Negroponte, today’s Khalkis, on EuboeaIn the Archipelago – Duke’s island –
tumultuous princelings – a show-place –
colonial life – the fall of Euboea – on admirals –
slow retreat and last stronghold – surrender
Humped and speckled, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea. You are never out of sight of them, and as one by one they slide past your ship’s prow, blue or grey or golden in the evening – as Patmos fades into the haze astern, Amorgos looms over the horizon ahead, so one myth follows another too, and the distant rocks are peopled in your mind with the gods, nymphs, heroes and sea-kings of the Aegean legend.
The Venetians called them generically ‘The Archipelago’, and cared little for their pagan echoes. Their importance to the Republic was strictly military, as potential strongpoints or havens along the shipping routes. Venetian merchantmen had been sailing these waters for centuries, generally just passing through, sometimes stopping to pick up fruit, salt or sweet wine from the islands. Their navigations, though, had always been hazardous. In times of war every island was potentially a hostile base, and even in peacetime passage among them was risky. The Aegean was a corsair’s paradise. From the landlocked bays of Lesbos; from the fine wide anchorage of Cos; from hidden havens in uninhabited islets; from a thousand unflushable lairs the pirates sprang, sometimes in hazy causes of national or religious purposes, more often for private gain.
Byzantium had been the suzerain of these waters, and to a sea-people like the Venetians, whose welfare depended so largely upon the trade routes to the Dardanelles, complete mastery of the Aegean might have been one of the greatest prizes to be snatched from the fall of Constantinople. They never achieved it, though. Their rivals the Genoese got Chios, off the Turkish coast, which they made into a great trading mart and naval base. The Knights of St John got Rhodes. Other islands were tossed down the years from proprietor to proprietor, from Frankish lord to Greek freebooter, from transient pirate to passing admiral. The Greek islanders generally detested the Venetians for their part in the Crusade, and often encouraged their enemies. The Turks, from bases in Asia Minor, made their positions in the islands progressively more precarious.
In one way and another, however, the Venetians did achieve a lasting overlordship in Euboea, the biggest of the off-shore islands on the Greek side of the sea, and in the scattered islands of the Cyclades. They earned few revenues from their possession of these places, and they spent fortunes in preserving them; but with the support of their naval bases in Crete and on the Greek mainland, for the next five centuries they maintained a presence there, until the banner of St Mark was lowered from the last island fortress, the hilltop city of Exombourgo on Tinos, in 1715.
The division of the Byzantine Empire by the Crusaders was, of course, a paper division – in many of the imperial possessions Byzantine officials were still in control. In 1205 the new Doge Pietro Ziani, considering how best to handle Venice’s own share of the spoils, decided to offer the Cyclades to free enterprise. Any Venetian citizens with enough ships, men and temerity might take the islands for themselves as feudal chiefs, on the assumption that they would remain in some sense clients of the Republic. It was no chance, perhaps, that the first to accept the challenge was a nephew of Enrico Dandolo, Marin Sanudo, who had followed his uncle to Constantinople. He was serving as a judge in the Venetian courts there, but he resigned his office at once, mustered a scratch force of adventurers, equipped eight fighting galleys, and sailing south through the Dardanelles into the enchanted seas, seized the Cyclades and declared himself their duke.
In theory his duchy became a fief of the Latin empire in Constantinople, but the Venetianness of it was never in doubt, and over the years it provided many imperial agents and governors in the east. The dukes, officially regarded by the Venetians as the premier dukes of Christendom, remained Venetian citizens. Venetian law obtained and the Venetian dialect of Italian was the official language. Sanudo handed over some of his two hundred islands as sub-fiefs to his comrades, and so some of the most celebrated Venetian clans became associated with the Cyclades. If one nephew of Enrico Dandolo was the duke himself, another was master of Andros. A Foscolo took Anafi, a Barozzi took Thira, Stampalia went to one of the Querinis, the Ghisi brothers took Tinos and Mykonos, a Giustinian helped to rule Kea. These were names destined to figure again and again in the annals of the Republic: and the distant island of Kithira, to the south of the Peloponnese, went to Marco Venier specifically because of his name – it was the birthplace of Venus, and the Veniers had always claimed that, as their patronymic demonstrated, they were direct descendants of that goddess.
Sanudo himself chose as his headquarters the island of Naxos. It was the place where Ariadne, having saved Theseus from the Minotaur in Crete, was abandoned by the hero on his way home to Athens. It was also the birthplace of Dionysos, god of wine, whom she married instead, and was one of the greenest and most cheerful islands in the whole Aegean. It did not fall easily to Sanudo and his cutthroats when, in 1207, their galleys appeared off the little village capital out of the Paros Channel, and sailing past the tall temple of Apollo on its islet, beached themselves upon the shore. The Genoese had got there first, and fought back so fiercely that in a gesture familiar enough to chroniclers of these seas, Sanudo ordered his galleys to be burned, to encourage the faint-hearts in his ranks. Inspirited thus, they stormed the Genoese positions at last and proclaimed Sanudo Duke Marco I of the Archipelago. A Catholic archbishop was promptly dispatched to the island by the Pope, and Apollo’s temple served as a quarry for the construction of a twelve-towered citadel, the seat of dukely government.
The remains of this stronghold are what we first see, as we sail in the wake of the galleys into the harbour of the island capital, the Chora (‘chief town’, in Greek). Some of its buildings have lately been restored, and from a distance it looks remarkably sheer and massive on its hillock in the middle of the town, like a miniature Potala. When we disembark, though, and begin our climb from the waterfront up its flanks, it is revealed as a more inhibited kind of fort. Throughout the centuries of their occupation the Venetians of Naxos remained aliens, if only because they were the Catholic rulers of a Greek Orthodox population, and so their headquarters on the hill, set as it is in the heart of the island’s chief town, has a curiously inbred or introspective feel to it.
We approach it through a labyrinth of steep and crooked streets, the homes in Venetian times of the Greek shopkeepers, fishermen, sailors, craftsmen, who soon came to live around the slopes of the citadel. Up we go, leaving the harbour and its life behind us, the polyglot clamour of the waterfront cafés, where the back-pack travellers gather, the splutter of rented motorbikes, the hoot of the approaching ferry, the thump of the hi-fi, perhaps, from the corner disco – up through the flowered and cat-frequented alleys until almost at the summit of the hill we pass beneath a grave fortified gateway (iron-studded door, black-shadowed archway) to find ourselves in the Kastro, the core of the ancient duchy.
Even now, so long after the departure of the Sanudos and their successors, it remains a Catholic enclave in an Orthodox comity. Silent and empty its streets run within its walls, and the escutcheons of the Venetian nobility stand haughty above its doorways still. In the central square of the Kastro are the remains of the ducal palace, and in the little Catholic cathedral next door, heavy with the crests and tombs of the duchy, on Sunday mornings you may still see, stooped and blackly gowned, late representatives of the Venetian feudalists worshipping in their hereditary style. They live in houses built into the ramparts of the citadel, and from one of their enviable rooftops, eating an omelette and Greek salad, perhaps, or drinking a glass of the island’s particular liqueur, a powerful embodiment of Dionysian traditions made from island lemons – established thus upon one of these eyries of the conquerors, looking down upon the alleys, cafés and fishing-vessels of the Greeks, and the solitary tall archway that alone remains of Apollo’s temple, it is easy enough to feel the old hubris of empire still.
Certainly the arrogance of the Venetians has never been forgotten by the Greeks – who, established here in Homeric times long before Venice existed, have out-stayed all successive rulers to remain as Greek as ever. Until the land reforms in Greece after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.
A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away. Sometimes the intervention of Venice was resented by her subjects on the spot, but sometimes it was devoutly welcomed: ‘They look upon our Admiral,’ reported a Venetian diplomat of one particularly tormented community, ‘as the Messiah.’
Sanudo, his colleagues and his successors behaved, as often as not, with a reckless impropriety. Sometimes they were absentee landlords – for years the lord of Andros governed it from his palace in Venice – but more frequently they lived life as a sort of game in their sunlit and storm-swept fiefs. All their islands were fortified, and they frequently went to war with each other, their petty navies fighting it out between the headlands, their minuscule armies hurling themselves at each other’s citadels. The Lady of Mykonos was abducted once by the Duke of Naxos, while Syros and Tinos once went to war over the ownership of a donkey.
For the Signory itself Aegean suzerainty must sometimes have seemed more trouble than it was worth, especially when problems of succession arose, and the judgement of Venice was called for. When in 1361, for instance, the reigning Duke of Naxos died without an heir, the Republic had to make sure that his daughter, who was young and beautiful, found herself a husband sufficiently compliant to Venetian interests. So uncooperative was she, and so unsuitable were the candidates for her hand, that in the end the Venetians sent a commando force to Naxos to kidnap her. They took her away to Crete, where they confronted her with a fiancé of their choice, a bold military man nicknamed ‘The Host Disperser’: fortunately she fell instantly in love with him, so we are assured, married him splendidly in Venice and lived with him happily ever after in the citadel on the hill.
Or there was the problem of the Duke Niccolò III. He was so ungrateful a vassal that he actually tried to steal Euboea from the Republic, and antagonized his Venetian peers as much as he oppressed his Greek subjects. He was conveniently murdered by a rival claimant to the dukedom, Francesco Crespi. Crespi seized the Kastro and proclaimed himself Francesco I, and the Venetians, who saw no contradiction between criminal tendencies and a talent for government, promptly and gratefully recognized him.
Then there was Giovanni III, at the end of the fifteenth century. Everyone loathed him, too. He encouraged pirates to use Naxos as their base. He taxed his people disgracefully. He affronted the Turks unnecessarily and took no notice of the Venetians. The Archbishop of Naxos himself appealed to Venice for his removal, but once again they were saved the trouble, for the Naxians themselves assassinated him.
There was Niccolò Adoldo, Lord of Serifos. This tyrant generally lived in Venice, but finding himself paid insufficient taxes by his subjects, in 1397 he went out to his island with a band of Cretan brigands, seized a number of island notables and shut them up in his castle. There they were tortured to make them disclose where they hid their money, but the plan failing (perhaps they had no money) they were thrown off the castle ramparts to their deaths. This was too much even for the pragmatic Republic. Adoldo was imprisoned for two years, deprived of his island and forbidden ever to visit it (but he died in the sanctity of old age, and was buried with every sign of respect in the church of Santi Simeone e Giuda, which he had prudently endowed).
Or finally there was Francesco III, the Mad Duke of the Archipelago. He was a direct protégé of the Signory, but unfortunately turned out to be a homicidal maniac. He murdered his wife by stabbing her in the stomach with a sword. He tried to kill his eleven-year-old son. He criminally assaulted his aunt the Lady of Nio. The Venetians whisked him away to Crete, where he died under restraint, but his son, growing up to succeed him, proved almost as difficult as his father, once getting himself captured by the Turks, and once forcibly occupying the island of Paros against the wishes of Venice: it did not matter much, however, for within half a century the dynasty was extinct anyway and the Duchy of the Archipelago was a Venetian ward no longer, but was held in fief by a Jewish financier, Joseph Nasi, under the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan, Selim the Sot.
So went the history of the Aegean, in the days of the Pax Venetica. There were few islands that did not at one time or another fall under the influence of the winged lion. So close was the association of Venice with this sea that for years the very sponge itself, that inescapable familiar of the Aegean waterfront, was known as the enetikos, the Venetian. The free-booting feudalists spread themselves, by skulduggery, matrimony or insinuation, from Tenedos to Karpathos. The merchant-venturers nosed in their cobs from port to port. The war-galleys glided into petty harbours, with awful oar-strokes and intimidating standards, like visitations from on high. Sometimes the Republic took an island peacefully under its protection, sometimes an island was seized in the exigencies of war, and wherever you wander now among those wine-dark waters, traces of Venice show.
Within the Dardanelles themselves Venetian castles stand at the water’s edge, while far in the south at Thira you may still fancy, in the thin line of white houses along the volcano’s ridge, the Venetian town that stood there until nineteenth-century earthquakes rattled it into oblivion. In Syros, the hub of the Cyclades, the Venetian citadel stands obdurate and cathedral-crowned on one conical hump, while the Greek Orthodox cathedral and its community stands slightly lower on another. Crumbled small castles on Andros or Paros, harbour moles and ornamental dovecotes, a Catholic bishopric surviving here, an antique snobbery somewhere else, escutcheoned doorways and pronged merlons – all these are the mark of Venice, and the exquisite little row of gimcrack houses on the waterfront at Mykonos, perhaps the most famous and familiar structure in the whole Aegean, is called Enetika to this day.
Much the greatest of the Venetian possessions was Euboea, which the Greeks call Evvoia nowadays, but which was known to the Venetians as Negroponte, Black Bridge. It is only just an island. About 120 miles long, 35 miles wide at its widest part, it lies so close to the Greek mainland of Boeotia that at one point the intervening channel, the Euripos, is only 130 feet across, and has been spanned since classical times by a bridge.
Beside the Euripos stood a town, which the Venetians called Negroponte too, but which is now Khalkis. It was of obvious importance to the Republic. It was not only a useful outlet for trade on the Greek mainland, but was also an invaluable staging point for shipping moving in and out of the Dardanelles, and a naval base commanding the whole of the Aegean. Khalkis itself became Venetian in the division of the crusaders’ spoils: later, by successive stratagems the Venetians acquired the rest of the island too, and made it a bastion of their maritime strength, with castles all over it, and a Bailie who was their most important official in the Aegean. To the courts and offices of Euboea came appeals, complaints or disputes from the other islands: from its harbours the galleys sailed out to keep the troublesome feudatories in order. When the Greek emperors returned to Constantinople in 1261, ending the Latin empire, the Catholic Patriarch transferred his see to Khalkis, and so it became a kind of spiritual pro-consulate too.
Khalkis was the show-place of the Venetian Aegean, and in old
Negroponte, today’s Khalkis, on Euboea
prints it is drawn bristling with towers and turrets, surrounded entirely by moat and sea-wall, and tight-stacked upon the water’s edge. Its site remains extraordinary. The Euripos is one of the world’s enigmas, for through it there rush, as through a mighty funnel, as many as fourteen powerful tides a day, in alternate directions. This is a weird spectacle. So narrow is the channel there, so immense is the weight of water rushing through, with the force and pace of a mountain torrent, that it feels as though all the water of the Aegean is being pumped that way. Nobody seems quite sure even now why it happens, and tradition says that Aristotle, infuriated by his failure to explain the mystery of the Euripos, drowned himself in it. The Venetians built actually on top of the channel, in the middle of a double drawbridge, a fortified tower that marked their imperial frontier. It was a romantic, Rhenish-looking construction, if we are to believe the old pictures, and so remarkable was the place, so suggestive the movement of the waters beneath it, that local rumour held it to be an enchanted castle, guarded by fairies or demons.
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.
Poor Canale! If he was scarcely a Nelsonic sailor, he was a man of culture and discrimination, a scholar, an experienced diplomat. In this he was not unusual among the admirals of the Venetian fleet. The Venetian system of oligarchic responsibility meant that while the Republic’s sea-commanders were always noblemen, they were not always professional seamen, and although this led sometimes to humiliation, it produced also, over the centuries, some very remarkable captains to lead the flotillas of Venice through the eastern seas. Let us, while we recover from the horrors of Khalkis, and try to forget the disjuncture of poor Erizzo on his planks, take a look at a few of them.
Another eminent amateur was Antonio Grimani, Captain-General later in the fifteenth century. He was a highly successful financier and a skilled negotiator, the father of a Cardinal and a great man in Venice, but like Canale, no genius as an admiral. Having lost a particularly crucial engagement against the Turks, he too was sent home in irons (one of them fastened to his leg, as a special favour, by his own son). In Venice he was greeted as a traitor, lampooned in popular ballads as ‘the ruin of the Christians’, and exiled for life to the Dalmatian island of Cres, but he arranged matters better than Canale. He escaped to Rome, and so cannily organized his reconciliation with Venice that in 1521 he was elected to the Dogeship, eighty-five years old, and officially described, so many years after his disgrace at sea, as serene, excellent, virtuous, worthy, and giving great hope for the welfare and preservation of the state.
Vettore Pisani, on the other hand, Captain-General during the fourteenth-century wars against Genoa, was everybody’s idea of a sea-dog, beloved of his men, contemptuous of authority, always ready for a fight. He was ‘the chief and father of all the seamen of Venice’. Arrested and charged after a defeat at Pola, in Istria, in 1379, he was spending six months in the dungeons when the Genoese took Chioggia, at the southern edge of the lagoon, and threatened Venice herself. The seamen of Venice declined to fight without him, and 400 men arriving from the lagoon towns specifically to serve under him threw down their banners and went home again – using, so their chronicler says, language too dreadful to record. So they let Pisani out. ‘Viva Messer Vettore!’ cried the adoring crowd as he emerged from the prisons, but he stopped them. ‘Enough of that, my sons,’ he said, ‘shout instead Viva the Good Evangelist San Marco!’ – and so he went to sea again, and rallied the fleet, and beat the Genoese, and saved Venice, and died in action like the hero he was.
His great peer and contemporary was Carlo Zeno, a very different character. Intellectual, statesman, fighting man, a knowledgeable scientist, a devoted classical scholar, a buccaneer and a showman, Zeno played a multitude of roles in a life full of excitement. We see him as a theological student at Padua, a young curé at Patras in Greece, a merchant on the Golden Horn, Bailie of Euboea. We see him as the most dazzling of galley commanders: burning Genoese ships all over the eastern Mediterranean, sending whole cargoes of loot to be auctioned in Crete, seizing in Rhodes harbour the greatest prize of all, the Richignona, the largest Genoese ship afloat, with a cargo worth half-a-million ducats and a complement of 160 rich and highly ransomable merchants.
Finally we see him, in the theatrical way he loved, appearing with his fleet before Chioggia just in time to join Pisani in the salvation of Venice from the Genoese. Zeno was imprisoned for conspiracy once, and once failed by only a handful of votes to become Doge of the Republic. He was scarred all over from his innumerable sea-battles, but he kept his eyesight until the end, never wearing spectacles in his life. They buried him, as was proper, near the Arsenal that built his ships for him, and somewhere there, lost under new dockyard buildings down the years, his grand old bones still rot.
Vittore Cappello, in the fifteenth century, was so disturbed by a series of reverses in Grecian waters that he was not seen to smile for five months, and died of a broken heart. Benedetto Pesaro, in the sixteenth century, kept a mistress on board his flagship until he was well into his seventies, and habitually beheaded insubordinate officers of his fleet, while his kinsman Jacopo Pesaro was not only an admiral, but Bishop of Paphos too. Cristofero da Canale wrote a book about naval administration in the form of an elaborate imaginary dialogue and took his four-year-old son to sea with him, claiming to have weaned him on ship’s biscuit. Francesco Morosini, whom we shall meet again, dressed always in red from top to toe and never went into action without his cat beside him on the poop.
Such were the remarkable characters who commanded the fleets of Venice. They lost battles almost as often as they won them, they could be cowardly as well as heroic, venal as well as high-minded. Few of them, though, sound ordinary men, and it must have made pulses beat a little faster, brought history itself a little closer, when one of these magnificos swept into harbour beneath his gold-embroidered standard, and stepped ashore upon the modest waterfront of Mykonos or Kea.
But even the admirals could not hold the Aegean for Venice. The loss of Euboea did not mean, as Cassandras forecast at the time, the loss of the whole empire, Cyclades to Istria, but it did deprive Venice of her chief base in the Aegean, and one by one the other islands fell to the Turks.
It was a slow and awful process, extended over 200 years. Sometimes the squeeze was squalid – the demand for protection money, for example, collected by implacable Turkish captains island by island. More often it was horrific. For generations the Aegean was terrorized by Turkish raiders: ports were repeatedly burned, islanders were seized in their thousands for slavery or concubinage, whole populations had to shut themselves up each night within fortress walls. The terrible corsair Khayr ad-Din, ‘Barbarossa’, when he raided an island, killed all the Catholics for a start. He then slaughtered all the old Greeks, took the young men as galley-slaves and packed away the boys to Constantinople. Finally, making the women dance before him, he chose the best-looking for his harem, sharing out the rest among his men according to rank, until the ugliest and oldest of them all were handed over to the soldiery.
The Aegean islands were the most exposed outposts of Christianity against the advance of Islam, but by the sixteenth century Venice was clearly powerless to save them, and the other powers of Europe would do nothing to help. Duke Giovanni IV of Naxos appealed directly to the Pope, the Emperor Charles V, Ferdinand King of the Romans, François I of France ‘and all the other Christian kings and princes’, but it did no good, and he became virtually a puppet of the Turks.
Desolation crept over the islands, and the more remote of them were almost empty of life. There were virtually no men at all, reported a fifteenth-century traveller, on the island of Sifnos; at Serifos the people lived ‘like brutes’, terrified night and day of Turkish raiders; the islanders of Syros lived only on carobs and goat flesh, while at Ios the farmers did not dare to leave the castle ramparts until old women had crept out in the dawn to make sure there were no Turks about. The lights faded in the pirgoi, the choirs no longer sang in the little island cathedrals, and one by one, almost organically, by assault or default the Venetian possessions of the Aegean dropped into the hands of the Turk.
By the last years of the seventeenth century everything was lost, except only the island of Tinos in the Cyclades. The Greek islanders had often betrayed their Catholic masters to the Turks, but this was one place where many of them had been converted to Catholicism themselves – other Greeks called it ‘the Pope’s island’. They were intensely loyal to the Signory, and so it was that when Euboea had been Turkish for 250 years, when the Duchy of the Archipelago was no more than a romantic memory, little Tinos, all 200 square miles of it, still bravely flew the flag.
The Republic could not take much credit for this, for it had neglected the island disgracefully. Tinos had come under direct Venetian government in 1390 by the bequest of its feudal lord, descendant of one of Sanudo’s men, but the Venetians were not anxious to be saddled with it. They auctioned a lease on it at first. Later they acceded to the appeals of its inhabitants, who had suffered greatly from their feudal masters (one of them had tried to deport them all to another underpopulated island he happened to possess), and who declared in a petition to the Signory that ‘no lordship under heaven is as just and good as that of Venice’. For three centuries a Venetian Rector governed the island, and the Venetian fleet intermittently protected it.
Intermittently, because here as everywhere they never did succeed in keeping Turkish raiders off. Time after time ferocious Muslim generals landed on the Tinos foreshore, burning villages and killing everyone in sight. They seldom stayed for long, though, and were often sent off in ignominy. Once a passing Turkish admiral sent a message to the Rector demanding the instant payment of a heavy tribute, in default of which the entire island would be laid waste by fire. The Rector replied that the Pasha had only to come and get it, but when the Turkish galleys entered the port, instantly their crews were fallen upon by a thousand Tiniots, led by the Rector in person, and humiliatingly beaten back to their ships. Tinos acquired a reputation for unwavering resolution, and was much praised in the reports and chronicles of the Venetians – ‘a rose among thorns’, as one writer picturesquely put it, surveying the ever pricklier prospect of the Aegean. (Besides, they very much liked its onions, which were eaten raw, like apples, and which were claimed to be odourless.)
The Tiniots themselves were no less proud of their loyalty, and to this day Tinos remains one of the most Catholic islands of the Greek archipelagos. This is piquant, for it is also the Lourdes of Greek Orthodoxy. In 1824 a miraculous icon of the Virgin was found buried beneath a chapel on the island, and a powerful cult grew up around it, with popular pilgrimages twice each year. Thousands of people come out for the day from Athens, and hundreds of sick are brought to be cured. On the Feast of the Assumption in 1940, when the place was crowded with pilgrims, the Greek cruiser Helle was torpedoed in the harbour, presumably by an Italian submarine, and this tragedy has become curiously interwoven with the story of the icon itself, so that models of the warship (which was built in America for the Chinese navy) are sold everywhere among the ex votos and holy pictures, arousing a powerfully emotional association of ideas.
At first, then, even on an ordinary weekday, Tinos feels anything but Venetian. The big white pilgrimage church above the town is patrolled by bearded tall-hatted priests. Crowds of black-shawled women move in and out of the shrine. Through the open doors of the icon’s chapel you may glimpse that mystery of candles, incense, gleaming silver things, swarthy ecstatic faces, shadows and resplendences that is the essence of the Orthodox style. The long, wide highway to the church is lined with booths and pilgrim hostels, and every other souvenir is stamped, somehow or other, with the image of the icon. Attended by these holy events, busy always with the ferry-steamers, the motor-caiques, the speedboats, the visiting yachts and the rumbling motor-gunboats of the Hellenic seas, Tinos town is pure, almost archetypically Greek. Only the fancifully decorated dovecotes on the edge of town, like so many pastry-houses, remind one that the Venetians, with their taste for the frivolous and the extravagant, were ever here at all.
It is in the countryside behind that you can still get in touch with them. The Catholic archbishop, successor to a long line of Venetian incumbents, tactfully has his palace in the inland village of Xynara, well away from the holy icon, and the Venetians themselves, in their days of power, established their headquarters away from the water’s edge. From a boat off-shore you can see the pattern of their settlement. To the left of the modern port a mole and a couple of ruins mark the site of their harbour; inland, white villages with Italianate campaniles speckle the countryside like exiles from the Veneto; and over the shoulder of the town, clinging to the sides of an almost conical mountain peak, you can just make out the remains of the Venetian colonial capital, their very last foothold in the Aegean Sea, Exombourgo.
Not much is left of it. In its great days it was something of a wonder, and the old prints, prone to licence though they are, suggest its spectacular character. The peak, which is actually 1,700 feet high, looks excessively tall, steep and sudden in these high-spirited old versions, and towers like an Everest over the island: and perched dizzily on its summit, like an outcrop of the rock itself, the fortress of Santa Elena stands in a positive eruption of towers, walls and flags. Apparently impregnable ramparts circle the peak, and below it the island seems to lie trustful and
secure, characterized by benign farmsteads and peacefully anchored ships.
It is not like that now. The remains on top of the hill still gloriously command the island landscape and the seas around, westward to Kea, northward to Andros, eastward to Chios and Irakia, southward to Paros and Naxos of the dukes. They are scarcely more than piles of stones, though, hardly recognizable as a fortress at all but for the steep steps that lead up the crag to them, the fortified gateway in the ramparts, and the little chapel which survives, fresh-painted and candle-lit, in the lee of the mountain below.
Besides, if the drama is there, the glory is gone, for in the end the Venetians themselves tamely surrendered the Rose of the Aegean, and brought their long suzerainty in these waters to an ignoble conclusion.
It was a famous scandal. By the end of the seventeenth century the island’s defences were in a shameful state. The Rector might still row about the place with his fourteen-oar galley, and the Venetian gentry still lived in some style in their mansions on the mountain. But the fortress was held, so a French visitor reported in 1700, only by ‘fourteen ragged soldiers, seven of whom are French deserters’. There were some 500 houses within the walls of Exombourgo then, but grand though their situation seemed to imaginative cartographers, on the spot it was not so enviable. Tinos was traditionally the home of Aeolus, Lord of the Winds: the cutting north winds of the Aegean swept through those stony houses as it chills the ruins today, and the office of Rector in this comfortless and perilous outpost of empire was looked upon by likely appointees, so the Frenchman says, as a mortification.
Huddled here then at daybreak on 5 June 1715, the last of the Venetian rulers of the Aegean saw, far in the bay below them, a Turkish fleet off-shore. A lonely moment! There were forty-five warships down there, and transports enough to carry an army of 25,000 men. The islanders rushed up to Exombourgo for safety, taking their weapons with them. The Turks advanced inland with artillery, mortars and scaling-ladders and, surrounding the mountain, began a bombardment of the fortress. At first the garrison fought back strongly, and Turkish casualties were heavy. There was plenty of food and ammunition up there, and the Greeks, we are told, were perfectly ready to fight it out to the end. It was the Venetians who surrendered. They are thought to have been bribed, and certainly the terms they arranged were disgraceful. Every Venetian on the island would be allowed to leave. Every Greek must remain. The Rector, Bernardo Balbi, agreed without argument, and he and his men were allowed to march out of the fortress with all the honours of war. They sailed away unharmed, leaving all their subjects, the most faithful they ever had, to the mercy of the Turks.
So the long Venetian presence in the sea of legend ended miserably, not at all as Dandolo, Sanudo and their bravos could have foreseen. Balbi, returning shamefaced to Venice, was accused of accepting bribes from the Turks, and imprisoned for life. His officers are said to have been punished for their venality by having hot silver poured over their bodies. The Turks blew up most of Exombourgo, and shipped the loyal Greeks of Tinos away to slavery in Africa.
Tinos