City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (55 page)

This exchange had decisive effects. The merchants of the lagoon also hastened the decline of the economic power of the Islamic Middle East and the rise of the West. Over centuries many of the industries that had made the Levant so wealthy – the manufacture of soap, glass, silk and paper, the production of sugar – were either usurped by the Republic or undermined by its transport systems. Venetian merchants moved from buying Syrian glass to importing the key raw material – soda ash from the Syrian desert – until the superior glass of Murano was being reexported to Mamluk palaces. Soap and paper-making followed the same trend. Sugar production moved from Syria to Cyprus, where Venetian entrepreneurs employed more efficient production processes to supply western markets. The merchant galleys allowed energetic European industries harnessing new technologies, such as water power and automatic spinning wheels, to undercut Levantine competitors and nudge them into spiralling decline. Every shipload that sailed east from Venice gradually
shifted the balance of power. Payment for oriental goods changed from silver bars to barter – on increasingly favourable terms for the westerners.

The function of the Stato da Mar was as much to funnel this trade across the sea as it was to provide wealth in its own right. It was Europe’s first full-blown colonial adventure. With exceptions – and the Dalmatians were certainly better treated than the Greeks – it was exploitative and indifferent. It provided something of a model to its successors, notably Holland and Britain, as to the ability of small maritime states to gain global reach. It served as a warning too of the vulnerabilities of far-flung possessions linked by sea power. The Venetian business model became suddenly obsolete and its supply lines vulnerable. Ultimately the Stato da Mar was as hard to defend as the American colonies were for Britain. The collapse of ocean-going empires could be as dramatic as their rise: by 1505 Priuli was already sketching an epitaph.

Epilogue

RETURN

A few miles west of Heraklion on the coastal highway, there is a prominent rocky outcrop above the sea. If you cross the road and follow the path round its base, you pass by an archway and vaulted tunnel onto an open platform with a wide prospect of the Aegean. The Cretans call this place Paleokastro – the Old Fort. It was built by the Genoese in 1206, then developed by the Venetians to guard the seaward approaches to Candia. It’s a lonely spot. At its outer edge the stone bastion falls away steeply down the base of the cliff; there is a smell of thyme on the soft wind; the smack of sea; the ruins of arched magazines; a subterranean chapel. In the distance modern Heraklion sprawls beyond a blue bay.

It was here in the summer of 1669, after the longest siege in world history, that the captain-general Francesco Morosini agreed the surrender of Venetian Crete. For twenty-one years, Venice engaged in a titanic struggle with the Ottomans for its hub of empire, but Priuli had been right. One by one its colonial possessions would be prised away. Cyprus, held for less than a century, was lost in 1570; Tinos, its most northern island in the Aegean, lasted until 1715; by then the rest were gone, and the trade had died. The
muda
system was in decline by the 1520s. The last galleys anchored in the Thames soon after. Pirates started to choke the sea.

Only Venice’s home waters held firm. Century after century the Ottomans hammered at Corfu but the door of the Adriatic stayed shut, and when Napoleon finally marched into St Mark’s
Square, burned the
Bucintoro
and trundled the bronze horses off to Paris in wheeled carts, there was something approaching grief along the Dalmatian coast. At Perasto, the governor made an emotional speech in the Venetian dialect and buried the flag of St Mark beneath the altar; the people wept.

The siege of Candia 1648–69

The visible remnants of the Stato da Mar lie scattered across the sea; hundreds of crumbling towers and forts; the impressive defences of Candia and Famagusta, with their angled bastions and deep ditches, powerless in the end against Turkish guns; neat harbours at Lepanto, Kyrenia and Hania, drawn tightly around pretty bays; churches, bell towers, arsenals and quays; countless Venetian lions, elongated, squat, tubby, winged and wingless, gruff, fierce, indignant and surprised, guard harbour walls, surmount gateways and spout water from elegant fountains. Far away, at the mouth of the Don, archaeologists still dig breastplates, crossbow bolts and Murano glass from the Ukrainian earth, but overall the traces of Venice’s imperial adventure are surprisingly light. There was always something provisional about the Stato da
Mar. Like Venice itself, it lived with the idea of impermanence; harbours and ports came and went and the roots it put down on many foreign shores were not deep. The lintel of more than one collapsed Venetian house on Crete bears the Latin motto ‘The world is nothing but smoke and shadows’. As if they knew, deep down, that all the imperial razzmatazz of trumpets, ships and guns was only a mirage.

Over centuries tens of thousands of Venetians engaged in this show – merchants, seamen, colonists, soldiers and administrators. It was mainly a world of men, but there was family life too. Like Dandolo, many never came back; they died of war and plague, were swallowed up by the sea or buried in foreign earth, but Venice was a centrist empire which retained a magnetic hold on its people. The merchant isolated in the
fondaci
of Alexandria, the consul watching the Mongol steppes, the
galeotto
working his oar – for all, the city loomed large. The idea of return was potent – the ship at last passing through the
lidi
again, feeling a different motion to the sea and the familiar skyline rising pale and insubstantial in the shifting light.

People on the quays, watched, idle or intent, for approaching ships. And until a seaman standing in the prow was close enough to shout, those craning to catch his words might wait in trepidation to hear if the news was good or bad – if a husband or son had died at sea, if the deal had been done, if there would be lamentation or joy. Landfall brought all the vicissitudes of life. People returned with gold, spices, plague and grief. Failed admirals came clanking in chains, triumphant ones with trumpets and cannon fire, trailing captured banners in the sea, the gonfalon of St Mark streaming in the wind. Ordelafo Falier stepped down the gangplank with the bones of St Stephen. Pisani’s body came packed in salt. Antonio Grimani survived the disgrace of Zonchio and became a doge; so did Gritti the spy. Marco Polo, wild-eyed and anonymous, burst through the door of his house like Ulysses returned – and no one recognised him. Felix Fabri came on the spice fleet of 1480 with the weather so cold that the oars had to break the ice in the canals. He arrived in the dark, just after Christmas. The night was clear and bright; from the deck the snowy tops of the Dolomites glimmered under a large moon. No one could sleep. As dawn rose, the passengers could see the golden roof of the campanile glinting in the sun, topped by the angel Gabriel welcoming them home. All the bells of Venice were ringing for the fleet’s return. The ships were dressed with banners and flags; the
galeotti
started to sing and, according to custom, threw their old clothing, rotted by salt and storm, overboard. ‘And when we had paid our fare, and the charges,’ wrote Fabri,

and tipped the servants who had looked after us, and said goodbye to everyone in our galley, both noblemen and servants, we put all our things into one boat and climbed down into it … And although we were glad of our enlargement from that uneasy prison, yet because of the companionship which had grown up between us and the rowers and others, sadness mingled with our joy.

Sources and Bibliography

The bibliography contains all the sources quoted in the book. The sources for the quotations can be found at www.faber.co.uk/work/cityoffortune under the resources section.

ORIGINAL SOURCES

Andrea, Alfred J.,
Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade
, Leiden, 2008

Angiolello, Giovan-Maria,
Memoir
, trans. Pierre A. Mackay, at http://angiolello.net, 2006

Barbara, Josafa and Contarini, Ambrogio,
Travels to Tana and Persia
, trans. William Thomas, London, 1873

Barbaro, Nicolo,
Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli 1453
, ed. E. Cornet, Vienna, 1856; (in English)
Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453
, trans. J. R. Melville Jones, New York, 1969

Canal, Martino da,
Les Estoires de Venise
, Florence, 1972

Casati, Luigi,
La guerra di Chioggia e la pace di Torino, saggio storico con documenti inediti
, Florence, 1866

Casola, Pietro,
Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494
, ed. and trans. M. Margaret Newett, Manchester, 1907

Cassiodorus,
Variaum libri XII
, Letter 24, at www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu, 2006

Chinazzi, Daniele,
Cronaca della guerra di Chioggia
, Milan, 1864

Choniates, Niketas,
Imperii Graeci Historia
, Geneva, 1593; (in English)
O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates
, trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Detroit, 1984

Clari, Robert de,
La Conquête de Constantinople
, trans. Pierre Charlot, Paris, 1939; (in English)
The Conquest of Constantinople
, trans. Edgar Holmes McNeal, New York, 1966