City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (53 page)

Lepanto

At the day’s end, the Venetian fleet withdrew out to sea; the battered Ottoman fleet inched on round the coast towards Lepanto harbour, protected by a contingent of the army following on land. The running fight continued but Venetian morale was gone and the failure would prove expensive. There were several more ineffectual jabs to prise the enemy out into open water; fireships were driven into the enemy fleet, a few galleys were sunk, but the bulk of the Ottoman armada proceeded intact. At the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth the Ottoman fleet had to risk open water in its final run into Lepanto. The Venetians were presented with a last chance; this time they were accompanied by a French flotilla. A few brave ships engaged the Turks, sinking eight galleys, but the rest, still apparently traumatised by the fireball at Zonchio, again flunked an encounter with heavy cannon. The French, seeing the confusion, also refused to engage. Their verdict on Venetian arrangements was deeply humiliating: ‘seeing that there was no discipline, they said that our fleet was magnificent, but they had no expectation it would do anything useful’. The chance was gone. ‘If all our other galleys had attacked, we would have taken the Turkish armada,’ bewailed Malipiero once again, ‘as sure as God is God.’ Instead the bulk of the Ottoman fleet rounded the last point towards Lepanto. Out to sea, the Venetians awaited the inevitable. ‘All good men in the fleet – and there were many, broke down in tears,’ Malipiero recalled. ‘They called the captain a traitor, who had not the spirit to do his duty.’

Within the town, the beleaguered garrison had already beaten off several assaults by the Ottoman troops and expectantly watched the sails pricking the western horizon. They rang the church bells with joy at the approach of a Venetian fleet. As the ships grew on the water, they realised, to their horror, that their flags were not lions but crescent moons. When they learned that they carried siege guns, the town promptly surrendered.

*

Grimani had hanged no one, reprimanded none of the noble commanders.

Hands on the Throat of Venice

1500–1503

In Venice, the loss of Lepanto was the scandal of the age. The inquiry and trials that followed were marked by unprecedented recriminations. Immense animosity was directed against Antonio Grimani and his clan; the Grimani palace was under siege from the mob; all its goods had to be hurriedly moved to a nearby monastery for safe keeping; a faithful Arab slave was attacked and left for dead in the streets; both the palace and the Grimani shops were daubed with graffiti. In the streets urchins took to shouting rhymes: ‘
Antonio Grimani, Ruina da Christiani
… traitor to Venice, may you and your sons be eaten by the dogs’. Other members of the family were too frightened to appear before the senate.

It was nearly four months before Grimani could bring himself to come back to Venice. He was peremptorily told that if he sailed into the Basin of St Mark in his general’s galley he would be executed on sight. He returned in a small sailing ship, chained like all disgraced naval commanders, in scenes as dramatic as those that accompanied the failure of Pisani. It was 2 November, the day of the dead.

Unlike Pisani, no sympathetic crowd of well-wishers turned out to watch Grimani struggle down the gangplank after dark. No man had fallen so far or so fast in the public estimation; the common consensus was that the admiral who had appeared to Priuli ‘like the Great Alexander, the famous Hannibal, the illustrious Julius Caesar’ had turned to jelly at the sight of an enemy. It was an example of the mutability of human fortune that one could see ‘this general pass from such fame and fortune to shame,
disgrace and infamy … and that everything could change in a flash’. Weighted down with fetters and supported just by his sons he clanked his way to the steps of the doge’s palace. Four servants had to carry him up to the council chamber. Despite the lateness of the hour, two thousand people watched in dead silence as the proclamation was read out committing him to a damp dungeon.

The proceedings that followed were bitter and long drawn out. With rhetorical fury, the prosecution demanded the ultimate penalty for the man who was declared to be ‘the calamity of the nation, rebel of the Republic, enemy of the state, unworthy captain who has lost Lepanto through irresponsibility, a man who is rich and vain’. They contrasted this disgrace with the long and glorious roll call of public offices held by Grimani, now ill from the deprivations of a prison cell, ‘commander of galleys, captain of the Alexandria convoy, proviseur of salt, sage of the Terra Firma, governor of Ravenna, leader of the Ten, lawyer of the Commune, admiral in chief’ and terminated on a drumbeat of doom: ‘On his tomb will be written: here lies he who was executed in St Mark’s Square.’ The charge of wealth introduced a new note into Venetian public life. To be rich had always been a virtue; now it was a moral stain. The piles of gold flaunted on the recruiting benches returned to haunt him. Behind this lay jealousy and factional spite within the heart of the ruling class. There was a determination to eliminate the Grimani clan from commercial competition.

Grimani’s defence was that his orders had not been obeyed; the
patroni
had not engaged; commanders had held back through cowardice and disobedience. Everyone had their own version. Alvise Marcello, despite his own protestations, certainly bore a part of the blame; Malipiero thought that Grimani’s fault was not cowardice but inexperience: he had failed to organise the fleet properly and he had caused confusion by raising a crucifix instead of the war standard which he was given in St Mark’s – the signal to which captains were accustomed to respond. It was clear that Grimani had not reprimanded the noble commanders for their failures to engage, probably because he had no wish to alienate
those on whose support his political future might lie. In the end it was recognised that the blame was collective, not individual. Grimani did not die. He was banished from Venice and forced to pay heavy compensation to the aristocratic families whose members had been killed in battle.

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The war went on almost as badly as before. New commanders were appointed but the tide of fortune could not be reversed. At Lepanto the Ottomans now had a secure forward base on the edge of the Ionian Sea from which to conduct naval operations. During this tense time, Leonardo da Vinci arrived in the city to offer his services as a military engineer. He came with a head full of extraordinary schemes for the city’s defence – a diving suit of pig’s leather with bamboo pipes for air tubes, sketches for submarines. Whatever conversations took place came to nothing. (Two years later he was drawing up proposals to put to Sultan Bayezit for a single-span bridge across the Golden Horn.)

The senate’s concerns were more immediate. During the early months of 1500 fears grew for the safety of Coron and Modon. In July, a new commander, Girolamo Contarini, fought a repeat of Zonchio in the same waters, with the same mixture of galleys, round ships and merchant vessels. At they swept in to attack, the wind failed; the round ships were unable to engage; four of the great galleys withdrew; two more were taken. Contarini’s vessel, shot to bits and sinking, was forced to withdraw. Again there were recriminations.

Bayezit then proceeded in person with his army to the walls of Modon. He brought with him a large number of cannon, and the standards of the vessels captured from Contarini to demoralise the defence. From the town, the rector despatched short, desperate messages describing their plight: the whole countryside beyond the walls covered with a sea of tents … unceasing bombardment day and night … a third of the population dead or wounded … everyone else expecting to lose their lives … the gunpowder almost gone. Off shore, the
patroni
of the merchant
galleys, daunted by the Ottoman fleet, again refused to fight. Only one captain, Zuam Malipiero, offered to take four galleys and run the blockade and ‘lay down his life for his country’. Such moments of exemplary bravery met their response. ‘At once, the galley crews cried out that they would volunteer to die with him, that they would man the galleys. The others,’ Priuli recorded bitterly, but from a safe distance, ‘lacking spirit and courage remained in the fleet.’ Malipiero’s galleys heroically pierced the Ottoman blockade and made it into the small encircling harbour of Modon. The exhausted defenders, overjoyed at the prospect of relief, abandoned their posts and started to run for the ships. The result was catastrophic.

On 29 August, at the twentieth hour, the news reached Venice as news always did: a light frigate cutting up fast on the wind to the Basin of St Mark. It was the day of the decapitation of St John, an ill-omened anniversary in the Christian calendar. When the loss of Modon was reported to the Council of Ten in their gilded chamber, the august dignitaries who commanded the Most Serene Republic of Venice burst into tears. Even more than Negroponte, Modon mattered. Its significance was both emotional and commercial. It was not just the six thousand prisoners taken, the loss of 150 cannon and the twelve galleys. Modon was part of the original imperial heritage of the Fourth Crusade; it counted as one of the richest treasures of the Stato da Mar. ‘It was’, said Priuli, ‘as if they had seen the whole ability of shipping to sail taken away, because the city of Modon was the staging post and maritime turntable for all ships on every voyage.’ When the sultan turned up at the walls of Coron twenty miles away, the case was judged hopeless; the town surrendered without a fight. The Eyes of the Republic had been extinguished. To Priuli the merchant it was a moment of prescient doom: ‘If the Venetians can’t make their voyages, their means of living will be gradually taken away, and in a short time they will wither away to nothing.’

On the eve of this gloomy news, the Republic had elected yet another captain-general of the sea. There were no volunteers for
the post; all those proposed excused themselves on grounds of age, ill health and so on, so low had fallen the standing of the post, so great was the fear of the Turkish fleet. Eventually they found Benedetto Pesaro, known colloquially as Pesaro of London, who willingly accepted. Pesaro was an experienced commander, stern, resolute, impervious to the politics of the noble class and completely ruthless. At the age of seventy he still apparently kept mistresses. ‘Totally reprehensible in such an old man,’ yelped Priuli. Pesaro was, in effect, a throwback to the rougher age of Pisani and Zeno – a seaman’s seaman, able to command respect and love from his crews, and fear from his captains. In the light of previous failings he was given the widest power to ‘kill and execute anyone guilty of disobedience, be they
provveditori
, captains or galley commanders … without seeking permission from Venice’. Such phrases had become stock; they were no longer believed, but Pesaro did just that. Like Pisani, the old libertine understood the mentality of the working seamen: he improved their morale enormously by giving them leave to plunder, whilst helping himself as well. He was effective. He rampaged round the coasts of Greece destroying Ottoman shipbuilding efforts, restoring some Ionian islands to Venetian control, preventing the enemy from further consolidating their naval position. He acted without fear or favour. When two noble subordinates, one of whom was a relative of the doge, surrendered their fortresses without a fight he simply killed them. When he captured the Turkish pirate Erichi he roasted him alive. He preserved the integrity of the Adriatic and maintained control over the Ionian Sea so effectively that by the end of 1500 the great galleys were resuming their voyages to Alexandria and Beirut. Ultimately, however, he was unable to reverse the tide of conquest.

In 1503 Venice accepted the inevitable and signed a humiliating peace with Bayezit that confirmed everything he had won. Soon the Venetians would dip their flags to passing Ottoman ships in implicit recognition of a vassal status they were too proud publicly to acknowledge. From now on co-operation with their powerful
Muslim neighbour would become an axiom of Venetian foreign policy and the city would turn its attention increasingly to building a land empire.

*

On 9 May 1500, as on every Ascension Day for the past five hundred years, the Senza took place in Venice, the elaborate ceremony that expressed the city’s sense of mystical union with the sea. As usual, the doge, decked out in his regalia, set sail in the golden barge and tossed a gold ring into the depths to proclaim the marriage. The same year de’ Barbari was running off images of the triumphant maritime city on Venetian presses. These were fine allegories but on the turning of the sixteenth century the reality was different. The sea was no longer quiet and the marriage was tempestuous. The truth had been neatly summed up in Constantinople some time earlier. When a Venetian ambassador presented himself at Bayezit’s court to broker a peace deal he was told that there was no point in being there. ‘Up till now you have married the sea,’ the vizier roundly remarked. ‘From now on it’s our turn; we’ve got more sea than you.’