City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (48 page)

Elsewhere the crusade remained unpopular. The tithes imposed by the pope were dubbed ‘sheer robbery’ in Bologna; the venture was widely seen as little more than a Venetian imperial project. The Florentine ambassador briefed furiously against it:

Your holiness, what are you thinking of? Are you going to wage war on the Turks that you may force Italy to be subject to the Venetians? All that is won in Greece by driving out the Turks will become the property of the Venetians who, after Greece is subdued, will lay hands on the rest of Italy.

Venice launched ferocious counterblasts against such lobbyings, setting out the record of its fifty-year resistance to the Ottoman advance point by point, if somewhat creatively:

The accusations being made at Rome are intolerable: the Signoria has always done its duty; [the ambassador] will insist on the victory at Gallipoli in 1416; the Turkish fleet was almost completely destroyed; but the other Christian powers are content to applaud, without ever responding to the exhortations of Venice; in 1423, Salonica … was occupied and protected for seven years at the expense of incredible efforts and enormous cost with the help of no one; in 1444–1445 Venice armed its galleys and kept them on action stations all winter, while the pope did not pay what he promised. Rather than listen to these libellers, the pope should consider that the Ottomans are squeezing all Venice’s possessions: the situation of Venice is totally different to that of the other Christian states … in reality no other state makes comparable efforts.

Pius was aware of Venice’s self-seeking interest in empire, but like Innocent III in 1201 he needed the Venetians for his crusade and conceded a measure of pragmatism. ‘We admit that the Venetians, as is the way of men, covet more than they have … [but] it is enough for us that if Venice conquers, Christ will conquer.’ Privately his view of the Venetians was far less flattering. In a passage of his
Commentaries
, tellingly deleted in the printed version, he wrote:

Traders care nothing for religion nor will a miserly people spend money to avenge it. The populace sees no harm in dishonour if their money is safe. It was lust for power and insatiable greed of gain that persuaded the Venetians to equip such forces and undergo such expense … They spent money to get more money. They followed their natural instincts. They were out for trade and barter.

Innocent could have written such words himself 250 years earlier.

But strategically Venice was right: if the Stato da Mar were weakened, Mehmet would advance on Italy. It understood the Ottomans better than anyone. However ambivalent it might be about the role, it was the only maritime shield that Christendom had. The Italian peninsula would be reminded of the fact in bitter circumstances sixteen years later.

*

The crusade never got off the ground. Pius was a hopeless organiser, better at rhetorical prose than the practical planning of wars. Only a rabble turned up at the mustering point of Ancona in the summer of 1464. Pius, who intended to crusade in person, surveyed the scene with growing despair. By the time that twenty-four Venetian galleys hove into view with their reluctant doge on 12 August, he was a dying man. He had to be carried to the window of the episcopal palace to see the lion banners of St Mark sweep into the bright bay. He died three days later. The venture collapsed ignominiously. His dying days stood as a metaphor for the death of crusading dreams. Cristoforo Moro sailed back home, no doubt with some measure of personal relief, but Venice was destined to fight alone – and for a long time. The Florentines, the Milanese, the king of Naples sat back to watch the spectacle from what they thought would be a safe distance.

‘If Negroponte Is Lost’

1464–1489

The war opened brightly enough with a successful invasion of the Peloponnese but quickly became unsustainable. The mercenary troops, commanded by the Wolf of Rimini, proved unreliable, though this was perhaps not surprising given that Venice failed to pay them reliably either. Venice’s galleys controlled the seas but could inflict little damage in a land-based war, while the Ottoman fleet, remembering the debacle of 1416, refused to fight. And the war was expensive: by 1465 it was costing seven hundred thousand ducats a year. A decade later that figure would have almost doubled.

Venetians within the Ottoman Empire suffered badly. The
bailo
died in a Constantinople prison; captive soldiers and resident merchants were publicly executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets. Trade in the Ottoman Empire was dying; commercial establishments collapsed. The Venetian advance in the Peloponnese was checked, then reversed. The inspirational captain of the sea, Vettor Capello, was unable to prevent the recapture of Patras on the western coast. The failure cut him deeply: Capello had been leader of the party that had promoted the war. After Patras, he was never seen to smile again; when he died of a heart attack at Negroponte in March 1467, the appetite for war began to wane. By July of that year Mehmet was five miles from the Venetian port of Durazzo on the Albanian coast. Only sixty miles of Adriatic sea separated the Ottomans from Brindisi on the Italian shore; shiploads of destitute refugees started to arrive there. In Naples it was common knowledge that Mehmet ‘hated
the Signoria of Venice and that if he found a suitable harbour in those parts of Albania, he would carry the war into its territory’. By 1469 raiders had reached the Istrian peninsula, considerably closer to Venice. Mehmet’s scheme of bridging the lagoon seemed not impossible.

The Republic shuttled restlessly between spirited defence, peace initiatives and diplomatic alliances with Mehmet’s Islamic rivals in Asia Minor, in an attempt to find a solution to a drawn-out fight. The war would lull and reignite, depending on Mehmet’s strategic imperatives, and his health. When he crossed the Bosphorus to campaign in Asia or on the Black Sea, Venice breathed a temporary sigh of relief. His returns were always ominous. Intermittently bouts of morbid corpulence would afflict the sultan; unable to haul himself into the saddle, he shut himself away in the Topkapi palace and the campaigns would pause.

And he played the diplomatic game with consummate skill. His knowledge of Italian politics, supplied courtesy of Florentine and Genoese advisers at his court and paid informers, was excellent. He dallied expertly with Venetian hopes, encouraging their ambassadors then dropping them, accepting gifts then reverting to silence, periodically buying time to regroup, or proposing peace on terms he knew they would refuse. From time to time unattributed emissaries would approach Venetian outposts with suggestions that peace negotiations might be possible, then vanish. Mehmet probed their resolve, tested their war-weariness and spread disinformation, leaving the senate to pick painstakingly over one piece of data after another. Strategically he kept his cards close to his chest, making spies second-guess the objective of each new season’s campaign. He was famously secretive. When asked about a future campaign he was reported to have replied, ‘Be certain that if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had learned my secret, I would pull it out and consign it to the flames.’ The Rialto was a cockpit of rumours.

The Venetians soon grasped his methods. Considering yet another peace initiative in 1470, the senate resolved that

we understand very well that this is one of the usual cunning tricks of the Turk, in whom we believe that absolutely no trust should be placed … considering the present state of affairs. However, it has seemed best to us to play his own game of pretence and to go along with him.

Venice was at the height of its powers; trade with the Mamluks continued to boom but the war was ruinous, its effects doubled by the snuffing out of trade in the Byzantine lands and the Black Sea. ‘The present state of affairs’ was always the Republic’s power deficit against the larger, better resourced Ottoman Empire.

Towards the end of the 1460s the voices of alarm were becoming increasingly shrill in diplomatic circles. Death and hardship fell heavily on the Greeks, Serbs and Hungarians – everyone on the continuously eroding frontiers of the Ottoman advance. Venice begged the pope for material aid, crusading tithes and support, ‘for when [the sultan] has occupied the coast of Albania, which God forbid, nothing else remains but for him to cross over into Italy, whenever he wishes, for the destruction of Italy’.

When Vettor Capello died at Negroponte in 1467, Venice appointed a new captain-general of the sea, Jacopo Loredan. Intelligence from Constantinople made it certain that sooner or later Mehmet would strike at Negroponte, ‘the shield and base of our estate in the east’. The imperative was to hold the island at all costs. It appointed a new
provveditore
to Negroponte with the self-same instructions. He was Dr Nicolo da Canal, previously ambassador at the Vatican. As a fail-safe, da Canal was given a further set of instructions:

If by chance, which God forbid, the captain-general of the sea should fall ill or suffer some infirmity so that he should be unable to carry on or if he should die, we order you … at once to embark as captain of the galleys of our fleet … assuming the responsibility of the said captaincy until … the captain-general shall regain his former health.

It was a fateful decision. Da Canal was a highly learned lawyer, the best-educated man ever to be entrusted with the command of Venice’s fleets, but he was no Pisani or Carlo Zeno. Unfortunately,
by the time that Mehmet did strike, it was da Canal at the helm.

In February 1469 a Venetian merchant on the island of Scios, Piero Dolfin, alerted the Republic to significant intelligence. His information was highly specific:

At the start of December we learned from Galata that the Turk has begun to prepare a fleet and has summoned the army; he has come in person to Constantinople, disregarding the danger of plague, to arrange things … and he aims to take his army from the mainland to the island via a bridge which will be constructed.

He went on to outline the preparations: so much flour was being diverted for ship’s biscuit that there was a shortage and unrest on the streets; large quantities of charcoal were being prepared for the manufacture of gunpowder; sixty ship’s caulkers had been despatched to the arsenal at Gallipoli; thousands of men were being called up; artillery was being hauled towards Salonica. He restated what everyone already knew about Negroponte: ‘The security of the whole state hangs on it. If Negroponte is lost, all the rest of the Levant will be in danger.’

On 8 March 1469, lawyer-admiral Nicolo da Canal received his commission as captain-general:

… because both by letters and by various other means we have word that the Turk, cruellest enemy of Christ’s name, is preparing a strong fleet and a powerful army to attack our city of Negroponte … we wish and order you, owing to the extreme importance of this matter, to hasten your voyage with all possible speed … to Modon and Negroponte in order to meet, with your customary prudence and valour and with the help of God’s clemency, the perils which could well be in store for us there.

Dread news continued to gather pace throughout the months of 1469 and into 1470. The sultan’s force was wildly estimated at a hundred thousand men and 350 ships – a tidal wave of military might. Venice, already exhausted by seven years of war, made desperate preparations; ‘We are squeezing not merely money from every source but even blood, so to speak, from our very veins to
aid the aforesaid city, if it is possible, lest such a slaughter and calamity fall upon all the Christians [in Negroponte].’ Again and again the Republic pressed the consequences of its loss on the Italian shore and the need for united action – to no avail. By the spring of 1470, Venice was on red alert. Two
patroni
of the arsenal were ordered to reside there permanently, the third sent to procure fleet supplies. Two thousand men were sent out on ten round ships with gunpowder and five hundred hired infantry. On 3 June, an Ottoman fleet set sail from Gallipoli.

It was sighted in the northern Aegean by a squadron of Venetian galleys. The galley commander, Geronimo Longo, was shaken by what he saw:

I have seen the Turkish fleet, which will be the ruin of Christianity, if God does not help us … otherwise we will lose in a few days what has taken us a long time to acquire … At first I judged it to be three hundred sail, now I think it’s nearer four hundred … the sea is like a forest; it might seem incredible, but the sight of it was quite extraordinary. They row very well, with a fast stroke, though not as well as us. But the sails and everything else are better than ours. I think they have more men than us.

‘We need action now, not words,’ he continued breathlessly, assessing their cannon and other equipment.