CHAPTER XVIII
For a quarter of a century after the events described in the last chapter, the Mediterranean continued curiously calm. Occasionally a minor squall might ruffle its surface, but there were no storms, no epic upheavals on the scale of Malta, Cyprus or Lepanto. Simply in the light of the previous history of the Middle Sea, this is remarkable enough; it is more surprising still when we consider that the very year of the Spanish Conspiracy, 1618, also saw the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, which was to tear much of northern and eastern Europe to shreds.
From the Venetian point of view, however, the peace came just in time. In October of the same year there occurred an incident which, though Venice bore no part of the responsibility for it, was ultimately to result in the loss of her most valuable remaining colony: the island of Crete. Sooner or later, as she must have known, war was inevitable; Crete was too tempting a prize, the Turks too covetous an adversary, for her possession to go much longer uncontested. It remains ironic that the initial Turkish attack should have been the result of a piece of deliberate provocation on the part of a minor power which, after the Republic itself, stood to lose more than any other from the surrender of the last important Christian outpost in the eastern Mediterranean.
Although the Knights of St John possessed a priory157 in Venice–inherited from the Templars after their dissolution in 1312–they and the Venetians had for centuries cordially disliked each other. It could hardly have been otherwise. Since their order was immensely rich in property held all over Christian Europe, the Knights despised trade and commerce. As men of God, bound by the monkish vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they disapproved of the Venetians’ worldliness and love of pleasure. Finally, as men of the sword and children of the Crusades, their avowed object–apart from the cure of the sick–was to fight the infidel wherever they found him, and they deplored Venice’s reiterated desire for peace with the Sultan, an attitude which they considered a shameless betrayal of the Christian cause.
By the 1640s the Knights were but a frail and feeble reflection of what they had been in those heroic days, only eighty years before, when they had successfully defended their island against the greatest fleet that Süleyman the Magnificent could hurl against them. They continued to run their famous hospital, where they still maintained standards of hygiene and of nursing far in advance of any to be found elsewhere, but their Crusading spirit was beginning to evaporate, and their naval operations tended all too often to savour less of holy war than of common piracy. Nor did they invariably confine their depredations to Muslim shipping; unprovoked attacks, launched on the flimsiest of pretexts, against Venetian and other Christian merchantmen were becoming increasingly frequent.
To the Venetians, in short, the Knights of Malta had become a nuisance only slightly less tiresome than the Uskoks in former days. Worst of all, they had adopted the old Uskok habit of harassing Turkish vessels in the Adriatic, a practice for which the Sultan invariably held Venice responsible–with much consequent damage to the friendly relations which the Venetians strove at all costs to maintain with the Sublime Porte. More than once, indeed, the Doge had been obliged to send for the local prior of the Order to make a vehement protest–never more forcefully than in September 1644, when he went so far as to threaten the sequestration of all the Knights’ property in the territory of the Republic if they did not improve their behaviour. The Knights, as usual, took no notice.
Cruising in the Aegean at the beginning of October, a squadron of six ships of the Order fell upon and captured a rich Turkish galleon carrying several distinguished pilgrims bound for Mecca, among them the city’s principal civil judge, the Chief Black Eunuch at the Sultan’s court, some thirty ladies of the harem and about fifty Greek slaves. The squadron then sailed on with its prize to Crete, where, landing at some unguarded beach on the southern coast, the ships took on water and disembarked the slaves, together with a number of horses. Soon the local Venetian governor arrived and, not wishing to be implicated even after the event in what was, after all, an act of shameless piracy, ordered them away. Having made several attempts to put in at various ports of the island and meeting on each occasion with the same point-blank refusal, the Knights finally abandoned the Turkish vessel (which was no longer seaworthy) with its passengers and returned to Malta.
Occupying the Ottoman throne at this time was the half-mad Sultan Ibrahim.158 When the news was brought to him he exploded with rage and ordered the immediate massacre of all Christians in his empire. This order, fortunately, he was later persuaded to countermand, but Venetian agents in Constantinople were by now sending reports of an immense war fleet being prepared on the Bosphorus, and it soon became clear that punitive action on an alarming scale was being contemplated. At first it was automatically assumed that this fleet was to be directed against Malta, an assumption that was confirmed by an official proclamation in March 1645, but despatches from the Venetian bailo in Constantinople warned that this was a deliberate feint. The Sultan, he reported, was convinced that the Venetians had been behind the whole incident; why else would the raiders have made straight for Crete? His true enemy was not the Knights, but Venice herself; his immediate objective was not Malta, but Crete.
It was not long before the bailo was proved right. On 30 April a Turkish fleet of 400 sail, carrying an estimated 50,000 fighting men, passed through the Dardanelles. At first it headed towards Malta as announced, sailing straight past Crete and putting in at Navarino, in the southwest corner of the Peloponnese, for reinforcements and supplies. Only on its departure from there on 21 June was it seen to have changed course. Four days later the invading army landed a little to the west of Canea (the modern Khania) and advanced on the town. The first round of the battle had begun.
Crete–or, as the Venetians called it after its capital city, Candia (now Heraklion)–had been Venice’s first properly constituted overseas colony, dating from 1211 and the sharing out of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade. Its government was based on that of the mother city, but it had never worked as easily or as well. The most fertile parts of the island had been largely swallowed up in vast feudal estates owned by prominent Venetian families, whose immense wealth and overbearing ways had done little to endear them to the local Greek population; these families in turn grumbled over their lack of any real political power, all the principal officials being sent out from Venice, where every major decision was taken. Defence was in normal times entrusted to feudal levies, raised and maintained at the expense of the landowners, and to local militias of townsfolk and peasants; but both sides tended to shrug off their obligations, and discipline varied between the poor and the nonexistent. Corruption was endemic, and the colony was a constant drain on Venetian resources.
The moment it was apprised of the imminent danger, the government of the Republic ordered a new and vigorous defensive programme for the island, sending out to its Proveditor-General, Andrea Corner, a special remittance of 100,000 ducats, an army of 2,500 men including military architects and engineers, and a fleet of thirty galleys with two galleasses to supplement those already on the island. A further fleet, Corner was informed, was in preparation and would sail as soon as possible. All this was better than nothing, but his resources were still hopelessly inadequate for the magnitude of his task, and the time allowed to him far too short. Already as he hurried to the beachhead on that fateful midsummer day, he must have known that the colony’s chances of survival were slim.
Much depended on the speed of the promised Venetian fleet; if it could arrive within a week or two, Canea might yet be saved. But it did not arrive. Corner would have been horrified to learn that it had orders to wait at Zante (Zakynthos) until it was joined by a further combined fleet of twenty-five sail, comprising ships from Tuscany, Naples, the Knights and the Pope; time was what counted now, not numerical strength. Meanwhile, the Turks were entrenching themselves more deeply with every day that passed. The island fortress of St Theodore fell to them, though only after its commander, Biagio Zulian, seeing that further resistance was hopeless, waited until it was overrun and then set light to the powder magazine, blowing up himself, his men, the attacking Turks and the building itself in a single epic explosion which must have been clearly audible in Candia. Canea was weakening fast, its ammunition and supplies running out, its defences steadily undermined by Turkish sappers. On 22 August it surrendered. The Turks, doubtless hoping by a well-timed show of magnanimity to encourage further surrenders as they advanced, promised to respect the lives, honour and property of the local population, allowing the garrison to leave the town with its colours flying and to embark unmolested for Soudha, beyond the Akrotiri159 to the east.
Now more than ever, fortune seemed to favour the invaders. At Soudha the Venetian admiral, Antonio Cappello, suddenly lost his head and abandoned the town; only its superb natural position and recently renewed fortifications saved it from capture. Then the combined fleet, at last arriving (in mid-September) in Cretan waters, made two attempts to recover Canea by surprise attack, but was each time driven back by equinoctial gales. Finally in October its non-Venetian element, under the command of the papal admiral Nicolò Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino–who from the start had shown extreme distaste for the whole expedition–announced its intention of returning home. Not for the first time, Venice’s allies had done her nothing but harm. She would have been better off alone.
Her government, meanwhile, was on full war footing. Having no reason to believe that Sultan Ibrahim intended to confine himself to a single theatre of operations, it sent an additional garrison to Corfu and even began strengthening the defences of the Venetian lagoon. But top priority was naturally given to Crete. Galleys and transports were now sailing for the island almost daily, laden with munitions and supplies of every kind. One need, however, remained unfulfilled: that of a supreme commander, a man whose seniority and reputation would set him above the petty jealousies and rivalries which–particularly when Cretan Venetians were involved–were an ever-present danger. The appointment was long debated in the Senate, and in the ensuing vote the name that emerged with an overwhelming majority was that of the Doge himself, Francesco Erizzo.
One voice only was raised against the proposal. Giovanni Pesaro–later to assume the ducal throne himself–very reasonably argued that the cost of sending out the head of state, with his Signoria and an adequate staff and secretariat, was quite unjustifiable at a moment when the Republic needed every penny to pursue the war, and that such a step might well encourage the Sultan similarly to take the field in person, thus greatly intensifying the Turkish war effort. One other consideration was also perhaps worth bearing in mind: Erizzo was now just two months short of his eightieth birthday. But no one listened; all attention was fixed on the old Doge who, in a speech which brought tears to the eyes of all who heard it, declared himself ready to assume the formidable task that had been laid upon him. Fortunately for Venice, he never did so. The preparations alone proved too much for him, and just three weeks later, on 3 January 1646, he died. He was buried in the church of S. Martino, but his heart, in recognition of his unhesitating acceptance of his last commission, was interred beneath the pavement of St Mark’s itself. There being no one else available in Venice of sufficient stature, the whole idea of a generalissimo was shelved, and is heard of no more.
Everything seemed to depend on containing the Turks in Canea, the only Cretan port that they as yet held. If they could be blockaded there while Venice built up her military strength in the other fortresses along the coast, it might not be impossible eventually to dislodge them. The young Tommaso Morosini, sent with twenty-three sail in an attempt to close off the Dardanelles and thus to pen up the Turkish reinforcement fleet in the Marmara, managed at least to delay it considerably; this delay so enraged the Sultan that he ordered his admiral to be beheaded forthwith. But the luckless admiral’s successor, doubtless impelled as much by the fear of a similar fate as by a favourable wind behind him, finally smashed his way through the Venetian line and swept down through the Aegean to Candia, where the Captain-General, the seventy-five-year-old Giovanni Cappello, was too slow and indecisive to stop him entering the harbour. The Venetian ships fell back on Rettimo (Rethymnon), but they were not to remain there for long. After a prolonged struggle, the town was forced to surrender on 13 November.
The fall of Rettimo had one beneficial effect, in that it brought about the dismissal of the useless Cappello and his replacement by Gian Battista Grimani, a popular commander forty years younger whose arrival instilled new life into the fleet. Early in 1647 Tommaso Morosini, suddenly finding himself surrounded by no fewer than forty-five Turkish ships, was given an opportunity to take his revenge for his failure the previous year. In the unequal battle that followed he and his crew fought heroically, holding their fire until the enemy was almost upon them and then blasting out at point-blank range. Before long the Venetians were grappled by three of the Turkish vessels simultaneously and the fighting was hand-to-hand, Morosini himself continuing in the thick of it until a Turkish arquebusier managed to steal up behind him and blow his head off. At just about the same time the Turkish admiral also fell mortally wounded, but still the battle continued. Suddenly the exhausted Venetians saw three more ships approaching in close order, the banner of St Mark fluttering at their mastheads; Grimani, hearing the firing, had come to investigate. They too now plunged into the melée, forcing the Turks to disengage. Four Ottoman vessels had gone to the bottom, the rest fled. Battered but still afloat, Morosini’s ship was towed back to Candia, whence the remains of its courageous young captain were returned to Venice for a hero’s burial.
But his heroism, inspiring as it had been, had in no way improved Venice’s basic position in Crete. Of the four principal strongholds ranged along the northern coast of the island–the fifth, Sitia, was so far away to the east that it could for the moment be ignored–two were already in enemy hands; of the other two, Soudha had been blockaded from the sea for well over a year and was desperately short of food, and both it and Candia itself had now been struck by plague, which not only destroyed morale but made adequate garrisoning impossible. The Turks, however, outside the walls, remained free of the disease, and it was in the summer of 1647 that they first laid serious siege to Candia–on which, as the capital, the whole future of the colony depended.
The siege of Candia was to last for twenty-two years, during which Venice, virtually single-handed, defended the little town–its civilian population numbering only some 10–12,000–against the combined military and naval force of the Ottoman Empire. In former times so long a resistance would have been inconceivable, if only because the interdependence of Turks and Venetians in commercial matters demanded that all hostilities between them should be short and sharp. But now that most of the carrying trade was in English or Dutch hands, such considerations no longer applied; the Sultan could afford to take his time. That Venice was able to hold out for so long was due less to the determination of the defenders within the walls–though that was considerable–than to her fleet which, by maintaining a continuous patrol of the eastern Mediterranean, not only frustrated every Turkish effort to blockade Candia from the sea; it actually increased its control over the Aegean to the point where, for the last ten years of the siege, the Turks were doing everything they could to avoid direct naval confrontation.
This is not to say that such confrontation never occurred; the story of the war is a national epic in every sense of the word, a story of innumerable battles, large and small, deliberate and unsought, their locations ranging from the mouth of the Dardanelles, where the Venetian fleet gathered every spring in the hope of blockading the enemy within the narrows, right through the Aegean archipelago to the roadstead of Candia itself. It is rich, too, in tales of heroism: of Giacomo Riva in 1649, pursuing a Turkish fleet into a small harbour on the Ionian coast and smashing it to pieces; of Lazzaro Mocenigo in 1651 off Paros, sailing in defiance of his admiral’s orders to attack a whole enemy squadron and, though severely wounded by several arrows and a musket-shot through the arm, putting it to flight; of Lorenzo Marcello leading his ships right into the Dardanelles in 1656, but not surviving to witness one of the most complete and overwhelming victories of the entire war; and in 1657, of Lazzaro Mocenigo again, now Captain-General, his squadron of twelve vessels driving thirty-three of the enemy still further up the narrow straits and pressing on through the Marmara towards the walls of Constantinople itself.
And yet, however glorious the achievements, however superb the seamanship and the courage, one somehow feels that there was always lacking an overall plan: that a more organised defence of the immediate approaches to the beleaguered town might have been more successful in cutting off the assailants from their reinforcements and supplies. Despite all Venetian efforts, these continued to get through, and even in their most triumphant moments the defenders must have known in their hearts that the fall of Candia could be only a question of time.
One thing alone could have saved it: the unstinting and enthusiastic support of the European powers. It is arguable that the whole history of Ottoman expansion in Europe can be attributed to the perennial inability of the Christian princes to unite in defence of their continent and their faith. They had not done so, in all the fullness of their heart and soul, since the Third Crusade nearly five hundred years before; and they did not do so now. Again and again Venice appealed to them, emphasising always that it was not the future of an obscure Venetian colony but the security of Christendom itself that hung in the balance: that if Crete were lost, so too was half the Mediterranean. Again and again they refused to listen, just as they always had. From Germany the Emperor pointed out that he had recently signed a twenty-year truce with the Porte; from Spain, to the astonishment of all, His Most Catholic Majesty was actually sending an ambassador to infidel Constantinople; France, true to her double game, passed occasional small and secret subsidies to Venice with one hand but continued to extend the other in friendship to the Sultan. England–whence little was expected, since she was not yet a power in the Middle Sea–was prodigal with promises, but with little else. Successive Popes, seeing Venice’s plight as a useful means of gaining some advantage for themselves, offered assistance only in return for concessions: Innocent X for the control of Venetian bishoprics, his successor Alexander VII for the readmission of the Jesuits, banned from the territory of the Republic since Paul V had laid it under an interdict in 1606.
Admittedly, as the years went by and the continuing resistance of Candia became the talk of Europe, foreign aid in the form of men, money and ships was a little more forthcoming, but such aid was invariably too little and too late. A typical example was the force of 4,000, under Prince Almerigo d’Este, sent out from France in 1660. It arrived not in the spring, when it might have been useful, but at the end of August; its first sortie against the enemy, over terrain which it had not troubled to reconnoitre, ended in panic and flight; a week or two later, laid low by dysentery, it had to be sent en masse to other more restful islands to recover its strength, after which the survivors–whose number did not, regrettably, include the Prince–returned to their homes having achieved precisely nothing.
So many, and so memorable, were the exploits of the Venetian commanders at sea that one all too easily forgets the still more heroic defence of Candia by the garrison itself, doomed to face twenty-two years of attrition–of all forms of warfare the most hopelessly discouraging–and to suffer constant disappointment when promised reinforcements from Venice’s so-called allies proved time and time again to be worthless. Such forces as did appear always seemed intent either on saving their skins or–almost as bad–gaining personal glory for themselves, thus risking not only their own lives but also many others that, with the chronic shortage of manpower, could ill be afforded.
This latter phenomenon became more and more frequent in the last stages of the siege. By now the name of Candia was famous across Europe, and among the French in particular the young scions of noble families flocked to the island, determined to make proof of their valour on so glorious a field of battle. The most remarkable influx came in 1668, when Louis XIV was at last persuaded to take a personal interest in the siege. Even now he did not enter the war, or even break off diplomatic relations with the Sultan; French merchants in the Levant had taken full advantage of the sudden departure of their Venetian rivals, and were doing far too well for the King to dream of any open rupture. He did, however, compromise his principles to the point of allowing Venice to raise troops from within his dominions, under the overall command of the Lieutenant-General of his Armies, the Marquis of Saint-André Montbrun; the result was a 500-strong volunteer force, the list of which sounds less like a serious professional army than the roll-call at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Foremost under Montbrun was the Duc de la Feuillade who, though by no means a rich man, had insisted on personally bearing the lion’s share of the cost; then there were two more dukes, of Château-Thierry and of Caderousse, the Marquis of Aubusson, the Counts of Villemor and Tavanes, the Prince of Neuchâtel (who was barely seventeen) and a quantity of other young noblemen bearing names which numbered them among the proudest families in France.
On their arrival in Crete at the beginning of December the young French nobles were entrusted by the new Captain-General, Francesco Morosini, with the defence of one of the outer ramparts on the landward side of the town. They refused. They had not, they pointed out, made the long and uncomfortable journey to Crete only to be told to crawl through the mud to some advanced outpost–there to wait, patiently and in silence, until the Turks should decide to launch their next attack. Instead, they demanded a general sortie which would ‘oblige the enemy to raise the siege’. Morosini very sensibly forbade any such thing. He had already made dozens of sorties, none of which had produced lasting results. His remaining men–there were by now fewer than 5,000–were barely enough to defend the breaches in the walls that the Turkish sappers were regularly opening up. But his arguments went unheard. As one of France’s own historians was to put it:
Monsieur de la Feuillade sought only vigorous action and glory for himself; he would have concerned himself little over the loss of seven or eight hundred of the Republic’s men so long as he could enjoy, on his return to France, the honour of having made a valiant sortie on Crete. Once out of the place, its subsequent loss through want of men to defend it would have occasioned him little distress.160
When he saw that the Captain-General would not be moved, La Feuillade, complaining loudly of Venetian timidity, announced his intention of making an unsupported attack on his own; this he did on 16 December, symbolically armed with a whip, at the head of a force whose numbers, we are told, had already been reduced from the original 500 to 280. The Turks resisted fiercely, but the Frenchmen, for all their foolhardiness, showed an almost superhuman courage, driving them back a full 200 yards and accounting for some 800 of them before, with the arrival of a fresh battalion of janissaries, they were finally forced to retire. The Counts of Villemor and Tavanes and some forty others were killed and over sixty badly injured, including the Marquis of Aubusson. La Feuillade himself, streaming with blood from three separate wounds, was the last to return to safety.
It was magnificent, but it was no help to Crete or to Venice. When the moment of glory was past, the surviving young heroes could not get off the island quickly enough. They were gone within a week, though many of them–even those who had somehow escaped unscathed–never saw France again. They had taken the plague bacillus with them.
Soon after the survivors landed at Toulon another force, far larger, more professional and better equipped, set sail from France for Candia. At last Louis XIV had been persuaded by the Venetian ambassador–Giovanni Morosini, a kinsman of the Captain-General–to take his Most Christian responsibilities seriously, and in the spring of 1669 his first important contribution was ready: 6,000 men, 300 horses and fifteen cannon, all carried in a fleet of twenty-seven transports, with fifteen warships as an escort. But even now Louis tried to conceal his breach of faith from his Turkish friends; the fleet did not sail under the banner of the fleur-de-lys, but under that of the crossed keys of the Papacy.
The bulk of the army, some 4,000 strong, commanded jointly by the Ducs de Beaufort and de Noailles, arrived at Candia on 19 June. They were appalled at what they saw. One of the officers wrote:
The state of the town was terrible to behold: the streets were covered with bullets and cannonballs, and with shrapnel from mines and grenades. There was not a church, not a building even, whose walls were not holed and almost reduced to rubble by the enemy cannon. The houses were no longer anything more than miserable hovels. Everywhere the stench was nauseating; at every turn one came upon the dead, the wounded or the maimed.
At once the story of La Feuillade began to repeat itself. So eager were the new arrivals for the fray that, refusing even to wait for the remainder of the army, they launched their own attack at dawn on 25 June. It began badly: the first body of troops on whom they opened fire proved to be a recently arrived detachment of Germans, marching up to give them support. Once order had been re-established they charged the Turkish emplacements, at first with considerable success. Then, suddenly, a stray Turkish shot ignited the powder barrels in one of the hastily abandoned batteries. The skill of the Turkish sappers was renowned; their mining operations had been a feature of the siege, and much of the damage to the defences of the town had been the result of subterranean explosions. The word now suddenly spread through the ranks of the French that the whole terrain on which they stood was mined, that the battery was a concealed blast-hole and that the detonation they had just heard was the first of a chain of similar explosions that would blow them all to smithereens. With the rumour went panic. They fled in terror, tripping over each other as they ran. Seeing this sudden and to them utterly unaccountable flight, the Turks regrouped and counter-attacked. Five hundred Frenchmen lost their lives; within minutes their heads, impaled on pikes, were being paraded in triumph before the Grand Vizir Ahmed. They included those of the Duc de Beaufort and of a Capuchin monk who had accompanied the army as its almoner.
Five hundred men out of 6,000 is not an intolerable loss; four days later the rest of King Louis’s army arrived and Morosini started planning a fresh attack on Canea in the west. But the spirit of his new allies was already broken. On 24 July a French man-of-war of seventy guns approached too near a Turkish shore battery and was blown out of the water; a few days later Noailles coldly informed the Captain-General that he was re-embarking the army and returning home. Protestations, entreaties and threats, appeals from the surviving civilian population, even thunderings from pulpits were of no avail; on 21 August the French fleet weighed anchor. In the general despair that followed, the few auxiliaries from the Papacy, the Empire and even the Knights of Malta likewise set their sails for the west. Morosini and his garrison were left alone–and the Grand Vizir ordered a general attack.
Somehow it was repelled, but the Captain-General knew that he was beaten at last. His garrison was reduced to a mere 3,600 men. There would be no more reinforcements that year, the defences were in ruins and he knew that he could not hope to hold Candia for another winter. By surrendering now, on the other hand, rather than waiting for the inevitable taking of the town by storm, he might be able to secure favourable, even honourable, terms. Admittedly he had no powers to negotiate on behalf of the Republic, but he was aware that on at least three occasions in the past–the first as early as 1647, and then again in 1657 and 1662–the question of a negotiated peace had been debated in the Senate and on every occasion had found a measure of support. In any case, he had little choice.
The treaty was agreed on 6 September 1669. The Grand Vizir, who had much personal admiration for Morosini, proved generous. The Venetians would leave the town, freely and without molestation, within twelve days, though this term could be prolonged–as indeed it was–in the event of bad weather. All the artillery that had already been in place before the beginning of the siege must be left where it was; the remainder they could take with them. The Turks would be left as masters, but Venice could retain the Gramvousa Islands at Crete’s northwestern extremity, their island fortress of Spinalonga and, in the extreme east, the town of Sitia which had never surrendered.
And so on 26 September, after 465 years of occupation and twenty-two of siege, the banner of St Mark was finally lowered from what was left of the citadel of Candia, and the last official representatives of the Republic returned to their mother city. With them went virtually all the civilian population of the town, none of whom had any desire to remain under their new masters. For Venice it was the end of an epoch. She had retained her three outposts, and there remained one or two pinpoints on the map of the Aegean where the winged lion still ruled, though his roar was gone and even his growl was barely audible; but Crete had been her last major possession outside the Adriatic, and with its loss not only her power but even her effective presence in the eastern Mediterranean was dead forever.
It had at least died magnificently. Never had Venetians fought longer or more heroically on land or sea; never had they faced more determined adversaries. The financial cost had been enormous, that in human lives greater still. Moreover, for nearly a quarter of a century, they had fought virtually alone. The assistance of their allies, on the comparatively rare occasions when it was given at all, had been grudging, half-hearted, inadequate or self-seeking; at times–as when it had caused long and inactive delays, or when it was suddenly withdrawn without warning–it had been positively detrimental to the common cause. Even in those last two or three years, when the former policy of attrition gave way to a frenzy of destruction and bloodletting, foreign interventions served only to demoralise and to discourage.
Yet it was neither demoralisation nor discouragement that drove Francesco Morosini to his surrender. It was the cold realisation that the loss of Candia was inevitable, and that the only choice was between departure on honourable terms now or wholesale massacre and pillage a very little later. Predictably, perhaps, he found himself in serious trouble when he returned to Venice. He was accused not only of having exceeded his legitimate powers by treating with the enemy as he had, but of cowardice, treason–even peculation and corruption. Fortunately he had no lack of champions who were quick to defend him, and when the question was finally put to the Great Council its vote was overwhelmingly in his favour. He emerged from the affair without a stain on his reputation–determined, however, to be avenged.
And indeed it was not long before the pendulum began to swing. Only twelve years later, in 1681, the Hungarian Protestant subjects of the Emperor Leopold I rose in revolt against what they considered to be Habsburg Catholic oppression and, almost insanely, invited the Sultan to support them. Mehmet IV asked nothing better, and in the spring of 1683 set off for Edirne, where a substantial army awaited him. It included whole regiments of artillery and engineers, with a number of irregular units, composed principally of Tartars from the Crimea. When they reached Belgrade, the Sultan handed over the command to his Grand Vizir Karamustafa (‘Black Mustafa’); and the last great Ottoman army to set forth against Christian Europe headed towards Vienna.
This was the second Turkish attempt on the imperial capital. Süleyman the Magnificent had set up his camp before the walls of Vienna in September 1529, but had been ultimately unsuccessful; after less than three weeks, the unexpectedly fierce resistance, the shortage of supplies and above all the approach of winter had forced him to retreat. Karamustafa had the advantage of an earlier arrival in the campaigning season: it was 13 July when he drew up his army outside the city. On the other hand, he had no heavy artillery–its transportation over such a distance would have been virtually impossible–and was obliged to rely largely on his sappers, mining beneath the fortifications in the hope of inducing a collapse from below. This had long been a Turkish speciality and proved, as always, highly effective; Vienna might well have fallen but for the arrival in the nick of time of a Polish army under King John Sobieski. Suddenly, the Turks found themselves caught in murderous crossfire between a desperate garrison and a brilliantly led relief force, and after a day-long battle fled in confusion. Süleyman had at least made a controlled withdrawal and had kept his army intact; Karamustafa suffered a debacle. In that one day, the reputation of the Ottoman Empire as an all-conquering power was gone forever. Never again would it constitute a serious threat to Christendom.
Vienna is well over 200 miles from the Mediterranean, and its unsuccessful siege would not have found a place in this book were it not for the fact that it encouraged the Emperor, the Pope and Sobieski to advance on the shattered Turks. Venice, still smarting from the loss of Crete, now received increasingly urgent appeals to join a new offensive league by which, using her sea power combined with their own on land, the Sultan could be swept from Europe for good–an expulsion from which no nation would derive greater benefit than the Most Serene Republic itself.
Venice sent no immediate reply. She had taken well over a decade to recover from the effects of the Cretan war; was she really to stake everything yet again, on the fortunes of another confrontation? On the other hand, the situation had undoubtedly changed since the Turkish defeat at Vienna. The next phase of the war might be fought at least partially at sea; did not her own interests–let alone her good name–demand that she should now pursue a more active policy? The Turks were weak and demoralised: their Grand Vizir, the hated Karamustafa, had been executed on the Sultan’s orders the moment he returned to Constantinople; their army was in shreds. Was this not the time to take the offensive, not only to avenge the loss of Crete but to recover it–and perhaps her other former colonies as well? After long debate, the imperial ambassador was informed on 19 January 1684 that Venice would join the league.
Her Captain-General at that time was once again Francesco Morosini. Despite his ultimate and inevitable surrender of Candia, he remained at sixty-four by far the ablest of Venice’s captains; he assumed command of his fleet of sixty-eight fighting ships–together with a number of auxiliary vessels from the Pope, the Knights of Malta and the Grand Duke of Tuscany–with enthusiasm and determination. Once out of harbour he headed straight for his first objective, the island of Leucas, and captured it, after a sixteen-day siege, on 6 August. Few quick conquests could have had a more strategic value: from its situation between Corfu and Cephalonia, Leucas commanded the entrances to both the Adriatic and the Gulf of Corinth; it also provided a bridgehead from which, a few weeks later, a small land force crossed to the mainland and forced the surrender of the castle of Preveza. Meanwhile, further north along the coast, the Christian populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina rose in simultaneous revolt against their Turkish overlords and drove south into Albania and Epirus. Further north again, the armies of the Emperor and John Sobieski continued their advance through Hungary. By the time winter had set in, Venice and her allies had good reason to be proud of their success.
With the coming of spring in 1685 Morosini sailed against the old Venetian port of Corone–lost to the Turks in 1500–landing some 9,500 men, including imperial, papal and Tuscan troops, as well as 3,000 Venetians and 120 Knights of St John. This time the Ottoman garrison put up a desperate defence; it was not until August that the white flag was raised on the citadel. Then, while the terms of surrender were being discussed, a Turkish cannon opened fire, killing several of the Venetians. Negotiations were immediately broken off; the allied troops burst into the town in fury and gave it over to massacre. A whole series of other fortresses followed; within another two or three months much of the southern Peloponnese was under allied control and a Swedish general, Count Otto William von Königsmark, had arrived–hired by the Republic at a salary of 18,000 ducats–to take overall command of the land forces.
Early in 1686, Morosini and Königsmark met on Leucas for a council of war. There were four main objectives from which to choose: Chios, Euboea, Crete or the rest of the Peloponnese. Largely, it seems, on the insistence of Königsmark, the last of these targets was selected. In the next two summers’ campaigning the league forces accepted the submissions of Modone and Navarino, Argos and Nauplia, Lepanto, Patras and Corinth. Morosini, meanwhile, had sailed his fleet around to Attica and had begun to lay siege to Athens. And now there occurred the second of the two great tragedies of history the blame for which, alas, must be laid at Venice’s door. The miserable story of the Fourth Crusade has already been told in Chapter VII; we must now sadly record that on Monday, 26 September 1687, at about seven o’clock in the evening, a mortar placed by Morosini on the Mouseion hill opposite the Acropolis was fired by a German lieutenant at the Parthenon–which, by a further curse of fate, the Turks were using as a powder magazine. He scored a direct hit. The consequent explosion almost completely demolished the cella and its frieze, together with eight columns on the north side and six on the south with their entablatures.
Nor was this the end of the destruction. After the capture of the city, Morosini–doubtless remembering the carrying off of the four bronze horses from the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 1205–tried to remove the horses and chariot of Athena that formed part of the west pediment of the temple. In the process the whole group fell to the ground and was smashed to pieces. The determined conqueror had to content himself with lesser souvenirs: the two flanking lions of the four now standing at the entrance to the Venetian Arsenal.
It is unlikely that many tears were shed in Venice over the fate of the Parthenon. The Venetians were too busy celebrating. Their last major victory at Lepanto had been well over a hundred years before; more important still, the conquests which Morosini was now making–unparalleled since the fifteenth century–seemed to point towards a final lifting of that black Ottoman cloud that had overshadowed them for so long, and perhaps even a return to those far-off days of commercial imperialism. No wonder they rejoiced, and no wonder that, when their Doge Marcantonio Giustinian died in March 1688, Francesco Morosini was elected, unanimously and at the first ballot, as his successor.
Morosini had, however, no intention of giving up his command. On 8 July 1688 he led a fleet of some 200 sail out of the Gulf of Athens and headed for his next objective, the island of Euboea (or Negroponte, as the Venetians called it). Like Crete, Euboea had first come into Venetian hands as a result of the partition of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade, and although Venice had forfeited it to the Turks over two centuries before–in 1470–its loss had never ceased to rankle. It was known to be heavily fortified, and the Turkish garrison of 6,000, even if it were to receive no reinforcements, was expected to put up a spirited resistance. But the league forces numbered twice that many, and neither Morosini nor Königsmark had any serious doubts that the island would soon be theirs. They had reckoned, unfortunately, without acts of God. Suddenly their luck changed, and no sooner had the siege begun than an appalling epidemic–probably dysentery or malaria–struck their camp. Within a few weeks the army had lost a third of its men, including Königsmark himself. In mid-August the arrival of a 4,000-strong relief force from Venice encouraged Morosini to continue, but almost immediately he found a mutiny on his hands. The imperial troops from Brunswick–Hanover flatly refused to fight any longer. With disaffection spreading almost as fast as disease, he had no choice but to order a general re-embarkation.
Yet even now he could not reconcile himself to the humiliation of a direct return to Venice. One more victory, however modest, would be enough to redeem his honour and enable his subjects to greet him as a hero after all. The fortress of Malvasia (Monemvasia) in the southeastern corner of the Peloponnese, one of the few mainland strongholds left to the Turks, would serve the purpose admirably. There was, however, a problem. The castle, set high on its virtually impregnable rock, could be approached only by a narrow path, most of it less than a yard across–useless for a besieging army. Bombardment was the only hope, and Morosini ordered the construction of two gun emplacements; but even before they were completed he himself was struck down by illness. Leaving the command to his Proveditor-General, Girolamo Corner, he sailed home in January 1690, sick and disconsolate, to a stirring welcome which he was quite unable to enjoy.
Corner proved a worthy successor, and a luckier one. He took Malvasia, where the standard of St Mark was hoisted on the battlements for the first time in 150 years; then, hearing that an Ottoman fleet was heading through the archipelago, sailed north again to meet it and scattered it off Mytilene (Lesbos), inflicting considerable damage in the process. Returning once more to the Adriatic, he launched a surprise attack on Valona, captured it and dismantled its defences. He was still there when the fever struck him; a day or two later he was dead. His successor showed himself a broken reed.
With the prospect of the Turkish war, which had begun so magnificently, grinding to an ignominious halt, the Venetians looked once again to their Doge for active leadership. Morosini, now seventy-four, had never properly recovered his health; nevertheless, when he was invited to resume his command he did not hesitate. He sailed from Venice, amid scenes of great pomp, on 25 May 1693–but his last campaign proved another sad anticlimax. The Turks had taken advantage of the winter and spring to strengthen the defences of both Euboea and of Canea in Crete. Contrary winds persuaded Morosini against another attempt on the Dardanelles. He reinforced the garrison in Corinth and one or two other strong-points in the Peloponnese, and chased a few Algerian pirates; finally–in order not to return completely empty-handed–he occupied Salamis, Hydra and Spetsai before putting in to Nauplia for the winter. By then it was clear that his exertions had taken their toll. Throughout December he was in constant agony from gallstones, and on 6 January 1694 he died. Never again until the fall of the Venetian Republic was a Doge of Venice to go to war.
In the history of Venice’s tragic attempt to regain control of the Mediterranean, only one short chapter remains. The island of Chios had been one of the four possible objectives considered by Francesco Morosini and Count von Königsmark in 1686. It boasted a predominantly Christian population, both Catholic and Orthodox, each with its own bishop; the Turkish garrison was thought to number some 2,000 at the most. Antonio Zen, the Venetian Captain-General who on 7 September 1694 landed 9,000 men on the island, expected no difficulties.
Nor, at the outset, did he encounter any. The bombardment began at once; the harbour, together with three Turkish ships that chanced to be lying at anchor, was captured without a fight and the garrison surrendered on the 15th in return for a guarantee of safe conduct to the mainland. Venetian spirits were high, and they rose higher still when reports reached Chios of a Turkish fleet of some fifty sail, rapidly approaching. For years now the Turks had done their utmost to avoid naval engagements, and Zen’s captains had little admiration for their seamanship or indeed their courage. Unfortunately, just as the Captain-General was about to emerge from the narrow straits that separate Chios from the mainland and to make for the open sea, the wind dropped. In the flat calm that followed, no confrontation was possible, and when on the 20th a very faint breeze sprang up it threatened the Turks–who, seeing their danger, quickly made for home and reached the harbour of Smyrna before the Venetians could catch up with them. Zen, still ready to fight, anchored in the roadstead outside the harbour, but no sooner had he done so than he was visited on board his flagship by the local consuls representing the three European powers outside the league–England, France and the Netherlands–who implored him not to risk Christian lives and property in the city by any unprovoked attack–backing up their entreaties, it is reported, with a considerable sum of money. Knowing that he was also running short of supplies, Zen agreed and returned to Chios.
But the great sea battle that most of the Venetian captains so eagerly awaited was not much longer to be delayed. The Sultan, furious at the loss of one of his most valuable offshore islands, had given orders for its immediate recovery, and early in February 1695 a new Ottoman fleet was signalled, consisting of twenty of his heaviest capital ships–sultanas, as they were called–supported by twenty-four galleys. Antonio Zen at once sailed out to meet it with a roughly comparable fleet–it included a sizable squadron made available by the Knights of Malta–and on the morning of the 9th battle was finally joined at the northern end of the straits. The fighting was long and violent, marked by several deeds of outstanding courage on the part of the Venetians–and probably on that of the Turks too, though these are not recorded in the Venetian reports; but when the two fleets separated at nightfall, despite heavy casualties on both sides–for the Venetians, 465 dead and 603 wounded–the result was inconclusive.
This proved, however, to be only the first phase. The fleets anchored off Chios, just out of range of each other’s guns, and waited ten full days, watching. Then, on 19 February, with a strong north wind behind them, the Turks once again bore down upon their adversaries. As they fought, the wind rose to gale force; the sea grew increasingly rough until close manoeuvring became impossible. The Venetians fought desperately to get to windward, but gradually they were forced down the narrow channel to the harbour. In such weather entry into port was impossible; the vessels could only lie to in the roadstead, where they were raked again and again by the pursuing Turks. It was a disaster. The Venetian losses were immense, the Turkish comparatively slight. The Captain-General called a council of war, but the outcome seems to have been a foregone conclusion. There were no longer enough men available for the adequate manning of the fortress; the defences were in lamentable condition; the treasury was empty and supplies were running low. Long before any help could be expected, the Turks were bound to attack again, and when they did, the consequences would be catastrophic.
So it was that the island of Chios was won and, within less than six months, was lost again. On the night of 20 February all the war materiel that could be carried away was loaded on to the ships, the remaining defences dismantled or destroyed. Then, on the morning of the 21st, the fleet sailed out of the harbour. With it, to escape the vengeance of the Turks, went most of the leading Catholic families of the island, who were granted new estates in the Peloponnese to compensate them for what they had left behind. Even on her departure, Venice’s ill fortune went with her. Scarcely was the last ship round the mole when one of Zen’s most important remaining vessels, the Abbondanza Richezza, laden with arms and ammunition, struck a hidden rock. All endeavours to free her failed and she had to be abandoned with most of her cargo still intact on board.
To the people of Venice, who had so recently been celebrating the recovery of Chios, the news of its loss was a matter less for sorrow than for anger. The Senate demanded an immediate inquiry, pending which the miserable Zen, together with several other senior officers, was brought back to Venice in chains. He died in prison in July 1697 while the inquiry was still in progress. Its findings were never made known.
The Turks were not beaten; but they were undeniably battered, and seemed likely to welcome the opportunity for a negotiated peace. The Emperor Leopold for his part was anxious that they should, for he knew that a fresh crisis was approaching–not on his eastern border this time but in the west, where the half-mad and childless King Charles II of Spain obviously had not long to live. There were two principal contenders for his throne–Leopold himself and Louis XIV of France, both grandsons of Philip III and sons-in-law of Philip IV–and Leopold understandably wished to have his hands free to deal with the struggle ahead. England and Holland, horrified at the prospect of seeing France and Spain united under Louis, offered their mediation with the Sultan; Poland and Venice, on the assumption that they would retain the territories they had conquered, were only too pleased to lay down their arms after fifteen years of war. The arrangements were quickly made, and on 13 November 1698 the various powers concerned met at Karlowitz in Hungary (now the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci).
The negotiations did not run as smoothly as had been expected, the representatives of the Sultan pointing out that their master, not having surrendered, saw no reason why he should be required to abandon all the territories now in Christian hands. In particular he had in mind certain of his Mediterranean possessions. Venice could have the Peloponnese; he would make no difficulty about that. She could also retain Leucas on one side and Aegina on the other, and a number of fortresses on the Dalmatian coast. He himself, however, was determined to keep Athens, Attica and all Greek territory north of the Gulf of Corinth. The Venetian representative objected violently, but received little support. The Emperor, once he had been assured of Hungary and Transylvania, was anxious to get home as quickly as possible; he let it be known to the Venetians that, if they insisted on making difficulties, he would have no hesitation in concluding a separate peace. For a time the Republic continued to argue, and when the treaty was signed on 26 January 1699 she was not among the signatories. But at last wisdom triumphed over pride, and on 7 February the Doge finally appended his seal.
It was as well that he did so, for the Treaty of Karlowitz is the one diplomatic instrument above all others that marks the decline of Ottoman power; and Venice, which had directly confronted that power for longer than any other Christian state, had more right than any to be a party to it. On the other hand, her forced renunciation of an important part of her conquests was not just a blow to her self-respect; it made it considerably more difficult for her adequately to defend that part which remained. There was now nothing to prevent the Turks from invading the Peloponnese from Attica, or indeed from anywhere along the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth–a point which they were, all too soon, to prove.