The Venetian Empire

by Jan Morris

  You could not call Iraklion very grand now. The Venetians might enjoy those oriental evocations of its backstreets, but they would be horrified by its discordant concrete blocks and grubby thoroughfares. Nevertheless you can still discover in the shape of the town the pattern of their old authority, deliberately symbolized

  The city of Candia, today’s Heraklion

  in architecture. The centre of the town was a miniature replica of the imperial headquarters in Venice. It is called Venezelou Square now, and is a shambles of congested traffic, but through the hubbub its design is recognizable still. On its north side was the duke’s palace, now obliterated by shops and offices, except for a few arcades, once towered and merlonated in direct imitation of its great original. On the west was the Basilica of St Mark, the duke’s private chapel here as in Venice: this is still there, in use as a public hall, but has lost its presiding winged lion, its three great flagpoles and its campanile. Around the corner is the Armoury, now the city hall, and nearby, recently reconstructed, there still stands the elegant Loggia, a nobleman’s club, a centre of social power, from whose balconies heralds made announcements, and dukes watched festive processions. Grouped around, though vanished now, were the houses of the military and naval commanders, and the big block of the state warehouse, where grain was stored for emergencies.

  A little way down the street was the cathedral of St Titus. This had been an Orthodox cathedral under the Byzantines, but the Venetians took it over, made it the see of a Latin archbishop, and later shipped away to Venice its most precious relic, St Titus’s head. The flag of St Mark flew always from its bell-tower, to proclaim it the church of state; in its graveyard bishops, dukes and generals were interred. At Christmas and Easter, and on the feast days of Saints Mark and Titus, the settler feudarchs were obliged by the terms of their fiefs to pray for the Doges of Venice in the cathedral, and outside it all the sacred ceremonials of state were conducted. St Titus’s was replaced by a mosque under the Turks in 1872, but this in its turn has been converted into an Orthodox cathedral again, and in 1966, all imperial instincts gone, the Venetians returned to it the head of its eponym, still in its original reliquary.

  From this official nucleus the city’s main street, a true imperial way, ran as it runs still directly to the harbour, and the whole was surrounded by a ring road. Outside it the life of the town fell away in diminishing circles of consequence. There were the barracks of St George, for the soldiers of the city garrison; there were the many monasteries and nunneries; there was the Jewish ghetto; and filling in the gaps were the markets, shops, bazaars and dwelling-places of the Greeks. Even now the people of Iraklion seem to be inhabiting the interstices between the buildings of authority, and even now too they are clamped within the circuit of walls with which, in the sixteenth century, the Venetians enclosed their capital.

  They are magnificent walls, engineered by the great Michele Sanmicheli, and more or less complete still, though here and there poor people have settled within their encientes, and there are ramshackle huts blocking embrasures, and tethered goats nibbling in moats. Birds in their thousands nest in the more sheltered stretches, skimming in and out of their crevices, whirling around the silent turrets, and lizards scuttle here and there from arrow-slit to gun-port.

  As you tramp the round of them, the elaboration of these imperial defences gradually unfolds: the strategic inner circle of roads, like a fire-break among the houses; the mighty defensive gateways, St George’s Gate, the Gate of Jesus, the Gate of the Pantokrator; the hidden magazines and barrack halls; the complex angles and protrusions of the walls themselves; until, reaching the northern side of the town, and looking out across the sea, you find the harbour of Iraklion within its own protective mole below you. On its quays the humpback sheds of the Venetian ship-wrights stand, and at the end of the mole rises the isolated fortress of La Rocca al Mare, the postern of Crete: squat, strong, forbidding, with the winged lion still gigantic above its gateway, and its battlements facing all ways, inwards to the subject Cretans, outwards to Turks, Greeks, Genoese and other perils of the sea.

  All their defences faced both ways, outwards and inwards too, because from the very start the Cretans detested Venetian rule. They are people of formidable self-reliance, and throughout their history their response to foreign interference has been one of irreconcilable violence. Death and cruelty are familiars of Crete, and a constant theme of Cretan life has been a dilemma of blood and fear, the choice between liberty and a quiet life, self-respect or survival.

  Weep not for the eagle

  Who must fly in the rain:

  Keep your tears for a bird

  That has no wings.

  So ran one of the Cretan folk-songs, and it was apposite. The Cretans lived harshly in their challenging landscapes, but they bore themselves heroically. They flew through thunderstorms, when required. Their system of resistance to unwanted authority was part guile, part brute force, part comradeship. The word ‘Cretize’, says the Oxford Dictionary, means ‘to play the Cretan, to lie, cheat’: but the word ‘syncretize’, from the same root, means to unite in the face of a common enemy. To this day, when you see a group of Cretans doing something communally, threshing perhaps, or treading the strange steps of their bewitched circle dances, half jig, half saraband, they can seem invincible in their bond of origin. This indomitable manner they greatly cherish. They have a word for their ideal hero, that moustachioed and cummerbunded swaggerer, heavy with bandoliers, so often to be seen immortalized in prints and village monuments. They call him the palikare, a bully-boy for freedom, and they honour him in the sagas of all their heroes down the ages.

  For the first two centuries of Venetian rule there was nothing but rebellion in Crete, and the palikare became a figure all too well known to the Venetians, one of whom described him generically as having big moustaches, big boots, lots of weapons and a strong smell of goat. The Venetians were fond of quoting St Paul on the Cretans – ‘liars, evil beasts, slow bellies’ – and newcomers to the island were warned that if a bite from a Cretan woman’s teeth was automatically fatal, the pox of her favours was pretty lethal too. Almost the moment the Venetians arrived, the islanders rebelled, obliging the very first duke to escape from Iraklion disguised as a woman, and within half a century a Venetian chronicler was frankly recognizing the Cretans as irreconcilable – ‘they have always held ill feelings towards Venice, never accepting their subordination to it’. So contagious was the island spirit, too, that by the end of the century some of the Venetian colonists were themselves rebelling against the Republic: they resented their exclusion from the top government jobs, and, like the British settlers in Africa, chafed under the interference of the distant central authority – what the Rhodesians used to call ‘the imperial factor’.

  The Cretans had been intensely loyal to Byzantium and its church. The leading island families bore celebrated Byzantine names. The church was devoutedly Byzantine in ritual and belief. The all-powerful priests hated everything Latin. So tremendously did Constantinople loom in the imaginations of the people that for another six centuries the bards would sing of a return to The City, and the expulsion of its usurping rulers. No wonder the arrival of the Venetians, the debasers of Byzantium, was hardly welcome. Revolutions and repressions dismally followed each other, and the stories of Venetian Crete are full of horror.

  Once there was a plot to murder all the Venetian officials on a single day: it was betrayed to the Doge and all the plotters were strangled. Once a rebel Cretan was invited to negotiate: when he arrived at the duke’s palace he was tortured, sewn into a sack and thrown in the sea – reprimanded for doing all this in secrecy, the Doge replied that he had wanted to spare the feelings of the deceased’s family. Once a Cretan leader, like Shakespeare’s Antony, finding his particular insurrection lost, ordered his servant to kill him (which, unlike Eros, he did). Among the Cretans, political terrorism, brigandage and vendetta overlapped: among the Venetians, insecurity repeatedly led to spitef
ulness. Villages were burned, hostages were executed or deported in their hundreds. Sometimes rebels were persuaded to hunt each other, being rewarded with pardons when an insurrectionary head was brought in to Iraklion: but by the sixteenth century the rule was that a rebel would only be forgiven if the head was of a comrade who had murdered more victims than he had himself – by the nature of the arrangement, two at least.

  The most serious rebellion of all took place in 1362, when some of the leading settlers occupied Iraklion, deposed the duke, announced their conversion to the Orthodox faith and threw off their allegiance to the Republic. With the enthusiastic support of the Cretans they then elected a duke of their own and proclaimed the brand-new island republic of St Titus. A mercenary army was raised in Italy to deal with them, troops were rushed from Naxos and Euboea, the Pope declared it a holy war, but only after protracted and terrible fighting was the rule of Venice restored.

  The poet Petrarch was in Venice during this affair, as a guest of the Signory. The news from the island was being followed there with distress – there had never been an imperial crisis so serious, and the involvement of so many Venetian families in the revolt profoundly disturbed the city. One morning, Petrarch says, he was standing at the window of the house he had been given on the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking out across the lagoon, when a galley sailed into the Basin garlanded all over with flowers, its crew crowding the decks waving flags and shouting. At its stern the ensigns of a defeated enemy were trailing in the water. Vast crowds rushed to the Piazzetta to greet this ship of victory, ‘and when the ambassador steps off the vessel, the facts are speedily known. The enemy has been conquered, slain, captured, put to flight; the citizens of the Republic have been rescued; the cities have returned to obedience, the yoke has been riveted on Crete once more.’

  The city threw itself into celebration. There were three days of games and pageantry in the Piazza. Mock battles were fought. Grand banquets were held. The King of Cyprus, who was passing through Venice, took part in the jousting. No such spectacle had ever been seen, wrote Petrarch delightedly, within the memory of man. Far away the isle of Crete lay desolate, and the rebels had all been executed, every one.

  In the Cretan mind the old antagonism has long been blurred, and the Venetians are muddled in the folk-memory with later adversaries, Turks, Egyptians, Germans. But there remain some sad legacies, here and there in the consciousness of the people, of the long fight against the Serenissima. Here are two of them.

  The first is a story. It is the tragic allegory of George Kandanoleon, one of the boldest of the palikares – part fiction, perhaps, for it has been embellished by generations of Cretan story-tellers, but told so often that it has acquired a truth of its own. It concerns one of the last of the revolts, in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The people of mountainous western Crete then refused to pay any taxes, threw out the Republic’s officials, and set up their own revolutionary government under Kandanoleon. He formed a true administration, not just a guerilla command, and was supported by some of the great men of Crete, members of those ancient Byzantine clans which had been powerful in the island before the Venetians came. Taxes were collected, local government was organized, and much of western Crete became in effect an independent state.

  Kandanoleon (so the story goes) now conceived the idea of marrying the two rival authorities – literally, for he proposed that his son Petros should wed the daughter of one of the great Venetian nobles, Francesco Molino of Alikianos. He took the fearful risk, in fact, of crossing into Venetian-held territory to put the proposal face to face to Molino. The Venetian unexpectedly consented to this startling match. Rings were exchanged, and the marriage was fixed for the next Sunday but one. It would, both sides agreed, be a quiet wedding, in the country castle at Alikianos. The Molinos would invite a few friends from Iraklion: Kandanoleon would bring not more than 500 of his comrades and relations from the mountains.

  The day dawned fine, as they say in these tales. Kandanoleon and Petros arrived in high fettle, with 350 guerillas and about 100 women, to find that the wedding feast was already prepared. A hundred sheep were turning on their spits, barrels of strong Cretan wine were being broached. The marriage contract was signed; the pact was concluded; the company relaxed. They danced, especially the Cretans. They drank as Cretans do. They ate all the spitted meat. By nightfall the guests were left sleeping it off around the great hall of the castle, and in the yard outside.

  But it was all a ruse, and what starts as an allegory of reconciliation ends as a figure of betrayal. Molino had alerted the military command in Iraklion, and during the night the troops arrived. One company came by road from the capital, another landed from galleys on the beach, until nearly 2,000 men surrounded the castle. Signal rockets went up from the troops; they were answered from the castle tower; the place was stormed, the Cretans were seized, and Kandanoleon was taken in chains to Iraklion. They hanged him from a tree, with his son the bridegroom, and all the other prisoners were shot, hanged or sent to the galleys. Their villages were razed to the ground. ‘Men of faith,’ reported a Venetian official, ‘who respected their God and their leaders, were comforted and consoled.’

  The second memory concerns a place. Lassithi is a high mountain plateau, six miles across and almost circular, which stands some twenty-five miles south-east of Iraklion. It is like a volcanic crater, 1,300 feet high and surrounded by harsh peaks on every side. The road there twists dramatically away from the coast into the heaps of slag, shale and limestone that are the Cretan highlands, the air getting rarer and cooler as you climb, the stones sharper, the road more precarious at its edges, until suddenly you see before you, standing in disconcerting sentinel across the lip of a pass, a line of squat stone forms. They straddle the road, and wait at intervals up the hillside on either side. Are they megaliths? Are they forts? Are they Minoan totems?

  They are windmills, immensely old and distinctly malevolent, some merely turrets now, some with the remnants of arms hanging derelict from their snouts; and when you cross the pass, and run down the gentler hill on the other side, towards the symmetrical green plateau that lies like an arena below, you discover that they are, so to speak, only the sentinels of their kind. Massed in the plain behind, wherever your eye turns, in every field, above every hut, there stand the 10,000 iron windmills of Lassithi, silent and motionless on a winter morning, clanking, whirring, flapping and groaning when the summer breezes freshen off the hills.

  Each is an ironic memorial to Venice. The people of the Lassithi plateau were a particularly prickly and independent community even by Cretan standards. Their fertile home, rich in corn, fruit and vegetables, was shut off from everywhere else by the high mountains all around it, but had been inhabited continuously since pagan times, and was littered with ancient sites and associations. It was a hive of Cretan feeling, and became a natural centre of resistance to the Venetians. From its great pit in the hills raiding parties of palikares repeatedly harassed the shores below, and they played an important part in the great rising of 1362.

  In retribution the duke in Iraklion, Paolo Loredan, ordered that the entire Lassithi plateau should be laid waste. Every single inhabitant was made to leave. The fruit trees were uprooted, the fields devastated, the villages burned. Cultivation of the plateau, even grazing of cattle on the surrounding mountain slopes, was punishable by the loss of a foot. By these means, Loredan reported to Venice, Crete ‘is for ever rendered incapable of further revolt’. Lassithi became a dead place, and for a century remained utterly deserted. Its fields were hidden in weeds and undergrowth, and dense forests sprang up in its cultivated foothills. The plateau was scorched brown in summer, while in winter the rains turned it into a lake, and only the agrimi, the great wild ibex of Crete, roamed its acres undisturbed. Among generations of Cretans the very name of Lassithi inspired grim fancies and cruel traditions.

  Crete, though, was a granary for Venice, and in 1463, when food was short, the Venetians were obliged to bring
Lassithi to life again. Technicians from Venice criss-crossed it all with a huge grid of drainage ditches, each square marked with a stone pillar in the classic style of the irrigation engineers. The scrub was cleared, the first of the windmills were erected, and gradually Lassithi’s fertility was restored. It was then leased out in plots, a third of its harvest to go to the state. Most of the new tenants were descendants of the original inhabitants, but for generations they would not live in the haunted plateau, but merely camped there on their fields in the summer months, like nomads.

  So Lassithi remains an ambiguous reminder of the Venetian empire. Any large-scale map shows the rectilinear grid of the imperial surveyors, and on the ground their ditches and marker stones, still standing here and there, are oddly suggestive of the Brenta marshes, or the further reaches of the Venetian lagoon itself. To this day the Lassithi villages bear the names of their tenants under Venice – Tzermiadho the pitch of the Tzermia family, Farsaro the lease of the Farsaris. And even now, when the windmills are silent in their fields, in the heat of the afternoon perhaps, or early on a winter morning, Lassithi still looks like a dead place, its scattered hamlets abandoned as they were during the years of its anathema, and only the goats and ghosts at large.

  Yet the Venetian impact on Crete was not all harsh. In some respects it was fructifying. By a happy paradox, if the Venetians oppressed the body temporal, they sheltered the body spiritual and artistic, and allowed the imagination of the Byzantines to flower once more under their anomalous aegis.

  The Venetians began their imperial career in a mood of ritual intolerance. Morosini, the first trumped-up Patriarch of Constantinople, pointedly swaggered around the city shaven, a deliberate affront to Orthodox convictions, while wearing, so one of the Greek chroniclers reported, ‘a robe so tight that it seemed to have been sewn to his skin’. The first Latin priests of the Aegean islands did their best to discredit the Orthodox rite, and scandalized the islanders with their worldly behaviour. To many Greeks, the religion of the Venetian was, if anything, more repugnant than the religion of the Turks – the Turks generally left the churches alone, and did not try to proselytize.