City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (27 page)

There was little rejoicing in Genoa either. ‘I saw no annual commemoration of this triumph,’ wrote the Genoese chronicler, ‘nor did the doge visit any churches to give thanks, as is the normal custom; perhaps, because so many brave Genoese fell in the fight, the victory of that day is best forgotten.’

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The war went on. It moved west and continued, through a series of oscillating mood swings that drove each republic in turn from manic joy to the brink of despair, like the dip and lurch of a huge sea. With smaller fleets and diminished resources of manpower, the effects of naval defeat were more keenly felt. When Pisani and the Aragonese wiped out a Genoese fleet off Sardinia the effects inside the city were dramatic. People wept in the streets; with Genoa cut off from its sources of wealth and grain, humiliation, starvation, and abject surrender seemed at hand. The citizens resorted to desperate measures. They made voluntary submission to Venice’s terrestrial rival, Giovanni Visconti, the powerful lord of Milan, as a protective shield. Victory was snatched from Venice’s hands. Visconti despatched Petrarch, at this time a diplomat in his court, to attempt to woo the Venetians. Using all his literary skill, he called flatteringly upon ‘the two most powerful peoples, the most flourishing cities, the two Eyes of Italy’ to make peace. And he pointed out that Venetian over-confidence might yet be punished: ‘the dice of fortune are ambiguous. It cannot but be that if one of the Eyes is put out, the other will be darkened. For to hope for a bloodless victory over such an enemy, beware less it betoken a fatuous and fallacious confidence!’

The warning went unheeded. The doge, Andrea Dandolo, sent a blunt reply:

… the aim of the Genoese is to snatch from us the most precious of all possessions – our liberty; and in meddling with our rights they drive us to arms … the quarrel is an old one … Thus we have undertaken war, merely that we may secure our country, which we hold dearer than life. Farewell.

Petrarch was left to mutter at the mercantile republic’s uncouth response: ‘No words of mine, not even of Cicero himself, could have reached ears that were stubbornly stopped, or opened obstinate hearts.’ And he repeated his warning about the dangers of internecine war: ‘Do not fool yourself that if Italy disintegrates Venice will not also fall: for Venice is part of Italy.’ Venice would beg to differ – it held itself distinct from the mainland, though by now more deeply involved than it liked to admit.

But as the contest went on the dice did indeed start to roll the other way. It was now Venice’s turn to be infected with fear. The Genoese constructed a new fleet and Doria returned to inflict a shattering defeat on Pisani at Porto Longo on the island of Sapienza, near Modon in the southern Peloponnese. It was a catastrophe as total as the Republic had ever experienced. All its galleys were lost. Six thousand men, the flower of Venice’s seafaring people, were taken prisoner and a huge amount of booty lost. Nicolo Pisani, his son Vettor and a detachment of sailors made it to Modon. Pisani was deprived of all further public office and lived the remainder of his days a broken man. Vettor was acquitted, but memory of the defeat at Porto Longo would cling to the family like a dark stain and return to haunt the Venetian lagoon twenty-five years later. The doge died two months before this disaster, ‘sparing him’, Petrarch wrote, with the smug satisfaction of a man who had been proved right, ‘the sight of his country’s bitter anguish and the still more biting letters that I should have written him’.

Unlike in Genoa however, defeat did not create civil unrest or constitutional collapse in Venice, though within a few months
Doge Dandolo’s successor, Marino Faliero, had been executed for an attempted coup. In June 1355, the duke of Milan imposed a new peace on the warring republics, to the relief of Venice and the fury of Genoa. It amounted, in effect, to little more than a ceasefire. Both parties agreed to keep out of the Sea of Azov for three years – a short-term setback to Venice, unable now to use Tana, but welcome to Genoa, whose primacy at Caffa was restored. Venice counted down the months to June 1358 with intense interest; meanwhile it embarked on a new round of diplomatic initiatives with all the trading nations of the hemisphere – the great khan of the Golden Horde, Flanders, Egypt and Tunis.

The war had proved indecisive but both sides had in turn glimpsed the possibility of an elusive final victory, only to have the ultimate prize snatched away by the meddling duke of Milan; each had penetrated deep into the other’s waters and taken its opponent to the brink. Twenty-five years later the same war would be refought with the same tactics, reversals, hopes and fears, in the same waters but with magnified consequences. Next time it would be fought to a finish.

In the Vatican they wrung their hands in exasperation at the running hostility of the maritime republics. Successive papal attempts at crusading ventures were repeatedly stymied by their rivalry, as only the protagonists possessed the resources to transport troops. What outsiders realised, and Venice herself was keenly aware of, was that in the interstices of these exhausting wars and the Byzantine collapse, the Ottoman Turks were inexorably advancing. The worst day’s work the Genoese ever did themselves, or the rest of Christendom, came in November 1354 when they ferried an Ottoman army across the Dardanelles into Europe. They charged a ducat a head. It was a handsome rate but a terrible bargain. Once established in Gallipoli, the Turks became impossible to dislodge. They were in Europe for good – a fourth snake entwined in the politics of Constantinople and its hinterland.

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These wars also had deepening repercussions in the Stato da Mar. The Republic’s maintenance of its seaways and maritime defences, under the pressure of competitors, drew increasingly heavily on the resources of its colonies. All its outposts, ruled directly from the centre, felt the weighty presence of the Dominante – especially in fiscal matters. The Venetians were masters of a complete vocabulary of taxation, refining and implementing with obsessive scrutiny models derived from their Byzantine predecessors. They levied the
capinicho
, the
acrosticho
and the
zovatico
– direct taxes – on households, land holdings and animals; indirect taxes, the
arico
, the
commerclum
and the
tansa
, fell on the sale of oil and wine, on exports of cheese and iron, on skins and salted fish and the mooring of ships (according to function and tonnage), on the transport of wine even within Crete, and countless other commodities and economic functions. The
angariae
– taxes in kind levied for the construction of fortifications, guard duty, the supply of fodder and firewood – were particularly irksome to the townspeople of Crete; monopoly purchase by the state of core commodities, especially wheat below the market rate, aggravated landowners. There were also special levies to cope with military emergencies and pirate attacks. Wherever the banner of St Mark flew, the Republic’s economic demands were felt. Taxes were levied impersonally on all its colonial subjects. They fell on Venetians and indigenous people alike, on foreigners, on clergy and laity, on peasants and townspeople – though Jews were taxed with singular zeal.

Images of empire: the Venetian domination of Crete

Nowhere felt these fiscal burdens more keenly than Crete. The island was the nerve centre of empire. Every commercial and maritime enterprise to the east passed through its harbours. It lay in the front line of crusade and maritime war. Its wheat was vital to the lagoon. It was responsible for arming galleys and levying their manpower, for supplying double-baked biscuits for the Republic’s war fleets, for soldiers and oarsmen. When Venice participated in a crusade to Smyrna in 1344 to discomfit the Turks, it was Crete that paid for it. It was Cretan wheat that was
monopolised by the Republic at discount prices. Furthermore the island was expensive to run. The increasing predations of Turkish pirates from the coast of Asia Minor called for military defence, fortifications and galley patrols. The walls of Candia were repeatedly damaged by earthquakes, and its vital man-made harbour and long protecting mole were subject to furious battering from the sea. All this required money and Crete had to pay. Decade after decade a slowly accumulating grudge against the tax demands of the distant mother city grew in strength – not just amongst the Greek population, who had rebelled frequently, but also amongst their landed Venetian overlords, the feudatories, now settled in the island for generations. In the summer of 1363 this dissatisfaction plunged the Venetian imperial project into turmoil.

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On 21 July 1363, the Venetian records noted a judgement by the Council of Ten, one of the state’s powerful governing bodies. It was against one Marco Turlanio, who had ‘permitted an armourer, not named, to go to Padua to practise his craft, notably the making of crossbows. This action is extremely damaging to Venetian interests. The Ten therefore condemn Turlanio to permanent exile and banishment to the island of Crete.’ Padua was a hostile city and the defection of craftsmen with specialised military or industrial skills was taken extremely seriously in Venice – salt- or glass-workers risked having their right hands cut off or their lips and noses (in the case of women), or being hunted down and
assassinated. Three months later, the registers record that Turlanio was still in Venice: the punishment had been suspended. What happened in between was a convulsion that shook Venice’s empire to the core.

On 8 August, the Venetian feudatories learned that the senate was intending to introduce a new tax for the maintenance and cleaning of the harbour at Candia. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The feudatories objected strongly; it was felt that the work was being undertaken solely for the benefit of the merchant fleets passing through Crete to the shores of Egypt and Syria. They assembled at Candia and demanded the right of appeal to the doge in Venice. The duke of Crete, Leonardo Dandolo, refused to budge; the tax must be paid. He despatched heralds across the city to proclaim this – pointedly to the Church of St Titus, Crete’s patron saint, where the chief objectors were gathered. The duke’s message was blunt: pay the tax or face confiscation of property and death. There were nineteen Venetian ships in the harbour and around five hundred sailors; Dandolo was advised to call on these men to seize control of the main square and disperse the demonstration. He refused, fearing that this might add fuel to the fire. The sailors stayed in the port.

But Dandolo’s edict failed to cower the landlords. The following day they gathered in the central square, backed by an aggrieved mob of townspeople, servants and soldiers, and attempted to storm the ducal palace. The doors held firm. The duke inside was obdurate but personally brave and ordered the gates to be opened. He commanded the feudatories to disperse or face death. Enraged, one of the ringleaders, Tito Venier, cried out, ‘It is you who will die, traitor!’ Dandolo was saved by his courage. Several other protesters stepped forward and shielded him, but by the end of the day he was under arrest, along with other leading dignitaries of the administration loyal to Venice.

Within a week, the rebels had created a mirror government for an independent Crete, with the Venetian landowner Marco Gradenigo appointed governor and rector, supported by four
advisers and a council of twenty. Crete had risen repeatedly in revolt against its Venetian masters for 150 years, but the rebellion of 1363 exposed a far deeper fault line in the Republic’s maritime empire. Previously all uprisings had been the work of dispossessed Greek landlords. This was different. For the first time, the Venetian colonists rebelled. They included some of the great names of the Republic’s history, noble families such as Gradenigo, Venier, Grimaldi, Querini and Dandolo, which had provided doges, administrators, admirals and merchant princes during the upward curve of expansion. The Republic had always pursued a strict policy of segregation between subject peoples and Venetian colonists and administrators, whom it hedged about with restrictive clauses and prohibitions. Its watchword was ethnic purity; its deepest fear assimilation. In the time-honoured phrase, however far-flung Venetian citizens might be – in Tana, London, Alexandria, Constantinople, Bruges, Lisbon or Candia – they were ‘flesh of our flesh, bones of our bones’ – loyal and patriotic participants in the communal venture that comprised the Most Serene Republic of St Mark, and whose magnetic north was the lagoon.

Yet on Crete, after 150 years of occupation, in which generations had lived on the island, this aloofness had softened. They spoke Greek as well as their own Venetian dialect, some had intermarried into the leading Greek clans, a few had leant towards the mystical beauty of the Orthodox rite: Crete was starting to conquer the conquerors. The tenor of this revolt was set by the debate over the standard that should now fly over the newly independent island, in an episode related by the heavily anti-Cretan Venetian chronicler de Monacis: