The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (9 page)

Beyond this magic tower Venetian Khalkis thrived. Besides its
Venetian rulers and its Greek indigenes, it attracted sizeable communities of Italians, Albanians and Jews, while a colony of gypsies made their base beneath its walls. The banking-house of Andrea Ferro, transferred here from Venice, did a booming business throughout Frankish Greece, while the Jewish financiers of Khalkis were advisers and money-lenders to improvident barons and prodigal princelings from Thebes to Thira. The patriarch became a great figure, with huge estates in the island countryside, and hundreds of serfs. The church of St Mark, the cathedral of the town, was handsomely endowed by the monastery-church of San Giorgio Maggiore, beside the Basin at Venice. Khalkis was powerfully fortified at the expense of the Jews and had two deep-water harbours, one on each side of the Euripos.

Through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Euboea was to figure constantly in the annals of the Republic. The job of Bailie went to men of great stature in the state, and the colony’s flag was one of those that flew on ceremonial occasions from the bronze flagstaffs before the Basilica of St Mark. But even as it reached the climax of its success, and the Venetian empire itself approached some kind of apogee, the luck of Khalkis changed. By then the Ottoman Turks had advanced far into Europe, around the northern flank of Greece. In 1453 they took Constantinople, and soon they were pressing into Greece itself, destroying the ramshackle Frankish kingdoms one by one. It was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to Euboea. Already their corsairs were brazenly raiding the island in search of Greek slaves and booty, and life in the remoter country parts was becoming so hazardous that some islanders actually petitioned the Bailie for permission to go over to the Turkish side.

In 1458 the Sultan of Turkey himself, the magnificent but predatory Mohammed II, sent notice to the Bailie of Khalkis that he would like to visit the town. This was an ominous announcement, and the Venetians awaited his arrival nervously. When he came, he came in character. With a great train of attendants and a thousand cavalry, he appeared on the high mainland ridge of Boeotia that looks down upon the Euripos, and sent a courteous message to the Bailie to announce his impending entry: but first
he spent a quarter of an hour up there on the ridge, making a careful survey of the scene.

The view from there is dramatic. Euboea, which is wild and mountainous, hardly looks like an island at all, but bounds the whole horizon like another country, while from north to south the strait narrows almost ridiculously into the funnel of the Euripos far below. Though Khalkis is no longer a great port, its southern roadstead is crowded with laid-up shipping, row after row of rusty freighter and abandoned tanker, and this gives to the prospect even now a spurious sense of consequence, and enables the modern traveller to see, if only through half-closed eyes, the view that Mohammed saw that day – the war-fleets of the Venetians beneath the towering walls, the smoke of the busy town, its spires and towers and pinnacles clustered there within the ramparts, the merchant cobs with bellied sails sweeping in and out.

The Venetians hastened out to meet the Sultan, and fulsomely conducted him across the bridge. He did not stay long, leaving again later the same day with urbane expressions of gratitude: but he took the opportunity to inspect the fortifications of the place, and twelve years later he was to make a second visit.

A storm was gathering, but never mind, in their scattered fiefs and colonies the Venetians generally managed to make the best of things. Balls and festivities, we are told, greeted admirals and ambassadors when they toured the islands, ‘at which there was no lack of polished and gracious ladies’, and even as the power of the Turks spread westward across the Aegean, life among the colonists proceeded much as before.

Let us go back to Naxos now, and follow those families of the Kastro on their summer migration to the countryside, for in Naxos more than anywhere one can still see how the Venetians and their clients lived, in the heyday of their Aegean dominion. It is a surprisingly tropical kind of island – it lies on the same degree of latitude as Algiers – and this gives it a suggestively colonial feel. There are palm trees about, and prickly pears. The high wind-barriers of bamboo which protect the coastal fields and pastures are oddly reminiscent of sugar-cane and slave-plantation. And the lush valley of the Tragea which lies athwart the island is a true
oasis, its declivity filled with rich green olive trees like groves of dates, its old tower-houses like fortresses in Oman and Aden. The scattered hamlets are almost lost in the green of it, and on a high peak far above, looking seawards towards Turks and pirates, landwards towards rebellion, the Venetian fortress called Apano Kastro stands in vigilant dereliction.

Venetian remains are scattered all over this idyllic countryside. The most suggestive of them, I think, are the fortified monasteries, six of them in all, for there not merely an empire, but a faith stands to arms. There is one on the escarpment immediately behind the Chora, painted white and inhabited only by a clutch of nuns, which looks astonishingly like some defiant frontier stronghold east of Suez, stamped about by sentries and pebbled with regimental crests. There is another, at the head of its own valley on the eastern coast, which though all in ruins now seems to bristle with the bellicosity of its Latin monks in this Orthodox landscape, its battlemented walls blocking the head of the gulley as though ready still to shower it with arrows or flood it with boiling oil.

But the most evocative of the memorials are the country houses. These are fortified too, and are mostly tower-houses, called
pirgoi
by the Greeks, heavily merlonated in the Venetian manner, and rising solid and thick-walled above their olive groves. Many of them, though, remain genial and gentlemanly despite their battlements, and speak seductively of hedonist days, and licentious nights, in the duchy long ago. One such country house, surrounded by its properties, lies in its own fold in the hills ten or twelve miles behind Naxos, and there is nowhere better in the Aegean to dream a few hours away in the sage-brush of the hillside, or beside the sedgy stream that runs along the bottom of the valley, imagining the Venetian imperialists at their ease.

Behind the house Apano Kastro stands upon its peaks, and beyond rises the mass of Mount Zas, at 3,000 feet or so the highest mountain in the Cyclades. Set against so grand a backcloth, the house seems to lie gratefully in its hollow. It is a ruin now, inhabited only by cattle and scrabbling hens, but it retains its poise delightfully. It is built of roughly dressed stone, and is drawn, so to speak, with a gifted but bucolic hand – a simple house, but stylish too, like a good country wine. Its tower is low and
unaggressive, though conventionally battlemented, and a little terrace, almost like a private piazzetta, gives to its front door a nicely ceremonial look. Above the door there lingers the ghost of an escutcheon, undecipherable now, and inside a faint air of squiredom survives. Ruined rooms still show their fine proportions, and shattered casements look out across the muddy farmyard to feudal hectares beyond.

Orchards attend this fortunate house – lemons, oranges, almonds, apples. Gnarled fig trees grapple with its garden walls. Lizards twitch about the place. Across the valley doves still fly around the family pigeoncote, and on a ridge a little way behind the house a small family chapel, its plaster peeling, its walls a little askew, flickers with the candles kept alight, year after year, by the descendants of the serfs.

But while those
pirgoi
mellowed in the sunshine, Mohammed went back to Khalkis, and this time he brought an army of 100,000 men, with twenty-one guns, using 45-pound charges to fire balls 26 inches across, and a fleet so vast that it looked, so one Venetian galley captain thought, ‘like a pine forest on the sea’. There ensued a great Venetian tragedy – 250 years after the Fourth Crusade, a terrible token of things to come.

For as the fall of Singapore was to the British in 1941, the fall of Euboea was to the Venetians in 1470 – the first grim warning that empires never last. The island was the cornerstone of Venice’s position in the Aegean, and its loss to the Muslims would be a mortification to all Christendom: yet its fall seems to have been ordained and inevitable. Everybody knew what was about to happen. The Sultan had made his reconnaissance. The huge Turkish fleet was made ready in Constantinople. The Ottoman army was embarked. The tragedy assembled itself slowly, inexorably, but nobody came to help. ‘The princes of Christendom,’ we are told, ‘looked on as if in a theatre.’

On 15 June 1470, the Turkish fleet appeared off Khalkis, and landed an army on the island shore just outside the city. Three days later a second force appeared over the mainland hills, led by the Sultan himself, and wound its way down the hillside to the shore of the Euripos. Mohammed did not try to take the castle
over the channel, behind its open drawbridge, but instead threw two bridges of boats across the strait, north and south, and so got his whole force on to the island. Khalkis was surrounded. There were 2,500 souls inside the city, at least 100,000 encamped outside, but when the Sultan summoned the city to surrender, promising its inhabitants exemption from all taxes for ten years, he got a tart response. The Bailie, Paolo Erizzo, replied that he proposed to burn the Turkish fleet and root up all the Turkish tents, while the men of the garrison told the Sultan to go and eat pork. The bombardment began that evening, and 3,000 Greeks rounded up in the countryside around were slaughtered below the walls of the city,
pour encourager les autres.

The Venetians were hardly less savage in their resistance. When they discovered a traitor in the city, a captain of artillery who had been giving intelligence to the Turks, they hung him by one foot in the town piazza before cutting his body into pieces and firing it out of guns into the Turkish camp. The information he had sent the enemy was then exploited to lure them into especially strongly defended sectors of the defence, where they were massacred. Successive Turkish assaults were beaten off, the morale of the defenders was high, and on 11 July the city seemed to be saved when the lookouts reported that a fleet of seventy-one Venetian warships was approaching down the strait from the north.

This was the fleet of Admiral Niccolò da Canale, Captain-General of the Sea, sailing in from Crete, and when he heard of its arrival the Sultan, so it is said, burst into tears of thwarted rage. If Canale broke the boat-bridges, the Turkish army would be isolated on the island. But inexplicably Canale anchored his ships six miles north of the Euripos, and there he stayed. He ignored all signals from the garrison. He refused requests from his own officers to ram the bridges. Perhaps, like all navigators, he was baffled by the tides of the channel: perhaps he was just frightened, or indecisive; whatever the reason, he hesitated too long, and next day the Turks, hardly believing their luck, took the city of Khalkis.

They had filled the moat with rubbish and corpses, and across this stinking causeway stormed the landward walls. The garrison still fought desperately back. Barricades were erected street by street. From the rooftops women threw pots, pans and boiling
water on the Turks below. Hour by hour, nevertheless, the Turks forced their way into the central piazza, and by noon on 12 July the fighting had ended. Canale, seeing the Turkish flag rise above the walls, sailed away to sea: every male person in the city over eight years old was butchered; the women and small children were enslaved. The Sultan himself rode through the streets, sword in hand, looking for skulkers, and the heads of the slaughtered garrison were piled in a huge bleeding heap in front of the Patriarch’s palace.

Erizzo the Bailie, with a group of women and children, had escaped from the town by a tunnel, and taken refuge in the tower on the Euripos bridge, hoping that Canale would at least send a ship to take them off. He was soon forced out of it. His companions were summarily executed. He himself was promised that his head would be spared, and so it was, for the Turks placed him upon planks and sawed him in half. The smoking city lay desolate at the water’s edge, and the Sultan, leaving a garrison behind, departed for Constantinople again. The Turkish fleet, too, loaded with spoils and captives, soon sailed for the Dardanelles. Canale’s ships did not interfere with its withdrawal, but escorted it on its homeward voyage, so the Turkish admiral sarcastically reported, with every courtesy. ‘You can tell the Doge,’ said the Grand Vizier to the Venetian envoy in Constantinople, ‘that he can leave off marrying the sea. It is our turn now.’

Not much is left of Venetian Khalkis. The tower on the bridge was wantonly destroyed when a new swing bridge was built in the nineteenth century: only its base survives, with a tall tide indicator mounted on it. The famous walls of the city, upon which the Sultan looked down that day from the ridge above, still stood in Victorian times, when John Murray’s
Handbook to Greece
reported that the streets behind them were littered with the cannon-balls of the siege, but gradually collapsed, subsided or were demolished over the years. One by one the winged lions disappeared from the ramparts, as Venetian rule gave way to Turkish, Turkish to Greek, slowly the shape of the place was blurred, and in 1940 the Germans, dive-bombing the shipping in the harbour, where the Venetian warships used to lie, and herding the retreating British army to the water’s edge as the Turks had forced
their captives to the galleys, destroyed what was left of the old fortifications, and erased all but the bitter memory of Negroponte.

Venice was appalled at the news from Khalkis, the worst that had ever reached the Republic. ‘Our grandeur was abased,’ wrote a contemporary historian, ‘our pride was extinguished.’ The Captain-General of the Sea was sent home in chains to stand trial for his timidity: he was banished from Venice for ever, and his back-pay was forfeited to ransom some of the more important captives carried away to Constantinople.