The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (24 page)

But agreeable though such fancies are, another and more ethereal presence really dominates the place. For 2,000 years before the Venetians built their fountain, the waters of Kardaki had bubbled through the precincts of a temple to Apollo on the hill above. For countless generations before the oarsmen of Venice toiled their way up that path, Greek sailors sprang ashore here, sweating and swearing too, to water their own galleys. It needs imagination to see the Venetians at Kardaki, but it requires no inner vision to conjure the images of Greece. They live there still, grand and ageless, in the green-blue of the sea, in the dapple of the trees, in the softness of the island air and the shrill passionate chatter of the children, playing immemorial Grecian games on the pebbles down below.

N
ow, leaving the
twin peaks of Corfu Town behind us, moving cautiously northwards through the Corfu channel, where the binoculars of the Albanians, we may be sure, like the cannon of the Turks before them, are trained upon our passage, murmuring a prayer as we pass the sailors’ church at Kassiopi, we sail through the Otranto Strait and enter home waters. Everything in the Adriatic points towards Venice at its head, and we are swept northwards, in the twentieth as in the fifteenth century, irresistibly by the magnetism of the lagoon.

The Venetians seldom kept footholds for long on the western shore of the sea, the flat Italian shore, but never throughout the whole course of their imperial history, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, were they without ports and bases on the eastern shore, what is now Yugoslavia. This magnificent coast, which they called generically Dalmatia, was predominantly Catholic by religion, and they regarded it almost as an extension of their own island estates, just as they regarded the Adriatic as a sort of magnification of their lagoon. Duke of Dalmatia was the very earliest of the Doge’s external honorifics, and it was to regain Venetian control of Zadar, halfway down the coast, that the Fourth Crusade first veered off its course to the Holy Land.

It is a vastly complicated coast. The shoreline of Yugoslavia, from Istria in the north to the Albanian frontier in the south, is rather more than 400 miles long as the gull flies; but it is 2,000 miles long if you follow all its island shores and inlets –
‘a co-efficient of indentedness’, says my Yugoslav handbook, ‘of 9.7’. There are said to be 725 islands, sixty-six of them inhabited, and 508 reefs and crags. Ethnically it was complex too – in Venetian times the hinterland people were all Slavs, but the Roman Empire had left a deposit of Latins in the coastal towns – and politically it was precarious: sometimes the Hungarians pushed down to the shore in one of their periodic spasms of expansion, and later the inevitable Turks pressed upon it from over the mountains.

For several centuries, though, the Venetians were effectively its suzerains, giving a territory here, gaining one there, ruling sometimes by direct force, sometimes by delegacy or persuasion, baffled sometimes by opponents too tough to crack, but never giving up, from start to finish. If they lost the mastery of this coast they lost the Adriatic too, and they were willing to fight any enemy, Byzantines, Magyars, Turks or common pirates to retain their authority over it – just as, in later years, the British were willing to risk any ignominy to keep control of the routes to their Indian Empire.

As India became to the British, so the Slav shore of the Adriatic Sea became to the Venetians – almost a part of themselves, linked by so many bonds and images, by such ancient associations, that the one seemed indivisible from the other, like a villa and its garden. Critics of the Venetians liked to call them ‘Slavs and fishermen’, and this is why: for the traffic was reciprocal, and if Venice profoundly affected the look and feel of Dalmatia, Dalmatia irrevocably influenced the character of Venice.

There is scarcely a mile of that tortuous shore, scarcely one even of its 659
un
inhabited isles, which does not possess some token of Venice, a campanile, a name, or just the ghostly score of prows and keels on a sandy beach, where the galleys once careened. Let us, as we sail up the coast ourselves, put in first at one of the most Venetian of all its seaports, to stand for all the others: the island town of Korčula, Curzola to the Venetians, or Korkyra Negra, which lies some 300 miles north of Corfu, and was once its dependency.

I first arrived in Korčula late on a winter evening, and the little
town looked very dark, almost deserted, piled on its hillock above the sea, and guarded still by its circuit of walls. There was dim light and muffled movement outside the walls, where the supermarkets are, and the cafés around the bus station; but up the steep steps to the Land Gate, through the little piazzetta inside, into the crooked lanes beyond, I met not a soul. Only when I reached the tall shape of the cathedral, in its cramped square in the centre of the town, did I hear the sound of organ music: so I pushed open its creaking door and went inside.

If we had been on the planet Mars I would have known that the Venetians had got there first. The cathedral of St Mark at Korčula is not exactly a clone of its greater namesake, for physically there is not much resemblance, but it has inherited every essential characteristic of the Basilica. A handful of nuns were singing a hymn when I entered, in very screechy voices, led by a solitary priest at the altar and accompanied at the harmonium by a sister of substantial physique and deliberate
tempi.
It was very dim in there, but all was familiar to me. The mosaic floor heaved beneath my feet, like the ancient chipped images on the floor of the Basilica; the stone seemed to be glowing in the half-light, like the substances of San Marco; all around me I sensed, rather than saw, those tall columned monuments, gilded and grandiloquent, by which the Venetians loved to remember their servants of state.

All Korčula is like that – full of allusions and reminders, rather Proustian in fact to those who have ever tasted the Venetian madeleine. The town is built to an ingenious crooked grid, like the skeleton of a fish – skew-whiff to prevent the winter sea-winds sweeping through the transverse streets from one side of town to the other. Time, though, has fretted the edges of the plan, with balconies and protrusions, with substitutions and decay, and today wandering around the little place, which is only a few hundred yards across, is a very Venetian experience. Ships show sometimes at the end of shadowy streets. The cathedral bell rings the centuries away, clang-clong-clang through the day and night. Ever and again a Korčulan cat, descended without a doubt from ship-borne forebears of Giudecca or Cannaregio, moves from gutter to dustbin with the true Venetian slink.

∗

From such places, from Budva and Kotor in the south, from Split and Zadar, from Fiume and Pula in the far north, the Venetians maintained their adamant control of the coast. They seldom ventured far from the towns: their frontier was the grey-white wall of the karst, running parallel with the sea a few miles inland, and even the coastal plains between the ports they generally left alone. Their system was pragmatic, sometimes fumbling. In earlier times they generally allowed the local authorities, landowners, churchmen, to keep their dignities, simply requiring the promise of support in wartime, and some symbolic annual tribute – oil for the Basilica from Pula, for example, marten skins from Vis, raw silk from the isle of Rab.

Gradually, however, they took over. They did not at first abolish the local offices of authority: instead they arranged that Venetian nominees should occupy them – local worthies first, later, more often than not, noblemen sent from Venice. One by one the semi-independent townships of Dalmatia, often enjoying civic dignities they had inherited from Roman times, were transformed into Venetian colonies. Venetians assumed all the important offices, loyal locals were mutated into honorary Venetians, or even admitted into the Golden Book of the metropolitan aristocracy.

To achieve this hegemony the Venetians had to beat off, or eventually buy off, the Hungarians, but once it was done they never let go, and used Dalmatia with energy to the end. They stripped the forests in their insatiable demand for ship-timber. They shipped mountains of Istrian stone to build their houses. They despoiled whole landscapes to make clear fields of fire for their garrisons. They shamelessly exploited the maritime skills of the Dalmatians, paying their locally recruited sailors far less than other nations did. They obliged the local ruling classes to speak Italian, further separating the towns from their countrysides: in Trogir (Trau in those days) specially-imported language teachers instructed the nobles, and the names of local families were compulsorily Venetianized – Cubranović, for instance, into Cipriani. The Venetians even filched the sacred relics of the coast: an arm of St Ivan (some say for the sake of the ring upon its hand), a foot of St Trifone and for a time the remains of a singularly
obscure martyr called St Euphemia, of whom nothing whatever is known except that she
was
a martyr.

They put down rebellions with their usual enthusiasm. Dandolo himself set the standard when he threw the whole weight of the Fourth Crusade against Zadar, sacking the town, setting it on fire and destroying all its fortifications. Thereafter the Venetians were always tough with their Dalmatian dissidents. ‘Proceed against the culprits,’ Vincenzo Capello was instructed, when sent to put down a rising in Hvar in 1514, ‘with whatever severe censure is in keeping with justice and the dignity of our state, bearing in mind the security of our interests’: which, being interpreted by the commanders of punitive expeditions, meant wholesale hangings and exiles. Here, as in Corfu, the secret denunciation was a tool of policy and the local Venetian governors, variously entitled Counts, Captains or Podestas, were autocrats within their walls.

Yugoslavs like to say that the Venetians gave Dalmatia nothing but the habit of blasphemy, and certainly they always remained aliens along this shore, inhabiting small castellated beachheads on the edge of the Slavic world. But if there was frequently disaffection with their rule, there was much loyalty too. Over 500 years and more the Dalmatians grew accustomed to their dependency. Venice was their overlord, but also their customer: produce from leather to vegetables flowed ceaselessly northward to the lagoon – the sailors of the island of Brac used to load their ships with wine and operate them as floating saloons on the canals of Venice. Besides, the existence of the empire gave their men of talent boundless opportunities to rise above that narrow strip of shore below the karst. Dalmatian architects became European figures. Dalmatian artists fulfilled themselves in Venice. We read of a Dalmatian archbishop of Famagusta, and the traitor who tried to betray Khalkis to the Turks in Chapter Three was a gunner from Korčula.

Certainly when the time came for Venice to go, there were regrets here and there along the coast. In Istria in the north the loyalty never faded, and flickers on even today in a longing for Italy. At Perast in the south, when the Venetians left at last, the people buried the banner of St Mark with a solemn requiem
beneath their church altar. It was another century and a half before the Dalmatians, their memories soured by later wars and occupations, began to chip the winged lion from its plaques and entablatures.

The winged lion! The lion of St Mark first went into action on the Venetian flag, it is thought, during an early expedition to Dalmatia, and along this coastline is the supreme collection of his images, stamped upon its structures in a thousand different styles, moods and postures.

Architecturally he was a blessing – so elegant but so muscular, he gave class to any rampart and admirably finished off the most meticulous arch. He was the symbol sometimes of peace, sometimes of war; he was religious by origin, distinctly secular by intent; sometimes he carried a flag, sometimes a sword, sometimes the Doge’s hat and nearly always, awkward though it sometimes was for the composition, the gospel of St Mark open or closed between his paws. If it was closed, it was an ominous sign of Venetian displeasure, a record of punishment, a threat of retribution, or perhaps just a reminder of Venetian military power. If it was open, with its serene slogan,
pax tibi marce, evangelista meus
– ‘Peace to you Mark, my evangelist’ – it was a pledge of protection and order, even sometimes of justice, that everyone understood. (The book in the paws of the huge lion outside the Arsenal in Venice was open – but blank.)

Winged lions of innumerable sub-species were erected in Dalmatia, and many are still there. Occasionally only a gap remains where the lion once stood, or his entablature has been filled instead by the red star of Communist Yugoslavia. His face may have been gouged off, or his rump removed. Generally, though, even now he remains anatomically complete and provides a sort of leitmotif for any journey up the Dalmatian shore. Sometimes he is elongated, sometimes he is squashed into rectangularity, as in a distorting mirror. Sometimes he offers a somewhat sickly smile, like those in rare photographs of Queen Victoria or Lord Kitchener. Sometimes he faces one way, sometimes the other, and sometimes his wings are curved sinuously behind his tail, or under his belly. Sometimes he is symbolically amphibious,
backfeet in the sea, forefeet on land; sometimes he is only just a lion at all, but is more like a mangled sort of griffin, or a frog.

There was a lion at Trogir whose book said: ‘Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered.’ There was a lion at Rovinj whose book said:
‘Vittoria
Tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus.’ There was a lion at Budva who seemed to have
two
books. There was a lion at Piran with the inscription: ‘Behold the winged lion! I pluck down earth, sea and stars…’ The mightiest of all the lions of the
Stato da Mar,
I think, is the one above Sanmichele’s Land Gate at Zadar, for many years the Venetian headquarters on this coast; on the other hand among the least successful is a late example on the loggia down the street, which was erected in 1792 and is depicted front-face – he grins toothlessly, points at his book with what appears to be a hoof, is surrounded by plumped-out feathers, like a turkey, and bears on his head a lightning conductor in the form of a palm tree.