The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (18 page)

She remained a queen – of Cyprus, she signed herself to the end, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia. The Republic fixed her up with a pseudo-kingdom, a fief of the delectable little hill-town of Asolo, forty miles north of Venice. There she lived happily ever after with her devoted court, with twelve maids of honour and eighty serving-men, with a Negress to look after her favourite parrots and a little menagerie to enliven the gardens of her castle. For twenty years she was Lady of Asolo, visited constantly by friends and relatives, attended often by eminent scholars and writers, entertained by pageants and torchlight processions. She died in 1510, fifty-six years old, and they built a bridge of boats across the Grand Canal from the Cornaro Palace, from whose steps she had sailed upon the adventure of her life in 1472, to take her body to the church of Santi Apostoli near the Rialto bridge. On a wet and stormy night they buried her there: her corpse was dressed in the brown habit of the Franciscan order, but upon her coffin was laid the crown of Cyprus.

C
yprus was the
∗∗∗eastern outpost of the Venetian Empire. Here we turn. The surrendered soldiers of Famagusta never did set sail westward for Iraklion, for they were enslaved by the Turks after all, but in happier times the Venetian convoys from Egypt and the Levant, when they left Cyprus behind them, were in their own waters. From Cyprus to Crete – past the clumped blue shapes of the Cyclades – west of Kithira and Matapan – until meeting, perhaps, as they rounded the Peloponnese, with, other vessels homeward bound from Aegean waters, they reached the ∗∗∗binge of the whole imperial construction, Modon. Modem, modern Methoni, stood at the extreme south-western point of the Peloponnese, and acted as junction, supply point, information office, command post, repair yard and recreation centre for all the Venetian shipping on the eastern routes. It was the most spectacular of all the sea-castles of the empire. It was said to stand ‘halfway to every land and sea’, and the Venetians called it ‘The Eye of the Republic’.

We will sail into it now, since our choice of transport is absolute, with a convoy of the early fifteenth century, say, when Methoni was in its heyday and the Venetian Empire itself still in the ascendant. As we stand on the foredeck of our galley, homeward bound from Beirut perhaps, with its oarsmen heaving at the oars below us and its captain languid on his high poop behind – as we stand there in the sunshine of a medieval Grecian morning, the lion of St Mark billowing above us, it is as though all the wealth of east and empire is pouring home with us to Venice.

There are spices and silks from Syria on the galley over there; cotton from Cyprus, peppers from Egypt on the ship behind; monkeys for the menageries of the rich, incense from Arabia, hides, furs, enamelware from Constantinople; Mongolian slaves from the Sea of Azov, wines from Naxos or Mykonos; Cornaro men on leave from the Cyprus plantations, soldiers thankfully re-posted from Tinos or Frangocastello, delegations from Syros, Jewish bankers from Euboea, Greek icon-artists, merchants retiring after a lifetime in Alexandria, or going home to invest the fortunes they have made in Aleppo’s bountiful profit margins.

Past the islet of Enetika we sail, itself a proclamation of sovereignty on the charts, and through the narrow channel past Sapienza Island, until we enter the great calm bay of Sapienza. Around us a mass of other shipping is assembled. There are war-galleys with prows like beaks, stocky square-rigged coasters, lateen skiffs from the islands, and as our convoy finds its berths, ship by ship, the bay is a bustle of small boats, and shouts, and rattling anchor chains, and whistles. We feel we have reached some great haven, some first chamber of Venice herself, where all will be safe and sure: and this is not surprising, for low-lying there across the water, ivory-coloured now that the evening is drawing in, the fortress-port of Methoni crouches fierce but reassuring, rather like a lion itself.

It is one of the great sights of Mediterranean travel. It stands on the tip of its own peninsula, above a half-moon sandy beach, and is a kind of screen or barricade of towers, one after the other along the water’s edge. Flags fly from its turrets, sentries patrol its cat-walks, windmills whir, and its two big sea-gates, thrown open to the harbour, are alive with traffic in and out. The smoke of hundreds of houses rises above its walls, for the whole community of the port lives within the fortifications – its merchants and its agents, its priests and its soldiers, its ship-builders and chandlers and bankers, its thriving colony of Jewish silk-workers, its famous hostel of the Teutonic Knights where the pilgrims stay, its Commander of the Galleys and its all-powerful Bailie. Only a shambled colony of gypsies lives outside the walls, in those tents and shanties over the moat to the north, trading in pigs with the Greeks of the countryside (and supplying nearly all the bacon of
Venice). To the east a track runs away over the bony hills to Coron, Koroni, the Second Eye, on the other side of the Messini peninsula; to the north a road goes up the coast to the Venetian fortress of Navarino; but Methoni itself looks altogether self-sufficient, sustained by the sea and cap-à-pie.

When a convoy like ours puts in, the place is in ferment. Thousands of oarsmen and passengers go ashore. The shops and taverns within the walls are packed to bursting (‘the very thought of the Muscat of Modon delights me,’ wrote the fifteenth-century traveller Father Felix Fabri). Officialdom hums. Bemused strangers wander the streets of the city, or look out in wonder across the bare landscape. Spiced and woody smells arise, there is a babel of languages, pilgrims kneel in thanksgiving before the head of St Athanasius, ‘Athanasius against the world’, in the cathedral of St John. Officers present their requirements to the shipyard men, grandees their introductions to the Bailie, merchants their bills of credit to the banks. It is the
Stato da Mar
encapsulated: sharp, cosmopolitan, grand of style but purely practical of function.

Darkness falls, only the sentries patrol the walls and the night watch murmurs on the decks of the galleys, and when we wake in the morning the centuries have passed and we look out at a different Modon. Twentieth-century Methoni is not at all what it was. The great sea-fort is only a shell now, rotted and sombre above its beaches. The wide bay is empty. A raggle-taggle village has grown up outside the walls, where the gypsies used to be, with a plate-glass tourist hotel at the water’s edge, beside the Bembo bastion. A bulldozer scrapes at the sand on the foreshore. A woman screams across the water to her husband on the jetty. In a
taverna
beside the sea the restaurateur, tooth-pick between his lips, serves you your fried fish distractedly, his eyes on the television above the bar. The hundreds of houses within the walls, the offices of empire, the warehouses, the pubs, the hostels and the barracks – all have vanished, leaving only grassy mounds here and there, a precarious wall or two, warrens of dark chambers in the earth, scuttled about by beetles, and chipped remains of the Venetian pillar of authority,
sans
lion,
sans
everything. The great seagates are crudely blocked with stones. Noble crests and sculpted animals look down dimly from the shadows, eroded by sea-winds.

Modon, now Methoni

But perhaps during the day, as sometimes happens, one of the great storms of the Cretan Sea will fall upon Methoni out of the south. The old walls shake with the thunder of it, the to wers stand silhouetted magnificently against the scudding clouds, and it sounds as though all the winged lions that ever were, wherever the Venetians ruled, are mourning their lost dominion.

Methoni was the most important of the prizes the Venetians acquired, at the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire, upon the mainland of Greece. Behind it the feudal states carved out for themselves by the Crusaders soon degenerated into a protracted scramble for power and territory, and Greece was a welter of violence and intrigue. Normans, Burgundians, Italians, Germans and Spaniards marched and counter-marched across the classic lands, Frankish forts sprang up among the citadels of Argos and Corinth, Thebes and Sparta. In the fourteenth century the Greek Byzantines, temporarily restored to power on the Golden Horn, recaptured much of Greece: in the fifteenth century the Turks,
having taken Constantinople, inexorably advanced down the peninsula until all was theirs.

The Venetians could not be aloof to all this, but they remained detached. Here as everywhere, they were
sui generis.
Though from time to time they were drawn into the incessant conflicts of Greece, and Venetian armies went into action far inland, for the most part they pursued their specialized concerns single-mindedly, and kept themselves, as sailors should, at the water’s edge. They were never interested in empire for empire’s sake, and they chose their Greek possessions, like all the others, with an eye only to the trade and security of the Serenissima.

From Nauplia in the north-east to Patras in the north-west, at one time or another the Venetians held almost all the principal ports and harbours of southern Greece. Besides being staging-posts on the convoy routes, and bases for their naval squadrons in the eastern Mediterranean, these put most of Greece’s seaborne commerce into Venetian hands – all the Latin rulers of the interior depended upon Venetian ships for their trade and transport. The possessions of the Grecian shore became part of the Venetian heritage. They called the Peloponnese the Morea, because it was thought to look like the leaf of the mulberry tree (
morus
), and this name was to recur constantly in the chronicles of the Signory until the seventeenth century. They called Methoni, the pivot of it all, ‘the receptacle and special nest of all our galleys, ships and vessels’, and when in 1500 it was lost to the Turks, the Council of Ten at home in Venice, ermine-dressed and velvet-capped-though its members were, burst unanimously into tears.

Though all these colonies were fortified, against attack from the land as well as the sea, they were essentially trading stations, and their life depended upon the cycles of commerce between Venice and the east. Methoni was the point of convergence of the two main eastern shipping routes. One went northwards through the Aegean into the Black Sea, and further still, to the Venetian trading station at Tarfa on the Sea of A
zov
. The second went by way of Crete and Cyprus to Syria and Alexandria, where the Venetians had maintained warehouses since the twelfth century.

In the fifteenth century, at our own moment of entry into
Sapienza Bay, traffic along these routes was scrupulously organized by the State. Venice then was approaching the climax of her maritime power: in 1414, according to the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo, she possessed 3,000 small merchant ships, 300 large ones and 45 war galleys, with some 36,000 seamen. Two convoys each year left the lagoon on each of the organized routes, generally travelling together as far as Methoni. The Venetians preferred to make their long voyages in fast oared galleys, rowed by free men, rather than in the big sailing ships used by other powers, and the State convoys generally consisted of fifteen or twenty of these impressive vessels, escorted by lighter fighting ships. A convoy was a mixture of capitalism and state enterprise. The Republic organized it, stipulated the design of ships, provided the naval escort. Private enterprise put up the money and made most of the profit. Every man on board a merchant galley was to some extent an investor in the enterprise, since each was entitled to do his own trading on the side, and when a galley put into one of the eastern ports it was turned almost at once into a sort of floating bazaar, with bumboats milling all about, and local traders clambering over the gunwales to start bargaining.

The convoys were elaborately ordered. They were commanded by an admiral, and led by a fleet navigator, appointed by the Republic. The ship’s secretary on each trading galley was an official appointee too, charged with keeping an eye on the books, and every aspect of the voyage was meticulously regulated, from oarsmen’s rations to permitted loading levels or turn-around times. Every ship carried its complement of archers, making the entire convoy a fighting unit, and distributed through the fleet were chaplains, doctors and the young gentlemen-bowmen who, by an old Venetian tradition, sailed with the galleys as part of their education.

Shipboard life was earthy. The captain might live well enough, in his cabin aft, and so did any important passengers: but the rest of the ship stank terribly from the bilges below, and from the excrement of the sheep, goats, calves, oxen and pigs huddled together on deck around the open kitchen. The crews included every kind of vagabond and runaway, and for the inexperienced traveller a voyage was full of incidental hazards. When one young fifteenth-century Venetian went to sea for the first time he was
warned by his elder brother against playing games with anyone on board (except possibly draughts with the chaplain), against being left behind when the sailing-drum sounded in port, against eating too much when they went ashore, and against consorting with the whores of Crete and Cyprus, all of whom were diseased.