The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (22 page)

Though most of these island swells were Greek Orthodox by religion, many of them claimed Venetian descent, and many more were happy to use Venetian titles. They had their own Golden List of nobility, modelled upon the Venetian Golden Book, and they successfully beat off successive attempts by the
bourgeoisie to get a share of the power; in 1537, when many noblemen lost their lives in the Turkish raid, by direct instruction from the Signory the order was repleted from the ranks of the middle-class, but in no time at all these new aristocrats became just as haughty as their predecessors. In an attenuated form the Golden List was to stay in existence long after the end of the Republic. In 1797, when Venice fell, 277 families were represented in the register: by 1925, when its last issue appeared, twenty-four remained. Of them three traced their origins to Venice itself: the others had sprung from every part of the old empire – from Crete, the Peloponnese, Cyprus, Dalmatia, even Constantinople – all drawn here, long before, to this Hellenic island in the lee of Islam, by the presence of the Serenissima.

By and large the Corfiote nobles formed a useful client class for their Venetian overlords, and they were assiduously humoured in return. Even the peasants seldom complained in Corfu, and performed with becoming grace exhibitions of loyalty at public functions. This showed restraint, for here as everywhere, the administration was not noticeably sympathetic to the common man. The last thing the Venetians wanted in their empire, especially in its later years, was an enlightened working class, and in the 1756 budget for Corfu and its sister islands, for example, out of a total expenditure of 421, 542 ducats only 822 ducats went on genuine social improvements. Schools scarcely existed in the island, and since the official language was Italian, in the Venetian dialect, ordinary people were quite out of touch with affairs of state and policy.

Corruption crept in too, here as everywhere. The class of impoverished Venetian noblemen called the Barnabotti provided most of the expatriate officials, and they were notoriously venal. Judges were often bribable. Tax collectors were often crooked. The Bailie lived in great style, escorted at all times by liveried servants, serenaded at his dinner table by his private band, but the garrison was often reduced to thieving and beggary, so sporadically was it paid, while the navy kept its accounts in balance by undertaking commercial transport on the side. During the 1537 fighting, when the Old Fort was closely invested by the Turks, the Venetians had no compunction in driving old people, women
and children out of the gates into no man’s land, where they wandered forlornly between the opposing armies, the women vainly crying for help, the men displaying to the soldiers on the walls, so eye-witnesses reported, the wounds they had suffered fighting for Venice in previous conflicts.

Yet faith in Venice herself, that distant majesty of the lagoon, remained undeterred. Deputations frequently made the journey north, to argue Corfiote cases before the Grand Council in the Doge’s Palace, and generally they seem to have found redress. The Venetians remembered always the grim example of Crete, with its interminable record of rebellion, and were inclined to be conciliatory to the Corfiotes. Venetian Bailies were repeatedly enjoined to treat the local people fairly and sometimes agents were sent out to report secretly upon the state of the island.

The Signory did not forget, either, that in Crete the Venetians themselves developed political ideas beyond their station. The commanders of the two town fortresses, so a seventeenth-century English traveller reported, had to swear not to communicate with each other during their terms of office, to make sure they could enter into no treasonable compact, and once the Republic felt obliged to decree that no more monuments were to be erected to Venetian governors of the island. The rulers of Corfu were to be, however prominent in their functions, non-persons in themselves: the Signory wanted no vivid demagogues up there in the fortresses, who might be tempted to go the Cretan way, and proclaim an island republic of St Spiridon.

‘With regard to the Greeks,’ wrote a French observer in Corfu, ‘the Venetians are infinitely more jealous than disdainful. The vivacity and natural perspicacity of the Greeks, the superiority of their native talents, and their marked aptitude for the arts and sciences, appeared dangerous to a jealous Government…’

This was probably true. They treated this volatile population, especially in their more experienced years, with distinct caution. Here as in Venice itself, citizens were encouraged to spy upon one another, and to make use of the lion’s head post-boxes, the denunciation boxes, which were affixed to walls at convenient corners of town. In particular the Venetians trod carefully when it
came to the susceptibilities of the Greek church, and they were more successful than usual in their dealings with the Orthodox community. They knew by now that the Greek clergy was invariably a political body too, the seedbed always of patriotic sentiment, and they well understood the power of the village priests – almost nothing terrified a Corfiote peasant more than the possibility of excommunication, freely dispensed by local parsons (and profitably rescinded).

They accordingly brought the Greek church actually into the Establishment of the colony. It is true that they deprived it of its titular archbishopric, transferring that to their own Latin prelate, but they allowed the Greeks their own sort of metropolitan, the Chief Priest, elected to office by a body of local clerics happily entitled The Sacred Band. They also astutely cherished the island’s own saint, St Spiridon, who wielded so immense an influence upon the Corfiotes that half the local boys seemed to be named for him. Spiridon was a fourth-century Cypriot bishop whose miracle-working corpse had been brought to Corfu in the fifteenth century; a church and a cult arose around him: he was credited with all sorts of wonders, from the ending of plagues to the discomfiture of pashas, and he became the central figure of the Orthodox faith on the island, its pride and its protector.

The Venetians fulsomely cultivated him. In 1489 they proposed to remove his corpse to Venice and were dissuaded only by the unanimous appeals of the people, but they never made that sort of error again. When in 1715 he saved the island from the Turkish invasion, the Senate itself sent a silver lamp to be hung in gratitude above his altar (where it remains). And when, four times a year, the embalmed corpse of the saint was processed in its ebony casket around the town, the Venetian Bailie, his councillors and the Proveditor-General carried the canopy that shaded it. A salute of twenty-nine guns was fired from the Old Fort. The warships in the harbour saluted and when the procession moved along the sea-ramparts, galleys were rowed in parallel alongside. While the saint was carried high on the shoulders of the priests, while choir and acolytes intoned their litanies, while the sick were rushed by their hopeful relatives into the path of the procession, trusting that the mere passage of Spiridon over their prostrate forms would be
enough to cure them – while all these symptoms of Greekness swayed and proliferated, solemnly bearing their canopy walked the Venetians, looking, we may reasonably assume, eminent but a bit embarrassed.

The Venetians may have been wary of the Corfiotes, but they loved Corfu. So delectably set there, so benign of climate and beguiling of silhouette, not too far from home, not too close for discomfort, it provided a perfect setting for the colonial enterprise, for a merchant setting himself up as a country gentleman, or a servant of state ready to retire from his labours. It was almost like another island in their own lagoon: and indeed when in 1753 the Sardinas family of Corfu were elevated to the nobility for their services in battle, they were simultaneously elected to the pages of another Golden List, that of their native island of Mazzorbo, an almost indistinguishable settlement some five miles north of Venice.

Corfu Town remains recognizably Venetian. Because the Republic held it continuously for 400 years it has an air of civilized constancy and well-being unique among Greek towns. It is hemmed in still between the two fortresses, and its much-loved Esplanade, arcaded by the French in later years, provided with bandstands and gravel cricket pitches by the British, is nothing more than the open field of fire decreed by the engineers of the Old Fort. Tall, jumbled and hung with washing are the houses of Corfu, aggrandized sometimes by the shadowy outline of a
palazzo,
long since declined to flats or tenements, and crowned here and there with authentically Venetian campaniles, from whose belfries on Sunday mornings properly cracked and fruity bells ring out across the water.

Here are the shady flagged streets of Venice, the arcaded shops, the alleys of ample vegetables and sweet-smelling breads, the skulking market rats, the ingratiating grocers, the nodding black-shawled women, the strolling bravos, the glimpses of sacred pictures through the glazed inner doors of crooked churches. The Venetians brought to Corfu, besides their forts and war-galleys, their coffee-houses, their concerts, their operas and their taste for cultivated dalliance: by the eighteenth century it was the duty of
the Venetian naval commander not only to supervise the upkeep and disposition of his ships, but also to arrange for the annual visit of the Commedia dell’ Arte players.

‘All the bad habits of the Corfiotes,’ a British administrator was to write, ‘come from the Venetians.’ He was thinking, no doubt, partly of their somewhat languid temperaments, and certainly there is something very Italianate about the leisurely evening stroll of the Corfiotes up and down the Liston, the paved promenade beside the Esplanade, fast-talking ladies arm in arm, lines of students linked across the pavement, solemn men in Homburg hats, paper under their arm, gravely discussing events in Athens up and down, up and down beneath the trees. The custom was introduced to Corfu by the Venetians, who made it the privilege of the Corfiote nobility and actually named the promenade the Liston after the Lista d’Oro. (And if, by the way, you want to consult that catalogue, where better than the library of the Reading Club, which is housed in a delectable small Venetian
palazzo
overlooking the bay, and is rich enough in leather, prints, smells of wood and furniture polish, hospitable librarians and savants sunk in ancient narratives, to make the most dedicated scholar of Venetiana, fresh from the libraries of San Marco itself, feel comfortably at home?)

In the country too, for all those Turkish incursions, there are signs of Venice still. Not only did the Venetians build, at the very end of their stay, the island’s first proper roads, but by offering subsidies they clothed all Corfu with the olive tree, whose dark green foliage and now wrinkled trunks set the very tone of the countryside today and seem as immemorial as the rocks themselves. Some of these trees are said to be survivors of the original plantings 600 years ago, and if you want to get a true idea of Venice’s aesthetic impact upon the island, try walking up one of the wooded hills that overlook Corfu Town from the south: for there, looking down over the blue waters that the galleys once patrolled, one can see the red roofs and white walls of the Venetian presence, the bell-towers and the castles, framed between the leaves of the most ineradicable legacy of them all, the olive, which once and for all plucked this island from its Balkan hinterland and made it part of the Mediterranean idea.

Corfu is another Venetian possession where you may see Venetian country houses – not medievally castellated like the Naxos tower-houses, but serene and modestly bucolic, couched in almond trees and gladioli, with wistaria winding its way up the garden cypresses, and anemones sprouting in the shade. At Kothokini, for example, in the rolling country south of Corfu Town, there is a house of the Sardinas family, those counts of Corfu and Mazzorbo. It is not a very big house and has rather a ship-like air to it, even to a flagpole; but it is unmistakably squirely in manner, having a private chapel in its cobbled yard, a big barn, and a little hamlet clustered respectfully around its walls – the Sardinas had the right to give sanctuary to fugitives from the law, and prospered for over several centuries from the fees they charged, not to mention their monopoly of the Corfu salt-pans.

It is a lovely place. Sardinas still own it, and it has kept its style intact. Its low-ceilinged rooms are shabby but gentlemanly, stuffed with quaint curios, and there are family crests about the place, and old portraits, and pedigrees on parchments. It is like Longhi’s Venice transplanted. On a hot afternoon it seems to dream there: as the loud Greek music thumps away from the village radios over the wall, and you sit in the rambly garden with your host beneath the pergola, so there drifts over you the sense of privileged seclusion that must have seduced the Sardinas in the first place.

They were, so to speak, exotics in this simple setting. The holiest Venetian shrine of Corfu is the little church of the Blessed Virgin at Kassiopi, on the north coast. Its site has always been sacred to seafarers. The Romans built a temple there, and for many centuries sailors made a point of stopping there on their voyages to and from the east – Nero offered oblations at Kassiopi on his way to compete as a lute-player in the Isthmian Games at Corinth. A very early Christian church succeeded the temple, and when it was destroyed by the Turks in 1537 the Venetians replaced it with one of their own.

This became exceedingly holy too. Later in the century a young man was unjustly condemned for theft and blinded by order of the Venetian judges. Fraught with pain and despair he wandered sightless around the island until he reached Kassiopi, and there spent the night within the church. He was awakened by gentle
hands pressed upon his eyes, and when he opened them he saw the Virgin Mary standing kindly over him. The vision faded, his sight remained, and the news was taken at once to the Bailie, who recognized the event as a miracle and hastened to Kassiopi to make amends. A Mass is celebrated still, every 8 May, to commemorate the day.

But beside the door of the church the Venetians erected a marble plaque rather truer to their memory, I think, than the tale of the blinded boy. It was placed there when the church was rebuilt in 1538, and recorded that, the building having been destroyed by ‘cruel Turkish pirates’, it was reconstructed by three pious Venetians: Niccold Suriano, Proveditor of the Fleet, Filippo Pasqualigo, Commander of the Adriatic Sea, and Pietro Francisco Malipiero, Commander of the Triremes.