The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (14 page)

This was always an especially violent part of Crete. Its inhabitants, the Sfakiots, were among the most troublesome of all the islanders, brigands and rebels almost to a man, given to piracy at sea, unremitting vendetta on land. Cut off by high mountains from the Venetian towns in the north, the coastline was also vulnerable to the corsairs of Genoa, the Turks and the Barbary emirs, who frequently stormed ashore here to seize slaves for their galleys or their harems. Frangocastello was built at the anxious request of the Venetian colonists of the district, and must have been an undesirable billet from the start.

It is not a very beautiful work, except for its honey colour, but it is immensely suggestive. It stands at the water’s edge heavy, square and uncompromising on a bleak expanse of turf, like a tidal meadow. Its outer walls are sturdy still, and emboldened by a sculptured lion, but inside all is empty ruin. The ground is muddy after rain, hard as wood in the hot dry summer. Through the shattered windows you can see, across the flatland, that grim gash in the hills behind. It is a sinister spot, and is attended by a famous superstition. It is said that once a year, on 17 May, a host of dead warriors is to be seen on the turf outside Frangocastello – in the small hours, when the dew is shimmering and cobwebby on the grass. Some are on foot, some are on horseback, and they are led by a huge spectral
palikare
, shimmering sword in hand. The Cretans call them the
dhrosoulites
– the dew shades. They are the ghosts of liberty, or alternatively of revenge.

∗

The time came, of course, when the Turks demanded Crete. The time came to most Venetian colonies, sooner or later. By the end of the sixteenth century the island was showing every symptom of imperial degeneracy. The worst of the rebellions were over, it is true, but only from sheer exhaustion, and the place was in a cruel condition. The old feudal system had more or less collapsed. The peasants lived miserably, ‘the women dressed in rags’, as one Venetian inspector reported, ‘the children naked, the men half-naked’. Press-gangs constantly raided the villages to carry men off for the galleys. Already many Cretans were defecting to the Turkish service, and in 1597 a group of Rethimnon citizens actually invited the Turks to intervene.

For by then the Turks were looming large over the Great Island. They were the masters of the Arab world. They had occupied the Balkans from Constantinople to northern Hungary, and stood at the gates of Vienna: they had even turned the flank of Venice itself, and sent their advance forces into the plain of Friuli, between the lagoons and the Dolomites – the smoke of their camp fires was seen from the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco. The Aegean was almost all theirs, and so was Cyprus. But they had been thwarted in their attempts to gain complete sea-control of the Mediterranean. In 1537 they had failed to take Corfu. In 1565 they had been driven away from Malta. In 1571 they were beaten by the Christian fleet in the great sea-battle of Lepanto. They came to see the island of Crete, lying there massively athwart the sea-routes from Constantinople, as a maddening obstacle to their success, and in 1645, after years of hit-and-run raiding, they attacked it in force.

The Venetian Republic was enfeebled and outclassed by then, but still it took the Ottoman fleets and armies, first to last, almost a quarter of a century to drive the Venetians out of Crete. The island was the last big Christian stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean, and so the struggle became, as it were, a contest of champions, between the warriors of Mohammed and the knights of Christ. All Europe watched the spectacle in fascination, and the Turks threw their armies into the island with a fanatic disregard of losses, and an implacable resolve. As for the Venetians themselves, their record of government in Crete was not much to boast
about, but at least when the great crisis came their fighting spirit rallied. The long defence of the island acquired an epic quality. The siege of Iraklion was one of the longest in history, and went into the Venetian language as an image of intransigent resistance –
una vera guerra di Candia
, a regular war of Crete.

Sieges are sieges always, and the dogged defence of Iraklion, as it is remembered by the Venetian historians, has much in common with Troy, Lucknow, the Alamo, or even Leningrad. The same heroics are recorded, the same horrors – the roasting of rats and the stewing of dogs, the unremitting bombardments, the bestial living in ruined houses or holes in the ground. Here, as always, the women are pictured by the epicists passing ammunition or selflessly tending the wounded. Here, as usual, tattered flag flies upon half-demolished battlement, attended by commander with drawn sword among his smoke-blackened, heavily-bandaged but still indomitable soldiery.

What makes the siege of Iraklion different from the others is the fact that it lasted for twenty-two years. A whole generation was born and grew up during the siege of Iraklion. The whole of European history moved on. Commanders came and went, soldiers grew grey in the service of St Mark, drummer-boys matured into sergeant-majors, veterans died of sheer old age. Observers came out from Europe to analyse the progress of military techniques. Kings died, governments rose and fell, dynasties were established, frontiers shifted, and still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

They had easily taken the other Cretan ∗∗∗towns. The defenders of Khania soon made use of that conve∗∗∗nient water-gate, while Rethimnon, the most powerfully fo∗∗∗rtified of the three and reputedly the strongest town in the Venetian empire, fell in just three days. The Venetians threw everything, though, into the defence of Iraklion. They appointed one of their most impressive fighting nobles, Francesco Morosini, to the command of the town; the admiral with the cat and the red outfit, he was the son of the Duke of Crete who had erected that jolly fountain in the central square. They raided Turkish islands in the Aegean, as distractions, and tried to force the Dardanelles to attack Constantinople itself. They fell upon Turkish convoys making for Crete.
They instituted taxes in Venice specifically to pay for the defence of the town, and even sold membership of the nobility to help finance the struggle. Through it all the Venetian fleet kept the supply lines open from the lagoons: but still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

They appealed to the rest of Christendom, and the Kings of Sweden and Savoy, the Elector of Bavaria, the Prince-Bishop of Fürstenberg, the Emperor Leopold and the Knights of St John all sent contingents to help. The Protector Cromwell of England would have sent soldiers too, if the Levant Company had not persuaded him otherwise in the interests of commerce. In 1669 7,000 Frenchmen arrived, led by the swaggering Dukes of Beaufort and Noailles, ‘mightily satisfied with themselves’. Bells pealed to greet them when they ran the blockade of the city, guns were fired in the harbour, red banners of welcome were displayed upon the ramparts. They made one gallant sortie from the Gate of St George, lost the Duke of Beaufort in a panicky retreat, refused to attack again unless the Venetians went first, and after two months sailed home to France again. Still the Turks besieged Iraklion.

By the autumn of 1669 there were less than 3,000 Venetians fit to fight within the city. Some 30,000 had been killed or wounded. They had made ninety-six sorties over the years, used 53,000 tons of powder, fired 276,000 cannon-balls. The foreign volunteers, party by party, sailed for home: the Knights of St John were the last to go, ‘and I lose more by their departure’, said Morosini, ‘than by that of all the others’. At last, on 5 September 1669, the city was surrendered to the Turks. The Venetians were given twelve days to leave the city, after ruling it for 459 years.

A strange hush fell over Iraklion, an eye-witness tells us, after so many years of carnage. The soldiers could leave their pickets at last, and the enemies met without malice, ‘speaking to each other about the accidents and adventures of the war, as though there had never been differences between them…’ Almost the entire community of Iraklion left the city. Only some priests, a few Greeks and three Jews elected to remain. The Turkish army entered through the wrecked walls of the St Andreas bastion, in
the west, and as they did so the last of the Venetian soldiers, 2,500 sick and ragged men, marched down to the harbour and boarded the galleys for home.

Under the treaty that followed the Turks allowed the Venetians to retain sovereignty over the three islands which they had fortified so long before off the northern coast of Crete. It was only in 1715, the year Tinos fell, that the Republic surrendered these last strongholds, and their castles still stand. Gramvousa is remote and inaccessible in the north-west. Soudha guards the entrance to Soudha Bay and the warships of the western alliance still steam beneath its ramparts to their base beneath the mountains. Spinalonga is in the east, in the land-locked and fiord-like bay of Elounda.

This is tourist country nowadays, whose shores sprout with hotels, and whose waters stir in summer to the scud of speed-boat and water-ski. Nevertheless Spinalonga is the best place to contemplate the last years of Venetian rule in this, the most difficult of all their colonies. It was, as it happens, the place where their first troops landed, when they arrived to drive the Genoese away in the first decade of the thirteenth century. During the half-century after the fall of Iraklion it became a haven of Crete, as Venetian Crete had been a haven of Constantinople: the sight of the old saintly banner flying there from its turrets, only a mile or two from the Muslim mainland, was a token of hope to the Christians of Crete, who escaped there in their hundreds.

The Venetians had named it for the island, at home in Venice, which was then called Long Spine and is now Giudecca; they stacked its mass with barracks and fortress walls, a fine house for the governor, a church for the garrison, and they armed it, in its later years, with thirty-five heavy guns. Its bristling presence must have been very galling to the Turks on the main island. They stomached the affront for half a century, but eventually repudiated their agreement of 1669 and laid siege to all three island castles. The Venetians, to whom by now the forts can scarcely have been of more than symbolic value, did not resist for long, and in 1715 the garrison was removed from Spinalonga by sea, and taken away to Corfu. The island remained a Turkish fortress until 1898, providing in its turn a refuge for Muslims against insurrectionary Christians, and then became a leper colony.

Nobody lives there now, though heaps of tourists visit it in the summer, and when one November afternoon I persuaded a boatman from Elounda to take me there, I found not a soul upon the island. ‘Be back in half an hour,’ the boatman told me darkly as we parted at the jetty, ‘or there will be problems’: and so I set off rather nervously among the remains. Some are Venetian, grand and military, some are sad huts and derelict wards from the leper settlement. All seemed bitterly haunted and oppressive. I climbed up the steep lanes, though, past the Dona Rampart, through Mocenigo Square, beyond the Grimani Curtain, until I reached the little redoubt on the summit called the Castello degli Spiriti, the Castle of the Spirits: and there suddenly a grand excitement seized me. It was as though the island had sprung to life again – and I saw the trireme galleys foaming past the island, and heard trumpets from the redan below, and felt the very slap of the rope on the flagstaff above my head, where the winged lion streaked still, all afire in the sunshine, in the dry hard Cretan wind.

‘Time to go!’ cried a voice far below me. ‘Time to go!’

T
o sail from
Venetian Crete to Venetian Cyprus is to sail out of epic into Grand Guignol – or novelette. The ghosts that stalk the Cretan hills are ghosts of war and fury. The spirits of Cyprus are altogether more lubricious. Here you are on the very edge of Asia. The high white mountains of Anatolia shimmer to the north, the mountains we saw as we sailed into Byzantium with Dandolo long ago, and not far away, you feel, watchers on the Syrian shore have their eyes upon you – it was from Beirut, sixty miles to the east, that James Elroy Flecker saw his old ships sail:

The chief deity of Cyprus is Aphrodite, goddess of love and dalliance, and the legends of the island are shot through with licence and intrigue, the passions of women, the loves of kings.

The Venetians had known Cyprus since the earliest days of their trading with the east, and perhaps felt spiritually proprietorial
towards it because Mark the Evangelist had learned his trade there, but they did not acquire it at the division of the Crusader spoils because it was not then part of the Byzantine empire. Its peasantry was Greekish, and Greek Byzantium had ruled it for a time, but it was really a
mélange
island, tinged by strains Assyrian, Persian, Phoenician, Arab, Egyptian, Turkish and many more. Since 1192 it had been an independent kingdom governed by Crusader grandees, and by the last decades of the fifteenth century indeed, when the Venetians first seriously considered getting hold of it, it was the only Crusader kingdom left, the only survivor of the brave if preposterous feudal entities, gaudy with the chivalry of the west, which the holy wars had established in the eastern Mediterranean.

It was ruled by kings of the Lusignan dynasty, of French descent. Though they paid an annual tribute to the Sultan of Turkey, by way of protection money, they called themselves Kings of Jerusalem and Armenia too, and were habitually surrounded in their capital of Nicosia by a colourful, brilliant and feline court. The kingdom was wealthy – Cyprus was the great mart of the eastern Mediterranean – and under the Lusignans architecture, literature and philosophy flourished. All the great trading countries had agents and warehouses on the island, all the religious orders had houses there. Famagusta, the chief port, was claimed in its prime to be the richest town on earth, where courtesans lived like great ladies, drugs were sold ‘as openly as bread’, and young bloods rode about on horses with orangedyed tails. Not surprisingly, the history of the Lusignans was charged with coups and counter-coups, politic marriages and ill-explained deaths. Their kingdom was, said one acerbic contemporary, the place where French pride, Syrian effeminacy and Greek fraud were all combined.