City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (19 page)

This empire was almost an accidental construct. It contained no programme for exporting the values of the Republic to benighted peoples; it had little interest in the lives of these unwilling subjects; it certainly did not want them to have the rights of citizens. It was the creation of a city of merchants and its rationale was exclusively commercial. The other beneficiaries of the partition of 1204 concocted scattered kingdoms with outlandish feudal titles – the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the kingdom of Salonica, the despotate of Epirus, the megaskyrate of Athens and Thebes, the triarchy of Euboea, the principality of Achaea, the marquisates of Boudonitza and Salona – the list was endless. The Venetians styled themselves quite differently. They were proud lords of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Empire of Romania. It was a merchant’s precise formulation, coming in total to three eighths, like a quantity of merchandise weighed in a balance. The Venetians, shrewdly practical and unromantic, thought in fractions: they divided their city into sixths, the capital costs of their ships into twenty-fourths and their trading ventures into thirds. The places where the flag of St Mark was raised and his lion carved on harbour walls and castle gates existed, in the repeated phrase, ‘for the honour and profit of Venice’. The emphasis was always on the profit.

The Stato da Mar allowed the Venetians to ensure the security of their merchant convoys and it protected them from the whims of foreign potentates and the jealousy of maritime rivals. Crucially, the treaty afforded unequalled control of trade within the centre of the eastern Mediterranean. At a stroke it locked their competitors, the Genoese and the Pisans, out of a whole commercial zone.

Theoretically Byzantium had now been neatly divided into discrete blocks of ownership, but much of this existed only on paper, like the crude maps of Africa carved up by medieval popes. In practice it was far messier. The implosion of the Greek empire shattered the world of the eastern Mediterranean into glittering fragments. It left a power vacuum, the consequences of which no one could foresee –the irony of the Fourth Crusade was that it would advance the spread of Islam, which it had set out to repel. The immediate aftermath was less an orderly distribution than a land grab. The sea became a Wild East for adventurers and mercenaries, pirates and soldiers of fortune from Burgundy, Lombardy and the Catalan ports. It was a last Christian frontier for the young and the bold. Tiny principalities sprang up on the islands and plains of Greece, each one guarded by its desolate castle, engaging in miniature wars with its neighbours, feuding and killing. The history of the Latin kingdoms of Greece is a tale of confused bloodshed and medieval war. Few of them lasted long. Dynasties conquered, ruled and vanished again within a couple of generations, like light rain into the dry Greek earth. They were dogged by continuous, if uncoordinated, Byzantine resistance.

Venice knew better than most that Greece was no El Dorado. True gold was coined in the spice markets of Alexandria, Beirut, Acre and Constantinople. They impassively watched the feudal knights and mercenary bands hack and hatchet each other and pursued a careful policy of consolidation. They hardly bothered with many of their terrestrial acquisitions. They never claimed western Greece, with the exception of its ports, and unaccountably failed to garrison Gallipoli, the key to the Dardanelles, at all. Adrianople was assigned elsewhere for lack of Venetian interest.

The Venetians’ eyes remained fixed on the sea but they had to fight for their inheritance, continuously dogged by Genoese adventurers and feudal lordlings. This would involve them in half a century of colonial war. Venice was granted the strategic island of Corfu, a crucial link in the chain of islands at the mouth of the Adriatic, but they had to oust a Genoese pirate to secure it
and then lost it again five years later. In 1205, they bought Crete from the crusader lord Boniface of Montferrat for five thousand gold ducats, then spent four years expelling another Genoese privateer, Henry the Fisherman, from the island. They took two strategic ports on the south-west tip of the Peloponnese, Modon and Coron, from pirates, and established a foothold on the long barrier island of Euboea, which the Venetians called Negroponte (the Black Bridge), on the east coast of Greece. And in between they occupied or sublet a string of islands round the south coast of the Peloponnese and across the wide Aegean. It was out of this scattering of ports, forts and islands that they created their colonial system. Venice, following the Byzantines, referred to this whole geographic area as Romania – the kingdom of the Romans, the word the Byzantines used for it – and divided it up into zones: Lower Romania, which constituted the Peloponnese, Crete, the Aegean islands and Negroponte, and Upper Romania, the lands and seas beyond, up the Dardanelles to Constantinople itself. Further still lay the Black Sea, a new zone of potential exploitation.

The cardinal points of the system were the twin ports of Modon and Coron (so frequently linked in Venetian documents as almost to constitute a single idea), Crete and Negroponte. This triangle of bases became the strategic axis of the Stato da Mar, and over the centuries Venice would fight to the death for their retention. Modon and Coron, twenty miles apart, were Venice’s first true colonies, so critical to the Republic’s maritime infrastructure that they were called ‘the Eyes of the Republic’ and declared to be ‘so truly precious that it is essential that we provide whatever is required for their maintenance’. They were vital stepping stones on the great maritime highway and Venice’s radar stations. Information was as invaluable for the merchants on the Rialto as ready coin; it was compulsory for all ships returning from the Levant to stop there and pass news of pirates, warfare and the price of spices.

Modon

Modon, with its encircling harbour ‘capable of receiving the largest ships’ capped by a fort fluttering the flag of St Mark,
animated by turning windmills, bastioned by towers and thick walls to shield it from a hostile hinterland, provided arsenals, ship repair facilities and warehouses. ‘The receptacle and special nest of all our galleys, ships and vessels on their way to the Levant’, it was labelled in official documents. Here ships could mend a mast, replace an anchor, hire a pilot; obtain fresh water and trans-ship goods; buy meat and bread and watermelons; venerate the head of St Athanasius or try the heavily resinated local wines, which ‘are so strong and fiery and smell of pitch so that they can’t be drunk’, one passing pilgrim complained. When the merchant fleets pulled in on their way east, the ports were transformed into vivid fairs where every oarsman with a little merchandise under his rowing bench would set up his wares and try his luck. Modon and Coron were the turntables of the Venetian sea. From here one route headed east. Galleys could tip the spiked fingers of the Peloponnese, drifting past the ominous headland of Cape Matapan, once the entrance to the underworld, and head for Negroponte, on the way to Constantinople. The other, more essential trunk route led south via the barren stepping-stone islands of Cerigo and Cerigotto to Crete – hub of the Venetian system.

The bases, harbours, trading posts and islands that Venice inhabited after 1204 were part of the commercial and maritime network that sustained its trading activities. If taxed heavily, they were generally ruled lightly. Crete however was different. The Great Island, ninety miles long, lying across the base of the Aegean like a limestone barrier buffering Europe from the African shore, resembled less an island than a complete world; a harsh intractable series of separate zones, spined by three great mountain ranges, intercut with deep ravines, high plateaus, fertile plains and thousands of mountain caves. Crete spawned Zeus and Kronos, the primitive gods of the Hellenic world; it was a landscape of wildness, banditry and ambush. For Venice, its occupation was like a snake attempting to swallow a goat. Crete’s population was five times that of Venice and its people fiercely independent, utterly loyal to the Orthodox faith and the Byzantine Empire, in whose destruction the Venetians were deeply complicit. Crete had been cheap to buy. Owning it would cost a fortune in money and blood.

From the start, there was spirited resistance. It took a dozen years to oust the Genoese in military ventures that cost Dandolo’s son, Ranieri, his life. Venice then embarked on a process of military colonisation. It tried to remake the island as an enlarged model of itself, breaking it into six regions, the
sestieri
, as in Venice, and inviting settlers from each Venetian
sestiere
to settle in the area that was given the same name. Waves of colonists left their home city to try their luck in this new world with promises of land holdings in return for military service. The outflow of population was considerable. In the thirteenth century, ten thousand Venetians settled on Crete, out of a population that never numbered more than a hundred thousand, and many of the aristocratic names of the Republic, such as Dandolo, Querini, Barbarigo and Corner, were represented. Still, the Venetian presence on the island was always small.

Crete was Venice’s full-blown colonial adventure, which would involve the Republic in twenty-seven uprisings and two centuries
of armed struggle. Each new wave of settlers sparked a fresh revolt, led by the great Cretan landowning families, deprived of their estates. The Venetians, essentially urban people, consolidated their hold on the three principal cities on the northern coast: Candia (the modern Heraklion), the hub of Venetian Crete, and further west the cities of Retimo and Canea. The countryside nominally pinned down by a series of military forts was more tenuously held, and among the limestone fastnesses of Sphakia and the White Mountains, where warrior clans lived by banditry and heroic song, no Venetian writ ran at all. Venetian rule was harsh and indifferent; the island was managed directly from the mother city by a duke, answerable to the Republic’s senate, a thousand miles away. Venice mulcted Crete with particular ferocity, worked its peasantry hard to extract grain and wine for the mother city, and repressed the Orthodox Church. Fearful of Byzantine national sentiment, which burned most brightly among the Orthodox clergy, spreading across the Aegean, they banned all priests from outside the island. The Republic practised an uncompromising policy of racial separation. No man could hold a post in the island’s administration unless he was ‘flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone’ as the formula ran; the fear of going native echoes through the Venetian records. Conversion to Orthodoxy meant immediate loss of a Venetian’s land holdings. The colonists were fond of quoting St Paul’s unflattering words on the Cretans: ‘always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies’. The Cretan peasantry were downtrodden and poor – and continued so for all the 450 years of Venetian rule.

The Cretans, arbitrarily taxed, exploited and stripped of their privileges, rose again and again: the revolts of 1211, 1222, 1228 and 1262 were just a prelude; the period 1272–1333 saw a wave of major national uprisings under the feudal Cretan lords – the Chortatzises and the Callergises – rendering Crete at times almost ungovernable. The duke of Crete was killed in an ambush in 1275; Candia was under siege in 1276; the following year pitched and bloody battles were fought on the Mesara plain, Crete’s great
fertile crescent; the mountaineers of Sphakia massacred their garrison in 1319; in 1333 the Callergises rose over taxes for a galley fleet.

The Venetians poured money and men into military response, interspersed with unfulfilled promises. Their reprisals were harsh and swift; they burned villages and sacked monasteries; beheaded rebels, put suspects to the torture, exiled women and children to Venice, tore families apart. When they finally captured Leo Callergis in the 1340s, they dropped him in the sea, tied in a sack, following the sombre formula applied in Venice. (‘This night, let the condemned be conducted to the Orfano canal, where his hands bound and his body loaded with a weight, he shall be thrown in by an officer of justice. And let him die there.’) The Republic’s colonial policy remained unbending.

Despite this, Cretan resistance seemed ineradicable. Time and again only clan feuding saved the Venetian project. The areas that rose up and were sacked followed a timeless pattern of resistance. The warrior culture ran uninterrupted down the centuries. The same villages would be burned again by the Turks and yet again in the Second World War. By 1348 Venice had endured 140 years of Cretan defiance. It still had the most shocking revolt to come.

The cost was high. ‘The perfidious revolt of the Cretans monopolises the assets and resources of Venice,’ the senate complained, but whenever it stopped spluttering about the price and contemplated the alternatives it could never bring itself to sail away. Crete was an axiom. If Modon and Coron were the eyes of the Republic, Crete was its hub, ‘the strength and courage of the empire’, the nerve centre of its maritime kingdom, ‘one of the best possessions of the Commune’. The ponderous superlatives ring through the official registers. Nowhere else was the Venetian lion carved more proudly on gateways and harbour walls. Crete was twenty-five sailing days away from the doge’s palace – as far off as Bombay from London to the British Empire of 1900 – but in the imagination of the lagoon, distance was telescoped. Crete loomed large. Misshapen maps of its long low profile, hooked upward
slightly at the eastern end, would be endlessly repeated down the long centuries of its occupation; news about Crete on the Rialto was a critical indicator of mercantile fortunes.