City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (31 page)

Luciano Doria had prepared his ambush well. He had ten more galleys concealed behind an outer point. His visible fleet fell back little by little before the spirited Venetian advance, drawing his opponent out to sea, then spinning smartly about as the hidden ships caught the Venetians on the flank and from behind – ‘and our men, surprised and terrified, went in a flash from bravery to abject terror’, ran the sober Venetian report. Panic led to a rout. One of the commissioners, Bragadino, formerly eager for battle, now terrified and trying to shelter from bombardment by the entrapping ships, fell overboard. Twelve experienced sea captains were killed or drowned; five were taken prisoner. With the tattered remnants of the Venetian fleet still engaged but close to flight, Luciano Doria over-confidently flipped up his visor and shouted, ‘The enemy are already beaten; we’re only a step away from complete victory!’ A Venetian captain hurtled forward in the blur of battle and pinioned him through the throat. Doria dropped dead on the spot. It was small consolation. Pisani tried to rally the remaining galleys but it was far too late. Seeing them slip away, including Steno, he gave up the unequal struggle and followed. Five ships made it to Parenzo thirty miles up the coast.

On 9 May, the new Genoese commander wrote to Padua totalling the extent of the victory:

… we won [it] in a very short space of time – just an hour and a half … of their twenty-one galleys we took fifteen with noble captains on board, three transport ships laden with grain and salted meat; we have 2,400 prisoners … over and beyond these prisoners we believe that seven to eight hundred died, either in battle or drowned in the sea.

On the 11th Francesco, lord of Padua, and all the people made a procession to the mother church ‘singing and thanking God for the victory over the Venetians … and there was great joy and revelry, many great feasts in the city, the ringing of church bells, and in the evening fires and illuminations in the open spaces and throughout the whole district’.

*

To Pisani fell the heavy obligation to report the defeat. There was no time to waste. A ship was despatched to Venice, another to the colonies in the Levant. The news struck the city dumb. There was amazement, consternation, fear. People wept for the loss of their relatives – and for the imminent danger to the city itself. There was now no fleet to protect it. Many of its most highly skilled captains and trained crews were either captives of Genoa or dead; Pisani’s fleet had been all but annihilated; Zeno’s was far out of reach somewhere on the high seas. There was sharp awareness of public calamity, linked to deep-held aristocratic grudges against the Pisani family. A universal chill descended on the lagoon. The order was sent out to Parenzo to arrest him ‘for having lost the Republic not only the backbone of its navy, the freedom of the sea, navigation, commerce, public taxes and the confidence of its citizens … in a single day, even in a single hour’.

On 7 July Pisani clanked down the gangplank on the quay by St Mark’s Square, bound in chains hand and foot. The reception was mixed – from the common people consolation, from the nobility nothing but malevolence. Still chained, he laboriously climbed the steps of the palace, to give his explanation before the doge and senate. There was no opportunity. He was hustled away into the darkness of the state prison. The prosecutors began the case against him. They demanded death – the mandatory sentence for
a commander fleeing in battle: he should be led between the two columns and decapitated ‘as an object lesson for the citizens’. The senate rejected the sentence – Pisani had lacked firmness, not courage: it was Steno who had originally incited the attack and then cut and run. The sentence was commuted to six months in prison and five years’ exclusion from public office. If this pleased the wounded nobility, it stirred a sullen discontent within the sailors and ordinary people of the city which would soon burst into open defiance.

While Pisani languished in the dungeons, the Genoese were moving closer. Another Doria, Pietro, succeeded the dead Luciano. With forty-eight galleys, he retook all the Dalmatian cities taken by Pisani; moving north into the Gulf of Venice, he recaptured Rovigno, Grado and Caorle, within seventy-five miles of the city. At the start of August Doria appeared off the Lido of St Nicholas and snatched a merchant ship with a cargo of Egyptian cotton, watched impotently by the population. Working his way down the
lidi
he attacked other settlements along the sandbanks that protected the lagoon, then departed trailing the banners of St Mark behind him in the water. It was a very potent demonstration of public humiliation; not only had Doria shown that Venice was unable to protect even its home waters, it underlined the certainty that as long as Genoa controlled the sea, Venice might be starved into defeat. On 25 June, Doria captured two grain ships from Puglia, while the Hungarians and Paduans were throttling the river traffic to Venice. Even the lagoon no longer seemed a secure refuge. The Genoese had also taken their time to reconnoitre the channels and take soundings.

The city was gripped by a sense of national emergency. Pisani’s rival, Taddeo Giustinian, was made captain-general of the sea; troops and commanders were apportioned to sectors of the defence. Two of the entrances to the lagoon were blocked with chains. Stout sailing ships were anchored as floating forts. Fortifications, wooden towers, palisades and earthworks were thrown up along the shores of the
lidi
. Giacomo de Cavalli’s expensively
bought mercenaries, who included a quarrelsome troop of Englishmen, were stationed there to man the defences. A war committee was on twenty-four-hour call in the doge’s palace and a system of alarm calls, radiating out from the bells of St Nicholas on the Lido, was put in place, so that at the first sight of a Genoese fleet, peals of church bells rippling across all the parishes of the city would summon the armed militia to St Mark’s Square, the nerve centre of whatever last stand the patriotic citizens of the Republic might be compelled to make. For good measure, the Venetians did what they had done in a similar emergency six hundred years earlier. They removed all the
briccole
– the stakes which marked the navigable channels of the lagoon – wiping its surface back to a primeval labyrinth in which nothing snagged the eye.

At the same time as military defence, the Republic had already resorted to diplomacy. Was it possible to split the triple alliance of Padua, Genoa and Hungary? Padua was too bitter a recent foe but Hungary, with troubles of its own elsewhere, might be detached. Ambassadors were hurried to Buda. The response was demoralising: the Hungarians had sensed a unique moment to strike down the Republic. They demanded a huge indemnity – half a million ducats – on top of an annual tribute of a cool hundred thousand and the surrender of Trieste, plus the acceptance of the doge and all his successors as vassals of the Hungarian crown. To add insult to injury, they helpfully suggested that if ready cash were in short supply they would accept the keys of half a dozen towns as a down payment, including Treviso and Mestre on the shores of the lagoon, plus the doge’s jewelled cap – the ultimate symbol of a free republic. ‘These demands are completely unworthy,’ reported back the ambassadors, ‘impossible to accept.’ If it were to be a choice between humiliation and death, the Republic would go down fighting. A ship had already been despatched with orders to find Zeno’s fleet and bring it back. The problem was that no one had any idea where he was.

On 6 August, the bells of St Nicholas started to clang ominously. A small fleet of six ships flying the red and white of Genoa
had been sighted on the horizon. Taddeo Giustinian decided to sally forth with an equal number to confront the intruders. As the ships closed, the Venetians spotted a man swimming towards them. He was Hieronimo Sabadia, a Venetian sailor captured at Pola, who had jumped overboard from one of the approaching ships to warn his compatriots not to advance; the six Genoese galleys were a decoy for the main fleet of forty-seven vessels lying over the horizon. It was on such patriotic actions that Venice’s hopes now rested. Giustinian turned smartly about; the chain was raised; he sailed back into the lagoon.

There were three principal entrances through the
lidi
into the lagoon; two had been blocked with chains and anchored hulks; the third, at the southern end of the lagoon, the entrance and exit to Chioggia, had been left open. It was here that Pietro Doria proposed to make his strike. The island of Chioggia was a miniature replica of Venice, protected from the open sea by its own
lido
, to which it was connected by a wooden bridge. There was another settlement on this
lido
, known as Little Chioggia, and further south the more substantial village of Brondolo. Chioggia’s strategic importance to Venice was immense; it commanded the mouths of the Brenta and the Adige, which linked Venice by water with central Italy, but which, with every passing day, were passing more firmly into the hands of the advancing Hungarian and Paduan troops. The Paduans had prepared a hundred well-armed barges to float supplies downstream to their naval allies.

By taking Chioggia, Doria hoped both to link up with the advancing land forces and to establish a base from which finally to destroy the rival republic. Set in the fringes of the lagoon, within marshes, saltpans, reed beds, sandbanks, narrow excavated channels, secret waterways, Chioggia was the place where a century of maritime warfare was destined to reach its resolution. Venice’s imaginative world, habitually vast, had now shrunk to the defence of a few square miles of floundering marsh.

At Chioggia, the Venetians determined to make a resolute stand. They armed a series of isolated outlying forts, water mills
and towers along the Brenta and on the shores of the lagoon. The
podesta
(mayor) of Chioggia, Pietro Emo, blocked the river approaches with rocks. Implacably the Paduans overcame all obstacles. With large resources of manpower, they hauled their barges overland, cutting diversionary channels round the obstructions, snuffing out isolated forts. By early August they had secured the strategic Bebbe tower at the mouth of the Brenta, just four miles from Chioggia itself. They established bastions controlling the approach canals and waterways and fought off counterattacks by convoys of small armed boats. Only one fortress held out, that of the Salt Beds, standing on the very edge of the lagoon. Chioggia was effectively cut off, though the Venetian knowledge of the shallow backwaters stood it in good stead: ‘Secretly by night many small boats came and went between Venice and Chioggia by tiny channels towards the castle of the Salt Beds, carrying letters and advice.’

On 8 August, the Paduan soldiers and their armed supply boats joined up with Doria’s fleet standing in the roadstead of Brondolo, bringing thousands of men, large supplies of food, and the promise of much more downstream from Padua. The allies now had twenty-four thousand men. Within Chioggia there were perhaps 3,500 in total, out of a population of twelve thousand, many of whom guarded the bridgehead which linked the island to its
lido
at Little Chioggia. The Genoese landed on the
lido
and unloaded their siege equipment – mangonels and bombards. In a short time Little Chioggia was taken; the armed hulk guarding the Chioggia channel was fired and destroyed. On 12 August they started to attack the bridgehead, which was defended by a stout bastion. For four days the fighting continued with the Genoese suffering great losses. On the 16th, desperate for a breakthrough, a reward of 150 ducats was offered to any man who could fire the bridge. According to the Genoese chroniclers, there was one enthusiastic volunteer:

… a Genoese soldier at once stripped off his armour, got into a small boat with straw and gunpowder and started rowing towards the bridge. When he was close to it, he set fire to the straw, jumped into the water and started pushing the boat towards the bridge … so that it was enveloped in flames. The Venetians were unable to defend the bridge any longer and so abandoned it.

In their haste they failed to raise the drawbridge behind them. ‘We pursued [the Venetians] with fire and with great losses on their side as far as the piazza of Chioggia. There was great destruction … the piazza was stained red with Christian blood and the grievous and cruel massacre of the Venetians.’

Eight hundred and sixty Venetians were killed; four thousand were taken prisoner; the women and children cowered in the churches. Doria brought his galleys into safe anchorage inside the lagoon. The Genoese now had a secure foothold within reach of Venice, to which it was directly connected by the Lombardy Channel, a deep-water arterial route through the lagoon down which even the deeper-draughted Genoese galleys could access the city. Doria was just twelve miles from St Mark’s Square. The flag of St George fluttered in the piazza of Chioggia; the lord of Padua’s from its ducal palace; Hungary’s from an adjacent tower. Francesco Carrara of Padua entered the city and was carried shoulder-high into the main square by Genoese soldiers, shouting, ‘Carro! Carro!’ They eyed the larger prize with the anticipation of a sack to equal that of Constantinople.

The news reached Venice at midnight. The bells of the campanile started to clang loudly; soon all the parishes were repeating the alarm. People came armed, running to St Mark’s Square to learn of the collapse at Chioggia. There was terror and panic, weeping and chaotic shouting, expectations that a Genoese war fleet would come nosing up the Lombardy Channel at any minute. The citizens began to bury their goods in anticipation of inevitable sack. Others were more resolute, declaring that ‘the state would never be lost so long as those who remain can man a galley or handle a weapon’. Gradually the old doge quietened the crowd with calm words and a steadfast face. The following day he sent three ambassadors to Chioggia under safe conduct to sue for
peace. After a lengthy oration they handed Doria a piece of paper setting out their conditions for peace. It was blank. The Genoese could write their own terms so long as Venice remained free. But Doria had come to destroy the hated rival. His reply was haughty: ‘There will be no peace until first we have put a bridle on those horses of yours on the portico of St Mark’s … then we shall be at peace. This is our intention and that of our Commune.’ Then, referring to the Genoese prisoners, he casually went on, ‘I don’t want them. Keep them locked up, because I intend to come and rescue all your prisoners in a few days.’ Venice would have to fight to the last gasp.