The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (11 page)

It is not like that now. The remains on top of the hill still gloriously command the island landscape and the seas around, westward to Kea, northward to Andros, eastward to Chios and Irakia, southward to Paros and Naxos of the dukes. They are scarcely more than piles of stones, though, hardly recognizable as a fortress at all but for the steep steps that lead up the crag to them, the fortified gateway in the ramparts, and the little chapel which survives, fresh-painted and candle-lit, in the lee of the mountain below.

Besides, if the drama is there, the glory is gone, for in the end the Venetians themselves tamely surrendered the Rose of the Aegean, and brought their long suzerainty in these waters to an ignoble conclusion.

It was a famous scandal. By the end of the seventeenth century the island’s defences were in a shameful state. The Rector might still row about the place with his fourteen-oar galley, and the Venetian
gentry still lived in some style in their mansions on the mountain. But the fortress was held, so a French visitor reported in 1700, only by ‘fourteen ragged soldiers, seven of whom are French deserters’. There were some 500 houses within the walls of Exombourgo then, but grand though their situation seemed to imaginative cartographers, on the spot it was not so enviable. Tinos was traditionally the home of Aeolus, Lord of the Winds: the cutting north winds of the Aegean swept through those stony houses as it chills the ruins today, and the office of Rector in this comfortless and perilous outpost of empire was looked upon by likely appointees, so the Frenchman says, as a mortification.

Huddled here then at daybreak on 5 June 1715, the last of the Venetian rulers of the Aegean saw, far in the bay below them, a Turkish fleet off-shore. A lonely moment! There were forty-five warships down there, and transports enough to carry an army of 25,000 men. The islanders rushed up to Exombourgo for safety, taking their weapons with them. The Turks advanced inland with artillery, mortars and scaling-ladders and, surrounding the mountain, began a bombardment of the fortress. At first the garrison fought back strongly, and Turkish casualties were heavy. There was plenty of food and ammunition up there, and the Greeks, we are told, were perfectly ready to fight it out to the end. It was the Venetians who surrendered. They are thought to have been bribed, and certainly the terms they arranged were disgraceful. Every Venetian on the island would be allowed to leave. Every Greek must remain. The Rector, Bernardo Balbi, agreed without argument, and he and his men were allowed to march out of the fortress with all the honours of war. They sailed away unharmed, leaving all their subjects, the most faithful they ever had, to the mercy of the Turks.

So the long Venetian presence in the sea of legend ended miserably, not at all as Dandolo, Sanudo and their bravos could have foreseen. Balbi, returning shamefaced to Venice, was accused of accepting bribes from the Turks, and imprisoned for life. His officers are said to have been punished for their venality by having hot silver poured over their bodies. The Turks blew up most of Exombourgo, and shipped the loyal Greeks of Tinos away to slavery in Africa.

A
t the southern
end of the Aegean, like a breakwater, stands the isle of Crete. It is another world. I first set eyes on Crete from a ship’s deck at the end of World War II, and it seemed to me then, as we lay off-shore in the dark bay of Soudha, to be positively smouldering with the furies of the battle just concluded. In the years since then tourism has penetrated every last cove of the Grecian seas, and ancient lifestyles have been tempered from Lemnos to Corfu: but Crete, we shall find as we sail in from the airy Cyclades, is smouldering still – not just at the moment with the embers of any particular conflict, but with its native intensity of temperament, its terrifying landscapes and its always ferocious memories.

It is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean – the Greeks call it simply ‘The Great Island’ – and it is like no other. It rises in wild mountain ranges directly from the sea, scoured often by savage winds, and nearly half of it is uncultivatable. It is not really very large – 160 miles long, never more than 36 miles wide – but its presence is gigantic. The mass of it is hacked all about with ravines, twisted this way and that, and the deep shadows scored in its mountain flanks seem to double the size of it, and make it all terrific. It is the very opposite of, say, Mauritius, which Darwin once defined as an ‘elegantly constructed island’. Crete is brutally built and full of portent – the birth-place of Zeus, the lair of the Minotaur.

Even in sunshine this is a landscape daunting and suggestive.
During the bitter winter it can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with sudden sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.

Cretan history has matched its look, and its legend. The Minoan civilization of pre-history was destroyed by some suitably appalling catastrophe, and was followed by centuries of alien occupation – Roman, Arab, Byzantine. In the Cyclades one feels that the pagan gods survive all that geopolitics can do to them, and may easily be out there sunbathing, or twanging guitars on the upper decks of ferry-boats. Crete is not that kind of place. It is an island charged with power, but without
tingle.
I once went up to the birthplace of Zeus, the cavern called Idheon on the slopes of Mount Ida, when the dusk was falling on a grey winter evening, and found it a disturbingly sterile site. The mountain is very lonely up there, and the tipple of goats’ feet somewhere was the only sound upon the silence, but it was not the desertion of the scene that chilled me, or the ashen colour of it. It was the feeling that, though it had once been the holiest of holy places, where if not a god, at least a grand idea was born, not a shred of emotion lingered there. There was no numen to it, no magic. The Cretan wind had swept it all away, and the cave was just a hole in the mountain face.

This awesome island inevitably became Venetian after the Fourth Crusade. It was allotted to Boniface of Montferrat but the Venetians bought the rights to it, cheaply enough, in an agreement resonantly entitled
Refutatio Cretae.
They had to dislodge the Genoese, though, who had already seized part of the island, and it was another decade before they were truly masters of it. Crete was called Candia then, and it became, especially after the loss of Euboea, the centrepiece of their eastern empire, to which their scattered settlements might look for protection, judgement or intervention, and through whose ports all their traffic to Egypt
and the Levant might pass. Many another possession was considered ancillary to the Great Island, and the thirteenth-century Doge Renier Zeno declared that the whole strength of the Venetian Empire lay in its possession.

Crete is one of the world’s junctions, equidistant from Europe, Asia and Africa. Even now, though it is an administrative region of Greece, it has an exotic feel, and parts of the capital, Iraklion, seem less like a European city than a bazaar town of Islam. Herb-scented, carcass-hung, brass-shining, hammer-ringing are the tumultuous alleys of its markets. Sizzling are the shish-kebabs of its backstreet restaurants. The haggle, the false retreat, even here and there the regurgitive hubble-bubble – all these symptoms of the east permeate the town, and give to its seedy lanes a consoling sense of caravanserai.

Life in the countryside, too, is sometimes more oriental than Hellenic. Consider the little procession stumbling down the rocky track towards us now. It might be stumbling down from Damascus. First, like scouts, come the purposeful dogs, then the herdsman on his fine donkey, wearing a black beaded turban and swishing a stick. The wife comes next on her rather less majestic ass, half-veiled with a black scarf around her chin, and cluttered with pans, bags and baskets. A myriad sheep and goats mill all around, tousled and blunt-faced, frequently stopping to butt each other, or nibble something by the track, or simply stand stock-still to sniff the air. Finally the sheep-boy strides along behind, with two or three cows in tow too, and a crook over his shoulders, and a fine high wave of the hand that seems to come straight from the black tents of the desert.

On a hot still day on the southern coast you may fancy you see dustclouds of Africa, sullenly blowing out of the Libyan Sea. Perhaps you do. It is only 200 miles from Crete to the African coast, and when the Romans built on the island they grouped it as a province with Cyrenaica. Bananas grow in Crete. Egyptians ruled it in the nineteenth century, and when in 1940 the Germans invaded the island thousands of Greek and British soldiers got away in small boats to Alexandria.

The Venetians well realized the geographical importance of the island. No impetuous nephews would be allowed to rule this
great possession. It must be a proper colony of the Republic, governed directly from Venice, settled by Venetian families, organized by Venetian administrators and given a complete system of government based upon the Signory itself – the first properly imperial government of the
Stato da Mar.

Crete was to be Venice translated. At the head of the colony there was a duke, the shadow of the Doge, appointed from Venice for a two-year term of office. With him came two councillors, and these three formed the local Signory. Beneath them was a Grand Council of Venetian noblemen, which elected from its own members a standing council to advise the duke. The island was divided into six administrative regions, corresponding to the six city districts of Venice, and bearing the same names – San Marco, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, Castello, San Polo, Santa Croce: so exact was the analogy intended to be that settlers for the Cretan districts were encouraged to come from their Venetian namesakes. Below these
sestieri
the island was split into 200 fiefs, mostly held by colonists from Venice in return for military duties to the Republic.

Each fief had its own corps of serfs, generally Arab by origin, who were tied to the land, and could be mustered for military service, and the prospect of feudal grandeur in Crete appealed to many ambitious young Venetians. Some of the greatest Venetian families took up lands in Crete, as they had grabbed islands in the Aegean, and names like Faliero, Foscari, Grimani, Contarini and Morosini gave an aristocratic shine to the settler community: in 1383 twelve noblemen had to be sent to Crete to escort home to Venice one member of a settler family, Antonio Venier, because he had just been elected Doge of the Republic.

Control from Venice was rigid, at least in theory, despite the three weeks it took the average vessel to sail from the lagoon to Crete. The organization of government was specified in every detail by the Signory, and teams of inspectors saw the rules were obeyed. A particular body of specialists, the
Sapientes
or Wise Men, came each year to inspect the maritime affairs of the island, and all-powerful
proveditori
, superintendents, periodically arrived to reorganize everything all over again.!

The administration was purely self-interested, and not very edifying. Crete was governed simply for the benefit of Venice. The Cretans were shamelessly exploited, driven to forced labour or conscripted for the wars against the Turks: ‘Many Cretans were killed in the last war,’ reported a Venetian official blandly in 1573, ‘but in a few years the gap will be filled, for there are many children between the ages of ten and fifteen…’ Wine was the chief export, but when in 1584 there was a glut on the international market, all the Cretan vines were torn up. Sugar was introduced, but was worked chiefly by slaves – Circassians, Armenians, Russians, sold by Tartars to Venetian shippers on the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov: the profits of the plantations went to Venice, or at least to Venetians. Wheat, barley, oil, cheeses, cotton, silk, timber for ship-building – all went into the Venetian commercial maw, and helped to make Venetian fortunes. Corruption was rife: one of the duke’s two professional councillors was imprisoned for taking bribes in 1431 – ‘What do fish care about law?’ demanded the outraged if prejudiced Pope Pius II. ‘As among brute beasts aquatic creatures have the least intelligence, so among human beings the Venetians are the least just and least capable of humanity…’

Over the years the Venetians fortified the island strongly. They walled its three towns – Iraklion, Khania, Rethimnon, which all stood on its northern coast. They built protective sea-castles on three off-shore islands, Gramvousa, Soudha and Spinalonga, and they covered the countryside with lesser strongholds. They established their capital in Iraklion, the easternmost of the three towns, which they confusingly called Candia too, and turned what had been a petty village, founded by Arabs long before, into an impressive colonial centre. Here the two-year duke lived, the expatriate nobility met to sustain their dignities, and here the Venetians tried to re-create some of the grandeurs of the mother city.

You could not call Iraklion very grand now. The Venetians might enjoy those oriental evocations of its backstreets, but they would be horrified by its discordant concrete blocks and grubby thoroughfares. Nevertheless you can still discover in the shape of the town the pattern of their old authority, deliberately symbolized

The city of Candia, today’s Heraklion