Venice was rocked by the true state of affairs on Crete. The crisis was as serious to its colonial interests as the contest with Genoa. The loss of Crete spelled potential catastrophe for the Stato da Mar. Without its hub, the whole imperial venture might disintegrate. Two particular possibilities haunted them: firstly that the Genoese might find Crete advantageous to their interests – and the rebels were already exploring this avenue; the second was that the revolt might spread across the Aegean and trigger uprisings across all Venice’s Greek-speaking possessions. This was also soon confirmed. On 20 October the senate learned that ‘the rebels have sent representatives to Coron and Modon, also to Negroponte, to encourage the inhabitants of these territories to join them’. What had seemed at first like a small local difficulty was developing into a major crisis.
The executive apparatus of the Venetian Republic swung into a state of emergency. Increasingly, Venice was replacing the description of its government as a commune with the grander notion of a signoria, implying lordship over wide realms. Its response was determined and unequivocal: ‘The Signoria cannot give up the great island, pivot of its overseas empire: an expedition will be organised to reconquer it.’ A flurry of terse orders was despatched from the doge’s palace. The first was to seal Crete off from the world. A series of clipped memoranda to the Collegio (the Venetian council concerned with the day-to-day dissemination of information) set down the plan. On 8 October:
The Collegio will communicate to foreign powers the intention of the Signoria with regard to the Cretan rebels: 1 Venice has decided to use all the means in its power to take back Crete; 2 an expedition is being prepared; 3 Foreign powers are requested to order their subjects to cut off all relations with the rebels, especially commercial ones.
The state registers bristle with urgency and tension. Ambassadors’ and messengers’ boats were sent to Rhodes, Cyprus, Constantinople, the baili of Coron, Modon and Negroponte – and above all to the pope, who was hoping that the Venetians would support a crusading project. And they sent envoys to the Genoese, in the belief that the pope would also pressurise their rival into staying its hand in the name of Catholic unity. Additionally ten galleys were ordered to blockade Crete from the outside world. In Coron and Modon, people were expressly forbidden to buy Cretan goods already available there. The island was to be strangled.
With brisk efficiency the Republic set about preparing an armed response. It publicly declared that ‘Crete will be besieged and conquered as quickly as possible’. It cast about for a suitable condottiere to lead an army. While Venice only ever managed naval expeditions itself, land wars were sub-contracted by law. One candidate, Galeotto Malatesta, was rejected on cost grounds – ‘his pretentious demands are exorbitant’, the senate complained. They finally secured the services of a skilled Veronese soldier, Luchino dal Verme, and raised a professional army: two thousand foot soldiers, mining engineers from Bohemia, Turkish cavalry, five hundred English mercenaries, siege engines, thirty-three galleys including horse transports, twelve round ships laden with supplies and siege engines. Venice was accustomed to being paid to carry other people’s armies across the eastern seas. Raising and transporting its own was highly costly – ‘the perfidious revolt of the Cretans is highly damaging to the goods and resources of Venice’ was the complaint – but the Republic was determined to strike fast and with an iron fist. It still took eight months to ready the fleet. On 28 March 1364 dal Verme swore his oath of office and received his war banner from the doge in an elaborate ceremony. On 10 April, after a grand review of troops on the Lido, the fleet set sail. By 6 May it was rocking at anchor in a small bay six miles west of Candia.
Long before dal Verme stepped ashore, news of Venice’s armada had begun to throw the rebellion into disarray. Some of the dissident Venetians started to think again. Murderous rifts appeared between factions: town against country, Venetian against Greek, Catholic against Orthodox. One of the Gradenigo clan, Leonardo, who had embraced Orthodoxy with the zeal of the convert, hatched a plan, in conjunction with a Greek monk called Milletus, to kill the waverers. Its remit widened to the murder of all Venetian landlords living outside the safety of the city walls. Milletus prepared a night of the long knives, targeting the isolated farms and country houses of the Italians. De Monacis gave a vivid description of this new wave of terror:
… in order to avoid suspicion of this plot, Milletus stayed with Andreas Corner … formerly his closest friend, in the house at Psonopila. When night fell, Milletus with his partners in crime burst their way into the house. Terrified, Andreas Corner said to him: ‘My friend, why have you come like this?’ Milletus replied, ‘To kill you.’ … Andreas said: ‘Have you stooped to such a great crime that you would kill your family friend and benefactor?’ He replied, ‘It must be so; friendship gives way to religion, liberty and the eradication of you schismatics from this island, which is our birthright.’ … Having said this, they killed him.
The scene was repeated across the Cretan countryside: the knock on the door, the gasp of surprise, the sudden blow. ‘That night right through until morning they killed Gabriele Venerio in his house at Ini, Marino Pasqualigo, Laurentio Pasqualigo, Laurentio Quirino, Marco and Nicolo Mudazzo, Jacobo and Petro Mudazzo …’ The list was long. A shiver ran through Venetian Crete. It was no longer safe to live outside the walls of Candia, Retimo or Canea. The rebellion threatened to spiral out of control. Candia itself lapsed into confusion, stirred by the combustible mixture of Greek patriotism and the newly formed rabble army. A mob attempted to storm the prison and kill the duke of Crete and the Venetian sailors. It was restrained by the city’s administration. Even Leonardo Gradenigo was alarmed by the turn of events. It was decided that the monk Milletus was too dangerous an ally for the Venetian rebels. He was lured to a monastery near Candia, captured and hurled off the roof of the duke’s palace, where the fickle mob finished him off with swords.
With the gathering news of a Venetian fleet and a growing fear of the Greeks, the debates inside the palace became more intense. What the Venetians and the urban Greeks of Candia feared alike was the stirring of a peasants’ revolt – the flaring of centuries of oppression by a downtrodden people. To manage an uprising they could no longer control, an extreme solution was put forward: ‘in order to rein in the Greek rebellion, to subject Crete to an external lord, namely the Genoese’. To many of the Venetian lords this was a betrayal too far; tugged by conflicting loyalties, some proposed that it was time to beg for Venice’s mercy. One of the proposers, Marco Gradenigo, was summoned back to the duke’s palace to discuss the matter – in fact to an ambush. Twenty-five young men had been hidden in the palace chapel. Gradenigo was killed. All the others who opposed the Genoese initiative were rounded up and imprisoned. The council was packed with additional Greek members and the vote carried. A galley flying the flag of St Titus set sail for Genoa, but eight dissenters managed to smuggle a message back to Venice, warning that their rivals were now being invited to enter the fray.
All this was in train when dal Verme anchored his fleet on 6 or 7 May 1364 and disembarked a few miles west of Candia. The terrain ahead was broken and rocky, cut by rivers and gorges, through which only narrow paths led to the city. In this landscape the rebel army lay in wait. Dal Verme despatched an advanced guard of a hundred to scout the terrain. Picking their way through the rocky passes, they were quickly ambushed and massacred. When the main force followed up behind, they stumbled upon a ghastly scene. The bodies had been horribly mutilated. According to de Monacis, keen to colour up Greek atrocities, the rebels had left the bodies with ‘their genitals in their mouths and had cut off their tongues and pushed them up their backsides. This atrocity greatly enraged the Italians.’ Both sides drew up their forces to gain control of the pass, but it soon became clear that the rabble army was no match for professional soldiers who had fought their way through the city wars of northern Italy – and who were now bent on avenging their fallen comrades. The rebels quickly broke and ra
n. Many were killed and captured; others took to the mountains. Within a few hours the army was plundering the suburbs of Candia; shortly after, the city surrendered. The keys were carried out by penitent officials to dal Verme. The towns of Retimo and Canea rapidly followed suit. Tito Venier, one of the original instigators of revolt, joined the Greek Callergis clan in the mountains. The revolt of St Titus had collapsed almost as abruptly as it arose. Its flag was torn down; once again the lion of St Mark fluttered gruffly from the ducal palace. In the main square of Candia, the executions began.
The news reached Venice on 4 June. Its arrival was recorded in a memorable letter written by Petrarch.
It was about midday … I was standing by chance at a window looking at the wide expanse of sea … suddenly we were interrupted by the unexpected sight of one of those long ships they call galleys, all decorated with green foliage, which was coming into port under oars … the sailors and some young men crowned with leaves and with joyful faces were waving banners from the bow … the lookout in the highest tower signalled the arrival and the whole city came running spontaneously, eager to know what had happened. When the ship was near enough to make out the details, we could see the enemy flags hanging from the stern. There was no doubt that the ship was announcing a victory … When he heard this Doge Lorenzo … together with all the people wanted to give heartfelt thanks to God throughout the whole city but especially in the basilica of St Mark, which I believe is the most beautiful church there is.
There was an explosion of festive joy within the city. Everyone understood how much Crete mattered. It was the hub of the whole colonial and commercial system, on which Venice depended for trade and wealth. There were church services and processions to give thanks for the victory, and expressions of civic generosity. Convicts were released from prison; dowries allotted to poor servant girls; the whole city, according to de Monacis, was given over to days of ceremonial and spectacle. Petrarch watched tournaments and jousting in St Mark’s Square, sitting beside the doge on the church loggia under an awning with the four horses breathing down his neck:
… they seemed to be neighing and pawing the ground as if alive … below me there wasn’t an empty spot … the huge square, the church itself, the towers, roofs, porticoes and windows overflowed with spectators jammed together, as if packed one on another … On our right … was a wooden stage where four hundred of the most eligible noble women, the flower of beauty and gentility, were seated.
Celebrations after the recapture of Crete
There was even a visiting party of English noblemen present to enjoy the proceedings.
With victory came retribution. The senate was determined to eradicate the guilty parties from its domain. Punishment came with many refinements: death by torture or decapitation; the tearing apart of families; the exile not just from the island of Crete but from ‘the lands of the emperor of Constantinople, the duchy of the Aegean, the Knights of St John on Rhodes, the lands of the Turks’. Venice sought to expunge Cretan branches of families such as Gradenigo and Venier from its records. For home consumption, some were brought back to Venice in chains. Paladino Permarino had his hands chopped off and was hanged between the twin columns as an inspiration and a warning.
*
Both celebration and exemplary punishment proved to be premature. The towns of Crete had been restored to fealty; in the countryside the embers of revolt kept bursting into flames that proved hard to stamp out. In the mountains of western Crete a small rump of dissident Venetian rebels, including Tito Venier, one of the original ringleaders, joined forces with the Greek clan of Callergis, backed by a truculent peasantry, to continue guerrilla warfare against the Venetian state. They targeted isolated farms, killing their occupants, burning their vineyards, destroying fortified positions so that Venetian landlords were forced back into the towns and the countryside became a zone of insurrection and danger; small military detachments were ambushed and wiped out. Venice had to devote increasing numbers of men and rotate their military commanders in a search for closure. It was a dirty, protracted war eventually won by cruelty and perseverance. It took four years. The Venetians employed a scorched-earth policy, backed by rewards for turning in rebels. As the Greek peasants starved, they began to co-operate, handing over captured rebels, their wives and children – and sacks of bloody heads. With their support base shrinking, the rebels were forced further and further back into the inaccessible recesses of mountain Crete. In the spring of 1368, Tito Venier and the Callergis brothers made a last stand at Anopoli, the most remote fastness in the south-west. Patiently they were tracked down by the Venetian commander and betrayed by the local populace. In a cave on a rocky hillside, Cretan resistance lived its final moments. Holed up and surrounded, Giorgio Callergis continued to fire defiant arrows at the Venetian soldiers, but his brother realised that further resistance was pointless. In a symbolic act of defeat, he broke his bow, saying that it was no longer needed. Venier, wounded in the ear, stumbled out to surrender. When he asked for a bandage, someone replied: ‘Your wound doesn’t need treatment; it’s utterly incurable.’ Venier realised what was being said and just nodded. Shortly afterwards he was beheaded in the public square in Candia.
Crete, exhausted and ruined, sank back into peace. There would be no further major rebellions. The Venetian lion would fly from the duke’s palace in Candia for another three hundred years; the Republic ruled it with an iron hand. Those areas that had provided centres of rebellion, the high, fertile upland plateau of Lasithi in the east, Anopoli in the Sphakian mountains, were desertified. Cultivation was forbidden on pain of death. They remained in this state for a century.
In all this turmoil, Genoa stayed its hand. When the rebel galley reached the city in 1364 and begged for aid, it was refused. Venice had sent ambassadors to request a united front against rebellion; Genoa probably resisted the temptation more because the pope had demanded Catholic unity than because of any active spirit of co-operation between the two rivals. It was only a temporary ceasefire. Five years after the final surrender war broke out yet again.
Bridling St Mark
1372–1379
The trigger was ominously familiar: the presence of rival merchants in a foreign port, then an exchange of words, a scuffle, a brawl, finally a massacre. The difference lay in the outcome – where previous wars had ended in uneasy truce, the resulting contest was fought to the finish. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century both sides went for the jugular. The War of Chioggia, as it is known to history, brought together all the choke points of commercial rivalry – the shores of the Levant, the Black Sea, the coasts of Greece, the troubled waterways of the Bosphorus – but it was decided within the Venetian lagoon.
The flashpoint was the port of Famagusta. Cyprus, ruled by a fading dynasty of French crusaders, the Lusignans, was a crucial trading hub for both republics. Venice had strong commercial interests there in cotton and sugar growing, and the island was a market for the exchange of goods and a way station on the route to the Levant. Famagusta, lying among palm trees beside a glittering sea, was only sixty miles from Beirut. Here, at the coronation of a new Lusignan king, Peter II, the jostling rivalries of Venice and Genoa suddenly exploded. The issue was petty precedence. The Venetians seized the reins of the king’s horse as he was led to the cathedral; at the subsequent banquet a dispute broke out as to which consul should have the honoured place at the king’s right hand. The Genoese started throwing bread and meat at their hated rivals, but they had also come with concealed swords. The Cypriots turned on them and hurled their consul out of a window, then descended on the Genoese quarter and ransacked it. For Genoa this was an insufferable insult. The following year a substantial fleet descended on the island and seized it.
The Venetians were not expelled from Cyprus but this turn of events ratcheted up the tension. It made them strategically anxious. They were in danger of being squeezed out of crucial trading zones. This feeling was soon compounded by affairs back in Constantinople,
where the Italian republics were meddling furiously in the interminable dynastic struggles for the Byzantine throne. They had become rival kingmakers in the city. Venice supported the emperor, John V Palaeologus; the Genoese backed his son Andronicus.
Cyprus
Both acted with ruthless self-interest. Venice was particularly keen to maintain its access to the Black Sea, which Genoa continued to dominate. When John visited the city in 1370, they held him prisoner for a year over an unpaid debt. Six years later they demanded the island of Tenedos with menaces – a war fleet in the Bosphorus – in return for his crown jewels, which they held in hock. Tenedos, a small rocky island off the coast of Asia Minor, was strategically critical; twelve miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles, it surveyed the straits to Constantinople and beyond. As such it was ‘the key to the entrance for all those who wanted to sail to the Black Sea, that is Tana and Trebizond’. The Republic wanted it as a throttle on Genoese sea traffic.
The emperor surrendered the island. Genoa’s reply was equally prompt. They simply deposed him, replaced him with his son and demanded the island back. However, when they despatched their own fleet to claim their prize, they were met with a forthright response. The Greek population sided with the Venetians and refused; the intruders were repelled. Andronicus arrested the Venetian bailo in Constantinople. Venice demanded the release of their officials and restitution of John V, now lingering in a gloomy dungeon on the city walls. On 24 April 1378 the Republic declared war.
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