The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (39 page)

This is strong language to describe what would on the surface appear to have been a fairly inept minor plot (even if its intentions were of the most serious nature). Indeed, this conspiracy may not have been quite all that it seemed. Certain mysterious elements were never fully cleared up. According to plans extracted by torture from a few sources, the Duke of Osuna intended to sail his fleet to within sight of the Lido, where he would land a Neapolitan force under his own command. Such a move would have been impossible without the cooperation of the Venetian authorities, and many suspect there was a plot-within-the-plot, to which only a few of the most powerful in the city were privy. According to this version, the Venetians had cooperated with Osuna, who was scheming to rid Naples of Spanish domination and bring the whole of southern Italy into the Venetian sphere of influence. Such a powerful alliance would soon have united the whole of Italy, re-establishing the Italians as a major power in Europe, a dream that had persisted since the glory days of the Roman Empire. A united Italy would thus have been able to resist Spain, France, Austria and the threat of the Ottoman Empire, possibly even laying the foundations for a re-emergence of power not seen since classical times.
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Convincing evidence of such a scheme-within-a-scheme in the so-called
‘Spanish Plot’ is admittedly fragmentary and unreliable. However, one telltale fact remains: in the course of eradicating the plot after its premature discovery, the Venetian authorities went to great lengths to murder anyone Spanish, Neapolitan or Venetian who was known to have had contact with Osuna. As for Osuna himself, he remained silent on the matter – neither denying nor confirming the rumours that quickly passed through the courts of Italy. And besides, from now on he would have more pressing matters to consider. For 1618 saw the outbreak in Europe of the catastrophic Thirty Years War.

What began as a religious conflict within the Holy Roman Empire between Catholics and Protestants would eventually involve the major powers in Europe, such as Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bohemia and Italy itself. Venice naturally sided against Spain, but apart from a couple of defeats whose effects were nullified elsewhere, managed for the most part to remain on the sidelines. Much like England, it was aided in this by astute diplomacy and its fortunate geographical location on the periphery of Europe. The result of the Thirty Years War was the commercial, agricultural and social destruction of large swathes of northern Europe, the bankruptcy of nations and an unprecedented loss of life. Whole regions were reduced to barren overgrown fields infested with carrion and scavengers, entire villages were simply obliterated from the map, and provincial cities reduced to ghost towns. Civil order disappeared, and bands of desperate brigands roamed the countryside.

Europe was left exhausted, and the beneficial advances following upon the Renaissance were halted – though by this stage Renaissance humanist ideas were too firmly entrenched in European civilisation to disappear altogether. (After all, they had played a major role in sparking the Thirty Years War in the first place.) However, the Enlightenment, which might naturally have evolved out of the late Renaissance, was set back by many decades, and in some cases by almost a century.

Following the spread of slaughter and war came pestilence and the bubonic plague. And from this Venice did not escape. In the summer of 1630 the plague swept across Lombardy, spread largely by invading
Landsknechte
(German mercenaries) besieging Mantua some sixty miles to the west. In July it reached Venice: during the summer heat the fetid canals and putrid detritus were at their worst, which only contributed to the widespread fear of this disease, whose means of contagion remained unknown, but was certainly thought to be spread by malodorous and unhygienic conditions. This was the time when the Venetian ‘plague doctors’ would don their distinctive outfit, which was invented in the previous century but only came into widespread use sometime later. This guise consisted of a cowled wax-covered black robe impregnated with aromatic oils and herbs. Beneath the hooded head their faces were rendered eerily inexpressive by large, round, rimmed glasses (intended to prevent the disease from entering the body through their eyes); the rest of his face was covered by a white mask, from which protruded a grotesque, long beaklike nose whose nostrils were protected by gauze (intended to filter the air). Such sinister figures were able to offer little by way of succour to the afflicted and served mainly to stigmatise the stricken abodes – from palazzi to slum tenements – that they were seen to enter. This outfit distinguished the doctors from other members of the population, enabling them free passage between districts of contagion and those that had remained free of the disease, though needless to say their very appearance was enough to spread terror. During the first months of the 1630 outbreak no fewer than 24,000 are known to have fled the city for the mainland.

The population of Venice had in fact never fully recovered from the plague of 1575–7, which had carried off Tintoretto and reduced the population by more than a quarter from its zenith of 190,000. By 1630 the population had gradually increased to almost 150,000, but over the ensuing sixteen months of plague it would be reduced by one-third of that number. According to the records, two years after the plague had abated in October 1631 the city population stood at only just over 102,000, reduced to the level it had been at two centuries previously, prior to its rise to imperial greatness.

Relations between Venice and the Ottoman Empire had been healed in the years since the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. One factor contributing to this uneasy alliance was the mutual development between Venice and the Ottoman Empire of their lucrative maritime trade. Venice remained the
leading trading partner with the Ottoman Empire, despite increasing inroads into the eastern-Mediterranean market by the French, the Dutch and even the English. However, perhaps the main reason for the improvement in Ottoman–Venetian relations during these years was the unexpected influence of a Venetian woman who became known as Safiye.

Safiye had been born Sofia Baffo in 1550 on the strategic Venetian island of Corfu, where her father, the scion of a respected noble family in Venice, had been appointed governor. During the early 1560s, on a trip home to her family, the ship on which she was travelling had been attacked by Corsair pirates and she had been taken prisoner. Such a prize – a beautiful, educated young European virgin of a noble family – had quickly been sold to the harem of the sultan’s son, Murad, in Constantinople. Here she had given birth to a son in 1566. Eight years later, in 1574, Murad had ascended to the sultanate as Murad III, with Safiye becoming his first wife and Bash Kadin (Chief Woman of the Harem).
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Making use of this powerful position, Safiye had skilfully and stealthily undermined the pervasive influence of Murad III’s mother, Nur Banu, who had effectively run the empire in league with the Grand Vizier. Safiye had then used her dominating influence over Murad to ensure good relations between Venice and Constantinople.When Murad III died in 1595 she had moved swiftly and ruthlessly to protect her power, having eighteen of her husband’s nineteen sons strangled.
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This had left the way open for Safiyes own weak-willed son to succeed as Sultan Mehmet III, and she would rule as
Valide Sultan, though in this instance her power was more akin to that of regent.

During this period, relations with Venice had continued for the most part to be diplomatically cordial. Yet, in the interests of commerce, Safiye had also maintained relations with Venice’s rivals. She had even written to Queen Elizabeth I of England, who sent her a modern horse-drawn carriage, in which Safiye took to driving about Constantinople to inspect her city. It was during this period that she instigated the construction of the last great classical mosque, the Yeni Cami, which to this day dominates the southern shore of the Golden Horn overlooking Galata Bridge: the full name of this architectural masterpiece is Yeni Valide Cami (New Mosque of the Valide Sultan); likewise the Malika Safiya mosque in Cairo is named after this Venetian matriarch of the Ottoman Empire.

However, over the years Safiye had made several powerful enemies, and in 1602 she herself was strangled in the harem at the behest of a rival faction.
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The following year her son Mehmet III died, and Venice now lost its favoured status amongst the Ottoman allies, with relations soon beginning to deteriorate. Although the two nations remained mutually dependent upon their, maritime trade, their ships now intermittently clashed in the shipping lanes, and on occasion both sides resorted to outright piracy. By the early decades of the seventeenth century Venetian trading agents in Constantinople were down to single figures, though admittedly Smyrna had now eclipsed the Ottoman capital as Venice’s main trading port in the north-eastern Mediterranean, and neither of these compared with the likes of Alexandria, Aleppo or Beirut.

Since the Ottomans had taken Cyprus in 1571 they had begun to view the Venetian island of Crete as the last remaining obstacle to their domination of the eastern Mediterranean. Here was a danger that lay at the heart of the trading routes within their empire and would always pose a potential threat as long as it remained in Venetian hands. Inevitably as relations between Venice and Constantinople became increasingly fractious, it was not long before an incident sparked a full-scale war over this issue. Ironically,
the incident in question had nothing to do with the Venetians, and was in fact provoked by the Knights of St John, whose habit of indiscriminate raids on merchant shipping had long incurred Venetian animosity.

The 600-year-old Knights of St John, originally a crusading order, had been driven from their base in Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522, eventually making their headquarters in Malta, where in 1565 they had resisted the most determined efforts by Suleiman to dislodge them. From this time on, they had existed largely as naval mercenaries and pirates. In late September 1644, a flotilla of half a dozen ships under the flag of St John happened across a poorly protected galleon travelling from Constantinople to Alexandria, transporting a select group of pilgrims on their way to the annual Haj in Mecca. Amongst its passengers were the Cadi of Mecca,
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fifty Greek slaves, and thirty members of the sultan’s harem, including his favourite wife. The galleon, along with its passengers, was taken captive by the Knights, who then sailed west, calling in at southern Crete to take on provisions and release the Greek slaves. News of this incident soon reached Constantinople.

The new sultan was now Ibrahim I, the great-grandson of the Venetian Safiye. Ibrahim had emerged by the customary process after spending many years in the Gold Cage. Unfortunately, this experience had left him so mentally unstable that he had soon become known, with good reason, as Ibrahim the Mad. Upon hearing the news of what had happened to his favourite wife and the members of his harem, he flew into a state of uncontrollable anger.
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In response to this outrage by the Knights of St John, Ibrahim ordered the immediate slaughter of all Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire. This would have eliminated a considerable number of Greeks, Serbians, Albanians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, and so forth, many of whom provided the commercial lifeblood of their local communities; indeed, conservative estimates indicate that this could have
involved anything up to a half million souls, and would have wreaked havoc on the economic life and political stability of the empire. In the event, Sultan Ibrahim’s Grand Vizier ‘reinterpreted’ this ruinous order, but would later pay for such bravery with his life. (During his eight-year reign Ibrahim would be in the habit of promoting, and then executing, Grand Viziers on an all-but-annual basis, though he would eventually be strangled at the behest of his final appointment to this post.)

In a more considered response to the act of piracy, the Grand Vizier ordered the assembling of a vast fleet in the Bosphorus. By the time this set sail on the last day of April 1645 it consisted of more than 400 ships carrying possibly as many as 100,000 troops. It was naturally assumed that this fleet was destined for the Knights of St John’s headquarters in Malta, but the Venetian
bailo
in Constantinople sent a despatch to Venice warning that he had received intelligence that the Turkish fleet was in fact bound for Crete. His suspicions were dismissed when it was learned that the Turkish fleet had sailed past Crete, and in June had put in for supplies and ammunition at the south-western Peloponnese port of Navarino (modern Pylos).

When news reached the new Pope Innocent X in Rome that this huge Ottoman fleet was sailing west, he immediately suspected that the Turks were planning a full-scale invasion of Italy. Acting decisively, he summoned Naples, Tuscany and Venice to join with the papal forces and form a joint fleet to repel the Turks. All agreed, and moves to assemble this naval force began at once.

After two weeks at Navarino, the Turkish fleet again set sail; but no sooner had it sailed over the horizon than it reversed its course, sailing east for Crete, where it arrived on 25 June, landing an army on the beaches to the west of Canea (modern Hania), the city controlling the west of the island. Within days, the port of Canea was blockaded and the Turkish army had begun digging in around the walls in preparation for a siege. When news of this surprise move reached Rome and Venice, the combined fleet set sail with all speed for Crete, picking up reinforcements on the way. Eventually the allied fleet numbered more than thirty galleons and seventy galleys, a well-trained and well-equipped fighting force whose skill would easily have matched that of the cumbersome Ottoman fleet.

However, by the time the allied fleet arrived off Crete, it learned that Canea had surrendered on 25 August, and the Turkish army had begun its march eastwards along the coast towards Candia (modern Heraklion). In September the Venetian fleet, supported by its allies, attempted to retake Canea by surprise attack, but were driven back by a storm. During a second surprise attack the allied ships were dispersed by another storm, and in a familiar development the papal and Neapolitan contingents decided to return home rather than ride out the winter in such a vulnerable situation. The ships of the Venetian fleet were now left on their own in dangerous waters to defend their colony as best they could. Fortunately the Turkish forces soon found themselves in similar disarray when their commanders were summoned to Constantinople to face a charge of transporting back insufficient booty, on which charge they were summarily executed. Not until July 1647, when the new Turkish commanders were in place, did the Ottoman army begin its siege of Candia.