicily and the Angevins of France until 1386. By then the local administration was so awful that the Corfiotes themselves appealed for Venetian protection, sending a delegation of local worthies to Venice to plead their case. The Venetians needed little persuasion; Corfu was the gate to the Adriatic, and with their long war against the Genoese just ended, they were on the point of taking the island anyway.
The Adriatic was almost a lake, in their eyes. It was the Gulf of Venice, and when each Ascension Day the Doge went out in his bucintoro to wed the sea, if it was in a morganatic way the universal ocean that he was marrying, in a more intimate and particular sense the Adriatic was his bride. The entrance to the Adriatic, the Otranto Strait, is only fifty miles across, and the sea within it really is distinct from the Mediterranean as a whole – physically and climatically different, lined on its eastern shores by the harsh escarpment of the karst, the limestone rim of the Balkans, and periodically churned into fury by that fearful wind of central Europe, the bora, which sends small ships scurrying for shelter, and has been known to blow railway wagons off their tracks.
For many generations it was the policy of the Signory that all traffic originating in this inner sea, 500 miles long and never more than 150 miles wide, should be channelled through the docks, banks and warehouses of Venice herself, La Dominante. Ships leaving Adriatic ports had to make deposits guaranteeing that they would take their goods to Venice, while in times of famine the Venetians held themselves entitled to seize food from any ship, wherever it had come from, encountered by their warships inside the Otranto Strait. The powers intermittently acknowledged this supremacy, and ship-masters of all nations, slipping past the watchful galleys of the Serenissima to enter the Adriatic, felt themselves to be in semi-private waters.
Corfu became the Gibraltar of Venice – the Pearl Harbor too, perhaps, for in later years the two squadrons of warships generally based there were the strike force of Venetian power. In their prime, their reach was long and swift. In 1517 the King of Tunis sent a rare and precious gift to the Sultan of Turkey – four eight-horse teams, each team of a different breed or colour, and each attended by eight slave-grooms of matched skin and costume. The consignment, valued at 200,000 ducats, was entrusted to a Venetian ship, but when it put in for provisions at Syracuse, in southern Italy, it was immediately surrounded by pirates. No matter. The Corfu command was alerted: at once three wargalleys left for Syracuse, and even before they had stormed into action the prudent buccaneers had dispersed, and the polychromatic stable proceeded on its way.
To Corfu, as to all other Venetian colonies, the greatest threat was the Ottoman Empire. The view from the waterfront of Corfu Town, on the eastern shore of the island, graphically illustrates the anxiety. The town stands cluttered above its quays, the bay is busy with ferries, freighters, motor-caiques and cruise ships, the island wanders bumpily away, clad in blues, greys and browns, littered with sweet mountain villages and distasteful hotels, and reaching a climax in the holy summit of Pantokrator, the Lord of All, dually crowned nowadays with a monastery and a radar station. Framing this happy prospect, though, is a line of mountains more remote – grimmer, grander mountains crowned with snow even in the spring and looking altogether alien and forbidding. They are the mountains of Albania, characterized by the fastidious Mr Lear as possessing ‘a certain clumsiness and want of refinement’. In Venetian times they contained the implacable Turks, in ours they enclose the most xenophobic and suspicious of the states of Europe, friends to nobody, churls to all. Only the narrow strait of the Corfu Channel, three miles wide at its narrowest point, separates them from the island.
It is a queer feeling nowadays to look across the water to those impenetrable highlands, and doubtless it sometimes gave the Venetians uneasy sensations too. There stood the Great Enemy. Those mountains were an outcrop of the great land mass which ran away to Constantinople itself, the centre of Islamic power. Corfu bristled like a porcupine in the lee of that tremendous reminder, and the Turks repeatedly attacked it. One great raid, in 1537, reduced the population from 40,000 to 19,000, and in 1715, when the Venetians fell back upon the island after their withdrawal from the Peloponnese, 30,000 Turks besieged Corfu Town for forty-two days and came within an ace of capturing it. They never succeeded, though. The town was a very figure of martial resolution, and the Serenissima spent millions of ducats on its fortifications – in the sixteenth century it had 700 guns.
Its focus was the Old Fort, the twin-peaked citadel which appears in hundreds of old maps and prints, and which sheltered within its walls the palace of the Venetian governors, the naval command and the Latin cathedral. It never did fall to an enemy (though Nelson suggested it might be taken by running a frigate ashore and storming the ramparts from the riggings, rather as Dandolo engineered the assault on Constantinople). Like so many imperial fortresses, it occupied the whole of a small peninsula, separated from the mainland by a ditch, and backed by a wide open space kept clear as a field of fire. Time has softened its grim outlines now, brooding there on its peaks, and in the summer evenings, when the fireflies waver about the shrubberies, and a
band plays perhaps upon the promenade at its feet, it seems hardly more than a romantic fantasy: but it was no conceit in its day, and suggestively at the flank of it, beside the moat, you may still see the mooring-places of the galleys, the fists of the Republic.
After the fearful Turkish raid of 1537, and just before Lepanto, the Venetians built another fortress, the New Fort, on the other side of the town. Dominated by these two great strongholds and by hill-top, forts commanding the landward approaches, in Venetian days this was a true garrison town, and the great man of Venetian Corfu was not the Governor, nor the Latin Archbishop, but a functionary called the Proveditor-General of the Levant, a military commander whose writ ran throughout the Venetian colonies of the east. When this grandee arrived at the start of his term of duty, protocol afforded him an almost mystical welcome. A special volume of etiquette was printed to govern the arrangements. The heads of both the Latin and the Greek churches were to be on hand to greet His Excellency. A Corfiote noble was to compose a panegyric upon his virtues. The Jews were to lay carpets along the streets through which he would pass from the harbour. The remains of St Spiridon, patron saint of the island, would be available for him to kneel before. More Jews, with bouquets of flowers, were to bow low as he entered his palace in the citadel to take up the immense responsibilities of his office.
Such was the importance of Corfu in the Venetian pattern of self-esteem and the Venetian strategy of survival. In the Golden Bull by which, in 1387, they declared their possession of the island they undertook never to leave it and to defend it against all enemies; and this commitment they honoured to the end.
Venetian noblemen ruled Corfu, of course – a Bailie and two councillors stood at the top of the administration, as in Crete – but here more than in their other colonies they allowed the indigenes some real share in government. A council of island noblemen disposed of almost all the local jobs, even the captaincy of the Corfu war-galleys: it was a Corfiote captain who captured the Turkish admiral’s flagship at Lepanto (and another, taken prisoner himself in the same battle, enjoyed the privilege of being flayed alive for Venice).
Though most of these island swells were Greek Orthodox by religion, many of them claimed Venetian descent, and many more were happy to use Venetian titles. They had their own Golden List of nobility, modelled upon the Venetian Golden Book, and they successfully beat off successive attempts by the bourgeoisie to get a share of the power; in 1537, when many noblemen lost their lives in the Turkish raid, by direct instruction from the Signory the order was repleted from the ranks of the middle-class, but in no time at all these new aristocrats became just as haughty as their predecessors. In an attenuated form the Golden List was to stay in existence long after the end of the Republic. In 1797, when Venice fell, 277 families were represented in the register: by 1925, when its last issue appeared, twenty-four remained. Of them three traced their origins to Venice itself: the others had sprung from every part of the old empire – from Crete, the Peloponnese, Cyprus, Dalmatia, even Constantinople – all drawn here, long before, to this Hellenic island in the lee of Islam, by the presence of the Serenissima.
By and large the Corfiote nobles formed a useful client class for their Venetian overlords, and they were assiduously humoured in return. Even the peasants seldom complained in Corfu, and performed with becoming grace exhibitions of loyalty at public functions. This showed restraint, for here as everywhere, the administration was not noticeably sympathetic to the common man. The last thing the Venetians wanted in their empire, especially in its later years, was an enlightened working class, and in the 1756 budget for Corfu and its sister islands, for example, out of a total expenditure of 421, 542 ducats only 822 ducats went on genuine social improvements. Schools scarcely existed in the island, and since the official language was Italian, in the Venetian dialect, ordinary people were quite out of touch with affairs of state and policy.
Corruption crept in too, here as everywhere. The class of impoverished Venetian noblemen called the Barnabotti provided most of the expatriate officials, and they were notoriously venal. Judges were often bribable. Tax collectors were often crooked. The Bailie lived in great style, escorted at all times by liveried servants, serenaded at his dinner table by his private band, but the garrison was often reduced to thieving and beggary, so sporadically was it paid, while the navy kept its accounts in balance by undertaking commercial transport on the side. During the 1537 fighting, when the Old Fort was closely invested by the Turks, the Venetians had no compunction in driving old people, women and children out of the gates into no man’s land, where they wandered forlornly between the opposing armies, the women vainly crying for help, the men displaying to the soldiers on the walls, so eye-witnesses reported, the wounds they had suffered fighting for Venice in previous conflicts.
Yet faith in Venice herself, that distant majesty of the lagoon, remained undeterred. Deputations frequently made the journey north, to argue Corfiote cases before the Grand Council in the Doge’s Palace, and generally they seem to have found redress. The Venetians remembered always the grim example of Crete, with its interminable record of rebellion, and were inclined to be conciliatory to the Corfiotes. Venetian Bailies were repeatedly enjoined to treat the local people fairly and sometimes agents were sent out to report secretly upon the state of the island.
The Signory did not forget, either, that in Crete the Venetians themselves developed political ideas beyond their station. The commanders of the two town fortresses, so a seventeenth-century English traveller reported, had to swear not to communicate with each other during their terms of office, to make sure they could enter into no treasonable compact, and once the Republic felt obliged to decree that no more monuments were to be erected to Venetian governors of the island. The rulers of Corfu were to be, however prominent in their functions, non-persons in themselves: the Signory wanted no vivid demagogues up there in the fortresses, who might be tempted to go the Cretan way, and proclaim an island republic of St Spiridon.
‘With regard to the Greeks,’ wrote a French observer in Corfu, ‘the Venetians are infinitely more jealous than disdainful. The vivacity and natural perspicacity of the Greeks, the superiority of their native talents, and their marked aptitude for the arts and sciences, appeared dangerous to a jealous Government…’
This was probably true. They treated this volatile population, especially in their more experienced years, with distinct caution. Here as in Venice itself, citizens were encouraged to spy upon one another, and to make use of the lion’s head post-boxes, the denunciation boxes, which were affixed to walls at convenient corners of town. In particular the Venetians trod carefully when it came to the susceptibilities of the Greek church, and they were more successful than usual in their dealings with the Orthodox community. They knew by now that the Greek clergy was invariably a political body too, the seedbed always of patriotic sentiment, and they well understood the power of the village priests – almost nothing terrified a Corfiote peasant more than the possibility of excommunication, freely dispensed by local parsons (and profitably rescinded).
They accordingly brought the Greek church actually into the Establishment of the colony. It is true that they deprived it of its titular archbishopric, transferring that to their own Latin prelate, but they allowed the Greeks their own sort of metropolitan, the Chief Priest, elected to office by a body of local clerics happily entitled The Sacred Band. They also astutely cherished the island’s own saint, St Spiridon, who wielded so immense an influence upon the Corfiotes that half the local boys seemed to be named for him. Spiridon was a fourth-century Cypriot bishop whose miracle-working corpse had been brought to Corfu in the fifteenth century; a church and a cult arose around him: he was credited with all sorts of wonders, from the ending of plagues to the discomfiture of pashas, and he became the central figure of the Orthodox faith on the island, its pride and its protector.
The Venetians fulsomely cultivated him. In 1489 they proposed to remove his corpse to Venice and were d
issuaded only by the unanimous appeals of the people, but they never made that sort of error again. When in 1715 he saved the island from the Turkish invasion, the Senate itself sent a silver lamp to be hung in gratitude above his altar (where it remains). And when, four times a year, the embalmed corpse of the saint was processed in its ebony casket around the town, the Venetian Bailie, his councillors and the Proveditor-General carried the canopy that shaded it. A salute of twenty-nine guns was fired from the Old Fort. The warships in the harbour saluted and when the procession moved along the sea-ramparts, galleys were rowed in parallel alongside. While the saint was carried high on the shoulders of the priests, while choir and acolytes intoned their litanies, while the sick were rushed by their hopeful relatives into the path of the procession, trusting that the mere passage of Spiridon over their prostrate forms would be enough to cure them – while all these symptoms of Greekness swayed and proliferated, solemnly bearing their canopy walked the Venetians, looking, we may reasonably assume, eminent but a bit embarrassed.
The Venetians may have been wary of the Corfiotes, but they loved Corfu. So delectably set there, so benign of climate and beguiling of silhouette, not too far from home, not too close for discomfort, it provided a perfect setting for the colonial enterprise, for a merchant setting himself up as a country gentleman, or a servant of state ready to retire from his labours. It was almost like another island in their own lagoon: and indeed when in 1753 the Sardinas family of Corfu were elevated to the nobility for their services in battle, they were simultaneously elected to the pages of another Golden List, that of their native island of Mazzorbo, an almost indistinguishable settlement some five miles north of Venice.