In the 1440s the slow, relentless Ottoman advance led to yet another call to crusade. For Venice this required a finely judged assessment of risks and returns. Taking advantage of a disruption in the Ottoman succession, the Serbs, Hungarians and the papacy made a fresh attempt to push the Ottomans out of Europe. Venice was brutally realistic about its chances. In return for blocking the Dardanelles to stop Ottoman troops crossing from Asia, it wanted cash payment for the ships and outright ownership of Salonica and Gallipoli in the case of success. It was clear-sighted about the strategic imperatives: ‘If the money is collected too late, it will be impossible to send the galleys to the Straits at the right moment, the Turks can cross from Asia into Europe and Christian defeat is certain.’ This became the subject of a furious row between the Republic and the papacy that replayed all the old distrusts. The papacy accused Venice of unchristian behaviour; the response was furious: ‘The Signoria spares nothing to defend Christian interests … one deplores these papal accusations, so unjust … Venice considers its honour impugned.’ Venice in the end grudgingly prepared the ships but the money was not forthcoming. ‘For the pope to pay up is a matter of honour … his conduct is pure ingratitude!’ they stormed. The relationship deteriorated from there: ‘Eugene IV pretends that Venice is the debtor to the Holy See. It’s untrue: on the contrary it’s the pope who owes the Republic.’ The gap between the merchant mentality and the pious and unworldly cardinals remained as wide as ever. The unpaid debt was not forgotten. A decade later it would surface again in even more tragic circumstances.
As it was, Venice was right to be sceptical. The crusade was hopelessly botched and the Republic mounted a blockade of the straits too late to prevent the Ottoman army being ferried across the Bosphorus by Genoese merchants. It was rumoured that private Venetian sea captains had also participated. At Varna, near the Black Sea, the crusaders were wiped out. This time there was no Venetian fleet to pick up survivors. The Turks left behind a pyramid of skulls. It was the last attempt to drive them out of Europe.
The noose continued to tighten on Constantinople. When Murat died in 1451, Venice again played a cautious hand. On 8 July, the senate despatched an ambassador to the new sultan, Mehmet II, offering peace and condolences; the following day the ambassador was ordered to proceed to the embattled emperor in Constantinople, Constantine, his new rival. A day later it instructed yet another ambassador to contact Mehmet’s enemy in Asia Minor, the Great Karaman. Galleys were detailed to ensure that the Dardanelles were kept open. Venice played on all sides.
The day after ascending the throne Mehmet had his young half-brother murdered in the bath. The Venetians, sensitive to the times, were quick to grasp the change of tone. Towards the end of his reign Murat had become less aggressive. The new sultan, aged twenty-one, was both ambitious and highly intelligent. He burned for conquests and he had just one objective in mind. By February 1452, the lagoon was receiving ambassadors from the emperor Constantine warning that ‘the enormous preparations of Sultan Mehmet II, both by land and sea, leave no doubt of his intention to attack Constantinople. There is no doubt that this time the city will succumb if no one comes to the aid of the Greeks and the courageous help of the Venetians would be a great prize.’ In the autumn the ambassadors were back again, their pleas more desperate. They begged for help to save the city. The senators vacillated, hedged their bets and palmed them off. They passed them on to the pope and the Florentines, citing their pressing war in Italy and, as a concession, allowed the export of breastplates and gunpowder. They lobbied continuously for joint action; ‘It’s necessary for the Holy See and the other Christian powers to be united.’
During the summer of 1452 Mehmet was busy constructing a castle on the Bosphorus with the intention of closing the passage to the Black Sea. The Ottomans named this new structure the Throat Cutter. Venice was well informed about it. Spies sent back detailed sketch maps of its layout; prominent in the foreground was a splay of large bombards, scanning the straits with the intention of blasting out of the water any passing traffic which failed to stop. The day before its completion, the senate reported that ‘Constantinople is completely surrounded by the troops and ships of Sultan Mehmet’. The Venetians strengthened their maritime arrangements accordingly but remained uncommitted. The uncertainty was reflected by a senatorial motion, defeated, that Constantinople should be left entirely to its fate.
Venice soon had personal experience of the implications of Mehmet’s blockade. On 26 November, a Venetian merchant galley bringing supplies to the city from the Black Sea was sunk at the Throat Cutter by cannon fire. The crew managed to make it to land, where they were captured and marched off to the sultan at Adrianople. By the time an ambassador made it to the court to plead for their lives, the sailors’ decapitated bodies were rotting on the ground outside the city walls. The captain, Antonio Rizzo, hung impaled from a stake.
The European diplomatic exchanges continued shrill, self-justifying and ineffectual throughout the early months of 1453. Venice informed the pope and the kings of Hungary and Aragon ‘of the great Venetian preparations, and asked them immediately to join their efforts with those of the Signoria; if not, Constantinople is lost’. The Vatican wanted to send five galleys and looked expectantly at the Republic – but Venice had not forgotten the Varna debts and would not give credit. In its response on 10 April the senate ‘rejoices at their intention, but one can not fail to remember the painful behaviour of Pope Eugene IV who, in 1444, unceasingly delayed the payment for ships’. All the tensions in the Christian system were on display. In early May, Venice was preparing galleys on its own behalf with contradictory and cautious orders: to proceed to Constantinople ‘if the route does not seem too dangerous … refusing combat in the Straits … but to participate in the defence of Constantinople’. At the same time the ambassador at Mehmet’s court was told to emphasise ‘the peaceful inclinations of Venice; if the Signoria has sent a few galleys to Constantinople, it’s purely to escort the Black Sea galleys and to protect Venetian interests; he will try to lead the sultan to conclude a peace with Constantine’.
It was already far too late. On 6 April Mehmet was camped outside the walls with a vast army and a formidable array of cannon; on the 12th, at one in the afternoon, a sizeable fleet came rowing up the straits from Gallipoli. It was the first time in forty years that the Ottomans had mounted any organised challenge to the naval power of Venice. The Venetians at Constantinople who saw this fleet approaching with ‘eager cries and the sound of castanets and tambourines’ were stunned. Mehmet was a master at logistics and the co-ordination of war. He had quickly realised that Constantinople could not be taken unless it was blockaded by sea. At Gallipoli he had caused the construction of a substantial naval force, which startled and challenged the easy assumptions of Venetian maritime hegemony. For the first time the Venetians clearly grasped the immense reach and resources of the Turks, their ability to innovate and to harness the technical and military skills of subject peoples.
If the state was tardy and ambivalent, the Venetian residents, under their bailo Girolamo Minotto, and the crews of their galleys in the Golden Horn fought bravely for the beleaguered remnants of the Byzantine Empire. The irony of this situation probably escaped them; 250 years after Venice had worked to sack the imperial city, its citizens stood shoulder to shoulder with Greeks to man the walls, guard the chain across the Golden Horn and repel a besieging army coming for conquest – whose advance the crusade of 1204 had done so much to assist. They dug trenches ‘with a will for the honour of the world’, as the patriotic diarist Nicolo Barbaro put it; paraded the banner of St Mark along the city walls to add heart to the defence ‘for the love of God and the Signoria’, kept their ships at the chain to repel the enemy fleet, mounted attacks by land and sea, guarded the Blachernae Palace and fought with stout bravery. In the cycles of Venetian history, the emotional attachment to this city, with which their relationship had been so long and contradictory, was deep and heartfelt. In 145
3 they fought for the memory of Dandolo’s bones and the profit and honour of the Venetian Republic. It was Venetian sailors who disguised themselves as Turks and slipped out in a light sailing ship to look for signs of a rescue fleet. After three weeks of searching the approaches to the Dardanelles they realised that no help would come. By now the implications were clear: to return to Constantinople was to risk death. In typical Venetian fashion the crew took a democratic vote. The majority decision was ‘to return to Constantinople, if it is in the hands of the Turks or the Christians, if it is to death or to life’. Constantine thanked them profusely for their return – and wept at the news.
The deep chafing with the Genoese continued to the last. There were Genoese who fought alongside the Venetians, with whom the relationship was always tense, whilst across the water in Galata the Genoese colony maintained a queasy neutrality, secretly helping each side and earning the opprobrium of both. The low point in this relationship came in mid-April. For all its vaunted strength, the Ottoman fleet did not perform well. It failed to capture four Genoese transport ships sent with supplies by the pope; it was unable to break the chain closing the Golden Horn, guarded by Venetian ships. Frustrated, Mehmet had seventy ships hauled overland at night. When they splashed into the Golden Horn on the morning of 21 April the defenders were stunned. It was a further blow for Venetian maritime self-confidence; ‘We were perforce compelled to stand to arms at sea, night and day, with great fear of the Turks,’ recorded Barbaro. When the Venetians planned a night attack on this enemy fleet now in the Horn it was betrayed, almost certainly by a Genoese signal; the lead galley was sunk by gunfire, the survivors swam to the shore and were captured. The following day Mehmet impaled forty Venetian sailors on stakes in full view of the city walls. Their shipmates watched the last agonised writhings with horror and pointed the finger at their old rivals: ‘This betrayal was committed by the cursed Genoese of [Galata], rebels against the Christian faith, to show themselves friendly to the Turkish sultan.’
The resident Venetians supported Byzantium to the bitter end. The lion flag of St Mark and the double-headed Byzantine eagle flew side by side from the Blachernae Palace. On the day before the final assault, ‘The bailo ordered that everyone who called himself a Venetian should go to the walls on the landward side, for the love of God and for the honour of the Christian faith, and that everyone should be of good heart and ready to die at his post.’ They went. On 29 May 1453, after fierce fighting, the walls were finally breached and the city fell. ‘When their flag was raised and ours cut down, we saw that the city was taken and that there was no further hope of recovering from this,’ recorded Barbaro. Those who could fled back to their galleys and sailed away past the corpses floating in the sea ‘like melons in a canal’. The Venetian survivors proudly listed the roll call of their dead, ‘some of whom had been drowned, some dead in the bombardment or killed in the battle in other ways’. Minotto was captured and beheaded; sixty-two members of the nobility died with him; some of the ships were so short-crewed they could hardly set sail – only the ill-discipline of Mehmet’s new navy, which had abandoned the sea to participate in the sack, allowed the escape.
A small frigate brought the news to Venice on the evening of 29 June 1453. According to eyewitnesses, it sailed up the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge, watched by an expectant crowd:
Everyone was at their windows and balconies waiting, caught between hope and fear as to what news it brought about the city of Constantinople and the galleys of Romania, about their fathers, sons and brothers. And as it came, a voice shouted out that Constantinople was taken and that everyone over six had been butchered. At once there were great and desperate wailings, cries and groans, everyone beating the palms of their hands, beating their breasts with their fists, tearing their hair and their faces, for the death of a father, a son or a brother – or for their property.
The senate heard the news in stunned silence. Despite the warnings to the rest of Europe it seemed that the Venetians were as incredulous as anyone that the Christian city that had stood intact for 1,100 years should be no more. For Barbaro, it was the Venetian complacency that had helped the Turks take the city. ‘Our senators could not believe the Turks could bring a fleet to Constantinople.’ It was a warning of things to come.
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As soon as the furore had died down, the city of merchants, pragmatic as ever, sent ambassadors back to Mehmet, congratulated him on his victory, and got a renewal of their trading privileges on reasonable terms.
The Shield of Christendom
1453–1464
A few years after the fall of Constantinople, the physical appearance, character and ambitions of the young sultan with whom the Republic now had to deal were analysed by a Venetian visitor to the city. Giacomo de’ Languschi’s account was both chilling and acute:
The sovereign, the Grand Turk Mehmet Bey, is a youth of twenty-six, well built, of large rather than medium stature, expert at arms, of aspect more frightening than venerable, laughing seldom, full of circumspection, endowed with great generosity, obstinate in pursuing his plans, bold in all undertakings, as eager for fame as Alexander of Macedonia. Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him by a companion called Ciriaco of Ancona and another Italian … He speaks three languages, Turkish, Greek and Slavic. He is at great pains to learn the geography of Italy and to inform himself … where the seat of the pope is and that of the emperor, and how many kingdoms there are in Europe. He possesses a map of Europe with the countries and provinces. He learns of nothing with greater interest and enthusiasm than the geography of the world and military affairs; he burns with desire to dominate; he is a shrewd investigator of conditions. It is with such a man that we Christians have to deal. Today, he says, the times have changed, and declares that he will advance from east to west as in former times the westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.
Languschi’s sharply drawn portrait was prescient of all the trouble that lay ahead. It caught exactly the truth about the new sultan’s personality: intelligent, cold, quixotic, secretive, ambitious and deeply frightening. Mehmet was a force of nature; relentless and ruthless, unpredictably prone both to bouts of homicidal rage and moments of compassion. His role model was Alexander the Great; his ambition was to reverse the flow of world conquest; his interest in maps and military technology, supplied in large part by Italian advisers, was purely strategic. Knowledge for Mehmet was practical. Its purpose was invasion. His goal was to be crowned as Caesar in Rome.
In the thirty years of his reign he would wage almost unceasing war, during which time he led nineteen campaigns in person; he fought until his exhausted troops refused to fight on; he spent money until he had devalued the coinage and emptied the treasury; he lived a life of personal excess – food, alcohol, sex and war – until gout had swollen and disfigured him. In the process he was estimated to have caused the deaths of some eight hundred thousand people. His life would be bookended by a second Venetian portrait, this time in oils by the painter Gentile Bellini. In the interval between the two, Mehmet would test the military and diplomatic skills of the Venetian Republic to the outer limit.
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Despite the peaceful trading conditions it had secured, Venice was undeceived. The Republic was now a front-line state; the Stato da Mar, stretching for thousands of miles around the coasts of Greece and the Aegean islands, was in direct contact with the remnants of the Byzantine Empire, which Mehmet intended to claim by right of conquest. They had enough previous experience of Ottoman methods to understand that the boundaries of hostilities were always blurred. Unattributed mounted raiders nibbled away at frontier zones until territory was softened up for open war; freelance corsairs ransacked islands. The senate’s dictum was emphatic: ‘One is always at war with the Ottomans and peace is never certain.’ Venice promptly started to re-fortify its colonies and islands.
The aftershock of the fall of Co
nstantinople rippled across the whole of Europe. Its effects were felt almost immediately within the Stato da Mar. A wave of Greek émigrés began to flee before the Ottoman advance. ‘Greek priests and landowners don’t cease flooding into Corfu,’ it was noted. The effects were most keenly felt on Crete. The arrival of refugees sparked a fresh revolt, driven by the desire to create a Byzantine heartland beyond the reach of the Turks. The authorities, alert to Greek national sentiment, stamped on it with practised ferocity; torture, execution, exile and the use of informers quickly smothered the flames, but everywhere the Republic was in a heightened state of vigilance. The management of the maritime empire was exhaustive, anxious and unceasing. The records acknowledge continuous trouble: a man is caught sending coded letters to the sultan asking for galleys to be sent to Crete; a double spy requests protection in the aftermath of the pre-empted uprising; new immigrants are expelled from the island; the chancellor of Crete is lost in a shipwreck; Joseph de Mayr, a Jew of Retimo, is accused of insulting remarks against the honour of Venice; ‘he will be put to the torture, as the facts aren’t yet clear’. Crete continued restless and troubled. The island was always lawless and the Turks upped the stakes. ‘Many Cretans, banished for murder or other reasons, live in the mountains,’ it was noted in April 1454. ‘It’s a cause of insecurity, also such men would be very useful in the army; if peace with Sultan Mehmet is not concluded by the time this decree is received, the authorities must proclaim a general amnesty.’ The background conditions of Cretan life remained ineradicable: poverty, poor harvests, plague, harsh administration, conscription into the hated galleys. After a century of enforced desertification, in 1463 the Republic finally allowed the cultivation of the Lasithi plateau and Sphakia once more.
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