City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  Loredan was in fact guilty of a breach of discipline. He had deserted his post at Corfu to share the glory of the hour. Grimani was irritated at having the attack disrupted; he was also put out at being upstaged. He reproved the newcomer for flouting orders but decided to let him lead the charge in the Pandora, one of the Venetian round ships, accompanied by Alban d’Armer in another. These were the largest ships in the fleet, each about 1,200 tons. Loredan had also come with scores to settle. He had spent considerable time hunting the corsair Kemal Reis; he now believed that he had his prey in sight, commanding the largest of the sailing ships built by Gianni; its captain was in fact the other corsair leader, Burak Reis. Excited cries of ‘Loredan! Loredan!’ rang across the fleet as the seamen watched their trophy ships closing on the invulnerable 1,800-ton floating fortress.

  What ensued was a signal moment in the evolution of naval warfare, a foretaste of Trafalgar. As the three super-hulks closed, both sides opened up with broadsides from their heavy cannon in a terrifying display of gunpowder weaponry: the roar of the guns at close range, the smoke and spitting flashes of fire astonished and unnerved those watching from the other ships. Hundreds of fighting troops, protected by shields, massed on the decks and fired a blizzard of bullets and arrows; forty feet higher in the crow’s nests, crested by the lion flag of St Mark or the Turkish moon, men fought an aerial battle from top to top, or hurled barrels, javelins and rocks onto the decks below; a swarm of light Turkish galleys worried the stout wooden hulls of the Christian round ships that reared above them. Men struggled to climb the sides and fell back in the sea. Despairing heads bobbed among the wreckage.

  In contrast the other Venetian front-line commanders hardly moved. The vanguard of the Christian fleet seems to have been gripped by a terrible indecision at the appalling spectacle before them. Alvise Marcello, the captain of the round ships, captured one light Turkish vessel and withdrew – though Marcello himself would give a much more dramatic account at the end of the day. Only one of the great galleys entered the fray under its heroic captain, Vicenzo Polani. It was set upon by a swarm of Turkish galleys in a battle that lasted two hours. In the smoke and confusion, ‘everyone thought it lost; a Turkish flag was hoisted on her, but she was stoutly defended and massacred a large number of Turks … and it pleased God to send a breath of wind; she hoisted her sails and escaped from the clutches of the Turkish fleet … maimed and burned; and if’, Malipiero went on, ‘the other great galleys and round ships had followed her in, we would have shattered the Turkish fleet’.

  Almost none of the other great galleys and carracks did. There was no response to Grimani’s frantic trumpet calls. The command structure collapsed. Orders were given and disobeyed or countermanded, Grimani failed to lead by example, while many of the more experienced captains were locked in the rear. The oarsmen in these galleys behind urged the heavy ships forward with shouts of ‘Attack! Attack!’ When this failed to provoke a response, howls of ‘Hang them!’ rang across the water. Only eight ships entered the fray. Most were the lighter vessels from Corfu, vulnerable to gunfire. One was quickly sunk, which further dampened enthusiasm for the fight. When Polani’s ship emerged, scorched, battered, but miraculously still afloat, the other great galleys followed her to windward.

  Meanwhile the Pandora and Alban’s ship continued to grapple with the carrack of Burak Reis. The three ships crashed together so that the men were fighting hand to hand, ship to ship. The battle continued for four hours until the Venetians seemed to be gaining the advantage; they clasped their opponent with grappling chains and prepared to board. Exactly what happened next is unclear; the ships were locked together, unable to separate, when fire broke out on the Ottoman vessel. Either by chance or as an act of self-destruction – for Burak Reis was pressed hard and close to despair – the powder supply in the Turkish ship exploded. The flames ran up the rigging, seized the furled sails and roasted the men in the foretops alive. The blackened stumps of the masts crashed to the decks. Those below were either instantly engulfed in flames where they stood or hurled themselves over the side. The watching ships observed this living pyramid of fire in rigid horror. It was maritime catastrophe on a new scale.

  But the Turks somehow held their nerve. While their indestructible battleship, carrying a thousand crack troops, ignited in front of them, the light galleys and frigates scuttled about rescuing their own men from the debris and executing their opponents in the water. On the Christian side they just watched, aghast. Loredan and Burak Reis disappeared in the inferno, Loredan, according to legend, still holding the flag of St Mark. More painfully, there was no effort to rescue the survivors. The captain of the other large carrack, d’Armer, escaped from his burning ship in a small boat but was captured and killed. ‘The Turks’, wrote Malipiero miserably, ‘picked up their own men in long boats and brigantines and killed ours, because we on our part showed no such pity … and so was done great shame and damage against our Signoria, and against Christianity.’

  And so it had been. The battle of Zonchio had not been lost. It had just not been won. Venice had flunked the chance to stem the Ottoman advance. In psychological terms 12 August was an utter catastrophe. Cowardice, indecision, confusion, reluctance to die for the flag of St Mark: the events at Zonchio inflicted deep and long-lasting scars on the maritime psyche. The disaster at Negroponte could be put down to a poor appointment or the inadequacy of a single commander; the debacle at Zonchio was systemic. It revealed fault lines in the whole structure. It is true that the senate had repeated its mistake and appointed an inexperienced man – largely for reasons of cash – but Grimani was not solely responsible. By the end of the day, with the cordite still on their hands and already perceiving hideous disgrace, the major participants were drafting reports.

  They all contained conditionals to the effect of ‘if someone else had done (or not done) something we would have won a glorious victory’. Grimani’s came, by proxy, from his chaplain. It blamed the defeat on the unwillingness of the noble merchant galley captains, and collective funk: ‘all the merchant galleys, with the exception of the noble Vicenzo Polani, kept to windward and backed off … the whole fleet with one voice cried ‘Hang them! Hang them!’ … God knows they deserved it, but it would have been necessary to hang four fifths of our fleet.’ He reserved his special ire for the aristocratic patroni of the merchant galleys; ‘I’m not going to hide the truth in code … the ruin of our land has been the nobles themselves, at odds from first to last.’

  Alvise Marcello wrote a highly self-serving account, blaming the confusion of the orders and depicting his own involvement in dramatic terms: he went alone into the melee and had his ship surrounded. ‘In the bombardment, I sent a vessel to the bottom with all hands; another came alongside; some of my men jumped aboard and cut many of the Turks to pieces. In the end I set fire to it and burned it.’ Finally with huge stone balls smashing into his cabin, wounded in the leg, with his companions being mown down around him, he was forced to withdraw. Others were more scathing of this feat: ‘He went in and out, and said he’d taken a ship,’ muttered the chaplain. Domenico Malipiero, one of the few to emerge with his reputation unscathed, put much of the blame on Grimani’s confusions. The ordinary seamen believed that Grimani had sent Loredan to his death purely out of jealousy.

  Lepanto

  At the day’s end, the Venetian fleet withdrew out to sea; the battered Ottoman fleet inched on round the coast towards Lepanto harbour, protected by a contingent of the army following on land. The running fight continued but Venetian morale was gone and the failure would prove expensive. There were several more ineffectual jabs to prise the enemy out into open water; fireships were driven into the enemy fleet, a few galleys were sunk, but the bulk of the Ottoman armada proceeded intact. At the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth the Ottoman fleet had to risk open water in its final run into Lepanto. The Venetians were presented with a last chance; this time they were accompanied by a French flotilla. A few brave ships engaged the T
urks, sinking eight galleys, but the rest, still apparently traumatised by the fireball at Zonchio, again flunked an encounter with heavy cannon. The French, seeing the confusion, also refused to engage. Their verdict on Venetian arrangements was deeply humiliating: ‘seeing that there was no discipline, they said that our fleet was magnificent, but they had no expectation it would do anything useful’. The chance was gone. ‘If all our other galleys had attacked, we would have taken the Turkish armada,’ bewailed Malipiero once again, ‘as sure as God is God.’ Instead the bulk of the Ottoman fleet rounded the last point towards Lepanto. Out to sea, the Venetians awaited the inevitable. ‘All good men in the fleet – and there were many, broke down in tears,’ Malipiero recalled. ‘They called the captain a traitor, who had not the spirit to do his duty.’

  Within the town, the beleaguered garrison had already beaten off several assaults by the Ottoman troops and expectantly watched the sails pricking the western horizon. They rang the church bells with joy at the approach of a Venetian fleet. As the ships grew on the water, they realised, to their horror, that their flags were not lions but crescent moons. When they learned that they carried siege guns, the town promptly surrendered.

  *

  Grimani had hanged no one, reprimanded none of the noble commanders.

  Hands on the Throat of Venice

  1500–1503

  In Venice, the loss of Lepanto was the scandal of the age. The inquiry and trials that followed were marked by unprecedented recriminations. Immense animosity was directed against Antonio Grimani and his clan; the Grimani palace was under siege from the mob; all its goods had to be hurriedly moved to a nearby monastery for safe keeping; a faithful Arab slave was attacked and left for dead in the streets; both the palace and the Grimani shops were daubed with graffiti. In the streets urchins took to shouting rhymes: ‘Antonio Grimani, Ruina da Christiani … traitor to Venice, may you and your sons be eaten by the dogs’. Other members of the family were too frightened to appear before the senate.

  It was nearly four months before Grimani could bring himself to come back to Venice. He was peremptorily told that if he sailed into the Basin of St Mark in his general’s galley he would be executed on sight. He returned in a small sailing ship, chained like all disgraced naval commanders, in scenes as dramatic as those that accompanied the failure of Pisani. It was 2 November, the day of the dead.

  Unlike Pisani, no sympathetic crowd of well-wishers turned out to watch Grimani struggle down the gangplank after dark. No man had fallen so far or so fast in the public estimation; the common consensus was that the admiral who had appeared to Priuli ‘like the Great Alexander, the famous Hannibal, the illustrious Julius Caesar’ had turned to jelly at the sight of an enemy. It was an example of the mutability of human fortune that one could see ‘this general pass from such fame and fortune to shame, disgrace and infamy … and that everything could change in a flash’. Weighted down with fetters and supported just by his sons he clanked his way to the steps of the doge’s palace. Four servants had to carry him up to the council chamber. Despite the lateness of the hour, two thousand people watched in dead silence as the proclamation was read out committing him to a damp dungeon.

  The proceedings that followed were bitter and long drawn out. With rhetorical fury, the prosecution demanded the ultimate penalty for the man who was declared to be ‘the calamity of the nation, rebel of the Republic, enemy of the state, unworthy captain who has lost Lepanto through irresponsibility, a man who is rich and vain’. They contrasted this disgrace with the long and glorious roll call of public offices held by Grimani, now ill from the deprivations of a prison cell, ‘commander of galleys, captain of the Alexandria convoy, proviseur of salt, sage of the Terra Firma, governor of Ravenna, leader of the Ten, lawyer of the Commune, admiral in chief’ and terminated on a drumbeat of doom: ‘On his tomb will be written: here lies he who was executed in St Mark’s Square.’ The charge of wealth introduced a new note into Venetian public life. To be rich had always been a virtue; now it was a moral stain. The piles of gold flaunted on the recruiting benches returned to haunt him. Behind this lay jealousy and factional spite within the heart of the ruling class. There was a determination to eliminate the Grimani clan from commercial competition.

  Grimani’s defence was that his orders had not been obeyed; the patroni had not engaged; commanders had held back through cowardice and disobedience. Everyone had their own version. Alvise Marcello, despite his own protestations, certainly bore a part of the blame; Malipiero thought that Grimani’s fault was not cowardice but inexperience: he had failed to organise the fleet properly and he had caused confusion by raising a crucifix instead of the war standard which he was given in St Mark’s – the signal to which captains were accustomed to respond. It was clear that Grimani had not reprimanded the noble commanders for their failures to engage, probably because he had no wish to alienate those on whose support his political future might lie. In the end it was recognised that the blame was collective, not individual. Grimani did not die. He was banished from Venice and forced to pay heavy compensation to the aristocratic families whose members had been killed in battle.

  *

  The war went on almost as badly as before. New commanders were appointed but the tide of fortune could not be reversed. At Lepanto the Ottomans now had a secure forward base on the edge of the Ionian Sea from which to conduct naval operations. During this tense time, Leonardo da Vinci arrived in the city to offer his services as a military engineer. He came with a head full of extraordinary schemes for the city’s defence – a diving suit of pig’s leather with bamboo pipes for air tubes, sketches for submarines. Whatever conversations took place came to nothing. (Two years later he was drawing up proposals to put to Sultan Bayezit for a single-span bridge across the Golden Horn.)

  The senate’s concerns were more immediate. During the early months of 1500 fears grew for the safety of Coron and Modon. In July, a new commander, Girolamo Contarini, fought a repeat of Zonchio in the same waters, with the same mixture of galleys, round ships and merchant vessels. At they swept in to attack, the wind failed; the round ships were unable to engage; four of the great galleys withdrew; two more were taken. Contarini’s vessel, shot to bits and sinking, was forced to withdraw. Again there were recriminations.

  Bayezit then proceeded in person with his army to the walls of Modon. He brought with him a large number of cannon, and the standards of the vessels captured from Contarini to demoralise the defence. From the town, the rector despatched short, desperate messages describing their plight: the whole countryside beyond the walls covered with a sea of tents … unceasing bombardment day and night … a third of the population dead or wounded … everyone else expecting to lose their lives … the gunpowder almost gone. Off shore, the patroni of the merchant galleys, daunted by the Ottoman fleet, again refused to fight. Only one captain, Zuam Malipiero, offered to take four galleys and run the blockade and ‘lay down his life for his country’. Such moments of exemplary bravery met their response. ‘At once, the galley crews cried out that they would volunteer to die with him, that they would man the galleys. The others,’ Priuli recorded bitterly, but from a safe distance, ‘lacking spirit and courage remained in the fleet.’ Malipiero’s galleys heroically pierced the Ottoman blockade and made it into the small encircling harbour of Modon. The exhausted defenders, overjoyed at the prospect of relief, abandoned their posts and started to run for the ships. The result was catastrophic.

  On 29 August, at the twentieth hour, the news reached Venice as news always did: a light frigate cutting up fast on the wind to the Basin of St Mark. It was the day of the decapitation of St John, an ill-omened anniversary in the Christian calendar. When the loss of Modon was reported to the Council of Ten in their gilded chamber, the august dignitaries who commanded the Most Serene Republic of Venice burst into tears. Even more than Negroponte, Modon mattered. Its significance was both emotional and commercial. It was not just the six thousand prisoners taken, the loss o
f 150 cannon and the twelve galleys. Modon was part of the original imperial heritage of the Fourth Crusade; it counted as one of the richest treasures of the Stato da Mar. ‘It was’, said Priuli, ‘as if they had seen the whole ability of shipping to sail taken away, because the city of Modon was the staging post and maritime turntable for all ships on every voyage.’ When the sultan turned up at the walls of Coron twenty miles away, the case was judged hopeless; the town surrendered without a fight. The Eyes of the Republic had been extinguished. To Priuli the merchant it was a moment of prescient doom: ‘If the Venetians can’t make their voyages, their means of living will be gradually taken away, and in a short time they will wither away to nothing.’