City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  The pilgrims had full opportunity to glimpse how hard the marine life was. They watched the intense labours of the galeotti, working to the whistle, doing everything at a run and with loud shouts, ‘for they never work without shouting’. Passengers learned to keep out of their way or risk being knocked overboard as the seamen lugged up anchors, lowered and raised sails, scurried up rigging, swayed from the tops, sweated on the oars to manoeuvre the ship against the wind into a secure harbour. They swore ‘Spanish oaths’, terrible enough to shock the pious pilgrims, suffered cold and heat and the endless delays of contrary winds and lived for moments of respite – landfall or a barrel of wine. All seamen were prey to superstition; they disliked holy water from the River Jordan on their ships and stolen holy relics and Egyptian mummies; drowned bodies were an ill omen; corpses in the hold were sure to bring disaster – all misfortunes of a voyage could be attributed to such events. They called on a galaxy of special saints to ease their passage and had their prayers said in Italian rather than Latin. When the winter sea became furious off the coast of Greece, it was the archangel Michael beating his wings; in the rough weather of late November and early December they called on St Barbara and St Cecilia, St Clement and St Katherine and St Andrew; St Nicholas was invoked on 6 December, then the Virgin herself two days later; they were wary of mermaids, whose singing was fatal, though these might possibly be distracted with empty bottles thrown into the sea, with which the mermaids liked to play. And in every port they brought out small quantities of merchandise from chests and sacks to try their luck.

  Fabri sat on deck by day and night in good weather and bad, following the intricate life of the ship. He compared it to being in a monastery. In Candia he watched underwater repairs to the rudder:

  … the waterman stripped to his drawers, and then taking with him a hammer, nails and pincers, let himself down into the sea, sank down to where the rudder was broken, and there worked under water, pulling out nails and knocking in others. After a long time, when he had put everything right, he reappeared from the depths, and climbed up the side of the galley where we stood. This we saw; but how that workman could breathe under water, and how he could remain so long in the salt water, I cannot understand.

  He had explained to him navigation by portolan maps and observed at close quarters how the pilot read the weather ‘in the colour of the sea, in the flocking together and movement of the dolphins and flying fish, in the smoke of the fire, the smell of bilge water, the glittering of ropes and cables at night, and the flashing of oars as they dip into the sea’. In the dark he frequently escaped the foetid pilgrim dormitory to sit upon the woodwork at the sides of the galley, letting his feet hang down towards the sea, and holding on by the shrouds. If there were the perils of storm and calm, there were also times of exhilaration and beauty when the sea would be like rippled silk, the moon bright on the water, the navigator watching the stars and the compass,

  … and a lamp always burns beside it at night … one always gazes at the compass, and chants a kind of sweet song … the ship runs along quietly, without faltering … and all is still, save only he who watches the compass and he who holds the handle of the rudder, for these by way of returning thanks … continually greet the breeze, praise God, the blessed Virgin and the saints, one answering the other, and are never silent as long as the wind is fair.

  Fabri and Casola were able to make almost the entire voyage to Jaffa by way of Venetian ports. All down the Dalmatian coast, round Coron and Modon, via Crete and Cyprus they put in at harbours where the flag of St Mark fluttered in the salt wind. They witnessed the majestic operation of the Stato da Mar at first hand. They observed the prowling menace of its war fleets, its state ceremonies, colonial dignitaries, banners and trumpet calls. They saw the tangible fruits of the sea stacked high in Venetian warehouses. To outsiders, the city projected in de’ Barbari’s map seemed the pinnacle of prosperity. But this was the last generation of pilgrims to sail so freely. Even as Neptune’s trident was raised triumphantly aloft, the Stato da Mar was simultaneously in hidden decline. For seventy years shadows had been creeping over a sunlit sea. There were social factors at work – the toughness of the maritime life was one – and the Venetian lion now had his paws firmly planted on dry land; the business of the terra firma was starting increasingly to consume the Republic’s resources. But above all it was the inexorable advance of the Ottoman Empire which threatened to dissolve Venice’s marriage with the sea at the moment of its supremacy.

  PART III

  ECLIPSE: THE RISING MOON

  1400–1503

  The Glass Ball

  1400–1453

  On 1 June 1416, the Venetians engaged an Ottoman fleet at sea for the first time. The captain-general, Pietro Loredan, had been sent to the Ottoman port at Gallipoli to discuss a recent raid on Negroponte. What happened next he related in a letter to the doge and the Signoria.

  It was dawn. As he approached the harbour, a signal to parley was misinterpreted as a hostile attack. The lead ships were met with a hail of arrows. In a short time the encounter had turned into a full-scale battle.

  As captain I vigorously engaged the first galley, mounting a furious attack. It put up a very stout defence as it was well manned by brave Turks who fought like dragons. But thanks to God I overcame it and cut many of the Turks to pieces. It was a tough and fierce fight, because the other galleys closed on my port bow and they fired many arrows at me. I certainly felt them. I was struck on the left cheek below my eye by one which pierced my cheek and nose. Another hit my left hand and passed clean through it … but by fierce combat, I forced these other galleys to withdraw, took the first galley and raised my flag on her. Then turning swiftly about … I rammed a galleot with the spur [of my galley], cut down many Turks, defeated her, put some of my men aboard and hoisted my flag.

  The Turks put up incredibly fierce resistance because all their [ships] were well manned by the flower of Turkish sailors. But by the grace of God and the intervention of St Mark we put the whole fleet to flight. A great number of men jumped into the sea. The battle lasted from morning to the second hour. We took six of their galleys with all their crews, and nine galleots. All the Turks on board were put to the sword, amongst them their commander … all his nephews and many other important captains …

  After the battle we sailed past Gallipoli and showered those on land with arrows and other missiles, taunting them to come out and fight … but none had the courage. Seeing this … I drew a mile off Gallipoli so that our wounded could get medical attention and refresh themselves.

  The aftermath was similarly brutal. Retiring fifty miles down the coast to Tenedos, Loredan proceeded to put to death all the other nationals aboard the Ottoman ships as an exemplary warning. ‘Among the captives’, Loredan wrote, ‘was Giorgio Callergis, a rebel against the Signoria, and badly wounded. I had the honour to hack him to pieces on my own poop deck. This punishment will be a warning to other bad Christians not to dare to take service with the infidel.’ Many others were impaled. ‘It was a horrible sight,’ wrote the Byzantine historian Ducas, ‘all along the shore, like bunches of grapes, sinister stakes from which hung corpses.’ Those who had been compelled to the ships were freed.

  An Ottoman galley

  In this first hostile engagement, Loredan had almost completely destroyed the Ottoman fleet – and the means quickly to recreate it. The Venetians understood exactly where the source of Ottoman naval power lay. Many of the nominal Turks in their fleet were Christian corsairs, sailors and pilots – maritime experts without whom the sultan’s embryonic navy was unable to function. The Republic’s policy was to remain unbending in this respect: snuff out the supply of skilled manpower and the Ottomans’ naval capability would wither. It was for this reason that they butchered the sailors so mercilessly. ‘We can now say that the Turk’s power in this part of sea has been destroyed for a very long time,’ wrote Loredan. No substantial Ottoman fleet would put to sea again for fifty years.

/>   The accidental battle of Gallipoli bred a certain over-confidence in Venetian sea power. For decades after, galley commanders reckoned that ‘four or five of their galleys are needed to match one of ours’. Touchy about their Christian credentials, they also used the victory to point out to the potentates of southern Europe their reputation as ‘the only pillar and the hope for Christians against the Infidels’.

  *

  The Ottomans had advanced so swiftly and silently across Asia Minor in the chaotic aftermath of the Fourth Crusade that their progress had passed, for a time, almost unnoticed. They had inserted themselves into the Byzantine civil wars and the trade contests of the Venetians and the Genoese. They were alive to the opportunities of confusion, siding with the Genoese in the 1350s, who shipped them across the Dardanelles to Gallipoli, from which they could not be dislodged. Picking up speed, they struck into Bulgaria and Thrace, surrounded Constantinople and reduced the emperors to vassals. By 1410 Ducas claimed that there were more Turks settled in Europe than in Asia Minor. It was as if the column in the Hippodrome had grown a fourth serpent, whose python-like grasp threatened slowly to squeeze all its rivals to death. Christian Europe, torn by conflicting interests and religious schisms, failed to respond. Successive popes, increasingly aware of the danger of ‘the Turk’, wrung their hands at the enmity between Catholic and Orthodox, and the endless Venetian–Genoese wars; without the naval resources of the maritime republics crusades died at birth in the antechambers of the Vatican.

  Venice was watchful of this burgeoning power. By the 1340s they were warning of ‘the growing maritime power of the Turks. The Turks have, in effect, ruined the islands of Romania [the Aegean] and as there are hardly any other Christians to combat them, they are creating an important fleet with a view to attacking Crete.’ The power vacuum which Venice had helped to create in 1204 was now being filled. It was the Republic’s policy never to make military alliances with the Ottomans, as the Genoese did, but neither were they in a position to act against them. Always distracted by other wars and by trading interests, and wary of unstable crusading alliances which could leave them dangerously exposed, they watched and waited. They observed sceptically from the sidelines an ill-fated crusade against the Ottomans by a joint French and Hungarian force in 1396; their sole contribution was a measure of naval support, picking up a pathetically small huddle of survivors from the shores of the Danube after its total defeat at the battle of Nicopolis. Their response to appeals to defend Christendom was stock: they were not prepared to act alone, but whenever they surveyed the idealistic crusading projects of the papacy they politely declined.

  By 1400 the Ottomans had reached the edge of their maritime empire and trading zones. For Venice, as for the rest of Europe, the multicultural Ottomans camped in the Balkans were only and ever ‘the Turks’, their sultan referred to as ‘the Great Turk’. Under their respective banners, the lion and the crescent moon, the two imperial powers were polar opposites: the Christian and the Muslim, the sea-going merchant class concerned with trade, the continental warriors whose valuations were counted in land holdings; the impersonal republic that prized liberty, the sultanate that depended on the autocratic whim of a single man. Venice quickly recognised that the Ottomans were different from the sedentary Mamluks: aggressive, restless, expansionist, their empire was built on the premise of continuous growth, whose intertwined and pre-ordained missions, both imperial and religious, were to enlarge Muslim realms and Ottoman lands. The exhausting persistence of the Turks was destined to tax Venice to the limit. ‘Things continue very unhappily with the Turks,’ one later ambassador to the sultan declared after years of experience, ‘because whether they are at war or peace they always wear away at you, rob you, always want justice their way.’ No European power spent so much time, energy, money and resources understanding the Ottomans. Venice would develop an intimate knowledge of their language, psychology, religion, technology, rituals and customs; the personality of each successive sultan would be pragmatically analysed for threat and advantage. No one else understood the nuances of diplomatic performance so finely or played the game of ambassadors with such consummate skill. For Venice diplomacy was always worth a squadron of galleys and it cost a fraction of the price.

  As early as 1360 the Republic despatched ambassadors to Sultan Murat I to congratulate him on his new capital at Adrianople, which effectively completed the encirclement of Constantinople. They quickly learned that they were dealing with obdurate opponents. When ambassadors went back to Murat in 1387 to protest about raids on Negroponte they took with them presents: basins and jugs of silver, robes, a fur coat with pearl buttons – and two big dogs, called Passalaqua and Falchon. The dogs were immensely popular; Murat immediately asked for a matching female dog to breed from. He did not however release the prisoners requested and the Venetian senate subsequently received a breathtaking letter declaring that the ambassadors had promised that the Republic would send an army at their own expense to support the Ottomans. They had done no such thing.

  The rules of the game were complex, and had to be learned anew. As the Ottomans reduced the Balkans and continental Greece to vassal status, Venice needed to play its hand with care; it was dependent on Greek grain. It could neither give up its role as a defender of Christendom nor be seen as ‘a constant accomplice of the Turk’. Pragmatic, cynical, ambivalent – keener on trade than causes – it needed to maintain good relations with both sides. Diplomatic skill with the Ottomans was tantamount. ‘Negotiations with the Turks were like playing with a glass ball,’ it would later be said. ‘When the other player forcibly threw it, it was necessary not to hurl it violently back or let it fall to the ground, because in one way or another it would shatter.’

  The Venetians would in time train their own corps of Ottoman linguists, the giovanni di lingua, but in the fifteenth century they relied on interpreters to conduct negotiations with the Ottomans through the medium of Greek. They worked out who, why and when to bribe. Knowing the attraction of the gold ducat they set aside specified amounts of baksheesh; they professionally valued gifts received from Ottoman emissaries and replied in kind; they matched the splendour of a diplomatic mission to the importance of the occasion. They paid close attention to each sultan’s death; uncertain which son might win the race to the throne, they prepared their letters of accreditation and congratulations in multiple copies, each bearing the name of a different candidate – or left blank for the ambassador to complete on the spot. They judged carefully the balance between threat and promise. During Ottoman civil wars they followed the practice of the Byzantines and supported pretenders to the throne to increase confusion. They sought alliances with rival Turkish dynasties in Asia Minor to squeeze the Ottomans from both sides. They shifted continuously with the wind, balancing threats of force with offers of payments.

  It was never easy. As the Ottomans strengthened their hold on Greece, the people of Salonica offered their city to Venice in 1423; the port was a valuable prize – both a strategic and a commercial hub. The senate ‘received the offer with gladness and promised to protect and nourish and prosper the city and to transform it into a second Venice’. Sultan Murat II, however, was insistent that it was his by right and demanded Salonica back. For seven years Venice poured in food and defensive resources whilst trying to work out a solution with the sultan, but he was not to be dissuaded. When they offered tribute it was turned down. When they sent ambassadors, he threw them in prison. When fleets were sent to block the Dardanelles, he merely shrugged. They increased their tribute offer; it was rejected. They sacked Gallipoli; the investment of Salonica went on. They forged an alliance with the rival Karaman dynasty in Asia Minor; Murat sent corsairs to ravage the coast of Greece.

  Year after year Venice shuttled back and forth between war and peace, working on the flanks of the Ottoman Empire, but the sultan was immovable:

  … the city is my inheritance, and my grandfather Bayezit took it from the Greeks by his own right hand. So, if the
Greeks were now its masters, they might reasonably accuse me of injustice. But you, being Latins and from Italy, what have you to do with this part of the world? Go, if you like; if not, I am coming quickly.

  In 1430 he did just that. The Venetians fought their way back to the harbour and sailed away, leaving the Greeks to their fate. It would have been better, a chronicler said, if the city had been hit by an earthquake or a tidal wave. The Ottomans had eaten up another piece of Greece.

  The following year Venice made peace and paid tribute to Murat. If the Stato da Mar was guaranteed official freedom from attack, the Ottoman advance went on, pushing out to the west coast of Greece and southern Albania, at the door of the Adriatic. Unattributable freelance raiding continued. It was the Ottoman method of softening up frontier provinces for future conquest – to unleash unpaid irregulars across the borders. At sea, Turkish-inspired corsairs continued to be a nuisance, even if Venetian maritime hegemony was unchallenged. Negroponte, the next base down the coast from Salonica, was becoming a cause for concern. The island was only separated by a narrow channel from mainland Greece, to which it was linked by a bridge. The senate forbade people from going to the mainland to harvest corn and ordered a detachment of eighteen men to guard the bridge night and day.

  The senatorial registers kept a running record of these subtle depredations. Year after year news of raids and troop movements, pirate infestations and abductions poured in. ‘For the past three years,’ it was noted of Negroponte in 1449, ‘the island has been subjected to continuous plundering by Turks, who steal flocks then claim they are acting in the name of the Sultan’s son at war with the Signoria, it’s the work of Turkish irregulars, inveterate plunderers’ – this despite the fact Venice was officially at peace with the sultan. They sent yet another ambassador to protest. The following year the misery of the islands came under scrutiny: ‘Turks and Catalans are plundering the isles; at Tinos, thirty men taken into slavery, fishing boats snatched, cows, asses and mules killed or seized – without boats or animals the Tiniots cannot work, they are reduced to eating their remaining beasts.’ Many of these attacks were directed by disaffected subjects of the imperial system. As early as 1400 it was noted that ‘a great number of Cretan subjects … are fleeing towards the land of the Turks and serve voluntarily on Turkish ships; they are well informed of what’s going on in ports and Venetian territories, they guide the Turks to places to pillage’. It was men such as Giorgio Callergis that galley commanders impaled on stakes or chopped up on their own decks.