The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (8 page)

Sanudo himself chose as his headquarters the island of Naxos. It was the place where Ariadne, having saved Theseus from the Minotaur in Crete, was abandoned by the hero on his way home to Athens. It was also the birthplace of Dionysos, god of wine, whom she married instead, and was one of the greenest and most cheerful islands in the whole Aegean. It did not fall easily to Sanudo and his cutthroats when, in 1207, their galleys appeared off the little village capital out of the Paros Channel, and sailing past the tall temple of Apollo on its islet, beached themselves upon the shore. The Genoese had got there first, and fought back so fiercely that in a gesture familiar enough to chroniclers of these seas, Sanudo ordered his galleys to be burned, to encourage the faint-hearts in his ranks. Inspirited thus, they stormed the Genoese positions at last and proclaimed Sanudo Duke Marco I of the Archipelago. A Catholic archbishop was promptly dispatched to the island by the Pope, and Apollo’s temple served as a quarry for the construction of a twelve-towered citadel, the seat of dukely government.

The remains of this stronghold are what we first see, as we sail in the wake of the galleys into the harbour of the island capital, the
Chora (‘chief town’, in Greek). Some of its buildings have lately been restored, and from a distance it looks remarkably sheer and massive on its hillock in the middle of the town, like a miniature Potala. When we disembark, though, and begin our climb from the waterfront up its flanks, it is revealed as a more inhibited kind of fort. Throughout the centuries of their occupation the Venetians of Naxos remained aliens, if only because they were the Catholic rulers of a Greek Orthodox population, and so their headquarters on the hill, set as it is in the heart of the island’s chief town, has a curiously inbred or introspective feel to it.

We approach it through a labyrinth of steep and crooked streets, the homes in Venetian times of the Greek shopkeepers, fishermen, sailors, craftsmen, who soon came to live around the slopes of the citadel. Up we go, leaving the harbour and its life behind us, the polyglot clamour of the waterfront cafés, where the back-pack travellers gather, the splutter of rented motorbikes, the hoot of the approaching ferry, the thump of the hi-fi, perhaps, from the corner disco – up through the flowered and cat-frequented alleys until almost at the summit of the hill we pass beneath a grave fortified gateway (iron-studded door, black-shadowed archway) to find ourselves in the Kastro, the core of the ancient duchy.

Even now, so long after the departure of the Sanudos and their successors, it remains a Catholic enclave in an Orthodox comity. Silent and empty its streets run within its walls, and the escutcheons of the Venetian nobility stand haughty above its doorways still. In the central square of the Kastro are the remains of the ducal palace, and in the little Catholic cathedral next door, heavy with the crests and tombs of the duchy, on Sunday mornings you may still see, stooped and blackly gowned, late representatives of the Venetian feudalists worshipping in their hereditary style. They live in houses built into the ramparts of the citadel, and from one of their enviable rooftops, eating an omelette and Greek salad, perhaps, or drinking a glass of the island’s particular liqueur, a powerful embodiment of Dionysian traditions made from island lemons – established thus upon one of these eyries of the conquerors, looking down upon the alleys, cafés and fishing-vessels of the Greeks, and the solitary tall archway that alone remains of
Apollo’s temple, it is easy enough to feel the old
hubris
of empire still.

Certainly the arrogance of the Venetians has never been forgotten by the Greeks – who, established here in Homeric times long before Venice existed, have out-stayed all successive rulers to remain as Greek as ever. Until the land reforms in Greece after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away. Sometimes the intervention of Venice was resented by her subjects on the spot, but sometimes it was devoutly welcomed: ‘They look upon our Admiral,’ reported a Venetian diplomat of one particularly tormented community, ‘as the Messiah.’

Sanudo, his colleagues and his successors behaved, as often as not, with a reckless impropriety. Sometimes they were absentee landlords – for years the lord of Andros governed it from his palace in Venice – but more frequently they lived life as a sort of game in their sunlit and storm-swept fiefs. All their islands were fortified, and they frequently went to war with each other, their
petty navies fighting it out between the headlands, their minuscule armies hurling themselves at each other’s citadels. The Lady of Mykonos was abducted once by the Duke of Naxos, while Syros and Tinos once went to war over the ownership of a donkey.

For the Signory itself Aegean suzerainty must sometimes have seemed more trouble than it was worth, especially when problems of succession arose, and the judgement of Venice was called for. When in 1361, for instance, the reigning Duke of Naxos died without an heir, the Republic had to make sure that his daughter, who was young and beautiful, found herself a husband sufficiently compliant to Venetian interests. So uncooperative was she, and so unsuitable were the candidates for her hand, that in the end the Venetians sent a commando force to Naxos to kidnap her. They took her away to Crete, where they confronted her with a fiancé of
their
choice, a bold military man nicknamed ‘The Host Disperser’: fortunately she fell instantly in love with him, so we are assured, married him splendidly in Venice and lived with him happily ever after in the citadel on the hill.

Or there was the problem of the Duke Niccolò III. He was so ungrateful a vassal that he actually tried to steal Euboea from the Republic, and antagonized his Venetian peers as much as he oppressed his Greek subjects. He was conveniently murdered by a rival claimant to the dukedom, Francesco Crespi. Crespi seized the Kastro and proclaimed himself Francesco I, and the Venetians, who saw no contradiction between criminal tendencies and a talent for government, promptly and gratefully recognized him.

Then there was Giovanni III, at the end of the fifteenth century. Everyone loathed him, too. He encouraged pirates to use Naxos as their base. He taxed his people disgracefully. He affronted the Turks unnecessarily and took no notice of the Venetians. The Archbishop of Naxos himself appealed to Venice for his removal, but once again they were saved the trouble, for the Naxians themselves assassinated him.

There was Niccolò Adoldo, Lord of Serifos. This tyrant generally lived in Venice, but finding himself paid insufficient taxes by his subjects, in 1397 he went out to his island with a band of Cretan brigands, seized a number of island notables and shut them
up in his castle. There they were tortured to make them disclose where they hid their money, but the plan failing (perhaps they
had
no money) they were thrown off the castle ramparts to their deaths. This was too much even for the pragmatic Republic. Adoldo was imprisoned for two years, deprived of his island and forbidden ever to visit it (but he died in the sanctity of old age, and was buried with every sign of respect in the church of Santi Simeone e Giuda, which he had prudently endowed).

Or finally there was Francesco III, the Mad Duke of the Archipelago. He was a direct protégé of the Signory, but unfortunately turned out to be a homicidal maniac. He murdered his wife by stabbing her in the stomach with a sword. He tried to kill his eleven-year-old son. He criminally assaulted his aunt the Lady of Nio. The Venetians whisked him away to Crete, where he died under restraint, but his son, growing up to succeed him, proved almost as difficult as his father, once getting himself captured by the Turks, and once forcibly occupying the island of Paros against the wishes of Venice: it did not matter much, however, for within half a century the dynasty was extinct anyway and the Duchy of the Archipelago was a Venetian ward no longer, but was held in fief by a Jewish financier, Joseph Nasi, under the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan, Selim the Sot.

So went the history of the Aegean, in the days of the
Pax Venetica.
There were few islands that did not at one time or another fall under the influence of the winged lion. So close was the association of Venice with this sea that for years the very sponge itself, that inescapable familiar of the Aegean waterfront, was known as the
enetikos
, the Venetian. The free-booting feudalists spread themselves, by skulduggery, matrimony or insinuation, from Tenedos to Karpathos. The merchant-venturers nosed in their cobs from port to port. The war-galleys glided into petty harbours, with awful oar-strokes and intimidating standards, like visitations from on high. Sometimes the Republic took an island peacefully under its protection, sometimes an island was seized in the exigencies of war, and wherever you wander now among those wine-dark waters, traces of Venice show.

Within the Dardanelles themselves Venetian castles stand at the water’s edge, while far in the south at Thira you may still fancy, in
the thin line of white houses along the volcano’s ridge, the Venetian town that stood there until nineteenth-century earthquakes rattled it into oblivion. In Syros, the hub of the Cyclades, the Venetian citadel stands obdurate and cathedral-crowned on one conical hump, while the Greek Orthodox cathedral and its community stands slightly lower on another. Crumbled small castles on Andros or Paros, harbour moles and ornamental dovecotes, a Catholic bishopric surviving here, an antique snobbery somewhere else, escutcheoned doorways and pronged merlons – all these are the mark of Venice, and the exquisite little row of gimcrack houses on the waterfront at Mykonos, perhaps the most famous and familiar structure in the whole Aegean, is called Enetika to this day.

Much the greatest of the Venetian possessions was Euboea, which the Greeks call Evvoia nowadays, but which was known to the Venetians as Negroponte, Black Bridge. It is only just an island. About 120 miles long, 35 miles wide at its widest part, it lies so close to the Greek mainland of Boeotia that at one point the intervening channel, the Euripos, is only 130 feet across, and has been spanned since classical times by a bridge.

Beside the Euripos stood a town, which the Venetians called Negroponte too, but which is now Khalkis. It was of obvious importance to the Republic. It was not only a useful outlet for trade on the Greek mainland, but was also an invaluable staging point for shipping moving in and out of the Dardanelles, and a naval base commanding the whole of the Aegean. Khalkis itself became Venetian in the division of the crusaders’ spoils: later, by successive stratagems the Venetians acquired the rest of the island too, and made it a bastion of their maritime strength, with castles all over it, and a Bailie who was their most important official in the Aegean. To the courts and offices of Euboea came appeals, complaints or disputes from the other islands: from its harbours the galleys sailed out to keep the troublesome feudatories in order. When the Greek emperors returned to Constantinople in 1261, ending the Latin empire, the Catholic Patriarch transferred his see to Khalkis, and so it became a kind of spiritual pro-consulate too.

Khalkis was the show-place of the Venetian Aegean, and in old

Negroponte, today’s Khalkis, on Euboea

prints it is drawn bristling with towers and turrets, surrounded entirely by moat and sea-wall, and tight-stacked upon the water’s edge. Its site remains extraordinary. The Euripos is one of the world’s enigmas, for through it there rush, as through a mighty funnel, as many as fourteen powerful tides a day, in alternate directions. This is a weird spectacle. So narrow is the channel there, so immense is the weight of water rushing through, with the force and pace of a mountain torrent, that it feels as though all the water of the Aegean is being pumped that way. Nobody seems quite sure even now why it happens, and tradition says that Aristotle, infuriated by his failure to explain the mystery of the Euripos, drowned himself in it. The Venetians built actually on top of the channel, in the middle of a double drawbridge, a fortified tower that marked their imperial frontier. It was a romantic, Rhenish-looking construction, if we are to believe the old pictures, and so remarkable was the place, so suggestive the movement of the waters beneath it, that local rumour held it to be an enchanted castle, guarded by fairies or demons.