The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (25 page)

The Trogir lion, it is claimed, miraculously closed his book when the Republic fell, and long afterwards, among the simpler Slavs, the beast retained magic powers, and was affixed to peasant houses, in ever cruder copies, to keep the worst at bay.

This is a sailor’s coast. It grows sailors as other lands grow farmers or miners, and its waters run with ships. Everywhere the ferryboats labour to and fro, the holiday hydrofoils streak away, the fishing boats hurry home with the evening catch. Sometimes, round a point, you come across a bay jammed tight with ships under refit – big Russian liners on stilts out of the water, tankers assaulted by swarms of welders. On remote island shores or in unexpected creeks you discover little country shipyards, like garages, with a solitary tall-funnelled steamer in dry dock, perhaps, or a crane protruding above the pines. Small grey warships cluster at jetties. Steady old steamers convey their villagers, animals, trucks, motorbikes and crates of garden produce patiently between the islands.

As it is now, so it was in Venetian times. Dalmatia was the true source of the Republic’s naval power; half the crews of Venetian ships came from Dalmatia, seamen whose sea-going experience was unrivalled in the Mediterranean and who were later to man
most of the Austrian navy too. The towns of this coast were navy towns. Hvar, Lesina then, was the headquarters of the Venetian Adriatic Fleet, and had an arsenal to arm its ships, and a theatre to keep its sailors happy. Poreč, Parenzo in Istria, was the headquarters of the Guild of Venetian Pilots: proud to be so perhaps, for the guild-men were very, very grand, especially those super-pilots, the
pedotti grandi,
who were alone permitted to guide the great galleasses in and out of the lagoon.

Many of the proudest civic memories concerned triumphs at sea in the Venetian cause. Lepanto in particular was the Trafalgar of this shore, to be remembered by old men in chimney-corners and commemorated municipally. Hardly a cathedral of Dalmatia lacks its memorial to the local heroes of the battle, and the mementos are inescapable. Here is a galley lantern perhaps; here an angel made of captured cannons; here an escutcheon won by courage of arms that day. The ceremonial Land Gate at Korčula, through which I passed a page or two back, was erected to commemorate Lepanto. So was the column of St Justina at Koper, old Capodistria, at the other end of the coast. On the Sea Gate at Zadar a plaque recalls the glorious reception given to the city’s galleys when they returned cock-a-hoop from the battle, and in a shadowy gateway at Trogir an old cock’s head on a wooden hand, once a Turkish figurehead, has been displayed ever since 1571 as civic booty of the victory.

At the southern end of the Yugoslav coast, near the Albanian frontier, the line of the shore is dramatically disrupted by a vast sea-fiord, the Gulf of Kotor – Cattaro to the Venetians – which breaks into the land mass there in a volcanic sort of way. What seems at first to be just another bay turns out, when you sail into it, to be a theatrically gloomy pair of salt-water lakes, connected one with the other only by a narrow channel, the Verige Strait, and towered over by the Lovćen mountains of Montenegro. This sombre haven was for many generations a familiar base of the Venetian navy: they closed the Strait with chains to give the inner lake absolute security, and at Lepantani, on the spit between the lakes, they maintained what would now be called a rest and recreation centre – the name is supposed to be a corruption of
le puttane,
‘the harlots’.

On the east shore of the gulf there is a place called Perast which played a particularly important part in Venetian naval history. It is hardly more than a hamlet, strung out along the waterfront, with the statutory Venetian campanile, a café or two beside the road, a palm tree here and there, scattered solitary cypresses on the bare hill above. Perast though was always a favourite retreat of sea-captains in the Venetian service, and they gave the place a certain stature, building their pleasant villas on terraces above the water, where they are mostly crumbling away now in flower-scent, bird-song and cock-crow, and are reached by crooked stone stairways clamped with iron. Some were consequential enough to have coats-of-arms above their doorways; one or two were proper little palaces, balconied and trellised, and in their heyday I would think, looking as they do boldly across the water, prominently telescoped too.

At this highly nautical place a school for sailors was established in a big house on the waterfront, watched over by the retired salts all around. For many years it produced officers in the Republic’s service, so successfully that Perast-trained seamen included many of the best-known Venetian professionals. In 1626 Peter the Great of Russia, laying the first foundations of the Russian Navy, noted this old record of accomplishment, and sent his first naval cadets to be trained at Perast: he went to England to learn how warships should be built, but he looked to this Venetian sea-hamlet of the Adriatic to acquire for his empire, in its turn, the arts of seamanship.

Pirates of many sorts infested the shore – Genoese, Catalan, Arab, Turk, even English and Dutch sometimes. In the period between 1592 and 1609 alone seventy ships bound for Venice were taken by pirates within the Adriatic: sometimes their seamen resisted strongly, sometimes they preferred to rely upon their insurance and abandoned ship at once. As early as the tenth century Slav pirates had raided Venice itself, carrying off all the brides from a mass wedding taking place in the church of San Pietro di Castello, and in successive centuries the pest was never quite stamped out – driven out of one den, the pirates simply set up their base somewhere else. In 1571, Lepanto year, the Sultan Selim II actually installed a pack of Arab pirates at Ulcinj, south of
the Gulf of Kotor, to harass Venetian shipping; they brought their Negro slaves with them, and the black people you sometimes see in Ulcinj now are their descendants.

The most melodramatic of all these varied miscreants were the people called the Uskoks, whose fearful memory lingers around their old lair of Segna, in the north, renamed Senj now but still crouching rather frowardly over its half-moon bay. The Uskoks were indisputably ghastly. The name probably comes from the Serbo-Croat
uskočiti,
to jump, and the Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. Their greatest fighting leader, Ivo, was supposed to have routed 30,000 Turks with a handful of comrades and to have come home from another battle holding his own severed left hand in his right. The Venetians said they were supernaturally guided, too, by wise women in caves.

The Uskoks took to sea the same skills and prejudices that had preserved them on land. Fanatically anti-Turk and anti-Muslim, they were never averse to Christian booty either, and with their long hair and trailing moustaches, and the iron rings they sported in their ears, they became the terror of all mariners. Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the pièce-de-résistance of a celebratory banquet). Captains would often run their ships aground rather than risk such a fate: ‘as if Whale should flie from a Dolphin’, scornfully commented an English traveller, who had perhaps not himself come face to face with a long-haired, iron-earringed Uskok on the high seas. Senj became a haven for rascals and runaways from many countries and its whole community was brutalized. The priests of Senj piously blessed the pirates’ enterprises. The citizenry at large contributed financially to the cost of them and shared cheerfully in the profits, one-tenth of the loot going to the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries.

During the Uskoks’ heyday, in the sixteenth century, they enjoyed the protection of the Hapsburg dukedom in Austria, and sold their captured goods in the great international market of
Trieste, from where they were distributed throughout the Hapsburg possessions. This was particularly infuriating to the Venetians, who fought the rascals with ever-increasing anger both at sea and on land – after one victory over them, they displayed the heads of luckless Uskoks on stakes all around the Piazza San Marco. But the shallow galleys of the pirates, rowed in relays by ten oarsmen each side, were exceedingly hard to catch, and it was only in the early years of the seventeenth century that they were eliminated at last: in their very last adventure of all, when only a handful of desperadoes was left to man the galleys of Senj, they seized a final Venetian ship, for old times’ sake, and made off with its cargo, worth 4,000 sequins.

So crippling was piracy to Venetian trade, during its worst periods, that the Signory cast around for alternative routes to the east, avoiding the most dangerous parts of the Adriatic. In the past Venetian merchants had often shipped their goods to Durrës, then Durazzo, on the Albanian coast, and taken them in caravans over the former Roman road, the Via Egnatia, which ran across Thessalonia and Thrace to Turkey. In the winter, too, the Venetian postal routes ran from Kotor over the Montenegrin mountains to Constantinople. In the sixteenth century the Venetians created a parallel route from Split, much further to the north, enabling them to by-pass most of the Adriatic altogether.

This was a truly imperial conception, undertaken on an imperial scale, and it was proper that it should be based upon the imperial city of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, himself a Dalmatian born and bred. Virtually the whole of Split, which the Venetians called Spalato, consisted of the emperor’s vast waterside palace, long since taken over by the citizenry and converted into a marvellous warren of houses, shops, halls and piazzas, with Diocletian’s mausoleum as a cathedral in the middle. It was a Venetian Jew, Daniele Rodrigo, who first suggested that this extraordinary place, then hardly more than a picturesque backwater, should be the base of the new route: in 1591 the Signory authorized him to make it so.

He set about it with style. An entire new town was built outside the Diocletian walls, with hostels and warehouses for merchants, customs houses, hospitals and a quarantine station. The fortifications
of the port were rebuilt. The roads into the interior were developed. A new kind of galley was designed for the short sea-run between Venice and Split, shallow-drafted, manned by a relatively small crew of 120 sailors and forty soldiers. Every other month one of these ships, the container ships of their day, made the double voyage: as soon as it reached Venice to unload, its crew was shifted to another vessel and sailed immediately back to Split.

The scheme worked brilliantly. Caravans with hundreds of horses plodded down the mountains to the seashore from places as far away as Armenia, Persia and even India. For the first time silks, spices, hides, woollens, carpets and waxes reached Venice from the east overland, a smack in the eye not only for the Adriatic pirates, but also for rival merchants of the west, laboriously sailing their caravels around the Cape of Good Hope. Split never looked back, became the principal port of the Dalmatian coast for the rest of the Venetian period, and is now the liveliest and most cosmopolitan coastal town of Yugoslavia.

Credit it to the Uskoks! There were no pirates like those sea-devils: trying to stop their predatory passages through the Adriatic, a Venetian senator once cried, was ‘like trying to stop the birds flying through the air with one’s bare hands’. There are said to have been, even in their prime, no more than a thousand fighting Uskoks, but nobody would ever forget them.

One great piece of grit impeded the Venetian mechanism of authority on the Dalmatian coast: the sea-city of Dubrovnik – Ragusa then – whose merchants were so enterprising, whose fleets ranged so far, that the very word ‘argosy’ comes from the name of their port. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Dubrovnik was nominally under Venetian suzerainty, and a Venetian governor was installed there; but it was never reconciled to the Signory’s rule, presently rejected it, and alone among the city-ports of the littoral, remained a bitter rival until the end of the Venetian Republic.

If you would like a suggestion, a sort of mirage perhaps, of the medieval meaning of Dubrovnik, disembark at the peninsula village of Cavtat, which lies some ten miles south of the city across the bay of Lokrum. From there you can see the place in
context. To the right the limestone mountains rise sheer and treeless, to the left is the green island of Lokrum, and half-hidden from the open sea upon its own inlet, the walled city of Dubrovnik shows like a white blur at the water’s edge. It has a very steely look from there, a private and plotting look, secreted as it is between the highlands and the sea, within its screen of islands.

A hard city it remains too, to my mind, when you cross the bay and land upon its quay, beneath its high fortifications. It is very beautiful, but hard. It lacks the yield or leniency of Venice. Built of a glittering and impermeable marble, enclosed with superb city walls, tilted slightly with the lie of the land and corrugated everywhere with battlements – tightly packed there within itself it has acquired none of the give-and-take of great age, but seems in a way a perfectly modern place, dogmatically planned and didactically displayed to visitors, like a model town in a trade fair.

Much of it was destroyed in a sixteenth-century earthquake, but it was all rebuilt, and the Dubrovnik we see today is still in all essentials the Ragusa which was so long a thorn in the side of Venice. Superficially it seems Venetian itself, and most visitors probably believe it to
be
Venetian. Its city fathers were inevitably influenced by the Serenissima, the force which made all this coastline look north for its examples. Though the people of Dubrovnik were Slav almost to a man, they assiduously Italianized their city. They imported artists and craftsmen from Italy, they adopted the latest Italian styles in dress, in literature, in modes of living. They even devised Italian genealogies for themselves. They based their constitution upon the Venetian pattern, though being even more vulnerable to the ambitions of potential despots, they decreed that their Doge, called the Rector, should hold office only for a month at a time and that he should leave his palace only if accompanied by a band and by twenty-four attendants in red liveries.