The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (15 page)

The Venetians were concerned above all with the military value of the island. Euboea had just been lost, the Aegean islands were on the brink, Crete was in its usual condition of stifled dissent, and the security of their eastern routes was threatened once again. Cyprus was the easternmost island of the Mediterranean, and its loss to any hostile power would be a disaster. The fripperies of the Lusignan court were not at all the Venetians’ style, their own
pageantries being of a much more calculated kind, and they viewed the island unromantically. For a figurative introduction to their attitudes we can hardly do better, the moment we arrive in Aphrodite’s island, than take a car and drive to one of the ruined castles which, high on pinnacled vantage points along the mountain range of Kyrenia, stand like so many eagles’ roosts above the northern coast.

The Crusaders built these marvellous forts, in lofty windswept places, scoured by sun and sea-breeze, drifted about by clouds, so improbable that they might be sets for some dream of Camelot or Ruritania. They are haunted by old tales, of mythic treasures, of fairy queens, of demons, enchanted gardens, bewitched peasants, of Aphrodite herself. Sweet smells and suggestions of the Mediterranean linger around them – the sage and the dry grass, the tinkle of the goat-bells, the whisper of nymphs and the grunts of satyrs. Fringed with surf the coastline runs away to Kormakiti and Cape Andreas; the wooded Troodos mountains stand far to the west; to the south the wide brown Nicosia plain, the central plain of Cyprus, lies at your mercy.

Such are the fancy emotions, and purple passages, those castles arouse in suggestible visitors. The Venetians, taking a more realistic look at them, realized that they had lost any serious purpose since the invention of gunpowder, and blew them all up.

Nevertheless Cyprus came into Venetian hands in circumstances of high romance – the novelette element. There was a powerful clan in Venice, the Cornaro (or Corner) family, which had been connected with Cyprus for generations. Since the 1360s the Cornaros had held in mortgage from the Lusignan kings the peninsula of Episkopi, in the south of the island, and by skilful irrigation works, and malleable slave labour, they had developed so profitable a sugar plantation that they had become the richest family of the whole Republic. They were as grand in Cyprus as they were in Venice, and they reached a summit of their ambitions when in 1468 Caterina Cornaro, daughter of Marco Cornaro and granddaughter of one of the Dukes of Naxos, was betrothed tojames 11, Lusignan King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. She had never met him, having lived in Venice all her life, and she was fourteen years old.

From the start the Signory watched this match with a crafty eye. The king was a bastard. He had been helped to his throne by Venetian intrigue, and his right to it was hotly disputed by his half-sister Carlotta, who was married to the Duke of Savoy. Caterina accordingly became Queen of Cyprus as a personal ward of the Republic. She was solemnly adopted as a ‘daughter of St Mark’ (‘never knew he was married’, commented the cynical Bishop of Turin) in an arcane ritual, especially invented for the occasion, before the high altar of the Basilica. The Doge acted as a kind of godfather. Caterina formally abandoned her family name, becoming Caterina Veneta instead, and the Serenissima solemnly vowed to act
in loco parentis
towards her. There was method to this madness: by acquiring the queen as a daughter the Republic acquired a claim to Cyprus itself, if the queen outlived her husband and died without heirs.

The betrothal lasted four years and then Caterina sailed from Venice to meet her husband and accept her crown. This was a moment delightful to the Venetians of the time, and vivid to their descendants ever after: it is likely that Carpaccio, who was a boy then, based upon his memories of the event his picture of St Ursula sailing away from Britain with all her virgins. Legend says, of course, that Caterina was a girl of surpassing beauty: later portraits show her to be more
interesting
than beautiful, but at least in 1472 she had the vivacity of youth, and presumably the glow of bridal and regal prospects. Anyway, Venice bade her farewell in the high old style. The
bucintoro
, the Doge’s luxurious official galley, was rowed stately up the Grand Canal to the steps of her palace, loaded deep with all the great men of the Republic, and down to the Basin they took her in glorious progress, flags and bunting all the way, to board the galley that took her to her kingdom.

In the very next year King James died, and it was a common assumption that the Venetians had poisoned him. (‘We shall treat your kingdom,’ the Venetian envoy told him just before he died in words that might have been more tactfully chosen, ‘as if it were our own.’) Two months later his baby son, James III, was born to Caterina, but he died too before his first birthday. The queen was left heir- and husband-less, and nobody was surprised when the
Venetians, like wicked stepfathers, promptly moved into the palace. Three councillors were sent to Cyprus to advise the queen in her bereavement. A corps of Venetian crossbowmen landed in the island. One of the Serenissima’s magnificent admirals, Pietro Mocenigo, Captain-General of the Sea, looked in at Famagusta with a fleet of sixty galleys. In no time Caterina was a puppet queen. The councillors were instructed to involve her in all their actions, ‘so that everything may appear to proceed from her’, but in fact her views were disregarded, and she was shamelessly bullied in the name of her adoptive parent, the Republic itself.

The Venetians had good reasons for this, too. Carlotta’s faction was still powerful in the island. Cliques and caucuses revolved around the court, weaving melodramatic plots, and always there lurked in the surrounding seas, only waiting for a moment of weakness, the predatory Turks. Hardly had the king died, indeed, than there was a rebellion against the queen, plotted by the Archbishop of Nicosia with the King of Naples, and two of her close relatives, stabbed to death one night, were left as rotting corpses outside her window.

The Republic preserved her, and tightened its grip. The Captain-General was a frequent visitor now. Cretan soldiers replaced the unreliable Cypriots at the gates of Famagusta. Official posts of State were gradually filled by Venetian expatriates or nominees. Carlotta and her family were deported to Venice, and all possible claimants to the throne were exiled or shut up in convents. For nearly fifteen years Caterina was virtually a prisoner in her own palace, and when in 1487 a new Venetian ambassador was sent to Constantinople, his instructions were that if he were asked about Cyprus, he should say that it had really been Venetian for many years, ‘and we have dominion over it and all its fortresses, and send our rector and proveditor hither, who rule over, govern and guard the island as our own, just as they do for all other places belonging to our state’.

In the end, inevitably, they did become its rulers, and rid themselves of its queen. By 1488 they had several plausible pretexts for her removal. They had heard that the Sultan of Egypt might be planning to seize the island. The Turkish threat seemed more menacing than ever. There was yet another plot to subvert
Venetian control, this time by marrying Caterina to Alfonso of Naples. An ambassador was sent from Venice to demand her abdication. ‘We fully authorize you,’ he was told, ‘to bow her to our will, with or without her own consent… by wise, circumspect, cautious and secure means, you are to get the queen on board a galley and bring her here to us at Venice.’ Poor Caterina complained in vain. ‘Is it not enough,’ she cried, ‘that Venice shall inherit when I am gone?’ But she was only thirty-four still, and Venice could not wait.

They insisted that she undergo a ceremony of abdication in every Cypriot town, to elucidate the shift in power.
Te Deums
were sung in the piazzas, the Lusignan flag was lowered, the banner of St Mark was unfurled, and, surrounded by Venetian advisers, guards and officials, the queen was ritually de-crowned – the same ceremony everywhere, town by town across the island, the solemn removal of the crown from her head, the discarding of her regal vestments, until not a soul in Cyprus could be unaware of the fact that their queen was un-throned, and Venice was their ruler. Caterina sailed for Venice in March, 1489, and never saw Cyprus again. She was no Aphrodite perhaps, but she left many sympathizers behind.

For the next eighty-two years the Venetian government of Cyprus, so cynically established, cynically proceeded with its duties. It was a rotten government. Its system was based on Crete’s, though the head of the administration was called the Lieutenant, with his capital at Famagusta, and the Grand Council consisted mainly of Cypriot noblemen, of Crusader and Byzantine origin. The Venetians never tried to make Cyprus a proxy Venice, though, as they had Crete, and they stamped upon its life none of the hierarchical splendours of the Serenissima. No great proconsuls are remembered from their years of rule. The only administrator history recalls is Cristoforo Moro, after whom a tower in the fortifications of Famagusta is still named: he was the original of Othello, and it was probably because of his name (shared by so many swarthy Welsh Morrises) that Shakespeare assumed him to be a blackamoor.

They exploited the island, of course, as thoroughly as they
could. Grain was the chief export, and whenever Venice ran short, ships arrived in Famagusta for extra supplies. Salt was shipped home under a government monopoly. Strong Cyprus wine became popular in Venice – three million gallons went to the lagoon in one year. So did
beccaficos
– pickled black-caps, which are rather like wagtails, and which were sold in their thousands in the markets of Rialto. The Cornaro sugar plantation flourished still, and cotton became so valuable a crop, cultivated as it was by serfs and sold at enormous profits, they called it ‘the plant of gold’.

But none of this benefited the islanders much, least of all the Greek peasantry: it paid for the sumptuous houses of the capitalists in Nicosia, or went home to the coffers of the Signory. The rich became richer, and more great Venetian magnates established themselves in the island: for instance Caterina’s own nephew Marco, who had become a Cardinal at the age of eighteen, and who was not only titular Latin Patriarch of Constantinople (a peripatetic dignity now that Khalkis was lost), but also, as Grand Commander of the Order of St John in Cyprus, the largest land-owner in the island. The Venetians did little to encourage indigenous industry or agriculture: there were virtually no schools, and hardly any doctors. The Greek merchants, financiers and craftsmen who had thrived under the fecund if febrile regime of the Lusignans, drifted away from the island, to Venice, to Greece and even to Turkey.

A German visitor to the island in 1508 reported that the ordinary people were ‘slaves to Venice… so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together’. The law was frequently corrupt. Petty officials were tyrannous. Taxes were very heavy. The serfs, forming more than half the population, were so cripplingly poor that when in 1516 the 26,000 villeins on the royal domains were offered their freedom for a fifty-ducat fee, only one had enough money to pay. Church benefices, Latin and Greek, were sold shamelessly to the highest bidders, but the Latin archbishops of Nicosia, who were always Venetian, seldom bothered to live in Cyprus anyway. By 1560 the Augustinian monks of Bella Paise, the lovely monastery outside Kyrenia, had adapted so thoroughly to the times that they nearly all had wives, sometimes more than one apiece, and
restricted the novitiate to their own children. When the Venetian Signory intervened in these affairs, as it did from time to time, disgraceful things were brought publicly to light: one official in Paphos was charged with sixty separate offences, including ill-treating the poor, condemning people without evidence, torturing accused persons unjustifiably, illegally dealing in salt and associating with pirates.

A monument to Venetian motives is the city of Nicosia, which stands almost in the centre of the island, dominating its central plain. This had been the capital of the Lusignan monarchs, and was by all accounts one of the liveliest and most fascinating cities in Europe. When the Venetians arrived, we are told, it had been a city of 50,000 people, a marvellously mixed population of Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, Armenians, Arabs and even Abyssinians. It was a scattered place of gardens, squares and flowered palaces, with 250 churches, a fine cathedral in the centre of town, and a magnificent royal monastery, San Domenico, where the kings, queens, patriarchs, archbishops and bishops of the island lay buried, together with their constables, marshals and seneschals.

In the 1560s, when a Turkish attack seemed imminent, the Venetians determined to turn this richly cultured city into a fortress. The scheme of fortification they devised, based upon the recently built walls of Iraklion, entailed the destruction of old Nicosia. Everything was to be subordinated to fire-power and defensive strength. A huge circuit earthwork was built, five miles around with a wide ditch in front of it, and nothing was allowed to stand in its way. The engineers destroyed everything that blocked its field of fire or obstructed its approaches, and a huge uninhabited swathe was created all around. Nothing was spared. Churches were blown up. Palaces were pulled down. Thousands of people were evicted from their homes. The monastery of San Domenico, the most precious building in Cyprus, disappeared with all its royal tombs, and its timbers were used for gun-carriages. The city was bound tight into a fortified circle, guarded by seven bastions, and symbolically in the centre of it stood the granite column, with the winged lion on top, that was the emblem of Venetian power everywhere in the empire (and which
had been taken, like so many more, from a conveniently handy classical ruin – Salamis).

You can see it all still, and sense to this day the singleness of purpose with which the Venetians developed, wrecked or adapted their colonial possessions. Even the column of dominion still stands near the government offices in the city’s central square, though its lion has been replaced by later imperialists with an iron bell and Queen Victoria’s royal cipher. The walls have been pierced here and there for new roads, but are still complete in circuit, and still overlook in many places the wasteland of that field of fire. From the air, as on the map, Nicosia still looks like a military machine – which is, more or less, what the Venetians made of it.