The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (16 page)

(The disciplined unity of the city has been lost, though, for slap across the middle of Nicosia now another wall has been built. It separates the Turks of northern Nicosia from the Greeks of the south, and it slashes through the pattern of the city streets as ruthlessly as any Venetian fosse. Soldiers stand guard here and there along it, toting their automatic rifles, and a tristesse of no man’s land, very apposite to our tale, hangs heavily around its purlieus.)

‘Who built these walls?’ I asked a passer-by once. He shrugged his shoulders. Franks? Arabs? Greeks? Turks? British? It might have been anybody, down the complex years of Cypriot history: and in fact the Venetians were the least likely constructors, for their stay in Cyprus was brief and infertile, and many intelligent Cypriots now are unaware that they were ever there.

It was not at all like Crete. The Cypriots suffered, by and large, in silence, and nothing much happened. The island languished down the years, only awaiting, it seemed, the moment when the Turks fell upon it at last: throughout the Venetian dominion of Cyprus, the galleys and corsairs of the Turks prowled around it threateningly, their diplomats huffed and their agents intrigued, and though the Venetians paid a tribute to the Sultan as the Lusignans had before them, nevertheless they nervously prepared themselves for the day of reckoning.

In Venice the Signory became preoccupied with the island’s
fate, constantly trying to interest the Christian powers in its survival, sending mission after mission to report on its affairs. They got little comfort, and the Cypriots themselves gave them no encouragement. Most of the Greeks actually looked forward to the arrival of the Turks, while the mixed population of Levantines was considered so unreliable that plans for the defence of Nicosia included the immediate internment of all Jews, Copts, Maronites, Syrians and Armenians. The flinty, dangerous tinge to the air of Cyprus, so inescapable in our own times, was potent then too, and the Venetians hung on to the island tensely, always looking over their shoulders.

It was, on the whole, the most peculiar of their possessions. Many languages were spoken in Cyprus – Latin, Italian, French, Greek, Albanian, Arabic – and every valley, it seemed, had its own customs, traditions and secrets. A great gulf divided the sophisticated rulers from their simple subjects; a mesh of legend and superstition helped to blunt the inquiries of government inspectors, or baffle the intentions of landowners.

The passive resistance of the islanders was enshrined in their particular version of the Orthodox faith, and this was esoteric enough to mystify anybody. The island was full of wonders. Here was the Monastery of the Snake-Hunting Cats, here the Monastery Built-Without-Hands, which had been brought over prefabricated by the Virgin herself from Asia Minor. Lazarus had been the first Bishop of Cyprus, it was claimed, while the Cross of Tokhori, brought to the island by St Helena, could raise tempests and defy fires, and had cured the dumbness of the Lusignan Queen Alice, when she lost the power of speech upon entering a monastery forbidden to women. St Theostios of Melandra was revered for his ability to blind crows in the interests of agriculture; St Mamas of Morphou was beloved because he had refused to pay taxes, and when ordered to the royal palace in Nicosia to explain why, rode there on a lion with a lamb in his arms.

At Nicosia they kept the body of St John de Montfort; this had been mutilated by a besotted German lady, who in the intensity of her devotions had bitten a slice out of its shoulders, but when she was apprehended and it was replaced, the flesh miraculously grew back into place again. At Kouka they preserved a small box of the
sawdust which dropped from the Cross when it was sawn into pieces. At Ayios Georgios the villagers ground down the fossil bones of pygmy hippopotamuses, common in the area, and drank them as medicine, believing them to be the bones of St George.

It was all very confusing. What with the Maronites of Cyprus, who held their services in Syriac, and the Nestorians, who held theirs in Chaldean, and the black Copts from Africa, who held theirs in Ge’ez and owed allegiance to the Patriarch of Alexandria, it is no wonder that the Venetians were somewhat dazed by the subtlety, the stubbornness and the secrecy of this island; but like all the other rulers who ever governed the place, they failed utterly to do anything about it.

Then the Turks came. The Sultan Selim II, Selim the Sot, formally demanded Cyprus from Venice in 1570. It is said that he was egged on to it by his financial adviser and confidant, Joseph Nasi. This formidable Jew had become, as we saw in the Aegean, Duke of Naxos, though he never visited the island. Now he wanted to establish a Jewish colony in Cyprus: he himself would be king of the island, and he already had its royal arms carved on the walls of his house in Constantinople.

Throughout the 1560s the Turks had waged a war of nerves against the island. Corsairs harassed shipping bound for Cyprus. There were repeated rumours of warlike armadas being fitted out at the Golden Horn. In 1561 the Turks were implicated in an attempted coup in which thousands of Cypriots were involved (though when two Cypriots arrived in Constantinople to enlist Turkish help in the liberation of the serfs, the Grand Vizier found their particular cause insufficiently attractive, and handed them over to the Venetian ambassador: neither of them was ever seen or heard of again).

In 1569 the Arsenal of Venice, still the source of all the empire’s naval power, was damaged by fire. The hand of Nasi was seen in this too, and certainly the accident, which was greatly exaggerated by rumour, encouraged the Sultan to take Cyprus by force. Officially he ordered the assault because the island was legally his: the Venetians had paid tribute to the Porte, and this, said the Turkish apologists, clearly implied that the Sultan was sovereign
there. Besides, the Venetians had been using the island to raid Turkish shipping, and so they did not deserve to keep it.

In any case the absorption of Cyprus into the Turkish empire was inevitable. Then as now, the anomalous situation of Cyprus, the eastern outrider of western society, meant that it could never find peace for long. Europe was alerted to the danger at last, and the Holy League, combining the forces of Spain, the Papal States and Venice, was formed specifically to check the Turks: but it was too late to keep them out of Cyprus, and on 1 July 1570 a Turkish army landed at Larnaca, on the southern coast of the island. The Greek population, far from resisting, welcomed its soldiers fulsomely: the Venetians of Larnaca surrendered at once, and the Turkish army, in the heavy heat of summer, crossed the parched central plain to cut off Nicosia from Famagusta.

Nicosia was commanded by a general of a famous family, Niccolò Dandolo. For all the charisma of his name, though, for all its mighty walls and ditches, it resisted feebly enough, and after seven weeks the Turks captured it. Few of the Greeks helped with the defence, and it was a Greek who hauled down the banner of St Mark and hoisted the crescent flag in its place. The Venetians and their Italian mercenary soldiers were driven into the central square, beside the column of St Mark, and like the garrison of Khalkis before them, slaughtered. ‘The victors,’ wrote one Venetian eye-witness, ‘kept cutting off the heads of old women.’ They frequently cut off people’s arms too, or split skulls when the whim took them, and in all it is said that 20,000 Christians died.

In the middle of Nicosia stood the Latin cathedral of Santa Sophia, a thirteenth-century building of great magnificence. Here it was that the Venetian Bishop of Paphos, Francesco Contarini, on the very eve of the city’s fall tried to raise the hearts of his people: ‘… inasmuch as you, freemen and scions of a noble and illustrious race, are called upon to contend with slaves, an ignoble and unwarlike rabble!’ Help would certainly be arriving from Venice soon, he assured his congregation, but until then ‘you will have time and cause to praise, honour and glorify the Most High God who, with singular kindness showing you the appearance only of his anger through the rage of this Ottoman barbarian, has been pleased to provide for the safety of your souls and for the

The city of Nicosia under Turkish siege

obtaining of the heavenly riches, and at the same time for the protection of your lives, your native land and property…’

It is a disquieting experience now, to read those fighting words in the porch of Santa Sophia, because for the past 400 years the old cathedral has been used as a mosque. It stands in the Turkish part of Nicosia, and is now the chief centre of the Islamic faith on the island. All its Gothic elaborations have been severely whitewashed, its stained glass is gone, and its high altar: instead a mihrab faces Mecca, and there are always Muslims meditating cross-legged on its carpets, or reciting the Koran to themselves in the shadow of its pillars.

Its doors are usually wide open to the street outside, and on the stillness of the old building market cries and blaring motor-horns intrude, and the buzzing of cicadas. Sitting in the narthex, beneath the great carved angels who still swing their censers above the main door, one can see the scene as it was in Bishop Contarini’s day. Beside Santa Sophia stood the domed Orthodox cathedral – Gothic arch beside Byzantine curve, the Latin out-facing the
Greek – and in front the busy cathedral piazza was surrounded by handsome houses of the nobility, with the meandering city markets just around the corner. It was a very European scene, the very image indeed of the Christian presence in Cyprus, temporal and secular too. But when the Turks came, the day after the Bishop’s sermon, it proved that the Divine Providence had neglected to preserve either the lives or the property of his congregation, and as the houses of the rich were looted all around, Bishop Contarini was among the first to die.

As for Niccolò Dandolo, his head was sent along the road to Famagusta, in a basin carried by a peasant, and presented to the Venetian commander there as a
memento mori.

A breathing space amid these miseries – for there is worse to come – to sit for a moment on the castle walls at Kyrenia, on the northern coast, where the high barrier of the mountains overlooks the sea, and those obsolete castles of the Crusaders vaguely show, like lumps of crumbled granite, on their high summits, The Turks did not destroy Kyrenia, for it was not defended – its commander took the hint when a Venetian officer from Nicosia arrived in chains on horseback, with the heads of two Venetian generals hanging from his saddle-bow. The fortifications, part Crusader, part Venetian, are much as they were in the sixteenth century. Having taken the city from the Venetians, and kept it for four centuries, the Turks were to lose it first to the British, then to the Greeks, but since 1974 they have been back there again, and Kyrenia today is entirely Turkish. A bust of Ataturk stands outside the military headquarters on the waterfront. Turkish motor-gunboats lie at their moorings beneath the castle. Twice a week a hydrofoil streaks away from the mole, jammed to the gunwales with stocky Turkish peasants and close-cropped Turkish soldiers, for the port of Tasucu in Anatolia.

For me Kyrenia is Venetian still. With its neat little rounded waterfront, its customs house upon the quay, the bulk of its castle looming powerfully but genially over the harbour, it has the true tang of Venice to it. But it feels like Venice in enclave, hemmed about and subtly distorted. The smell is wrong for a start – too oily, too southern. The light is wrong, too – too dry and
uncompromising. There is a special suggestion to the air of Cyprus which is particularly un-Italian – something sly perhaps, which springs I think out of the conspiratorial history of the place, its bare landscapes and its incestuous legends. The Venetians were seldom happy in Cyprus, and the Signory so far recognized the uncongeniality of the island that they often banished people there: for example, a convicted sodomite once, an uncelibate prioress, a man who spoke malignantly about the Republic, two who tried to introduce a law giving money to the poor, and one who made a fellow Grand Councillor’s nose bleed.

Almost nobody wanted to serve in Cyprus. They had extreme difficulty even in getting a chaplain to take the services in Nicosia Cathedral, and the Senate once officially declared itself sick to death of people refusing to become Captains of Famagusta. Efforts to induce Venetians to settle there, to make it a Venetian colony like Crete, were hardly more successful, though free passages were offered, and any Venetian who stayed in the island for five years, and ‘practised no mechanical arts’, was eligible to join the Cyprus Grand Council as a member of the local nobility. It was not an easy island for Venetians: the local people mostly hated them, while earthquakes, droughts, lethal epidemics and plagues of locusts all occurred during the eighty-odd years of their occupation. Besides, throughout their stay the Venetians were in dread of a Turkish attack: the most common reason for refusing an appointment to the island was perfectly frank:
‘Because of the Turks’.

Ineffective though it was, the control of the home government was a constant irritation to the men on the spot. Here are some of the instructions given to a Captain of Cyprus, John Contarini, when he was posted to the island in 1538. He is to take eight servants at his own expense, and keep eight horses. He is strictly forbidden to engage in trade. Once during his term of office he is to ride throughout the island inspecting its fortresses (ten bezants a day to be allowed for his expenses): otherwise, except in emergencies, he is never to sleep out of Famagusta. He is not to wear mourning except for father, mother, child or wife, and that only for eight days, and with no mantle. In handing over to his successor at the end of his term, he is to say only, ‘I consign this
government to you in the name of the most illustrious Signory of Venice’; penalty for saying more or less, 500 lire and loss of office.