City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (43 page)

By way of further explanation, Pesaro went on to recount that Erichi’s ghastly end was revenge exacted for similar inflicted on a Venetian nobleman.

For dashing Venetian galley commanders pirate hunting could almost be a sport. In February 1519 Zuan Antonio Taiapiera wrote to his brother about his recent exploits:

It was the feast day of St Paul, which was the 25th of last month. At dawn I spied the
fusta
[small galley] of Moro de la Valona, one mile off Durazzo, and I went towards it. The ship fled back into the lee of Durazzo. As it ran, I discharged two shots from my cannon but failed to hit it. When I saw it had reached the walls, I turned my stern about to follow my route to Corfu. But they [the pirates] wanting to avenge themselves for another ship, destroyed at Cape Cesta, boarded as many brave men as they thought the galley needed, and started to chase me. When I saw their pursuit, I prepared my ship and retreated five miles out to sea, and there the two sides attacked each other so fiercely that the battle lasted seven or eight hours, and I cut them all to pieces. Among the dead was il Moro and four other captains of the
fuste
… On my galley there were seven dead, ninety-three wounded, but only three of these critically, among whom was my chief bombardier whom I killed [as an act of mercy]. The others were also badly wounded. They will lose their eyes or be lame, but we hope they will survive. I have only one lance wound on my thigh, which has only slightly wounded me though it was a heavy enough blow. But I was satisfied that in the last attack they leaped on my prow and with my own hands I slaughtered two of them – it was then they struck me with a pike. I have seized the castanets, drums, banners – and the head of il Moro, which I shall rightfully display on my prow.

As a more permanent memorial than the rotting head, Taiapiera asked his brother particularly to ‘have a banner made for me with fields of yellow and blue, separated by a third dotted with turbans, and make it big, and send it at the first opportunity to Corfu, so that I will have it for the first of May for the parade’. He was certainly going to advertise this success.

*

Travelling by ship was everyday life for many Venetians, too familiar to be described in detail. It was outsiders who provided the most vivid accounts of the Venetian experience of seafaring life towards the end of the Middle Ages, particularly landlubber
pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, such as the German monk Felix Fabri and the Florentine Pietro Casola. Fabri, insatiably curious, made the voyage twice and recorded all the alarms and mood swings of the voyage.

Venice ran regular sailings to the Holy Land in adapted merchant galleys, which, keen to preserve its good name and aware of the unscrupulous instincts of noble captains, it regulated with care. It provided a kind of package service with food provided and transport between Jaffa and Jerusalem included. It was backed up by legal contract. All the same, the each-way voyage of five to six weeks was a form of purgatory – and at times a glimpse of hell. The pilgrims were housed in a long unlighted hold beneath the main deck where each slept in a space eighteen inches wide, with the stench of the bilges below and smoke seeping through the deck from the kitchen above. Nights below deck were foetid and foul, ‘right evil and smouldering hot and stinking’ one English pilgrim called the experience, what with the cries and groans of fellow passengers, the unfamiliar motion of the rolling ship, the smell of vomit and urine from upturned chamber pots, arguments, fights, bedbugs and fleas.

Storms, when they came, were abrupt and shattering. In June 1494, Casola’s galley off the coast of Dalmatia was hit by a rising sea and driven seventy miles west to the tip of Italy. Down in their pitch-black hold, the pilgrims were hurled from side to side in the dark; they could feel the ship ‘twisted by the fury of the sea’, creaking and groaning ‘as if she would break up’. Water was forced through the hatches, soaking the wretched travellers. The screaming was terrible: ‘as if all the souls tormented in hell were down there’. ‘Death was chasing us,’ Casola recalled of such an occasion:

the sea so agitated that every hope of life was abandoned by all; I repeat by all … During the night such heavy waves struck the ship that they covered the castle in the poop … and the whole galley in general with water … the water came from the sky and from the sea; on every side there was water. Every man had ‘Jesus’ and the ‘
Miserere
’ constantly in his mouth, especially when those great waves washed over the galley with such force, that, for the moment, every man was expected to go to the bottom.

The
galeotti
, drenched to the skin, begged to be allowed below. Those left on deck to steady the ship were exposed to mountainous waves; it took three helmsmen wading in water on the poop deck to manage the rudder.

At times Fabri, keen to witness everything that life had to offer, could experience an almost aesthetic delight in watching a violent sea. ‘Waves of sea water are more vehement, more noisy, and more wonderful than those of other water. I have had great pleasure in sitting or standing on the upper deck during a storm and watching the marvellous succession of gusts of wind and the frightful rush of the waters.’ At night, though, it was a different story. A gale struck Fabri’s galley just north of Corfu.

It was yet dark, and no stars could be seen; as we tacked to windward there arose a most frightful storm, and a terrible disturbance of the sea and air. Most furious winds tossed us aloft, lightning flashed, thunder roared dreadfully … on either side of us fearful thunderbolts fell, so that in many places the sea seemed to be on fire … violent squalls kept striking the galley, covering it with water, and beating upon the sides of it as hard as though great stones from high mountains were sent flying against the planks.

They hit the ship with a noise ‘as though millstones were being flung against her … so fierce a wind kept tossing the galley up and down, rolling it from side to side and shaking it about, that no man could lie in his berth, much less sit, and least of all stand’. The pilgrim deck was a shambles.

*

We were obliged to hang on to the pillars which stood in the middle of the cabin supporting the upper works, or else crouch on our bended knees besides our chests, embracing them with our hands and arms, and so holding ourselves still; and while doing so, sometimes big heavy chests would be upset, together with the men who were clinging to them.

In the dark, objects swinging from the bulkheads came crashing through the air; water poured through the hatches, ‘so that there was nothing in the whole ship which was not wet; our beds and all our things were sopping, our bread and biscuits all spoiled by sea water’. It was the creaking of the timbers that petrified most of all. ‘Nothing ever frightened me in storms so much as the loud groans of the ship, which are so intense that one thinks that the ship must be broken somewhere.’ It was now that the arsenal’s quality controls were put to their supreme test.

On deck the situation was more dire. The mainsail had been ripped to shreds, the yardarm ‘bent like a bow … our mast made many dreadful noises, and the yard likewise; and every joint in the whole galley seemed to be coming to pieces’. Ship management was in a state of pandemonium:

… the galley-slaves and other sailors ran to and fro with as much noise and shouting as though they were just about to be run through with swords; some climbed up the shrouds on to the yard, and tried to draw the sail down to them; some on deck below ran about trying to catch hold of the sheet again; some rove ropes through blocks and put brails round the sail.

Amid this terror and confusion and the strobic bursts of lightning, a sudden apparition stopped the crew in their tracks. A fixed light – almost certainly a manifestation of St Elmo’s fire – was seen hovering above the prow. ‘Thence it slowly moved throughout the whole length of the galley as far as the stern, where it vanished. This light was a ray of fire about a cubit in width.’ Astonished and awestruck in the middle of the storm, all those on deck ‘left off their working, ceased their noise and shouting, and kneeling down with their hands raised to heaven, cried out in a low voice nothing except “Holy, holy, holy!”’ It was taken as a sign of divine grace. ‘And after this,’ with the storm still raging, ‘the galley slaves returned to their accustomed labours … and worked with joyous shouts.’

Three days after surviving this storm, Fabri’s ship found itself risking another disaster. As night fell off the Dalmatian coast
and the wind freshened, the vessel was pitching at ‘the foot of a precipitous mountain … When we were close to the mountain and were trying to turn the galley head to wind, it was struck by the wind and waves so violently that it became unmanageable, and threatened to run its bows ashore on the precipitous rocks.’ There was an instant collapse of discipline; the
galeotti
‘began to run hither and thither and prepared to make their escape’; ‘My lords, come on deck; the vessel is a wreck and is sinking,’ was the cry heard down in the hold. Everyone ran to the stern in great disorder; there was a crush on the companion ladders, the ship’s boats had been launched ‘in order that the captain himself with his brother, his brother’s wife and his own followers might be the first to escape’. Fabri had been fed enough tales of maritime disaster to know that the instance of the
Magna
was not unique: ‘those in the boats would have drawn their swords and daggers and kept others from entering them … [and] cut off with their swords the fingers and hands of men who are hanging to the oar or to the ship’s sides. Howbeit,’ Fabri went on, ‘this time also God saved us; the disorder was quieted, the ship was moored to the rocks, the sails furled, and anchors laid out.’

When a ship was being dragged onto a lee shore, human life hung on the quality of its cables and anchors. Ships carried a large number of anchors which could be tested to the limit. When the galley taking Domenico Trevisan to the Mamluk sultan was off the Peloponnese in 1516, ‘A furious sirocco wind blew up and although the anchors were cast out and we were firmly fixed to the shore by cables – and we increased the number of anchors to eighteen – we were frightened of dragging on our anchors, seeing our cables snapped and our galley hurled on the rocks.’

Ships carried cables of immense length – Casola’s had one that was 525 feet long – but nothing was proof against the vagaries of the sea. The sickening slow-motion doom of the anchors dragging on the sea bed and a looming shore could make even the most hardened seaman quail; the sailors dubbed the heaviest anchor the ‘anchor of hope’: it was the last resort. Fabri watched
in dismay their largest anchor failing to catch; with enormous effort it was hauled in and dropped in another spot

… where it again followed the galley just as a plough follows the horse. It was then weighed again, and we dropped it in a third place, where it caught upon a rock; but when the galley stopped, and rode to her cable, sheering from side to side, the fluke of the anchor slipped off this rock, and began to drag again, but of a sudden came upon another rock where it stuck fast. So there we hung throughout the night … the captain and all the officers and galley slaves were all night without sleep, expecting their own death and ours at every moment.

Sometimes survival depended literally on a fluke.

Hardly less dreadful were patches of complete calm, when the ship sat motionless for days in the hot sun on a sea so flat ‘that it appeared like a glass of water’. ‘When all the winds are silent and the sea is dumb and calm everywhere,’ thought Fabri,

it is more distressing than any peril, except actual shipwreck … everything becomes putrid and foul and mouldy; the water begins to stink, the wine becomes undrinkable, meat, even when dried and smoked, becomes full of maggots, and all of a sudden there spring into life innumerable flies, gnats, fleas, lice, worms, mice and rats. Moreover all men on board become lazy, sleepy and untidy from the heat, fretful from the evil passions of melancholy, anger and envy, and troubled with other similar distempers. I have seen few men die on board ship during a storm, but many I have seen sicken and die during these calms.

Sailors who had clean water left could sell it for more than wine, ‘although it was lukewarm, whitish and discoloured’. No galley could travel many days without putting in for water, and these great calms caused great suffering. Fabri had such thirst that he daydreamed longingly of his native Ulm, and ‘I would go up straightway to Blaubeuren and sit down beside the lake which rises out of the depths until I had satisfied my thirst.’

Seasickness, heat, cold, the foul conditions, the poor diet, the lack of sleep, the tumbling motion of the ship, all took their toll. The galley for Fabri became ‘a hospital full of wretched invalids’.
Experiences of death were sudden and frequent. Pilgrims, unused to the conditions of nautical life, sickened and died of fevers and dysentery; sailors perished at their benches from the cold or in maritime accidents. Fabri watched one of the noble pilgrims ‘die piteously’.

We wound a sheet about him, weighted his body with stones, and with weeping cast him into the sea. On the third day after this another knight, who had gone out of his mind, expired in great pain and with terrible screams. Him we took ashore for burial in our small boat.

Shortly after, ‘while the officers of the ship were engaged in managing the sails and tackling the galley, lo! of a sudden a block fell from the masthead which struck and killed our best officer … there was exceeding great lamentation in the galley … nor was there his like on board to take his place’. When they landed, more than once Fabri came across drowned corpses on the beach. Burial rites at sea were according to status. The
galeotti
were given not even a shroud; after a short prayer, they ‘were thrown overboard naked, for the sea beasts to devour’; whereas when Andrea Cabral, Venetian consul in Alexandria, died on the way home, his body was eviscerated, embalmed and packed in the ballast sand beneath the pilgrim deck, where it became a talisman of bad luck on a frightful run home.