The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (20 page)

Everybody, admiral or galley slave, was in equal danger, and little quarter was given. When the Venetians on the left captured the Bey of Alexandria after rescuing him from drowning, they beheaded him there and then, on the deck. When AH Pasha himself surrendered his flagship, they hacked off his head at once and presented it to Don John, before mounting it on a pike and displaying it to the Turkish fleet. Barbarigo was killed by an arrow; so was Prior Giustinian of the Order of St John, commander
of the Maltese contingent. (On the other hand one hand-to-hand skirmish, it is said, degenerated into a hilarious pelting of oranges and lemons between Christians and Muslims, both sides in fits of laughter.)

It was a fearful battle, all in all. Some 8,000 Christians lost their lives, and at least 20,000 Muslims. Thousands more Turks were taken prisoner, thousands of Christian captives were freed from their oars, and Ottoman sea-power was held for ever within the eastern Mediterranean. Christendom felt itself to have been saved, and in many parts of Europe even now you may see tokens of its immense relief – paintings of the battle in galleries everywhere, captured flags and trophies, a pulpit shaped like a galleyprow at Irsee in Bavaria, a stained-glass window at Wettingen in Switzerland. Even the flowering of the baroque style itself, so some historians suggest, owes its exuberance to the new hope of Lepanto.

The Venetians were the most delighted of all, for the news of the victory, raced to Venice in ten days flat, reached the lagoons the very day after the hideous story of Famagusta. It was hailed as one of the classic Venetian triumphs, proof that the old blood still ran high and the lion of St Mark had not lost his roar. It was, after all, the great Venetian gunships which had stood in the front of the Christian line and taken the brunt of the Turkish assault. All Venice went into celebration when the galley
Angelo Gabriele
sailed into the Basin with a huge Turkish flag and a long line of turbans trailing from its stern, its crew wildly firing off their guns and shouting ‘Victory! Victory!’ Tremendous services were held in the Basilica, mighty banquets were organized, an oratorio was composed, dozens of popular songs swept the streets, heady pageants paraded around the Piazza, Turkish prisoners were displayed in chains, supervised by a stucco lion and a lady in red velvet symbolizing Victory.

It was like Mafeking night in London 300 years later. All the barriers were lowered, all the classes mixed, and even the pickpockets, we are told, took a night off. The euphoria lasted for months. Tintoretto painted a huge picture of the battle. Andrea Vicentino painted another, featuring himself as a floundering but impeccable officer up to his neck in water. Veronese painted a vast
allegorical Victory which was placed directly above the Doge’s throne. An altar was erected in the church of San Giuseppe, the entrance to the Arsenal was reconstructed, a whole new charitable brotherhood, the Scoula del Rosario, was established specifically to celebrate 7 October 1571.

All over the territories of the
Stato da Mar
, too, you may discover memorials of the battle and boasts of the part Venetian ships and sailors played in it. But in the event, if Lepanto possibly saved Europe, it did little to preserve the Venetian empire. Cyprus was lost anyway – as the Grand Vizier observed sagely in Constantinople, the Turk might have had his beard singed, but Venice had lost an arm. The Ottoman fleet was soon rebuilt, and if it never ventured to challenge all Christendom again, was strong enough to fall upon Venetian Crete eighty years later.

As for little Lepanto, Navpaktos, it was always to remain for the Venetians a metaphysical possession, so to speak, a colony in the mind.

Rather more than a century later, all the same, the Venetians did go back there. By then the Republic was in obvious decline, its wealth denuded, its fleets diminished, its hardy working people softened, its once dutiful nobility ever more selfish and irresponsible. The empire was almost lost – Iraklion had fallen in 1669, and all that was left were the Ionian Islands, Tinos, the ports of the Adriatic coast and three island-fortresses off Crete. The splendours of Methoni were long gone: Venice depended now largely on foreign-built ships and foreign mercenaries.

Yet when war with the Turks broke out again in 1684, the Venetians fought with unexpected aggression. German, Maltese and Italian troops were hired to reinforce the Republic’s army of Venetians and Dalmatians, and it was decided to forestall Turkish offensives by a massive invasion of Greece. This was a startling decision, but there was a commander to hand of sufficient boldness to undertake the campaign: Francesco Morosini, the heroic defender of Iraklion fifteen years before. His conduct then had saved him not only from bisection or disembowelment by the Turks, but also from the dungeons or horrid islands usually reserved for Venetian generals who had surrendered their commands,
and he was the national hero of the day. A fleet was prepared; an army of German, Venetian, Maltese, Slav and Italian troops was mustered; in August 1684, an invasion force landed at Koroni.

This was a triumph. Morosini proved himself once more an inspired leader, and there is a description of him personally turning the tide of battle, when things were going badly at Methoni, by the sheer grandeur of his carriage – that scarred old pillar within the fortress ruins is named for him to this day. Within a few months he had taken the whole of the Peloponnese, more than Venice had ever ruled before, had brought the winged lion back to Navpaktos, had crossed the Isthmus of Corinth to capture Athens, was planning an invasion of Euboea and was even thinking of going on to Crete. The Signory was overjoyed, and erected a bust of the general in the Doge’s Palace, dubbing him Morosini the Peloponnesian. The Greek inhabitants of the Peloponnese were not, on the whole, so delighted: their religion had generally been tolerated by the Turks and they had unhappy memories of old Venetian arrogance. Nevertheless Morosini set up the usual elaborate administration all over the peninsula and for a while it seemed that the name of the Morea, so evocative to Venetian ears, would once again enter the registers of the Serenissima.

It lasted in the event only thirty years, but it left behind it the greatest single monument of the empire’s declining years – the fortress of Palamidhi above the city of Nauplia, at the head of the Gulf of Argos. The Venetians had held Nauplia throughout the fifteenth century, and it had always been an important place – after the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, in 1831, it was to become the first capital of independent Greece. In 1685, when the Venetians returned there after 145 years, it was already dominated by the fortress of Akronauplia, and by the sea-castle which they themselves had built on the off-shore reef of Bourtzi (used by the Turks as a safe residence for their retired executioners). The Turks had strengthened the town still further and had crowned it everywhere with minarets (even Bourtzi had two) making it the toughest and spikiest looking place imaginable. Morosini decided, though, to build a far more
formidable fortress on the high hill behind the town, to be the Venetian military headquarters for the whole of conquered Greece, and this was to prove the last masterpiece of the Venetian imperial adventure.

Nauplia is still the most Italianate of all the towns of mainland Greece. It played little part in the Greek War of Independence, in which so much medieval architecture was lost, and is full of blithe charm. The minarets have gone. You may take rooms in the executioners’ island castle. The engaging waterfront is lined with tourist cafes, the Venetian barracks in the main square have been turned into a museum, two hotels have been built within the ramparts of Akronauplia. Picturesque hilly lanes run upwards from the sea and every other house is a
pension.
It is a lively little place, a prawn-and-retsina, souvenir-tile, excursion-round-the-bay sort of place.

But immediately behind it looms something much more sombre: Morosini’s Palamidhi, touched up a little by archaeology but impervious to tourism. It was built long after the prime of Venice, and is rather a self-conscious stronghold, I think – a showy, virtuoso construction, expressing perhaps, despite its strength, some underlying sense of wasting power. But its style is undeniably terrific, and when the Venetians built it Palamidhi was easily the most powerful fortress in Greece – the only truly modern fortress, according to contemporary specialists.

Elaborately, in many layers, it crowns the bald hill. You can drive to its gates now round the back, but originally the main approach was by way of a covered track direct from the port, arched and loopholed for defence, which gave way in its upper reaches to a winding and precipitous stairway up the face of the rock. This is still there, is popularly supposed to have 999 steps (actually there are 857) and is still climbed every day by dogged, perspiring and all too often regretful visitors. No doubt this disagreeable clamber, imposed upon visiting plenipotentiaries, defeated generals or dilatory allies, tellingly emphasized the castle’s consequence: certainly when at last you reach the final step, and pass through the intricate defensive gateway into the fortress itself, you are in no mood to scoff.

Inside all is cunning device. It must have seemed a futuristic
fortress in the 1690s, set against the antique citadels of Greece. Eight self-sufficient lesser forts are contained within its immense outer wall, each with its own ammunition bunkers, cisterns, barracks and gun-stations, and in the heart of it all is a master-fort, with a huge reservoir, deep storage-rooms for food and munitions, and a field of fire covering all the outer-works. So, at least, the books say; but though I am sure there really was nothing accidental about the design of Palamidhi, every slit and cranny having a military purpose, nowadays it is hard to grasp its pattern properly, and sometimes its succession of gates and staircases, its beautifully dressed stone ramps, buttresses and archways, remind me rather of a Piranesi prison, whose staircases lead nowhere after all, and whose vaulted arches support nothing but themselves.

Palamidhi does not feel, like Methoni or Monemvasia, organic to its site, or to history. It doth protest too much. From the summit of its hill there is, to be sure, an almost stagey sense of command. The sea lies glistening at our feet, the mountains rise misty over the water, rain-shafts, perhaps, slant here and there, and across the plain you can see the tall rock-citadel of Argos, for so many centuries Nauplia’s twin guardian of the gulf. But still it feels a place of contrived majesty, just as the whole last fling of Venice in Greece seems, in retrospect, unnatural – a gesture out of time. The Venetians were overreaching themselves, in their brave return to Hellas. The attack on Euboea failed, all plans for a Cretan campaign were abandoned and by 1715 the Turks were storming back again. Nauplia fell after the briefest of resistances. Monemvasia did not resist at all. The garrisons of Methoni and Koroni mutinied rather than fight. In three months it was all over; the empire of Venice in the Morea was ended. Palamidhi was its epitaph, and Morosini the Peloponnesian, who had gone home to become Doge, emblematically died in Nauplia during a return to the scene of his triumphs.

On a gate upon the lower fortress wall, three years before they left, the Venetians erected the most decadent of all the winged lions of their empire. You can see it there still, overgrown now with figs and wild magnolia, at the head of the steps from the town: a stunted beast, a runt of a lion, with a head too big for its body and a puny pair of wings.

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We will not leave them there, though, for the Venetians created one more monument to themselves, more permanent even than the fortress walls of Nauplia, during their last years in Greece.

On 26 September 1687, a lieutenant from Lüneburg serving in Morosini’s army found himself with his mortar unit on the summit of the hill called the Mouseion in Athens. The view from this high observation post was stupendous, and is easy to re-create now, if you care to walk up there through the scented woods. On the top of the hill, then as now, stands a first-century memorial to the Syrian philhellene Philopappos, and somewhere there the lieutenant posted his men. To the south, where you now see the shipping of Piraeus crowded like an invasion flotilla itself off the smoky port, he could see, through crystal air, the Venetian fleet at anchor off-shore – scores of the high-hulled, square-rigged vessels by now standard in the Venetian service, which had arrived there five days before with an army of 10,000 men. Where now the southern suburbs of the city straggle shapeless to the sea, he could still make out the lines of Themistocles’ Long Walls, built 2,000 years before to link Athens with its port. To the north, where today the charmless capital extends mile after mile, street after street as far as the eye can see, for him there was only the little village that was Athens itself. Some three hundred houses was the whole of it, a hangdog little settlement, spiked by the minarets of its Turkish overlords, with the exquisite little churches of the Byzantines knobbly among the rooftops, and only the open countryside beyond, stretching away around the hill of Lycabettus towards the distant mountains.

Directly to the lieutenant’s front, and directly before us too – the Acropolis! It is a ruin now. It was a fortress then, the Turks garrisoning it in force. The silhouette so familiar to us now was rather different in 1687, for the Parthenon itself, its dominant shape, was still complete: after consecration as a cathedral under the Greek emperors and the Frankish dukes, it had been turned into a mosque by the Turks and embellished with a tall minaret at its northern end. Then the sacred enclosure all around it was filled with a clutter of shacks, barracks and stores, into which the whole Turkish community of Athens, some 3,000 people in all, had withdrawn for safety. The exquisite temple of Nike, which we
can see today rebuilt at the south-west corner of the Acropolis, had been dismantled by the Turks so that they could use its stones for defences. The glorious entrance of the Propylaea, now shattered, was partly a ruin even then, having been damaged by a chance explosion in a munition store, but was partly used as the harem of the Turkish governor, and had a square tower on top of it.