This small victory did much to improve the security of the Adriatic, and indeed of all the central Mediterranean, but it did little to change the basic political situation. The overriding threat to the peace of the region remained Spain, and Spain was not looking only to armed force or to artful diplomacy to advance her interests. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were above all the age of intrigue. The idea itself, of course, was nothing new; in the Florence of the Medici, the Milan of the Visconti, the Rome of the Borgias, there had been instances aplenty of plots and poisonings, of spies and counterspies, of the stiletto beneath the cloak. But now, in France and England as well as in Italy, conspiracy became almost a way of life. Within the memory of men still in their middle age, there had been the assassinations of Admiral Coligny and of Henry IV himself, the countless machinations that marked the sad, violent life of Mary Queen of Scots–and then, on 5 November 1605, the Gunpowder Plot.
There was no government in Europe more involved in the dark world of intrigue than that of the Most Serene Republic. Every embassy, every foreign household even, was thoroughly penetrated by Venetian agents, reporting directly back to the dreaded Council of Ten details of comings and goings, of letters steamed open and conversations overheard. A special watch was kept on the leading courtesans, several of whom were paid by the state to pass on any pillow talk that might prove of interest, for purposes of blackmail or otherwise. Normally, however, the Ten preferred to perform its more distasteful duties in secret; it was therefore with some astonishment that early risers, passing across the Piazzetta on 18 May 1618, saw the bodies of two men, each dangling by a single leg–a sure sign that their crime was treason–from a hastily erected gallows between the two columns at the southern end. More astonishing still was the fact that, even after the two bodies had been joined by a third bearing unmistakable signs of torture, no proclamation was made to identify the unfortunates or to explain the reason for their fate. Inevitably, rumours spread, most of them focusing on the likelihood of a major conspiracy against the Republic, of which there could be only one instigator. Hostile demonstrations were staged outside the Spanish Embassy, obliging the ambassador, the Marquis of Bedmar, to ask the authorities for special police protection. Meanwhile, he reported back to Madrid:
The name of the Most Catholic King, and that of the Spanish nation, is in Venice the most odious that can be pronounced. Among the people the very word ‘Spanish’ is an insult…They seem to thirst for our blood. It is all the fault of their rulers, who have always taught them to hate us.
This was not strictly true. For years the Spanish Embassy had been the busiest centre of intrigue in the city, its anterooms and corridors teeming with sinister, slouch-hatted figures whispering together in groups while they awaited audiences with the ambassador. And when, the following October, the Ten finally disclosed in a full report to the Senate the details of what had taken place, the Marquis was revealed–as everyone had known he would be–as one of the leading figures in what came to be known as the Spanish Conspiracy.
It is entirely appropriate that this conspiracy should have indirectly furnished Thomas Otway with the material for his best and most celebrated play, Venice Preserved. The true story has all the elements of seventeenth-century melodrama. Here is the villain Don Pedro, Duke of Osuna and Spanish Viceroy of Naples, determined to destroy the power of Venice in the Mediterranean. Here is the Marquis of Bedmar, Spanish ambassador, cultivated and charming but in reality ‘one of the most potent and dangerous spirits Spain ever produced’, filled with an implacable hostility towards Venice and fully approving of Osuna’s objective. Here are the two chief instruments of the conspirators: Jacques Pierre, Norman adventurer and corsair, now a Spanish secret agent with the Venetian fleet, practically illiterate but one of the most brilliant seamen of his day, and his inseparable antithesis Nicolas Regnault, educated and plausible with his mellifluous Italian and his exquisite handwriting. And here, finally, is the hero: the young Frenchman Balthasar Juven, who has come to Venice to enter the service of the Republic.
The conspiracy itself, too, was ambitious enough to satisfy the most demanding dramatist. It was also, like all its kind, complicated and convoluted in the extreme. A full account of it would be insufferably tedious, and has no place in this book.156 For some weeks before the appointed day, Spanish soldiers in civilian clothes would be infiltrated in twos and threes into Venice, where they would be secretly armed by Bedmar. Then, when all was in readiness, Osuna’s galleons, flying his own personal standard, would advance up the Adriatic and land an expeditionary force on the Lido, together with a fleet of flat-bottomed barges in which that force would be rowed across the lagoon to the city. The Piazza, Doge’s Palace, Rialto and Arsenal would be seized, their armouries ransacked to provide additional arms for the conspirators and for any Venetians who might be prepared to lend them support. The leading Venetian notables would be killed or held to ransom. Venice itself would pass into the possession of Osuna; the loot and ransom money would go to the other conspirators to share among themselves.
Whether so wild an enterprise could ever have succeeded seems improbable; its originators, however, had no chance to put it to the test. The discovery of the plot was due to Juven, who was approached by a compatriot named Gabriel Moncassin, informed of all that was afoot and invited to participate. What Moncassin did not know was that Juven was a Huguenot. Detesting Spain and the religion it stood for, he immediately informed the Venetian authorities, and the Council of Ten swung into action. Jacques Pierre was arrested and summarily dispatched; his body was sewn into a sack and dropped overboard. Regnault and two other conspirators, the brothers Desbouleaux, were seized, tortured and then, after they confessed, hung upside-down in the Piazzetta. As many as 300 minor participants were discreetly liquidated. Only Osuna and Bedmar were too powerful to be touched. They continued their intrigues from behind the walls of their respective palaces, but their grand opportunity had been missed. Venice was preserved.
CHAPTER XVIII
Crete and the Peloponnese
For a quarter of a century after the events described in the last chapter, the Mediterranean continued curiously calm. Occasionally a minor squall might ruffle its surface, but there were no storms, no epic upheavals on the scale of Malta, Cyprus or Lepanto. Simply in the light of the previous history of the Middle Sea, this is remarkable enough; it is more surprising still when we consider that the very year of the Spanish Conspiracy, 1618, also saw the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, which was to tear much of northern and eastern Europe to shreds.
From the Venetian point of view, however, the peace came just in time. In October of the same year there occurred an incident which, though Venice bore no part of the responsibility for it, was ultimately to result in the loss of her most valuable remaining colony: the island of Crete. Sooner or later, as she must have known, war was inevitable; Crete was too tempting a prize, the Turks too covetous an adversary, for her possession to go much longer uncontested. It remains ironic that the initial Turkish attack should have been the result of a piece of deliberate provocation on the part of a minor power which, after the Republic itself, stood to lose more than any other from the surrender of the last important Christian outpost in the eastern Mediterranean.
Although the Knights of St John possessed a priory157 in Venice–inherited from the Templars after their dissolution in 1312–they and the Venetians had for centuries cordially disliked each other. It could hardly have been otherwise. Since their order was immensely rich in property held all over Christian Europe, the Knights despised trade and commerce. As men of God, bound by the monkish vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they disapproved of the Venetians’ worldliness and love of pleasure. Finally, as men of the sword and children of the Crusades, their avowed object–apart from the cure of the sick–was to fight the infidel wherever they found him, and they deplored Venice’s reiterated desire for peace with the Sultan, an attitude which they considered a shamele
ss betrayal of the Christian cause.
By the 1640s the Knights were but a frail and feeble reflection of what they had been in those heroic days, only eighty years before, when they had successfully defended their island against the greatest fleet that Süleyman the Magnificent could hurl against them. They continued to run their famous hospital, where they still maintained standards of hygiene and of nursing far in advance of any to be found elsewhere, but their Crusading spirit was beginning to evaporate, and their naval operations tended all too often to savour less of holy war than of common piracy. Nor did they invariably confine their depredations to Muslim shipping; unprovoked attacks, launched on the flimsiest of pretexts, against Venetian and other Christian merchantmen were becoming increasingly frequent.
To the Venetians, in short, the Knights of Malta had become a nuisance only slightly less tiresome than the Uskoks in former days. Worst of all, they had adopted the old Uskok habit of harassing Turkish vessels in the Adriatic, a practice for which the Sultan invariably held Venice responsible–with much consequent damage to the friendly relations which the Venetians strove at all costs to maintain with the Sublime Porte. More than once, indeed, the Doge had been obliged to send for the local prior of the Order to make a vehement protest–never more forcefully than in September 1644, when he went so far as to threaten the sequestration of all the Knights’ property in the territory of the Republic if they did not improve their behaviour. The Knights, as usual, took no notice.
Cruising in the Aegean at the beginning of October, a squadron of six ships of the Order fell upon and captured a rich Turkish galleon carrying several distinguished pilgrims bound for Mecca, among them the city’s principal civil judge, the Chief Black Eunuch at the Sultan’s court, some thirty ladies of the harem and about fifty Greek slaves. The squadron then sailed on with its prize to Crete, where, landing at some unguarded beach on the southern coast, the ships took on water and disembarked the slaves, together with a number of horses. Soon the local Venetian governor arrived and, not wishing to be implicated even after the event in what was, after all, an act of shameless piracy, ordered them away. Having made several attempts to put in at various ports of the island and meeting on each occasion with the same point-blank refusal, the Knights finally abandoned the Turkish vessel (which was no longer seaworthy) with its passengers and returned to Malta.
Occupying the Ottoman throne at this time was the half-mad Sultan Ibrahim.158 When the news was brought to him he exploded with rage and ordered the immediate massacre of all Christians in his empire. This order, fortunately, he was later persuaded to countermand, but Venetian agents in Constantinople were by now sending reports of an immense war fleet being prepared on the Bosphorus, and it soon became clear that punitive action on an alarming scale was being contemplated. At first it was automatically assumed that this fleet was to be directed against Malta, an assumption that was confirmed by an official proclamation in March 1645, but despatches from the Venetian bailo in Constantinople warned that this was a deliberate feint. The Sultan, he reported, was convinced that the Venetians had been behind the whole incident; why else would the raiders have made straight for Crete? His true enemy was not the Knights, but Venice herself; his immediate objective was not Malta, but Crete.
It was not long before the bailo was proved right. On 30 April a Turkish fleet of 400 sail, carrying an estimated 50,000 fighting men, passed through the Dardanelles. At first it headed towards Malta as announced, sailing straight past Crete and putting in at Navarino, in the southwest corner of the Peloponnese, for reinforcements and supplies. Only on its departure from there on 21 June was it seen to have changed course. Four days later the invading army landed a little to the west of Canea (the modern Khania) and advanced on the town. The first round of the battle had begun.
Crete–or, as the Venetians called it after its capital city, Candia (now Heraklion)–had been Venice’s first properly constituted overseas colony, dating from 1211 and the sharing out of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade. Its government was based on that of the mother city, but it had never worked as easily or as well. The most fertile parts of the island had been largely swallowed up in vast feudal estates owned by prominent Venetian families, whose immense wealth and overbearing ways had done little to endear them to the local Greek population; these families in turn grumbled over their lack of any real political power, all the principal officials being sent out from Venice, where every major decision was taken. Defence was in normal times entrusted to feudal levies, raised and maintained at the expense of the landowners, and to local militias of townsfolk and peasants; but both sides tended to shrug off their obligations, and discipline varied between the poor and the nonexistent. Corruption was endemic, and the colony was a constant drain on Venetian resources.
The moment it was apprised of the imminent danger, the government of the Republic ordered a new and vigorous defensive programme for the island, sending out to its Proveditor-General, Andrea Corner, a special remittance of 100,000 ducats, an army of 2,500 men including military architects and engineers, and a fleet of thirty galleys with two galleasses to supplement those already on the island. A further fleet, Corner was informed, was in preparation and would sail as soon as possible. All this was better than nothing, but his resources were still hopelessly inadequate for the magnitude of his task, and the time allowed to him far too short. Already as he hurried to the beachhead on that fateful midsummer day, he must have known that the colony’s chances of survival were slim.
Much depended on the speed of the promised Venetian fleet; if it could arrive within a week or two, Canea might yet be saved. But it did not arrive. Corner would have been horrified to learn that it had orders to wait at Zante (Zakynthos) until it was joined by a further combined fleet of twenty-five sail, comprising ships from Tuscany, Naples, the Knights and the Pope; time was what counted now, not numerical strength. Meanwhile, the Turks were entrenching themselves more deeply with every day that passed. The island fortress of St Theodore fell to them, though only after its commander, Biagio Zulian, seeing that further resistance was hopeless, waited until it was overrun and then set light to the powder magazine, blowing up himself, his men, the attacking Turks and the building itself in a single epic explosion which must have been clearly audible in Candia. Canea was weakening fast, its ammunition and supplies running out, its defences steadily undermined by Turkish sappers. On 22 August it surrendered. The Turks, doubtless hoping by a well-timed show of magnanimity to encourage further surrenders as they advanced, promised to respect the lives, honour and property of the local population, allowing the garrison to leave the town with its colours flying and to embark unmolested for Soudha, beyond the Akrotiri159 to the east.
Now more than ever, fortune seemed to favour the invaders. At Soudha the Venetian admiral, Antonio Cappello, suddenly lost his head and abandoned the town; only its superb natural position and recently renewed fortifications saved it from capture. Then the combined fleet, at last arriving (in mid-September) in Cretan waters, made two attempts to recover Canea by surprise attack, but was each time driven back by equinoctial gales. Finally in October its non-Venetian element, under the command of the papal admiral Nicolò Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino–who from the start had shown extreme distaste for the whole expedition–announced its intention of returning home. Not for the first time, Venice’s allies had done her nothing but harm. She would have been better off alone.
Her government, meanwhile, was on full war footing. Having no reason to believe that Sultan Ibrahim intended to confine himself to a single theatre of operations, it sent an additional garrison to Corfu and even began strengthening the defences of the Venetian lagoon. But top priority was naturally given to Crete. Galleys and transports were now sailing for the island almost daily, laden with munitions and supplies of every kind. One need, however, remained unfulfilled: that of a supreme commander, a man whose seniority and reputation would set him above the petty jealousies and rivalries which–particular
ly when Cretan Venetians were involved–were an ever-present danger. The appointment was long debated in the Senate, and in the ensuing vote the name that emerged with an overwhelming majority was that of the Doge himself, Francesco Erizzo.
One voice only was raised against the proposal. Giovanni Pesaro–later to assume the ducal throne himself–very reasonably argued that the cost of sending out the head of state, with his Signoria and an adequate staff and secretariat, was quite unjustifiable at a moment when the Republic needed every penny to pursue the war, and that such a step might well encourage the Sultan similarly to take the field in person, thus greatly intensifying the Turkish war effort. One other consideration was also perhaps worth bearing in mind: Erizzo was now just two months short of his eightieth birthday. But no one listened; all attention was fixed on the old Doge who, in a speech which brought tears to the eyes of all who heard it, declared himself ready to assume the formidable task that had been laid upon him. Fortunately for Venice, he never did so. The preparations alone proved too much for him, and just three weeks later, on 3 January 1646, he died. He was buried in the church of S. Martino, but his heart, in recognition of his unhesitating acceptance of his last commission, was interred beneath the pavement of St Mark’s itself. There being no one else available in Venice of sufficient stature, the whole idea of a generalissimo was shelved, and is heard of no more.
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