by Jan Morris
Although the town may be broken and shabby, it is well-proportioned still and somehow commanding, like some stout old dowager gone down in the world. The cathedral of St Nicolas is still there, with its great rose window, though it was long ago turned into a mosque; its facade is lopsided now because the Turks put a minaret upon its north tower, and most of its windows have been filled in with arabesque patterns of plaster of Paris, but it is still recognizably descended from Rheims or Amiens.
Directly opposite, across the dusty square, rises the grand facade, all that is left, of the Venetian Lieutenant’s palace. It has been badly knocked about in one war and another, and is now all mixed up with the adjacent police station, whose trucks are parked in its shattered courtyard, and whose trembling detainees are sometimes to be seen briskly escorted towards the cells. A pile of Turkish cannon-balls gives it a martial flavour still, and above its precarious central arch you can make out the arms of the Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Renier, who governed Cyprus during its construction.
There is a ruined Franciscan church just in sight beyond the square, bits and pieces of Venetian stonework lie here and there, and when a gust of wind blows up, dust from old Venetian masonries still swirls upon the air. Down the road to the south Othello’s Tower, only a few hundred yards away, marks the presence of the sea. Beside the cathedral stand two grand old pillars, doubtless filched from Salamis too, which were the symbols of Venetian sovereignty.
We are looking at the scene of the grand tragedy which, in 1571, marked the end of Venetian rule in Cyprus, and gave a famous martyr to the Republic. Here was Grand Guignol. Famagusta bravely resisted the Turks for ten months, long after the rest of Cyprus was lost. It was an allegorical kind of siege. The Turks were commanded by a general known to history only as Mustapha Pasha, a sort of generic Islamic commander. The Venetians were led by Marco Antonio Bragadino, Captain of Cyprus and a member, as they preferred, of one of their oldest noble families. Even the style of fighting fitted. Sometimes there were single combats between champions, watched by crowds of soldiers and citizens, and often messages of threat or defiance were exchanged between the combatants, as jousting knights might exchange courtly abuse between charges.
The Venetians fought with great spirit. Once they pretended to have abandoned the city, and when the Turks moved in for the capture, mowed them down with gunfire and slashed them about with cavalry charges. Once they recaptured one of their own standards, taken by the Turks at Nicosia. They made daring sorties, they scattered poisoned nails outside the walls, to disable the enemy cavalry. The Turks, for their part, invested the city with their usual massive determination, appallingly wasteful of lives and money, but true to their own code of moral and national duty. They had at least 200,000 men to invest some 8,000 defenders, and fresh troops kept pouring in from Syria to keep their army up to strength. The Pasha was advised by a Spanish military engineer, until he was killed by a mine, and his corps of 40,000 Armenian sappers dug an enormous mesh of deep trenches all around the town – so big that the whole army, it was said, could be concealed within them, and so deep that tents were pitched inside, and cavalry could move about unseen. At the head of these subterranean approaches they filled in the town ditch and built two forts, of oak and earth, which towered castle-like above Famagusta, so that they could bombard it constantly and at almost point-blank range.
Bragadino was undeterred. One day, he told Mustapha after another of the Pasha’s repeated calls for surrender, the Venetian fleet would arrive to relieve the city and destroy the Turkish army: ‘Then I shall make you walk before my horse and clear away on your back the earth you have filled our ditch with.’ He lived to regret this choice of threat. A Venetian squadron did fight its way in after a brilliant little action, but it sailed away again to Crete, taking with it all the Venetian children of the city. After that, no more help came. By July 1571 life was so terrible within the town that the citizens petitioned the general to surrender. Bragadino replied by asking the Bishop of Limassol to say a public mass in the cathedral, with Bragadino himself as his server, and then appealing to the congregation to hold on for fifteen days more. Nearly all the food had gone by now. All the cats and donkeys had been eaten, and only three horses were left alive. The ammunition was almost spent.
For fifteen more days, nevertheless, they stuck it out as their general asked, ceaselessly bombed and repeatedly mined, quenching fires, repairing shattered revetments, fighting hand to hand battles now at one corner of the walls, now another, until the garrison was reduced to half-starved men, the Bishop of Limassol was dead like Paphos before him, and even the indomitable Bragadino was exhausted. Only seven barrels of powder were left in the magazines: on 1 August 1571 they raised the white flag on the ramparts.
The Turks are said to have lost 50,000 men in the siege of Famagusta, and in return they had practically razed the little town, leaving to this day that air of abandoned defeat we felt inside the walls. When at last Bragadino surrendered, Mustapha promised him that the garrison might sail for Crete with full honours of war. For what happened in the event, history has generally relied upon the word of the Venetian chroniclers: Turks say that Bragadino broke the surrender terms by putting some of his prisoners to death, but it is the Venetians’ account that has prevailed, and here is their version of the end at Famagusta in 1571.
Mustapha Pasha ordered a fleet of twelve ships to embark the surrendered garrison, and on 3 August the embarkation began. Two days later Bragadino set off for the Pasha’s camp to take him the keys of the city, before boarding the galleys himself. He wore his purple robe of office, and above his head was held the red umbrella which was the prerogative of his office. He was escorted by some three hundred of his officers and men. They were conducted to the Pasha’s camp, where they were courteously required to give up their arms, and Bragadino and his senior officers were taken into Mustapha’s pavilion. At first the Pasha was polite, but after a few moments of conversation he flew into a rage. He accused Bragadino of breaking the surrender terms, and of squandering thousands of Turkish lives by a needless and hopeless resistance.
Suddenly the Venetians were seized and bound, and the soldiers outside the pavilion were fallen upon by the janissaries and cut into pieces. Only a handful escaped, not always by the most comfortable means – Hercules Martenigo, scion of a famous aristocratic clan, became a eunuch’s slave. Bragadino was made to kneel for execution, three times, but each time the axe was stayed at the last moment: Mustapha himself then cut off the Venetian’s right ear, while a soldier removed his left ear and his nose.
Twelve days later, horribly mutilated and pitifully weak, he was dragged back into the city, and his old threat to the Pasha was turned against him. He was made to carry heavy sacks of stone and earth up and down the ramparts, kissing the ground each time he passed Mustapha. Then they tied him in a chair and hoisted him to the yard-arm of a galley, for the army and the citizens to see: and then, taunted all the way, hit by anyone who cared to, jeered at constantly by the Pasha himself, he was taken to the square beside the cathedral, opposite the palace, and tied face front to one of the Venetian pillars.
Mustapha Pasha sat in the loggia of the palace, and offered Bragadino his life if he would become a Muslim. Bragadino, one supposes, was past apostasy by then, and so in agony he faced the pillar, while an executioner flayed him alive in the sunshine. His head was stuck on a pike (where it shone like the sun, so Christian legend was to say, and gave forth a lovely fragrance). His body was quartered, and the various parts were distributed among the breaches the Turks had made in Famagusta’s walls. His skin, stuffed with straw, dressed in his purple robe and surmounted by his red umbrella, was carried around the streets of the city on a cow, before being slung to the yard of a warship and taken on a triumphal cruise around the eastern Mediterranean, now truly a sea of Turks.
Finally it was taken to Constantinople by Mustapha Pasha himself, and presented as a trophy of victory to the Sultan. It was placed in the Arsen
al in the Golden Horn, directly opposite the place where, 350 years before, the Venetian forces had broached the walls of Constantinople and begun their imperial history. In 1650 a citizen of Verona, Jerome Polidoro, was persuaded by the Bragadino family to steal it. It was brought to Venice, and laid at last, all torments ended, in the church of San Zanipolo. As for Polidoro, the Turks caught him and tortured him appallingly, but he was ransomed by the Bragadinos, and given a pension of five ducats a month by the grateful Signory.
So there came to an end the brief and unhappy Venetian domination of Cyprus, 1489 to 1571. Two months after the fall of Famagusta the Holy League achieved a great victory over the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, but it was too late to save the island. Hardly a Venetian was left in Cyprus then: only a few noble families, it is said, their lives spared by the Turks, melted into the peasantry and remained for another 300 years, from their village of Athenion in the central plain, the chief muleteers of the island. The Turks remained sole rulers of Cyprus until the nineteenth century, but they did not bring it contentment. Stagnant and divided the island festered on, until the memory of the Venetians was almost lost and nothing was left of them there but the ruined and fateful walls of fortresses, a church or two, a winged lion here and there. They had earned no gratitude, and gained little love, from their anxious generations in the bittersweet island.
But what, you may ask, became in the end of Caterina Cornaro, whose sad marriage all those years before had brought Cyprus into the Signory’s grasp? She was lucky to have abdicated, as it turned out, for the second half of her life proved much happier than the first. She never married again, and a portrait of her in middle age, by Gentile Bellini, shows her massively shouldered and busted, with her hair cut short, her mouth resolute and her rather porcine eyes displaying a slight but distinctive outward squint. Instead she devoted herself to cultural and social pleasures, and became in later years a famous patron of the arts.
She remained a queen – of Cyprus, she signed herself to the end, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia. The Republic fixed her up with a pseudo-kingdom, a fief of the delectable little hill-town of Asolo, forty miles north of Venice. There she lived happily ever after with her devoted court, with twelve maids of honour and eighty serving-men, with a Negress to look after her favourite parrots and a little menagerie to enliven the gardens of her castle. For twenty years she was Lady of Asolo, visited constantly by friends and relatives, attended often by eminent scholars and writers, entertained by pageants and torchlight processions. She died in 1510, fifty-six years old, and they built a bridge of boats across the Grand Canal from the Cornaro Palace, from whose steps she had sailed upon the adventure of her life in 1472, to take her body to the church of Santi Apostoli near the Rialto bridge. On a wet and stormy night they buried her there: her corpse was dressed in the brown habit of the Franciscan order, but upon her coffin was laid the crown of Cyprus.
Shores of Greece
The Eye – sui generis – tramps and argosies –
Monemvasia – view of a battle – last fling –
lasting accomplishment
Cyprus was the ∗∗∗eastern outpost of the Venetian Empire. Here we turn. The surrendered soldiers of Famagusta never did set sail westward for Iraklion, for they were enslaved by the Turks after all, but in happier times the Venetian convoys from Egypt and the Levant, when they left Cyprus behind them, were in their own waters. From Cyprus to Crete – past the clumped blue shapes of the Cyclades – west of Kithira and Matapan – until meeting, perhaps, as they rounded the Peloponnese, with, other vessels homeward bound from Aegean waters, they reached the ∗∗∗binge of the whole imperial construction, Modon. Modem, modern Methoni, stood at the extreme south-western point of the Peloponnese, and acted as junction, supply point, information office, command post, repair yard and recreation centre for all the Venetian shipping on the eastern routes. It was the most spectacular of all the sea-castles of the empire. It was said to stand ‘halfway to every land and sea’, and the Venetians called it ‘The Eye of the Republic’.
We will sail into it now, since our choice of transport is absolute, with a convoy of the early fifteenth century, say, when Methoni was in its heyday and the Venetian Empire itself still in the ascendant. As we stand on the foredeck of our galley, homeward bound from Beirut perhaps, with its oarsmen heaving at the oars below us and its captain languid on his high poop behind – as we stand there in the sunshine of a medieval Grecian morning, the lion of St Mark billowing above us, it is as though all the wealth of east and empire is pouring home with us to Venice.
There are spices and silks from Syria on the galley over there; cotton from Cyprus, peppers from Egypt on the ship behind; monkeys for the menageries of the rich, incense from Arabia, hides, furs, enamelware from Constantinople; Mongolian slaves from the Sea of Azov, wines from Naxos or Mykonos; Cornaro men on leave from the Cyprus plantations, soldiers thankfully re-posted from Tinos or Frangocastello, delegations from Syros, Jewish bankers from Euboea, Greek icon-artists, merchants retiring after a lifetime in Alexandria, or going home to invest the fortunes they have made in Aleppo’s bountiful profit margins.
Past the islet of Enetika we sail, itself a proclamation of sovereignty on the charts, and through the narrow channel past Sapienza Island, until we enter the great calm bay of Sapienza. Around us a mass of other shipping is assembled. There are war-galleys with prows like beaks, stocky square-rigged coasters, lateen skiffs from the islands, and as our convoy finds its berths, ship by ship, the bay is a bustle of small boats, and shouts, and rattling anchor chains, and whistles. We feel we have reached some great haven, some first chamber of Venice herself, where all will be safe and sure: and this is not surprising, for low-lying there across the water, ivory-coloured now that the evening is drawing in, the fortress-port of Methoni crouches fierce but reassuring, rather like a lion itself.
It is one of the great sights of Mediterranean travel. It stands on the tip of its own peninsula, above a half-moon sandy beach, and is a kind of screen or barricade of towers, one after the other along the water’s edge. Flags fly from its turrets, sentries patrol its cat-walks, windmills whir, and its two big sea-gates, thrown open to the harbour, are alive with traffic in and out. The smoke of hundreds of houses rises above its walls, for the whole community of the port lives within the fortifications – its merchants and its agents, its priests and its soldiers, its ship-builders and chandlers and bankers, its thriving colony of Jewish silk-workers, its famous hostel of the Teutonic Knights where the pilgrims stay, its Commander of the Galleys and its all-powerful Bailie. Only a shambled colony of gypsies lives outside the walls, in those tents and shanties over the moat to the north, trading in pigs with the Greeks of the countryside (and supplying nearly all the bacon of Venice). To the east a track runs away over the bony hills to Coron, Koroni, the Second Eye, on the other side of the Messini peninsula; to the north a road goes up the coast to the Venetian fortress of Navarino; but Methoni itself looks altogether self-sufficient, sustained by the sea and cap-à-pie.
When a convoy like ours puts in, the place is in ferment. Thousands of oarsmen and passengers go ashore. The shops and taverns within the walls are packed to bursting (‘the very thought of the Muscat of Modon delights me,’ wrote the fifteenth-century traveller Father Felix Fabri). Officialdom hums. Bemused strangers wander the streets of the city, or look out in wonder across the bare landscape. Spiced and woody smells arise, there is a babel of languages, pilgrims kneel in thanksgiving before the head of St Athanasius, ‘Athanasius against the world’, in the cathedral of St John. Officers present their requirements to the shipyard men, grandees their introductions to the Bailie, merchants their bills of credit to the banks. It is the Stato da Mar encapsulated: sharp, cosmopolitan, grand of style but purely practical of function.
Darkness falls, only the sentries patrol the walls and the night watch murmurs on the decks of the galleys, and when we wake in the morning the centuries have passed and we look out at a diff
erent Modon. Twentieth-century Methoni is not at all what it was. The great sea-fort is only a shell now, rotted and sombre above its beaches. The wide bay is empty. A raggle-taggle village has grown up outside the walls, where the gypsies used to be, with a plate-glass tourist hotel at the water’s edge, beside the Bembo bastion. A bulldozer scrapes at the sand on the foreshore. A woman screams across the water to her husband on the jetty. In a taverna beside the sea the restaurateur, tooth-pick between his lips, serves you your fried fish distractedly, his eyes on the television above the bar. The hundreds of houses within the walls, the offices of empire, the warehouses, the pubs, the hostels and the barracks – all have vanished, leaving only grassy mounds here and there, a precarious wall or two, warrens of dark chambers in the earth, scuttled about by beetles, and chipped remains of the Venetian pillar of authority, sans lion, sans everything. The great seagates are crudely blocked with stones. Noble crests and sculpted animals look down dimly from the shadows, eroded by sea-winds.
Modon, now Methoni
But perhaps during the day, as sometimes happens, one of the great storms of the Cretan Sea will fall upon Methoni out of the south. The old walls shake with the thunder of it, the to wers stand silhouetted magnificently against the scudding clouds, and it sounds as though all the winged lions that ever were, wherever the Venetians ruled, are mourning their lost dominion.
Methoni was the most important of the prizes the Venetians acquired, at the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire, upon the mainland of Greece. Behind it the feudal states carved out for themselves by the Crusaders soon degenerated into a protracted scramble for power and territory, and Greece was a welter of violence and intrigue. Normans, Burgundians, Italians, Germans and Spaniards marched and counter-marched across the classic lands, Frankish forts sprang up among the citadels of Argos and Corinth, Thebes and Sparta. In the fourteenth century the Greek Byzantines, temporarily restored to power on the Golden Horn, recaptured much of Greece: in the fifteenth century the Turks, having taken Constantinople, inexorably advanced down the peninsula until all was theirs.
