City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (26 page)

During the summer of 1348 the black-draped pontoons punted slowly through the foetid canals. The terrible cry rose up: ‘Dead bodies! Dead bodies!’ Every house was compelled by punitive edicts to bring out its corpses. Extraordinary measures were put in place to try to stem the death rate. A special health committee was convened; ships suspected of being infected were burned; all trade ground to a halt; the sale of wine was prohibited, taverns closed; criminals were let out of prison for lack of warders. The Rialto, the docks, the busy canals fell silent. Venice was gripped in gloom. Out on the distant islands of the lagoon the dead went on being tipped into pits – a layer of earth, then a layer of bodies, then another layer of earth – ‘just like lasagne’ as one Florentine writer unnervingly put it.

By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist. The survivors were literally treading on the dead. For centuries, unwary fishermen stepping ashore on certain deserted islands deep in the lagoon scrunched on the whitening bones of the hastily buried victims. The Black Death radically altered the outlook of Venetian merchants. For 150 years, Venice had advanced on a rising tide of European prosperity, growing wealth and booming populations. Maritime ventures, characterised by an optimistic culture of risk-taking, had brought rich returns. But it was the rampant materialism, the expansion of trade routes, the commercial connections across vast distances that had brought not only silk, spices, ivory and pearls, grain and fish, but also the plague bacillus from inner Asia. It was the Italian maritime republics who were charged with carrying death to Europe; the consequences were taken to be divine judgement for cupidity and sin. The contemporary chronicler Gabriele de Mussis set out the charge in an imaginary dialogue between God and the merchants:

‘Genoa, confess what you have done … Venice, Tuscany and the whole of Italy, say what you did.’

‘We Genoese and Venetians are responsible for revealing God’s judgement. Painfully, we set sail to our cities and entered our homes … and alas, we carried with us the darts of death, and at the very moment that our families hugged and kissed us, even as we were speaking we were compelled to spread poison from our mouths.’

By the end of 1350, as a by-product of the Black Sea trade, probably half of Europe’s population had died. The figure in the Mediterranean basin was perhaps as high as seventy-five per cent in places. The Black Death jolted a whole continent into new ways of thinking and acting, wrenching it away from a communal medieval past. Venice, whose materialistic drive had affronted Petrarch, was the harbinger of multiple new worlds, identities and mindsets. Afterwards the mercantile mood of Italy would itself darken. Melancholy tinged the bright prospects for wealth and trade: ‘Nothing is more certain than death,’ became the popular sentiment, ‘nor is anything more uncertain than the hour of it.’ Merchants became more risk-averse, more conservative, more aware of sudden reversals of fortune; in the stock phrase of maritime enterprise,
fortuna maris
, the fortune of the sea, made men increasingly cautious. Henceforth Venice was patrolling the plague frontiers of Europe.

But the competition in the Black Sea went on regardless. The trade boycott was breached by both parties. In 1347, the Venetians overtly broke ranks and acquired new concessions from Zanibeck to trade at Tana. Genoa, determined that ‘there shall be no sailing to Tana’, prepared to retaliate. Its proud declaration that Venetian voyaging in the Black Sea was ever only with the express permission of Genoa made new wars inevitable. They would take both players to the brink of ruin.

The Flag of St Titus

1348–1368

The Black Sea remained an unresolved problem, which plague had done nothing to ease. It merely reduced the available manpower and the protagonists’ naval capabilities. Within a year of losing two thirds of their populations, Genoa and Venice were at war again. In the aftermath, the contest moved back to the Bosphorus, the choke point that controlled access to the markets of central Asia. War returned again to the sea walls of Constantinople, a repeated point of destiny in Venice’s maritime adventure.

By the late 1340s it was clear that the reconstituted Byzantine Empire had never recovered from the trauma of the Fourth Crusade. Racked by civil war, harassed by the inexorable advance of the Turks across the Anatolian land mass, totally incapable of managing its maritime frontiers, the city had no means of controlling the predatory instincts of Venice and Genoa. The two republics became kingmakers, backing differing factions in the city’s internal power struggles. In this respect, the Genoese were far better placed. From their strongly fortified trading town at Galata with its sheltered harbour, just across the water from the city, they were uniquely positioned to squeeze the Greek emperor. Constantinople was entirely dependent on Genoese ships for access to the wheat of the Black Sea, and Galata had stolen much of the city’s trade. By 1350 its customs revenues were seven times those of Constantinople. The entwined snakes of Constantine’s column had become parasites threatening to overwhelm the host body. Constantinople found itself helplessly entangled in the running
fight between the two cities for commercial dominance. War advanced remorselessly to its doorstep;

The Genoese acted with impunity. In 1348 they mounted an attack on the city; the following year, when the Byzantines attempted to construct a new fleet they destroyed it in the Golden Horn; they helped themselves to strategic Byzantine bases along the coast of Asia Minor; in 1350, they occupied a castle on the Bosphorus which gave them absolute control over the entrance to the Black Sea. When they seized Venetian ships at Caffa, war with Venice became inevitable.

The third Genoese war, which started in 1350, was in most respects scarcely distinct from its predecessors; a chaotic, wide-ranging and visceral maritime brawl, involving hit-and-run tactics, piracy, raids on bases and islands and pitched sea battles. The difference lay in the size of the fleets. The Black Death had devastated the manpower resources of both cities; seafarers had been particularly badly affected. In 1294, Venice had manned some seventy galleys in a matter of months; in 1350 it was hard pushed to fill the rowing benches of thirty-five. Already a small step-change was starting to take place in attitudes among the ordinary citizens towards the sea-going life. The plague had left its survivors better off. They had inherited considerable wealth and the scarcity of labour forced up the asking price. A rift was also opening up between the classes which would become dramatic in fleet matters a generation later. The ordinary seamen began to feel they were not sharing the same risks and conditions as their aristocratic commanders. When it came to conscription, there were complaints that whereas the captains fed on good bread, the oarsmen subsisted on indigestible millet. As a result many of the conscripted men preferred to hire substitutes from among the colonial subjects of Greece and the Dalmatian coast. The solidarity, the discipline, the sense of shared life among the citizens was starting to fray, with long-term consequences for Venetian sea power.

However, if the fleets were now smaller, the contests grew in bitterness. With each returning cycle of war, Venetian–Genoese
hatred increased; and in 1352 the two maritime powers were to fight a battle off the walls of Constantinople which would pass down in Venetian memory as one of the nastiest they ever experienced.

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In 1351 Venice signed a pact with the Byzantine emperor, John V, for the express purpose of expelling Genoa from the Bosphorus and releasing its throttling grip on the Black Sea. To compensate for its shrunken fleet, the Venetians also enrolled the support of the king of Aragon, in faraway Spain, who had his own reasons for discomfiting the Genoese. He contributed a Catalan force of thirty galleys, twelve of which Venice paid for out of its own pocket. The Venetian command passed to its most experienced admiral, Nicolo Pisani. He was well matched by the Genoese commander, Paganino Doria, scion of a noble maritime family, in a rivalry which would be handed down through the generations. There were initially months of skirmishing in which the protagonists kept missing each other; at one point Pisani, chased back to Negroponte with an inferior force, scuttled his galleys in the harbour rather than risk a fight. Doria was forced to withdraw. Pisani refloated his ships and sailed on.

Early in 1352, a joint Venetian, Byzantine and Catalan fleet finally hunted down their rivals in the mouth of the Bosphorus. On Monday 13 February the two fleets prepared for battle off the city walls of Constantinople. Here the Fourth Crusade had launched its first assault on the city 150 years earlier under very different conditions. It was afternoon when the two fleets finally closed, the depth of winter, bitterly cold, the weather blustery, the sea chopped into fury by a strong wind blowing up from the south and the Bosphorus current running against it with a powerful surge.

Ship-handling was extremely difficult. There were only a few hours of daylight left. In these conditions Pisani considered it wise to hold off for a fresh day, but the Catalan admiral was convinced of easy victory. Sword in hand, he declared he would fight
and gave the trumpet call for the attack. Pisani had little option but to follow him in. As they raised anchor, the wind increased its velocity; the sea began to mount into castling peaks and vertiginous troughs. It became impossible to bear down on the Genoese fleet in any kind of order. Doria drew his ships back into the mouth of a sheltered creek, and the allied vessels, propelled by the force of the gale, shot past unable to engage; with huge difficulty they turned about, the rowers straining at the oars, to make a second attempt.

Galley wars

A hundred ships were now wedged into the neck of the Bosphorus at a point only a mile wide. Bucking and rearing, with neither side able to organise its lines, they attempted to engage. The strait was jammed with ships, colliding, crashing into each other, driven ashore by the force of the wind. Rather than a sea battle, it was a series of incoherent micro-fights, small groups of five, six, seven ships tearing at each other blindly in the wind. Night fell abruptly over the violent sea. Confusion increased. It became impossible to tell friend from foe. Venetian ships
tried to board each other; Genoese rained arrows down on their own vessels; men fell overboard; galleys lost their steering systems; their oars were shattered in the impact of the battle; vessels floated away rudderless on the current. Once fire caught a ship it blazed like tinder in the fierce gale and was swept away flaring and guttering into the dark. The wind, the biting cold, the splintering of wood, the confused cries, the men staggering along their decks, trying to fight, driven forward by an appalling madness: it looked like a version of hell. There was no strategy or control. Outcomes were decided by luck. Locked together, ships crashed onto the coast; their crews leaped ashore and continued to batter and stab at each other so that in places the sea battle became a land battle. The men from seven Catalan galleys just ran away; the Greeks, perhaps more wisely, hardly engaged at all and retreated into the Golden Horn. Men fought to the death with demented fury. They killed their own side as often as the other.

Dawn broke on a scene of devastation. Empty hulls floated on the water or lay wrecked on the shore; the sea was littered with corpses, spars, the detritus of battle. No one could tell who had won. Both sides claimed the victory. The casualties were huge. Franciscan friars from Galata tried to arrange a prisoner exchange. When they visited the Venetian fleet, they found so few captives that they decided not to return, fearing that when the Genoese learned of their losses they would slaughter their own prisoners out of hand.

Yet in the aftermath advantage remained with Genoa. The Venetian and Catalan fleet withdrew, unable to sustain the assault on Galata. And the Genoese now had military aid from the Ottoman sultan, Orhan. The Byzantines had no choice but to sign a peace treaty with Genoa, under the terms of which Greek ships should have no entry to the Black Sea without Genoese permission. In addition, the Genoese were confirmed in their possession of Galata, which they now fortified more strongly as a sovereign colony. Byzantium was being slowly strangled, not only by the
avid maritime republics, but also by the advancing Ottoman Turks. For Venice, the strategic consequences were severe. What they learned from the Battle of the Bosphorus was that without a strategic fall-back point at the approaches to the Black Sea they would never be able to exercise any concerted pressure on the trade to the furthest East. They cast an acquisitive eye over the small island of Tenedos, strategically positioned at the mouth of the Dardanelles.