The authorities also had to patrol the plague frontier, sifting news of outbreaks and seeking their origins. In September 1458 they warned of the arrival of a ship from Negroponte on which ‘the plague has caused the death of the secretary and a quarter of the crew’. In June 1461, it was reported that ‘a German merchant had died within three days; others are gravely ill. The risk is great. All landing by passengers from Greece, Albania or Bosnia is forbidden; elsewhere, it is better to cut off all contact with Ancona. The plague threatens Venice.’ But above all, it was the insistent, shrill warnings about the Ottomans that preoccupied the senatorial registers for the Stato da Mar after 1453. Mehmet continued his advance. He snuffed out Serbia and pushed into the Peloponnese, the last stronghold of Byzantium. By 1460 almost all of it was in his hands. Only strategic Venetian ports and harbours, including the prize colonies of Modon, Coron and Negroponte, still clung to the Greek shore.
‘The perfidy of the Turk demands one get ready,’ became the Venetian watchword. The state busied itself with the distribution of cannonballs, gunpowder and oars to various strategic hubs; the construction of galleys and conscription of men; the supply of ship’s biscuit; urgent requisitions of masons and materials for the repair of fortifications; instructions to the captain-general to track the Ottoman fleets ‘but only from afar and with discretion’. All the Republic’s prized possessions suddenly seemed vulnerable. ‘It’s necessary to defend Crete, where recent reports make manifest a lack of arms,’ it was recorded. ‘The masters of the galleys must send five hundred iron breastplates before the end of March [1462].’ Bombards were installed at Modon.
Nowhere worried the senate more than Negroponte. After 1453, the long ribbon island off the east coast of Greece was now the Republic’s forward position. Negroponte was of vital strategic importance as a military and administrative hub and a commercial centre for galleys and merchants. Within six weeks of the fall of Constantinople, the inhabitants were demanding the services of a military engineer and master masons. By the end of the year it was clear that ‘the capture of Constantinople has placed Negroponte in the front line and the Turk wants to take it … important measures must be taken to fortify [it] because of its crucial importance’. Outside the walls Turkish freebooters continued to seize the crops. In August 1458, the senate sent ‘four bombards, six hundred schiopetti [muskets], 150 barrels of gunpowder for the bombards and one hundred for the schiopetti, lances and crossbows’. Everywhere the Turks were increasing their ravage of the Greek countryside. It was reported in January 1461,
The information from the captain of the Gulf and the authorities in Modon–Coron show too plainly that the sultan has the intention of imposing his authority on the whole of the Peloponnese and that he’s the enemy of Venice. The Turks are right at the borders of the Venetian territories, which they penetrate quite freely, causing damage and snatching the serfs; they have just taken a castle very close to Modon.
During the late 1450s and early 1460s the Republic remained in a state of strained expectancy about what the sultan might do next. ‘Though the Turkish fleet is disarmed,’ it was reported in October 1462, ‘one can’t rest easy about Mehmet’s intentions.’ Wherever he went, tales of arbitrary cruelty trailed behind him. Men were sawn in half; women and children massacred. Sometimes even a guarantee of safety in the case of negotiated surrender proved worthless; at others Mehmet might be unpredictably forgiving. In 1461 he was outside the walls of Coron and Modon; when some of the inhabitants came out to him with a flag of truce, he had them killed. In early September 1458, having bloodlessly taken possession of Athens and unpredictably spared its population out of respect for the ancient culture of Greece, he paid an impromptu ‘friendly’ visit to Negroponte with a force of a thousand cavalry. The terrified population thought that their last hour had come. They came out to greet the sultan with rich gifts. He jingled across the bridge connecting the island to mainland Greece and inspected the place. It was a warning. Such visits were never innocent; Mehmet had sat outside the walls of Constantinople for three days in 1452, appraising its defences. Venice went on stockpiling gunpowder, deepening ditches and strengthening the town walls.
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While Mehmet restlessly gobbled up territories to the west and east – the southern shores of the Black Sea in 1461, Wallachia, the lands of Vlad the Impaler, in 1462, Bosnia the following year – the Republic continued to play the diplomatic game. Juggling the glass ball became increasingly fraught, like playing with an ogre. The position of bailo in Constantinople was the most important, well-paid and least enviable posting in the whole administration. The bailo was at once consul, commercial agent and ambassador to the Ottoman court, tasked, above all, with ensuring that commerce in the empire continued as smoothly as possible. It was fear of losing valuable trade in Mehmet’s realms which stayed Venice’s hand. The post called for patience and fine judgement. Again and again, the bailo was requested to make representations to the sultan for the unofficial depredations, thefts and incursions of his subjects into Venetian realms. The senate exhaustively charged their man with raising these matters. Approach to the sultan in his newly adorned palace above the Bosphorus was as extraordinary as the ceremonial of the Mamluks, but infinitely more frightening. In the back of the mind of every incumbent was the fate of Girolamo Minotto, beheaded after the city’s fall in 1453, so it was hardly surprising if a bailo should be tempted to say what Mehmet wanted to hear. The senate however could be equally demanding. Bartolomeo Marcello was hauled before it in 1456 for having ‘negotiated with the sultan about some Turks who had been justly imprisoned at Negroponte, against the honour of the Republic’. His punishment: a year in prison, a hefty fine, dispossession of all honours and permanent exclusion from public office.
Negroponte (on the right) was joined to mainland Greece by a drawbridge guarded by a fort at its midpoint
The game was being played in bad faith on both sides. Mehmet cast a keen eye over maps of Venice. He kept in his court a number of Florentine and Genoese agents eager to brief against their rival. They fuelled his ravenous strategic appetite. According to one, ‘Mehmet wants to know exactly where and how Venice is sited, how far from dry land and how one might force one’s way in by land and sea.’ The advice was detailed enough for the sultan to conclude that ‘it would be easily possible to construct a long bridge from Marghera [on the mainland] to Venice for troops to pass across’. To the man who had hauled seventy galleys three miles across dry land in 1453 anything was possible. In imagination he held the orb of the world in his hand like a ripe apple. Already Mehmet styled himself the sovereign of two seas – the Black Sea and the Mediterranean – assumptions particularly distasteful to Venice.
Beneath the polite surface of diplomatic discourse there was a shadow war in play which would become a hallmark of Venetian–Ottoman relations down the centuries: coded messages, spies and bribery; the collection of information and its mirror image, the dissemination of disinformation; torture, assassination, acts of sabotage – such methods all played their part in state policy. The Ottomans employed a healthy network of paid informers within Venetian realms; Venice replied in kind. It was the patriotic duty of every merchant to spy for his country. The state bribed heavily and strategically. The Jewish population, disinterested middlemen with no particular national or patriotic ties, were considered particularly promising agents but were correspondingly also badged as potential traitors. The senate sought unofficial routes to influence the sultan – and branching solutions. In 1456 the bailo in Constantinople was ordered to offer Mehmet’s Jewish doctor, ‘Master Giacomo’, a hefty one thousand ducats if negotiations with Mehmet over the islands of Imbros and Lemnos proved satisfactory.
The same year they also started plotting to kill him. They accepted a proposal from ‘the Jew N’ to assassinate Mehmet ‘with pleasure … considering the benefits that would ensue, not only for the Signoria, but for the whole of Christendom … everything must be done secretly … it’s importa
nt to act with the greatest prudence, no witnesses, nothing written down’. Nothing came of it, but the idea was revisited regularly. In 1463 a similar proposal by a Dominican priest, also ‘N’, was considered ‘a laudable project’, worthy of ten thousand gold ducats and a further pension of a thousand a year if successful. Between 1456 and 1479 the Council of Ten authorised fourteen attempts to poison Mehmet, via a string of unlikely operatives, including a Dalmatian seaman, a Florentine nobleman, an Albanian barber, a Pole from Cracow. Most promising of all was Mehmet’s physician, the aforementioned Giacomo, who may or may not have been a double agent and may indeed have been the first ‘N’. These murder projects, apparently unsuccessful (though the actual circumstances of Mehmet’s death remain murky), were never abandoned. Eliminating the Mehmet problem with a single phial remained immensely appealing.
The whole of southern Europe had been deeply shaken by Mehmet’s continuous advance. Step by step the Ottomans were moving closer, now scouring out Bosnia, now establishing themselves on the Albanian coast, just sixty miles from Italy. The prospect terrified the papacy. Vivid imagination saw turbaned cavalry riding up the Appian Way to Rome. Mehmet, ‘son of Satan, perdition and death’, was drawing ever nearer. ‘Now Mohammed reigns over us. Now the Turk hangs over our very heads,’ wrote the future Pope Pius II, breathless with dread. ‘The Black Sea is closed to us, the Don has become inaccessible. Now the Vlachs must obey the Turk. Next his word will reach the Hungarians, and then the Germans. In the meantime we are beset by internecine strife and hatred.’
The implications – which Venice never failed to trumpet to the rest of Italy – loomed large in the minds of successive popes after 1453. Immediately after the fall the Venetians fired off a brusque report: ‘We fear greatly for the Venetian possessions in Romania … if these territories fall, there is nothing to stop the Turk landing in Apulia … We invite the pope to preach concord among the Christian princes, so that they unite their forces against the Ottomans.’ The papacy responded with ringing calls for new crusades – but the strife and hatred that Pius acknowledged proved insuperable obstacles. Venice was making its case off the back of a bitter war with Milan and Florence and its long and dubious relationships with the Islamic world. Italy was fragmented into a score of commercial and territorial rivalries. Where Venice tried to present itself as the front-line state – the shield of Christendom – others perceived it as proud, rich, and self-seeking – the infidel’s friend.
Within Italy the diplomatic atmosphere was poisonous; all parties were guilty of hypocrisy. Venice was only concerned in furthering its trading interests and gaining a firmer hold on the Peloponnese; its Christian credentials were flourished as convenient. Its opponents were equally culpable. Almost all the Italian states were prepared to do deals with the sultan at one time or another. The Florentines hoped to replace Venice as preferred merchants in the Ottoman Empire; the Anconitans sent war supplies to Constantinople; in time the king of Naples would be willing to open his ports to Mehmet. The prospect of Venice exhausting its wealth in a bitter war was immensely pleasing to its rivals.
Venice, protected by its lagoon, was seen as the last line of defence for Christian Europe
Pope Pius himself, ardent for crusade, was given to the anachronistic belief that Christianity might be stirred by the force of papal rhetoric to rise up, as in days of old, and take the cross, spontaneously showering money, resources and manpower on the holy project to retake Constantinople. In moments of pure fantasy he even drafted letters appealing to Mehmet to convert to Christianity. The pope was hundreds of years too late. What had proved difficult in 1201 was impossible in the 1460s. Europe was too nationalistic, too divided, too materialistic, too secular. In 1461, the Venetians intercepted a ship carrying the painter Matteo de’ Pasti, on his way from the court of Rimini to Istanbul to paint the sultan’s portrait. They found amongst his possessions a copy of De Re Militari, a modern treatise on military tactics and war machines, and a detailed map of the Adriatic. He was travelling at the behest of the lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, ‘the Wolf of Rimini’, the most treacherous and intimidating condottiere in Italy. (In the ever switching allegiances of Italian politics the Wolf would be fighting for Venice three years later.)
Venice was determined that it would crusade if, and only if, everyone else did. As long as unity remained uncertain, the senate forbade the preaching of crusade within its territories; there were too many informants ready to report back to Constantinople that Venice had broken the ‘peace’. In June 1463, as Bosnia collapsed, the doge warned the detested Florentines that Mehmet would advance ‘almost to the gate and entrance of Italy’ if no stout resistance was mounted. It all fell on deaf ears. By now the Republic, goaded beyond endurance, saw a stark choice: fight alone, or see the Stato da Mar dismantled piece by piece. In July, by a narrow majority, Venice voted to fight. At once the Venetians rediscovered a healthy interest in Pius’s initiative. The following month the crusade was preached enthusiastically in St Mark’s Square, in another cyclical repeat of Venetian history. Conscious of its own myths, the senate was determined that the aged doge, Cristoforo Moro, should follow in the footsteps of Dandolo and pin the cross to his corno. Apart from age, Moro had little in common with his illustrious predecessor and politely declined. The senate bluntly insisted that ‘the honour and welfare of our land are dearer to us than your person’. A doge could be treated as harshly as anyone else.
Elsewhere the crusade remained unpopular. The tithes imposed by the pope were dubbed ‘sheer robbery’ in Bologna; the venture was widely seen as little more than a Venetian imperial project. The Florentine ambassador briefed furiously against it:
Your holiness, what are you thinking of? Are you going to wage war on the Turks that you may force Italy to be subject to the Venetians? All that is won in Greece by driving out the Turks will become the property of the Venetians who, after Greece is subdued, will lay hands on the rest of Italy.
Venice launched ferocious counterblasts against such lobbyings, setting out the record of its fifty-year resistance to the Ottoman advance point by point, if somewhat creatively:
The accusations being made at Rome are intolerable: the Signoria has always done its duty; [the ambassador] will insist on the victory at Gallipoli in 1416; the Turkish fleet was almost completely destroyed; but the other Christian powers are content to applaud, without ever responding to the exhortations of Venice; in 1423, Salonica … was occupied and protected for seven years at the expense of incredible efforts and enormous cost with the help of no one; in 1444–1445 Venice armed its galleys and kept them on action stations all winter, while the pope did not pay what he promised. Rather than listen to these libellers, the pope should consider that the Ottomans are squeezing all Venice’s possessions: the situation of Venice is totally different to that of the other Christian states … in reality no other state makes comparable efforts.
Pius was aware of Venice’s self-seeking interest in empire, but like Innocent III in 1201 he needed the Venetians for his crusade and conceded a measure of pragmatism. ‘We admit that the Venetians, as is the way of men, covet more than they have … [but] it is enough for us that if Venice conquers, Christ will conquer.’ Privately his view of the Venetians was far less flattering. In a passage of his Commentaries, tellingly deleted in the printed version, he wrote:
Traders care nothing for religion nor will a miserly people spend money to avenge it. The populace sees no harm in dishonour if their money is safe. It was lust for power and insatiable greed of gain that persuaded the Venetians to equip such forces and undergo such expense … They spent money to get more money. They followed their natural instincts. They were out for trade and barter.
Innocent could have written such words himself 250 years earlier.
But strategically Venice was right: if the Stato da Mar were weakened, Mehmet would advance on Italy. It understood the Ottomans better than anyone. However ambivalent it might be about the role, it was the only ma
ritime shield that Christendom had. The Italian peninsula would be reminded of the fact in bitter circumstances sixteen years later.
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The crusade never got off the ground. Pius was a hopeless organiser, better at rhetorical prose than the practical planning of wars. Only a rabble turned up at the mustering point of Ancona in the summer of 1464. Pius, who intended to crusade in person, surveyed the scene with growing despair. By the time that twenty-four Venetian galleys hove into view with their reluctant doge on 12 August, he was a dying man. He had to be carried to the window of the episcopal palace to see the lion banners of St Mark sweep into the bright bay. He died three days later. The venture collapsed ignominiously. His dying days stood as a metaphor for the death of crusading dreams. Cristoforo Moro sailed back home, no doubt with some measure of personal relief, but Venice was destined to fight alone – and for a long time. The Florentines, the Milanese, the king of Naples sat back to watch the spectacle from what they thought would be a safe distance.
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