The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (19 page)

Several times a year, then, one of these spectacular armadas appeared off the coast of Greece, as we ourselves appeared that morning. Every boy on the waterfront knew the names of the ships; every Rector, Bailie or Governor knew their captains; every prostitute had experienced their crews. Nothing could be more lovely than the sight of the great galleys, the liners of the Venetian trade, moving down the Grecian coast, ensigns aflutter, escort all around; ∗∗∗and with their long sleek lines, their bright colours and the measured beat of their oars, seen from some high headland of Hellas, looking across to Kea, say, from the Lavrion peninsula, they must have looked hauntingly like the long-ships of the ancients, carrying their Homeric heroes through these same wine-dark seas.

In times of distress, and especialy during the long advance of the Turks into Greece, the Venetian colonies around the coast played the part of havens. By 1460 the whole of the Peloponnese was Turkish except the Venetian colonies, and then refugees poured out of the mountain passes to take shelter within their walls. Deposed chieftains took ship there, or left their wives and children in Venetian care. Young Greeks joined the locally recruited companies of light horse, the
stradioti
, which provided the most spirited element of the Venetian land defences – Graitzas Palaeologus indeed, a Greek of famous name who heroically resisted the Turkish advance during the 1450s, was made commander of all the Republic’s light horse. The presence of Venice, the stance of the winged lion over the city gate, seemed in those violent times to be a pledge of stability: Normans and Catalans might come and go, Turks might storm across the land, but there on the edge of the blue the towers of Venice seemed to stand inviolate. Sometimes it was truly so, and in some Venetian cities of Greece people could hardly conceive of life without the protection of St Mark. In others the Venetian tenure was brief, but so potent that in a short
time an ancient comity might be altogether Venetianized, its past half forgotten and its future apparently secured.

One such place was Monemvasia, on the east coast of the Peloponnese. The Venetians ruled it for less than a century, from 1463 to 1540, and it was a famous place long before their time, but it might have been designed by nature for them, so perfectly suited was it to their manner. It was a steep almost treeless rock, connected to the mainland by a causeway perhaps a hundred yards long, and it had been inhabited always. The ancients had built a citadel on its windswept summit. The Byzantines had built a church there, naming it after Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and made it the seat of a bishopric. Corsairs of Monemvasia were notorious throughout the Middle Ages; wine of Monemvasia was famous, as malmsey, all over Europe. But the Venetians made it their own, and developed it into one of the most interesting of all their colonial stations.

Monemvasia means ‘the only entrance’, and you must still approach the place over the causeway from the mainland. It was heavily fortified in Venetian times, but today it hardly feels like a bridge at all, so narrow is the channel there. There is no doubt, nevertheless, about the insularity of Monemvasia. Its massive but shapely rock rises from the sea in a posture wonderfully apart. In its prime it bristled with armaments, from causeway to high summit, and even now as you pass through the double gateway in its walls, near the water’s edge, you feel you are passing into some distinctly unwelcoming, if not actually hostile encampment.

The lower town of Monemvasia, enclosed within its own walls near the bottom of the rock, is predominantly Byzantine, and feels it. A little colony of Bohemians and expatriates lives there, and there is a café, and a modest pension (defined in one of the franker recent guidebooks as ‘spooky’). Much of it, though, is in ruins. Crisscross arid confusing run its alleys through the wreckage, like the runs of weasels or city foxes, and its houses are jumbled cheek-by-jowl on the escarpment above the sea, sometimes almost on top of each other, so that the lanes have to burrow and probe beneath them, here and there opening out into a little plaza with a church, or a neglected esplanade along the sea-wall. A goat nibbles distractedly among the toppled walls; the voices of
Stuttgart batik designers echo thickly down the alleys; from their shadowy terrace an elderly French couple with their spaniel contemplate, glasses in hand, the passing of the centuries in this place.

But higher, far higher up the rock the Venetians made their stronghold. A steep zigzag track leads there, and halfway up a huge iron-studded door, bullet-pocked, marks the entrance to the Kastro. Up this track, through this door, everything had to pass into the Venetian fortress: there is no other way. Through the dark gatehouse you must go, past the guard-post, and there as you emerge into the sunshine and follow the track to the crest of the rock, a scene of magnificent dereliction unfolds. Wherever you look on that high plateau, sun-bleached and scoured, scattered chunks of buildings stand. At the very summit of the rock are the ruins of the utmost guard-post, and from there the remains of the city, tight-packed across the bumpy plateau, have rather a Celtic look, old and eerie: as you lie among the cyclamen watching the fishing boats or following the fluttering antics of skylarks in the blue, you may fancy you hear a distant murmur of voices, and perhaps the sound of water too, drip-drop, drip-drop, in some ancient cistern far below.

It is probably no more than fancy, though, for of all the buildings on the summit of that rock, only the cathedral is still alive. The Byzantines built it on the very edge of the rock, where every approaching ship could salute it, perhaps the most superbly sited of all their churches: actually on the Up of a precipice, like a pledge to providence, looking up the lovely coastline towards Athens, Salonika and distant Constantinople itself. The Venetians recognized the glory of this structure, and embellished it with a handsome narthex, and when all else in the city was destroyed, the last shipload of malmsey had long sailed from the little harbour below, and Islam was supreme all over Greece, the church of Santa Sophia remained a noble echo of its great progenitor on the Golden Horn, and its cousin beside the Piazza San Marco.

It remains the single spark of animation among those structural skeletons. People come to its services from the lower town and from the mainland, laboriously climbing that track through the scarred old Kastro gate. Candles burn always beneath its dome,
dimly illuminating the mosaics all around: on one wall there hangs a modern picture of the original Santa Sophia, restored to all its Christian glory by the artist’s wishful fancy, overflown by the Virgin Mary, and surrounded by all those columns, statues, obelisks and memorials of The City to whose destruction Dandolo and his Venetians so long ago contributed.

On the other side of Greece, the western side, just inside the Gulf of Corinth stands the little port of Navpaktos. Though fortified from top to toe, it looks rather demurely southward across the gulf to the Peloponnesian mountains, and is a delightful little specimen of Colonial Venetian, at an opposite extreme from the stark fascination of Monemvasia. High on the hill behind stands its guardian citadel, and in intermittent bastions down the wooded slopes, resolving themselves near the bottom into trellised cottages, pergolas and pretty lanes, the fortifications run down to the harbour mouth, enclosing the town within their protective walls, and embracing indeed the little harbour itself, which has a lighthouse on its mole, and stern gun-platforms above its bobbing yachts. It is a very satisfying ensemble. In summer tourist coaches line up along its waterfront, wanderers from the north pile their rucksacks beneath the jacarandas of its square, and children clamber all over the harbour walls, looking at the guns.

In the days when the Venetians held this place, they commanded the Gulf of Corinth, the inner sea through which all ships must pass to the narrow isthmus joining the Peloponnese to the rest of Greece. Today many ships sailing to Athens from the west come this way, making for the Corinth canal, and there is seldom a moment when there is not a vessel in sight. A few miles to the west, where the ferry now crosses from Patras, are the Navpaktos narrows which are the entrance to the gulf, ‘the little Dardanelles’, and the small castles of Rion and Anterion which command them, one on each side. For the Venetians, this was one of the most important of the Greek coastal stations, but paradoxically it became a household name to them only when they had lost it to the Turks. For this was Lepanto, and from its roadsteads sailed the Turkish fleet whose defeat in the open sea outside the narrows provided the proudest of Venetian battle-honours.

The Turks took it from the Republic in 1499, thanks to the incompetence of Antonio Grimani, one of those admirals whose fortunes we followed in Chapter Three. He was exiled for his failure, only to become Doge later in life; the commander of the garrison was hanged in public outside the Doge’s Palace. The Turks immediately turned Lepanto into their main base in western Greece; and so it came about that when, in 1571, the war between Islam and Christianity reached a climax in one of the most famous of all naval battles, it was from this archetypically Venetian port that the ships of the Turkish Grand Admiral sailed out to fight.

It was the time of the war in Cyprus, when Turkish mastery at sea and apparent invincibility on land seemed still to threaten the existence of Christianity itself. The Venetians had been driven from most of their Aegean possessions and all their strongholds on the Greek mainland. Even their territories on the Dalmatian coast, within the Adriatic, were hardly more than enclaves in enemy territory. Nicosia had fallen, Famagusta was invested. In this extremity the Venetians, the rearguard of western Europe, had appealed more desperately than ever for help from the Christian powers; in October 1571 the great confrontation occurred, between the battle-fleets of the Holy League and the Empire of the Ottomans.

From the highest point of Navpaktos fortress, among the aromatic pines and cypresses, you can see it all. From the calm waters of the gulf below you, where the ships go by for Italy or Piraeus, the Turkish fleet of some 280 galleys sailed, on the evening of 6 October, between the twin forts on the headlands to the open sea. They flew the long pennants of the Sultan of Turkey, the Bey of Alexandria and the great corsair Uluj Ali, Dey of Algiers, who was said to be a renegade monk from Calabria. They were rowed by Christian prisoners and their admiral was another of those semi-anonymous Turkish commanders – Ali Pasha is what the world calls him, and history knows no more. He took with him a sacred talisman, a tooth of the Prophet Mohammed mounted in a crystal ball, and above him there flew the grand standard of the Ottoman Empire, never yet captured in battle, inscribed with the name of God 26,000 times. He sailed against
the advice of many of his captains, who wanted to stay safe under the guns of Lepanto, but he hoped that by destroying the Christian fleet he could not only seal the fate of Cyprus, but also lay Crete and all the rest of the Venetian empire at the Sultan’s mercy.

Away to the west outside the narrows, far beyond the ferries plodding from Rion to Anterion and back again, where the bay of Patras broadens towards the open sea, your mind’s eye may see the sails and flashing oars of the Christian fleet, assembling for the battle – ships from Spain, Sicily, Genoa, Naples, Malta and Venice. Their commander was Don John of Austria, twenty-four years old, natural son of the Emperor Charles V and half-brother to Philip II of Spain, a precipitate, conceited but undeniably dashing scion of the European chivalry. His command was a difficult one, for the allies frequently quarrelled among themselves, the Venetians and the Genoese were hereditary enemies, and just before the battle the disheartening news arrived by dispatch vessel from Cyprus that Famagusta had fallen.

Nevertheless the fleet we may dimly see, milling into their battle positions beyond the narrows, was the greatest ever assembled in the name of Christendom, with more than two hundred ships and 50,000 men. More than a hundred of the ships were Venetian, under the command of Sebastiano Venier, Captain-General of the Sea, and Agostino Barbarigo. Sixty had come from Venice herself, sixteen of them manned by convicts chained to the oars, the rest by free men. Five more were contributed by Venetian noblemen of the
terra firma.
Thirty came from Crete, seven from the Ionian Islands, eight from the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia.

The most striking Venetian contribution, though, was a flotilla of six great galleasses. These specialities of the Arsenal were a cross between the traditional galley, the backbone of Mediterranean fighting fleets for centuries, and the big sailing galleons used by the navies of northern Europe. They had four masts, three carrying lateen sails, one with a square sprit-sail protruding over the bows. The galleasses were very broad in the beam and this enabled them to carry, besides a heavy broadside, a circular structure in the bows, rather like a modern gun-turret, in which were mounted at least half a dozen heavy guns. They were hard to
manoeuvre, and so we may fancy their great shapes, away out there to the west, being towed into their fighting stations by galleys.

By the morning of 7 October the two fleets were in position and 100,000 men were preparing for action. It was a Sunday, the feast of St Justina, and for the Christians this was a crusade. On every galley crucifixes were raised and men confessed thek sins to the chaplains. Don John, in full armour, attended mass on board his flagship, the Spanish galley
El Real
, and later himself hoisted to its masthead a banner, bearing the image of Christ crucified, which had been blessed by the Pope. The Turks were assembled in a crescent, with two supporting wings and a flotilla in reserve behind; the Christians were grouped in three fighting lines, with thirty-five galleys in reserve and the six Venetian galleasses like champions in the van.

Hundreds of fanciful pictures illustrate the battle of Lepanto, and usually show its tactics neat and logical. Naval historians, too, make it all sound rational enough: how the two fleets clashed head-on, while the Turkish wings tried to outflank the Venetians on the Christian left, the Genoese on the right; how the great galleasses broke the Turkish impetus; how Don John, sailing from here to there along the line, pulled his fleet together and reinforced its worst-hit squadrons; how the issue was decided in the centre, when Spanish soldiers boarded the Turkish flagship and forced its surrender. I doubt, though, if we would see it very orderly from our vantage-point above Navpaktos. It was doubtless a terrible muddle, like most sea-battles from Actium to Midway, and the classic formations in which the fleets opened operations soon collapsed into savage hand-to-hand fighting across the splintered decks of broken and listing galleys.