City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (50 page)

So many tried to escape over the bridge that it collapsed, hurling them into the sea, but the fort in the middle was unreachable and still holding out. Eventually the defenders surrendered with a promise of safe conduct. When this was reported to Mehmet, he turned furiously on the pasha responsible: ‘If you gave your word [to spare their lives], you did not remember my oath.’ They were all killed. In some accounts, it was reported that the
bailo
was among those on the bridge and that Mehmet had agreed to spare his head. He complied to the letter: the
bailo
was sandwiched
between planks and sawn in half. More likely he had died at the walls. It does appear that the sultan exacted terrible revenge. Particularly enraged by the mere boys who had shot down his men so effectively, he had all the male survivors ten years and above, about eight hundred, brought into his presence. Their hands were tied behind their backs; they were made to kneel in a large circle, then beheaded one by one, creating a pattern of corpses. The bodies were thrown in the sea, the surviving women and children marched off into slavery.

Despite Mehmet’s oath, a few did survive, among them Giovan-Maria Angiolello, taken off as a slave, and a monk, Jacopo dalla Castellana, who was probably able to disguise himself. His short account ends autobiographically: ‘I, Brother Jacopo dalla Castellana, saw all these events, and escaped from the island because I speak both Turkish and Greek.’

The Venetian fleet ineffectually tracked the enemy convoy back to Gallipoli, then trailed home in disgrace.

*

The news from Negroponte was, if anything, more devastating than that from Constantinople seventeen years earlier. First there were just rumours. On 31 July a shipwrecked sailor turned up with some damp letters from the rector of Lepanto: fires had been seen along the enemy coast – ominous signs of a victory. It was quickly followed by confirmed reports. The senate was struck dumb with shock.

Those of the Collegio, coming out into St Mark’s Square to go home, were accosted by lots of people who wanted to know how things were going. They refused to reply and walked away as if dumbstruck with lowered heads, so that the whole city was filled with dismay, wondering what extraordinary event had occurred; it began to be rumoured that Negroponte was lost; the whole place was abuzz with this news; it’s impossible to describe the groans and laments.

Bells rang throughout the city; penitential processions wound through the squares; preachers lamented Christian sin. ‘The whole
city is so struck with horror that the inhabitants seem dead,’ wrote the Milanese ambassador. The fall of Negroponte was the first intimation of imperial decline; it felt like the beginning of the end. ‘Now,’ wrote the chronicler Domenico Malipiero, ‘it seems that the greatness of Venice has been humbled and our pride destroyed.’ In that second, far-seeing commentators glimpsed the future decline of the Stato da Mar and its sea power. The shocking news was spread across Italy by new-fangled Venetian printing presses.

The senate attempted to maintain a stiff upper lip. The messages it sent out to the states of Italy were resolute:

… we are neither shattered by this loss nor broken in spirit, but rather we have become the more aroused and are determined with the advent of these great dangers, to augment our fleet and to send out fresh garrisons in order to strengthen and maintain our hold on our other possessions in the East as well as to render assistance to the other Christian peoples whose lives are threatened by the implacable foe.

However it was soon transmitting a more desperate appeal for help, unity, money and men. ‘All Italy and all Christendom are in the same boat,’ wrote the doge to the duke of Milan. ‘No coastline, no province, no part of Italy, no matter how remote and hidden it may seem, can be considered safer than the rest.’ The pope preached crusade again but it made no difference. There was not one state reluctant to enter into agreement with Mehmet. As for da Canal, he avoided the mandatory death sentence. The senate recognised that the mistake had been in the original commission – he should never have been appointed. He was banished permanently to the dusty town of Portogruaro, thirty miles from Venice. For the educated lawyer, ‘born to read books but not to be a sailor’, it might have been as distant as the Black Sea. But the lessons of his appointment had not been learned: the mistakes would be repeated a generation later.

*

Venice fought on alone, losing ground little by little. Most of the fortresses gained early in the war were lost again; Coron, Modon
and Lepanto held out because they could be continuously supported by sea. Peace initiatives came and went; alliances within Italy and with Hungary and Poland proved fruitless. After Mehmet crushed Uzun Hassan in 1473, Venice’s ally on the Persian frontier, his full attention was turned to the Venetian possessions in Albania. In 1475 he finally snuffed out Genoese and Venetian colonies in the Black Sea. By 1477, the mood had become grim indeed.

There were small victories in an otherwise unhalted decline. In early 1472 the new captain-general of the sea, Pietro Mocenigo, was approached by a Sicilian called Antonello with a proposition. The young man, who had been taken away as a slave after the fall of Negroponte, offered to sabotage the arsenal at Gallipoli. Mocenigo agreed. Antonello was provided with a small boat, six volunteers, barrels of gunpowder, sulphur, turpentine, and a large quantity of oranges. Sailing up the Dardanelles with their materials hidden under the fruit, they approached Gallipoli at night on 20 February. The defences of the arsenal were evidently slack, a fact that Antonello well knew. Creeping ashore, each man carrying a sack of gunpowder on his shoulder, they forced the lock on the arsenal with pliers and made their way into the magazines. They stacked gunpowder amongst the sails, weapons and rigging, laid trails of gunpowder, then set light to them from outside. Nothing happened. The powder had got damp on the voyage. Finally they managed to set fire to a large quantity of pitch and tallow. The night sky erupted in flame; Antonello began firing the galleys as the Turks came running, then took to the boat.

Pulling away, the saboteurs were overtaken by disaster; a sack of powder set fire to their vessel. They managed to row back to shore and scuttle it, but were caught and hauled off to face Mehmet’s wrath. Antonello was fearless to the last. He admitted freely to the deed without the need for torture and boldly confronted the ‘Terror of the World’, declaring

… with great spirit, that any one would have done this, because [the sultan] was the plague of the world, he had plundered all his neighbouring princes, kept faith with no one and tried to eradicate the name of Christ, and that’s why he had taken it into his head to do what he had done.

Mehmet’s response to the bravery of a doomed man was somehow typical. ‘The sultan listened to his words with patience and much admiration – then ordered his decapitation.’ The fire at Gallipoli burned for ten days. It gutted the arsenal and caused a hundred thousand ducats’ worth of damage.

Elsewhere Venice fought resolutely to stem the Ottoman tide. Antonio Loredan, a Venetian commander of the old school, conducted a heroic defence of the Albanian fort of Scutari against overwhelming odds. The same feat was repeated in 1478 when Mehmet came in person to supervise the capture of this irritating but strategic obstacle, but the expense of war was mounting steadily. By the mid-1470s the annual cost had risen to 1,250,000 ducats a year. Venice was war-weary and demoralised; hope would be raised from time to time by the prospect of peace, then dashed again. There were repeated rumours that Mehmet had died, only to be confounded by a new campaign. Year after year the sultan raised fresh armies and set out for unpredictable destinations. And in the Venetian response there was a creeping loss of nerve. They were still superior at sea but failed repeatedly to engage the Ottomans in open battle. Maybe, by now, the consequences of failure were so daunting that no captain of the sea dared take the risk. Like Mocenigo, they preferred saboteurs to sea battles.

The Ottomans kept drawing nearer. In 1477 freelance Ottoman cavalry entered the plains of Friuli, plundering and killing, burning houses, woods, crops and farms. Captives were carried back to the sultan. In the city these strikes induced terror. From the top of the campanile in St Mark’s Square the Venetians could see a line of flame marching across the landscape just thirty miles beyond their lagoon. Mehmet’s appetite for war seemed inexhaustible. When the Venetians agreed peace with him the following year, he
changed his mind, ordered another attack on Friuli and went in person to the siege of Scutari. The king of Naples offered Mehmet his ports for a final assault on the Republic. In Constantinople, the sultan was coining gold ducats in imitation of Venice’s unassailable currency. They bore the legend ‘Sultan Mehmet, son of Murat Khan, glorious be his victory!’ and on the reverse an assertion of imperial power across all terrains: ‘The Coiner of Gold, the Lord of Power and Victory, on Land and Sea’.

*

Venice had reached the limits of endurance. It had fought to the point of despair. Pessimism and plague infected the stagnant backwaters of the city. The sight of burning Friuli terrified the populace. Heretofore Venice had been too proud to negotiate on any but reasonable terms. Now it was prepared to concede almost anything; dignity was abandoned, peace essential. The senate despatched their most capable statesman, the Cretan Giovanni Dario, with almost limitless freedom to negotiate. He was ordered only to protect Venice’s commercial interests as best he could; almost anything else could be conceded. Mehmet demanded harsh terms. Scutari, so bravely defended, was given up; Negroponte was gone for ever and all other territories taken in the war returned to the Turks. After 1479, the Republic controlled just twenty-six forts in the Peloponnese; the Ottomans had fifty. In addition they paid the sultan a hundred thousand gold ducats outright and a further ten thousand a year for the right to trade in the Ottoman Empire. The
bailo
was restored to Constantinople. With him went the painter Gentile Bellini as part of the peace settlement, to decorate his palace and to produce an imperial portrait of the conqueror.

Venice was relieved and exhausted. The war had lasted for sixteen years. The Venetians considered it an exceptional event in their history and referred to it as the Long War, but they were mistaken. It was just the overture, an opening skirmish.

They had fought alone and had gained no help or credit from Christian Europe. The following year, Mehmet did what Venice
had already predicted he would if unchecked: he sent an invasion force to Italy. Venetian squadrons were ordered to track the fleet but not to interfere in any way; diplomats were to keep silent about all the preparations that they had observed. This armada attacked and sacked the town of Otranto, massacred its population and felled the bishop at his altar. This strike into the heart of Christendom, just three hundred miles from Rome, caused utter consternation. Terror was palpable, blame apportioned. The Venetians, who had assumed intermittently the role of Christendom’s shield, were held accountable for watching the Ottomans sail by. In the aftermath it was declared that ‘this business arises from the Signoria of Venice’. The Venetians were excoriated by their fellow Christians for their inactivity, or connivance – ‘traders in human blood, traitors to the Christian faith’, the French howled – but they had fought alone for sixteen years and would take no lectures from anybody, nor would they any longer entertain talk of a Christian league. They had paid a fortune in money and blood for Ottoman peace. In reality the lords of a quarter and half a quarter had been squeezed into neutrality by more powerful forces. No one burned with a fiercer joy when an emissary arrived in Venice on 19 May 1481 with the news of Mehmet’s death. The cry ‘The great eagle is dead!’ rang through the city. Church bells clanged; there were services of deliverance and fires in the streets. The Otranto beachhead was abandoned – and with it the fickle notion of crusades.

*

Meanwhile the trade with the Mamluks, for all its difficulties, was at its peak. The Venetians were assiduous in their collection of commercial intelligence about trading conditions and political disturbances that might disrupt the spice business, but there were forces at work in world trade that had escaped their gaze. During the
muda
season of 1487, while Venetian spice traders were buying ginger and pepper in Alexandria, elsewhere in the city two Moroccan merchants were dying of fever. The city’s governor was so certain of their fate that he had already appropriated their
property, according to right. Miraculously the two men survived, demanded the return of their goods and departed for Cairo.

In fact they were not Moroccans nor were they merchants. Their names were Pero da Covilha and Afonso de Paiva and they were Portuguese spies. Fluent Arabic speakers, they had been sent from Lisbon to explore the spice route to India. For seventy years Portuguese navigators had been inching down the west coast of Africa, leaving stone crosses on the headlands to mark the extent of their voyages as an encouragement to their successors. The following year Bartolomeu Dias would round the southern tip of Africa, which he named the Cape of Good Hope, but was unable to go on; his men refused, fearing they might sail off the edge of the world. The two spies were to try to discover all they could about the routes to India across the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa. The secrecy of their mission was not just to avoid the Arab gaze – discovery would mean certain death – but also to conceal their interest from Christopher Columbus and the Spanish king, who had competitive interests. The prize was to win the race to cut out the Arab and Venetian middlemen and to buy spices in bulk and at source.

For two years Covilha criss-crossed the Indian ocean disguised as an Arab merchant, passing between the ports of India and the coasts of Africa, learning about the pattern of the monsoon winds, the currents, harbours and spice bazaars, and recording his findings on a secret chart. By the time he returned to Cairo, Paiva was dead, in unknown circumstances. In 1490 Covilha handed over his chart and his report to Jewish agents who had come to Cairo to find him. The master spy never made it home. Addicted to travel, he went to Mecca as a Muslim pilgrim, then to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, from where the king of the country refused to let him depart. Thirty years later a Portuguese mission found him still alive, living like an Ethiopian. His information, however, did make it back to Lisbon. It resolved vital blanks in the Portuguese navigators’ maps.