The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (21 page)

The Acropolis was an active fortress, commonly called ‘the castle’. Turkish pickets held the steep slopes of the hill, there was artillery on the summit, and the Venetians, though they had easily occupied the rest of Athens, had so far been unable to dislodge the garrison from this remarkable redoubt. They had tried tunnelling into the rock and had succeeded only in losing their chief sapper, who fell down the cliff. They had tried bombardment, but their shells had mostly gone over the top of the hill, falling into the Greek houses on the other side and provoking angry demands for compensation. On 25 September, though, a Turkish deserter arrived at the Venetian lines with the intelligence that the Turks had now concentrated all their ammunition actually within the Parthenon; orders went out to aim specifically at that majestic target, and on the Mouseion hill the lieutenant from Luuneburg adjusted his sights.

It cannot have been a difficult target really. The range was no more than half a mile, and the brilliant Attic air made it seem closer still, and illuminated every detail. On the evening of the 26th the lieutenant got it right. The bang of the mortar, the whine of the projectile over the valley, a distant thump as it burst somewhere in the mass of the temple, and then, a mighty explosion, a cloud of flying debris, a shaking of the ground itself, and when the smoke and the rubble cleared, through a mass of flames the temple of Athene, the loveliest of all the temples the Greeks had ever built, was seen to be a roofless ruin. The whole ammunition store had gone up inside it, killing 300 Turks, including the commander of the garrison, bringing all resistance precipitously to an end, and scarring the Acropolis for ever.

The German mercenaries, it seems, were rather ashamed at what their fellow countryman had achieved, but the Venetians were apparently not so much distressed. Morosini, so one of his
officers wrote, ‘fell into an ecstasy’ as he gazed upon the ruined Parthenon. He reported to his government that ‘a fortunate shot’ had given him command of the fortress, and he put a Venetian garrison up there at once, raising the banner of St Mark above the Propylaea. He had already earmarked for Venice the celebrated fountain-lion that had guarded the mouth of Piraeus harbour since classical times, but he thought the Serenissima should also have a trophy from the Acropolis itself, even to the world-weariest soldier some sort of ultimate objective. Unfortunately, when his engineers tried to remove the figure of Poseidon and the chariot of Victory from the pediment of the Parthenon, the sculptures fell to the ground in pieces. He sent home some other lions instead: one of them was headless, but as he airily remarked to the Signory in an accompanying dispatch, they could easily get another head from somewhere.

The Acropolis has never recovered from this tragedy. We scramble down the Mouseion now, down the zigzag path through the pine trees and up the steep slope of the Acropolis on the other side of the valley; as we climb the awesome steps to the sanctuary, pass between the pillars of the Propylaea and find ourselves upon the sacred rock itself, even now it is like walking into a battlefield, or entering a bombed city. The Parthenon stands there as the Venetians left it, roofless and gutted still, and the great empty space of the rock around is scattered with broken columns, bits of statuary, struggling trees and bric-à-brac, rather as though it has all been swept by blast. Even the perpetual chattering crowds fail to dispel the sadness of the scene, and the poisonous mist which swirls around the rock so often nowadays, driven up by the sea-wind from the chemical plants of Piraeus, suggests to me still the fumes of cordite.

The Lüneburg lieutenant’s later career is lost to history, but alas, his accurate trajectory upon the holy hill was to prove the one Venetian accomplishment in Greece that the world would always remember.

M
ost
V
enetian
imperial chapters end with explosions – shrieks too, drums, and recriminations. As we sail up the northwest coast of Greece, though, out of Methoni’s spectacular bay, past the hill-top castle of Navarino, through the battle-waters of Lepanto, along the harsh high shore of Epirus, we approach the one great Venetian possession which was acquired painlessly, beat off all foreign assaults, and remained a more or less loyal subject of the Serenissima until the Republic itself faded away from sheer decrepitude. The Greek island of Corfu is made for pleasure or escape – ‘a very small tittle-tattle place’, Edward Lear once called it – and by the restless standards of the
Stato da Mar
, a pleasant enough refuge it was during the four centuries of Venetian sovereignty. The climate was agreeable, the peasantry was docile, the local gentry flexibly adapted to Venetian ways, and by general consent Corfu was the most desirable station of the Venetian colonial service.

In Corfu the Venetians, at least in the earlier years of their dominion, were at their most statesmanlike. In the islands of the Aegean, in Crete and Cyprus and the Grecian fortress-ports, they seem always to be mere successors in the train of history: they look back to Roman or Byzantine forebears, they blend often enough vaguely into the mists of paganism, their admirals lost in the company of the gods, their legends merged in yet more insubstantial myth. When they go, they are replaced by the blank and unlettered presence of the Turks, like night descending. It is on the
island of Corfu that we first feel them to be forebears, trustees, one day to hand over responsibility to successors in their own kind.

I was rummaging one day in an antique shop in Corfu Town, the capital of the island, when I came across a curious local coin, grimy with a century’s handling and slightly squashed around the rim. Polishing this unprepossessing object on the seat of my trousers, and helped by the spit and handkerchief of the shopkeeper, I discovered it to be inscribed with two majestic devices. On the one side it bore the emblem of St Mark. On the other there appeared the winged lion’s direct successor in the iconography of imperialism, Britannia, holding a trident, a laurel leaf and a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack. The Turks, when they inherited a colony, obliterated everything Venetian; at least the British, recognizing the noble style of their predecessors, had the courtesy to acknowledge a line of descent.

The Venetians were allotted Corfu at the division of the Byzantine empire, but they failed to keep it for long and it fell into the successive hands of the Despots of Epirus, the King of Sicily and the Angevins of France until 1386. By then the local administration was so awful that the Corfiotes themselves appealed for Venetian protection, sending a delegation of local worthies to Venice to plead their case. The Venetians needed little persuasion; Corfu was the gate to the Adriatic, and with their long war against the Genoese just ended, they were on the point of taking the island anyway.

The Adriatic was almost a lake, in their eyes. It was the Gulf of Venice, and when each Ascension Day the Doge went out in his
bucintoro
to wed the sea, if it was in a morganatic way the universal ocean that he was marrying, in a more intimate and particular sense the Adriatic was his bride. The entrance to the Adriatic, the Otranto Strait, is only fifty miles across, and the sea within it really is distinct from the Mediterranean as a whole – physically and climatically different, lined on its eastern shores by the harsh escarpment of the karst, the limestone rim of the Balkans, and periodically churned into fury by that fearful wind of central Europe, the
bora
, which sends small ships scurrying for shelter, and has been known to blow railway wagons off their tracks.

For many generations it was the policy of the Signory that all traffic originating in this inner sea, 500 miles long and never more than 150 miles wide, should be channelled through the docks, banks and warehouses of Venice herself,
La Dominante.
Ships leaving Adriatic ports had to make deposits guaranteeing that they would take their goods to Venice, while in times of famine the Venetians held themselves entitled to seize food from any ship, wherever it had come from, encountered by their warships inside the Otranto Strait. The powers intermittently acknowledged this supremacy, and ship-masters of all nations, slipping past the watchful galleys of the Serenissima to enter the Adriatic, felt themselves to be in semi-private waters.

Corfu became the Gibraltar of Venice – the Pearl Harbor too, perhaps, for in later years the two squadrons of warships generally based there were the strike force of Venetian power. In their prime, their reach was long and swift. In 1517 the King of Tunis sent a rare and precious gift to the Sultan of Turkey – four eight-horse teams, each team of a different breed or colour, and each attended by eight slave-grooms of matched skin and costume. The consignment, valued at 200,000 ducats, was entrusted to a Venetian ship, but when it put in for provisions at Syracuse, in southern Italy, it was immediately surrounded by pirates. No matter. The Corfu command was alerted: at once three wargalleys left for Syracuse, and even before they had stormed into action the prudent buccaneers had dispersed, and the polychromatic stable proceeded on its way.

To Corfu, as to all other Venetian colonies, the greatest threat was the Ottoman Empire. The view from the waterfront of Corfu Town, on the eastern shore of the island, graphically illustrates the anxiety. The town stands cluttered above its quays, the bay is busy with ferries, freighters, motor-caiques and cruise ships, the island wanders bumpily away, clad in blues, greys and browns, littered with sweet mountain villages and distasteful hotels, and reaching a climax in the holy summit of Pantokrator, the Lord of All, dually crowned nowadays with a monastery and a radar station. Framing this happy prospect, though, is a line of mountains more remote – grimmer, grander mountains crowned with snow even in the spring and looking altogether alien and
forbidding. They are the mountains of Albania, characterized by the fastidious Mr Lear as possessing ‘a certain clumsiness and want of refinement’. In Venetian times they contained the implacable Turks, in ours they enclose the most xenophobic and suspicious of the states of Europe, friends to nobody, churls to all. Only the narrow strait of the Corfu Channel, three miles wide at its narrowest point, separates them from the island.

It is a queer feeling nowadays to look across the water to those impenetrable highlands, and doubtless it sometimes gave the Venetians uneasy sensations too. There stood the Great Enemy. Those mountains were an outcrop of the great land mass which ran away to Constantinople itself, the centre of Islamic power. Corfu bristled like a porcupine in the lee of that tremendous reminder, and the Turks repeatedly attacked it. One great raid, in 1537, reduced the population from 40,000 to 19,000, and in 1715, when the Venetians fell back upon the island after their withdrawal from the Peloponnese, 30,000 Turks besieged Corfu Town for forty-two days and came within an ace of capturing it. They never succeeded, though. The town was a very figure of martial resolution, and the Serenissima spent millions of ducats on its fortifications – in the sixteenth century it had 700 guns.

Its focus was the Old Fort, the twin-peaked citadel which appears in hundreds of old maps and prints, and which sheltered within its walls the palace of the Venetian governors, the naval command and the Latin cathedral. It never did fall to an enemy (though Nelson suggested it might be taken by running a frigate ashore and storming the ramparts from the riggings, rather as Dandolo engineered the assault on Constantinople). Like so many imperial fortresses, it occupied the whole of a small peninsula, separated from the mainland by a ditch, and backed by a wide open space kept clear as a field of fire. Time has softened its grim outlines now, brooding there on its peaks, and in the summer evenings, when the fireflies waver about the shrubberies, and a band plays perhaps upon the promenade at its feet, it seems hardly more than a romantic fantasy: but it was no conceit in its day, and suggestively at the flank of it, beside the moat, you may still see the mooring-places of the galleys, the fists of the Republic.

After the fearful Turkish raid of 1537, and just before Lepanto,
the Venetians built another fortress, the New Fort, on the other side of the town. Dominated by these two great strongholds and by hill-top, forts commanding the landward approaches, in Venetian days this was a true garrison town, and the great man of Venetian Corfu was not the Governor, nor the Latin Archbishop, but a functionary called the Proveditor-General of the Levant, a military commander whose writ ran throughout the Venetian colonies of the east. When this grandee arrived at the start of his term of duty, protocol afforded him an almost mystical welcome. A special volume of etiquette was printed to govern the arrangements. The heads of both the Latin and the Greek churches were to be on hand to greet His Excellency. A Corfiote noble was to compose a panegyric upon his virtues. The Jews were to lay carpets along the streets through which he would pass from the harbour. The remains of St Spiridon, patron saint of the island, would be available for him to kneel before. More Jews, with bouquets of flowers, were to bow low as he entered his palace in the citadel to take up the immense responsibilities of his office.

Such was the importance of Corfu in the Venetian pattern of self-esteem and the Venetian strategy of survival. In the Golden Bull by which, in 1387, they declared their possession of the island they undertook never to leave it and to defend it against all enemies; and this commitment they honoured to the end.

Venetian noblemen ruled Corfu, of course – a Bailie and two councillors stood at the top of the administration, as in Crete – but here more than in their other colonies they allowed the indigenes some real share in government. A council of island noblemen disposed of almost all the local jobs, even the captaincy of the Corfu war-galleys: it was a Corfiote captain who captured the Turkish admiral’s flagship at Lepanto (and another, taken prisoner himself in the same battle, enjoyed the privilege of being flayed alive for Venice).