‘If Negroponte Is Lost’
1464–1489
The war opened brightly enough with a successful invasion of the Peloponnese but quickly became unsustainable. The mercenary troops, commanded by the Wolf of Rimini, proved unreliable, though this was perhaps not surprising given that Venice failed to pay them reliably either. Venice’s galleys controlled the seas but could inflict little damage in a land-based war, while the Ottoman fleet, remembering the debacle of 1416, refused to fight. And the war was expensive: by 1465 it was costing seven hundred thousand ducats a year. A decade later that figure would have almost doubled.
Venetians within the Ottoman Empire suffered badly. The bailo died in a Constantinople prison; captive soldiers and resident merchants were publicly executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets. Trade in the Ottoman Empire was dying; commercial establishments collapsed. The Venetian advance in the Peloponnese was checked, then reversed. The inspirational captain of the sea, Vettor Capello, was unable to prevent the recapture of Patras on the western coast. The failure cut him deeply: Capello had been leader of the party that had promoted the war. After Patras, he was never seen to smile again; when he died of a heart attack at Negroponte in March 1467, the appetite for war began to wane. By July of that year Mehmet was five miles from the Venetian port of Durazzo on the Albanian coast. Only sixty miles of Adriatic sea separated the Ottomans from Brindisi on the Italian shore; shiploads of destitute refugees started to arrive there. In Naples it was common knowledge that Mehmet ‘hated the Signoria of Venice and that if he found a suitable harbour in those parts of Albania, he would carry the war into its territory’. By 1469 raiders had reached the Istrian peninsula, considerably closer to Venice. Mehmet’s scheme of bridging the lagoon seemed not impossible.
The Republic shuttled restlessly between spirited defence, peace initiatives and diplomatic alliances with Mehmet’s Islamic rivals in Asia Minor, in an attempt to find a solution to a drawn-out fight. The war would lull and reignite, depending on Mehmet’s strategic imperatives, and his health. When he crossed the Bosphorus to campaign in Asia or on the Black Sea, Venice breathed a temporary sigh of relief. His returns were always ominous. Intermittently bouts of morbid corpulence would afflict the sultan; unable to haul himself into the saddle, he shut himself away in the Topkapi palace and the campaigns would pause.
And he played the diplomatic game with consummate skill. His knowledge of Italian politics, supplied courtesy of Florentine and Genoese advisers at his court and paid informers, was excellent. He dallied expertly with Venetian hopes, encouraging their ambassadors then dropping them, accepting gifts then reverting to silence, periodically buying time to regroup, or proposing peace on terms he knew they would refuse. From time to time unattributed emissaries would approach Venetian outposts with suggestions that peace negotiations might be possible, then vanish. Mehmet probed their resolve, tested their war-weariness and spread disinformation, leaving the senate to pick painstakingly over one piece of data after another. Strategically he kept his cards close to his chest, making spies second-guess the objective of each new season’s campaign. He was famously secretive. When asked about a future campaign he was reported to have replied, ‘Be certain that if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had learned my secret, I would pull it out and consign it to the flames.’ The Rialto was a cockpit of rumours.
The Venetians soon grasped his methods. Considering yet another peace initiative in 1470, the senate resolved that
we understand very well that this is one of the usual cunning tricks of the Turk, in whom we believe that absolutely no trust should be placed … considering the present state of affairs. However, it has seemed best to us to play his own game of pretence and to go along with him.
Venice was at the height of its powers; trade with the Mamluks continued to boom but the war was ruinous, its effects doubled by the snuffing out of trade in the Byzantine lands and the Black Sea. ‘The present state of affairs’ was always the Republic’s power deficit against the larger, better resourced Ottoman Empire.
Towards the end of the 1460s the voices of alarm were becoming increasingly shrill in diplomatic circles. Death and hardship fell heavily on the Greeks, Serbs and Hungarians – everyone on the continuously eroding frontiers of the Ottoman advance. Venice begged the pope for material aid, crusading tithes and support, ‘for when [the sultan] has occupied the coast of Albania, which God forbid, nothing else remains but for him to cross over into Italy, whenever he wishes, for the destruction of Italy’.
When Vettor Capello died at Negroponte in 1467, Venice appointed a new captain-general of the sea, Jacopo Loredan. Intelligence from Constantinople made it certain that sooner or later Mehmet would strike at Negroponte, ‘the shield and base of our estate in the east’. The imperative was to hold the island at all costs. It appointed a new provveditore to Negroponte with the self-same instructions. He was Dr Nicolo da Canal, previously ambassador at the Vatican. As a fail-safe, da Canal was given a further set of instructions:
If by chance, which God forbid, the captain-general of the sea should fall ill or suffer some infirmity so that he should be unable to carry on or if he should die, we order you … at once to embark as captain of the galleys of our fleet … assuming the responsibility of the said captaincy until … the captain-general shall regain his former health.
It was a fateful decision. Da Canal was a highly learned lawyer, the best-educated man ever to be entrusted with the command of Venice’s fleets, but he was no Pisani or Carlo Zeno. Unfortunately, by the time that Mehmet did strike, it was da Canal at the helm.
In February 1469 a Venetian merchant on the island of Scios, Piero Dolfin, alerted the Republic to significant intelligence. His information was highly specific:
At the start of December we learned from Galata that the Turk has begun to prepare a fleet and has summoned the army; he has come in person to Constantinople, disregarding the danger of plague, to arrange things … and he aims to take his army from the mainland to the island via a bridge which will be constructed.
He went on to outline the preparations: so much flour was being diverted for ship’s biscuit that there was a shortage and unrest on the streets; large quantities of charcoal were being prepared for the manufacture of gunpowder; sixty ship’s caulkers had been despatched to the arsenal at Gallipoli; thousands of men were being called up; artillery was being hauled towards Salonica. He restated what everyone already knew about Negroponte: ‘The security of the whole state hangs on it. If Negroponte is lost, all the rest of the Levant will be in danger.’
On 8 March 1469, lawyer-admiral Nicolo da Canal received his commission as captain-general:
… because both by letters and by various other means we have word that the Turk, cruellest enemy of Christ’s name, is preparing a strong fleet and a powerful army to attack our city of Negroponte … we wish and order you, owing to the extreme importance of this matter, to hasten your voyage with all possible speed … to Modon and Negroponte in order to meet, with your customary prudence and valour and with the help of God’s clemency, the perils which could well be in store for us there.
Dread news continued to gather pace throughout the months of 1469 and into 1470. The sultan’s force was wildly estimated at a hundred thousand men and 350 ships – a tidal wave of military might. Venice, already exhausted by seven years of war, made desperate preparations; ‘We are squeezing not merely money from every source but even blood, so to speak, from our very veins to aid the aforesaid city, if it is possible, lest such a slaughter and calamity fall upon all the Christians [in Negroponte].’ Again and again the Republic pressed the consequences of its loss on the Italian shore and the need for united action – to no avail. By the spring of 1470, Venice was on red alert. Two patroni of the arsenal were ordered to reside there permanently, the third sent to procure fleet supplies. Two thousand men were sent out on ten round ships with gunpowder and five hundred hired infantry. On 3 June, an Ottoman fleet set sail from G
allipoli.
It was sighted in the northern Aegean by a squadron of Venetian galleys. The galley commander, Geronimo Longo, was shaken by what he saw:
I have seen the Turkish fleet, which will be the ruin of Christianity, if God does not help us … otherwise we will lose in a few days what has taken us a long time to acquire … At first I judged it to be three hundred sail, now I think it’s nearer four hundred … the sea is like a forest; it might seem incredible, but the sight of it was quite extraordinary. They row very well, with a fast stroke, though not as well as us. But the sails and everything else are better than ours. I think they have more men than us.
‘We need action now, not words,’ he continued breathlessly, assessing their cannon and other equipment.
I promise you that from head to tail the whole fleet is conservatively more than six miles long. To tackle this armada at sea, in my opinion we would need not less than a hundred good galleys, and even then I don’t know how it would turn out; to be certain of winning, it’s necessary to have seventy light galleys, fifteen heavy galleys, ten sailing vessels each of a thousand botte [perhaps about six hundred tons] – all well armed … now we need to show our power … and send with all possible speed ships, men, food, money; if not, Negroponte is in peril, all our empire in the Levant will be lost as far as Istria.
Longo was predicting the collapse of the whole Stato da Mar. The Adriatic itself would be in terrible danger: Istria lay at the doorstep of Venice, just a night’s sail away.
In Venice, public prayers were being ordered. Late in the day, the danger was at last being perceived on the Italian mainland. Everyone now understood what defeat might bring. ‘The Turkish navy will soon be at Brindisi, then Naples, then Rome,’ wrote Cardinal Bessarion. ‘With the Venetians defeated, the Turks will rule the seas as they do the land.’ Pope Paul directed prayers be said throughout Italy. On 8 July a penitent procession of cardinals wound its way barefoot from the Vatican to St Peter’s; a Turk was baptised as a morale-raiser; everyone was exhorted to pray; indulgences were granted to people who fought or paid another to fight. Despite the vast fleet and Longo’s urgent words, the memory of Gallipoli buoyed Venetian confidence. Its naval supremacy had never been challenged in battle.
*
Negroponte – the Black Bridge – was the name the Venetians had given to both the principal town and the whole of the Greek island of Euboea. The island is a freak in the geological history of the Mediterranean. It lies so hard up against the eastern coast of Greece that it is hardly an island at all: a long ribbon of land, mimicking the rhythm of the mainland into which it interlocks, but separated from it by a drowned valley, the Euripus, which comprises a minor wonder of the marine world. The narrow channel acts like a hydraulic ram, pumping the water through in a series of tidal bores at the rate of fourteen a day, seven in each direction. At its narrowest point, where the island and the mainland are separated by a strait only fifty yards wide, the water surges with the speed of a mill race. It was here that the Venetians had their town, on the site of the ancient Greek settlement of Chalkis. This was the Italian state in miniature, impressively bastioned, with a harbour and a bridge linking it to the mainland that was surmounted, halfway, by a fortified tower and a double drawbridge to seal the island from intruders.
After the fall of Constantinople the strategic importance of the island was inestimable. Its population was never large – probably no more than three thousand – but it was Venice’s hub in the northern Aegean. ‘The place was well stocked with wealthy men and great merchants … so that it was in its greatest splendour and prosperity,’ according to a flattering contemporary account.
Negroponte, separated from mainland Greece by the Euripus. The Ottomans built their bridge to the right of the island’s black bridge. Da Canal’s fleet came down the strait from the north, to the left of the bridge.
Some time around 8 June, the Ottoman fleet reached Negroponte and anchored downstream from the city, disembarking men and guns on the shore. As intelligence had predicted months earlier, they immediately started constructing their own bridge of boats across the straits, south of the Black Bridge, whose drawbridge was now pulled up. What was obscured from the defenders was that this naval force was just one arm of a pincer movement. The shouts of defiance died on their lips on 15 June when a large army was spotted cresting the skyline on the mainland opposite, led by Mehmet himself. The personal presence of the sultan lent weight to a campaign; Mehmet only took to the field to win. Reining in his horse on the ridge, he spent two hours telescopically appraising the panorama below him: the narrow strait, the causeway with the fortress at its midpoint, then the moated and fortified city beyond, with the lion of St Mark carved on its outer walls and fluttering from its towers; his own fleet rocking at anchor. The immaculately co-ordinated operation was a trademark of Mehmet’s style. His aim was to deliver a knockout blow before the Venetian fleet could respond.
His army of perhaps twenty thousand jingled down the slope to the banks of the Euripus, followed by a long train of camels and mules with all the impedimenta of a beseiging army. He crossed the pontoon bridge, erected his tents and started to draw his forces tightly around the city. The stock request to surrender was shouted over the walls: none of the inhabitants would be harmed; they would be free from all taxation for ten years; ‘To any nobleman who own a villa, he will give two. And the magnificent bailo and captain he will appoint as lords if they want to stay here; if not he will give them great honours in Constantinople.’ Mehmet was well aware that no Venetian governor could tamely surrender a city and return home alive.
The response was spirited. The bailo, Paolo Erizzo, conscious that da Canal’s fleet was on its way, declared that the place was Venetian and would remain so. He promised that within a fortnight he would burn the sultan’s fleet and root up his tents, then warming to his theme, invited the sultan ‘to go and eat pig’s flesh and come and meet us at the ditch’. When this insult was translated, Mehmet narrowed his eyes and resolved that no one would come out alive.
What followed was a miniature re-enactment of the siege of Constantinople, a pitiless spectacle of cruelty and blood. Mehmet had brought a battery of twenty-one large bombards that pounded the high medieval walls of the town without ceasing, day and night, terrifying the population and gradually reducing their bastions to rubble. The Venetian cannon had some success of their own, knocking out guns and killing their crews, but the weight of Ottoman firepower was relentless. Incendiary bombs and mortars, which lobbed missiles into the heart of the city, compelled the terrified population to shelter in the lee of the outer walls, ‘since the firing for the most part hit the centre of the city’. ‘There was so much artillery and because the firing was so continuous,’ wrote Giovan-Maria Angiolello, a survivor of the siege, ‘it was impossible to make lasting repairs, since so many of our men were killed by the gunfire which scoured the city both frontally and from the flanks.’ The Turks inched their ladders and siege trenches forward into the rubble of the outer walls; on 29 June, accompanied by a wall of noise – the blaring of horns and the deep rhythmic thud of drums – Mehmet ordered a general assault. It was beaten back with much loss of life.
The bailo soon had to contend not only with continuous attacks but also the presence of a fifth column within his walls. Critical to the Venetian defence were five hundred mercenary infantry recruited largely from the Dalmatian coast under their commander Tommaso Schiavo. It was discovered that Schiavo had been sending envoys to the Ottoman camp; the administration covertly unpicked the plot, arresting and torturing his associates to expose a web of spying and intrigue that stretched years back and all the way to Venice. Mehmet had agents planted deep within the state. Under torture Schiavo’s brother revealed a plan to let the Turks into the city at the next attack. He was quietly killed.
The bailo now had to deal with Schiavo himself. It required extreme stealth as the traitor commanded a substantial force. Erizzo summoned him to the loggia – the adm
inistrative centre of the town – to discuss details of the defence. Doubtless suspicious, he came to the central square with a large and fully armed retinue. Entering the loggia, his fears were allayed by the bailo’s cordial manner. After some lengthy discussion, Schiavo dismissed his men back to their posts. With his back turned, twelve concealed men fell upon the commander and struck him down. He was strung up in the square by the foot.
Mehmet, meanwhile, was unaware of this turn of events. He was awaiting a pre-arranged signal to indicate that a certain bastion would surrender without a fight. The bailo prepared a trap. The signal flag was hoisted; when the Ottomans rushed forward, they were slaughtered, according to a chronicler, ‘like pigs’.
In the aftermath, the authorities in the town moved to kill many of the other ringleaders but the whole event had a deeply destabilising effect on the citizens’ morale. There was uproar in the streets and fighting between the townspeople and some Cretans on one side and the Dalmatian mercenaries on the other. An increasing number of the hired Slavs had to be put to death. With the supply of manpower ebbing away, public criers went round the streets ordering all boys of ten and over to the arsenal. Five hundred were chosen, rapidly trained in the use of handguns and sent to the walls, with the promise of a reward of two aspers for every Turk shot dead. ‘Each day in the evening,’ according to an eyewitness, ‘the bailo distributed to these boys three to five hundred aspers.’ A further major attack was beaten off.
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