The Flag of St Titus

 

1348–1368

The Black Sea remained an unresolved problem, which plague had done nothing to ease. It merely reduced the available manpower and the protagonists’ naval capabilities. Within a year of losing two thirds of their populations, Genoa and Venice were at war again. In the aftermath, the contest moved back to the Bosphorus, the choke point that controlled access to the markets of central Asia. War returned again to the sea walls of Constantinople, a repeated point of destiny in Venice’s maritime adventure.

By the late 1340s it was clear that the reconstituted Byzantine Empire had never recovered from the trauma of the Fourth Crusade. Racked by civil war, harassed by the inexorable advance of the Turks across the Anatolian land mass, totally incapable of managing its maritime frontiers, the city had no means of controlling the predatory instincts of Venice and Genoa. The two republics became kingmakers, backing differing factions in the city’s internal power struggles. In this respect, the Genoese were far better placed. From their strongly fortified trading town at Galata with its sheltered harbour, just across the water from the city, they were uniquely positioned to squeeze the Greek emperor. Constantinople was entirely dependent on Genoese ships for access to the wheat of the Black Sea, and Galata had stolen much of the city’s trade. By 1350 its customs revenues were seven times those of Constantinople. The entwined snakes of Constantine’s column had become parasites threatening to overwhelm the host body. Constantinople found itself helplessly entangled in the running fight between the two cities for commercial dominance. War advanced remorselessly to its doorstep;

The Genoese acted with impunity. In 1348 they mounted an attack on the city; the following year, when the Byzantines attempted to construct a new fleet they destroyed it in the Golden Horn; they helped themselves to strategic Byzantine bases along the coast of Asia Minor; in 1350, they occupied a castle on the Bosphorus which gave them absolute control over the entrance to the Black Sea. When they seized Venetian ships at Caffa, war with Venice became inevitable.

The third Genoese war, which started in 1350, was in most respects scarcely distinct from its predecessors; a chaotic, wide-ranging and visceral maritime brawl, involving hit-and-run tactics, piracy, raids on bases and islands and pitched sea battles. The difference lay in the size of the fleets. The Black Death had devastated the manpower resources of both cities; seafarers had been particularly badly affected. In 1294, Venice had manned some seventy galleys in a matter of months; in 1350 it was hard pushed to fill the rowing benches of thirty-five. Already a small step-change was starting to take place in attitudes among the ordinary citizens towards the sea-going life. The plague had left its survivors better off. They had inherited considerable wealth and the scarcity of labour forced up the asking price. A rift was also opening up between the classes which would become dramatic in fleet matters a generation later. The ordinary seamen began to feel they were not sharing the same risks and conditions as their aristocratic commanders. When it came to conscription, there were complaints that whereas the captains fed on good bread, the oarsmen subsisted on indigestible millet. As a result many of the conscripted men preferred to hire substitutes from among the colonial subjects of Greece and the Dalmatian coast. The solidarity, the discipline, the sense of shared life among the citizens was starting to fray, with long-term consequences for Venetian sea power.

However, if the fleets were now smaller, the contests grew in bitterness. With each returning cycle of war, Venetian–Genoese hatred increased; and in 1352 the two maritime powers were to fight a battle off the walls of Constantinople which would pass down in Venetian memory as one of the nastiest they ever experienced.

*

In 1351 Venice signed a pact with the Byzantine emperor, John V, for the express purpose of expelling Genoa from the Bosphorus and releasing its throttling grip on the Black Sea. To compensate for its shrunken fleet, the Venetians also enrolled the support of the king of Aragon, in faraway Spain, who had his own reasons for discomfiting the Genoese. He contributed a Catalan force of thirty galleys, twelve of which Venice paid for out of its own pocket. The Venetian command passed to its most experienced admiral, Nicolo Pisani. He was well matched by the Genoese commander, Paganino Doria, scion of a noble maritime family, in a rivalry which would be handed down through the generations. There were initially months of skirmishing in which the protagonists kept missing each other; at one point Pisani, chased back to Negroponte with an inferior force, scuttled his galleys in the harbour rather than risk a fight. Doria was forced to withdraw. Pisani refloated his ships and sailed on.

Early in 1352, a joint Venetian, Byzantine and Catalan fleet finally hunted down their rivals in the mouth of the Bosphorus. On Monday 13 February the two fleets prepared for battle off the city walls of Constantinople. Here the Fourth Crusade had launched its first assault on the city 150 years earlier under very different conditions. It was afternoon when the two fleets finally closed, the depth of winter, bitterly cold, the weather blustery, the sea chopped into fury by a strong wind blowing up from the south and the Bosphorus current running against it with a powerful surge.

Ship-handling was extremely difficult. There were only a few hours of daylight left. In these conditions Pisani considered it wise to hold off for a fresh day, but the Catalan admiral was convinced of easy victory. Sword in hand, he declared he would fight and gave the trumpet call for the attack. Pisani had little option but to follow him in. As they raised anchor, the wind increased its velocity; the sea began to mount into castling peaks and vertiginous troughs. It became impossible to bear down on the Genoese fleet in any kind of order. Doria drew his ships back into the mouth of a sheltered creek, and the allied vessels, propelled by the force of the gale, shot past unable to engage; with huge difficulty they turned about, the rowers straining at the oars, to make a second attempt.

Galley wars

 

A hundred ships were now wedged into the neck of the Bosphorus at a point only a mile wide. Bucking and rearing, with neither side able to organise its lines, they attempted to engage. The strait was jammed with ships, colliding, crashing into each other, driven ashore by the force of the wind. Rather than a sea battle, it was a series of incoherent micro-fights, small groups of five, six, seven ships tearing at each other blindly in the wind. Night fell abruptly over the violent sea. Confusion increased. It became impossible to tell friend from foe. Venetian ships tried to board each other; Genoese rained arrows down on their own vessels; men fell overboard; galleys lost their steering systems; their oars were shattered in the impact of the battle; vessels floated away rudderless on the current. Once fire caught a ship it blazed like tinder in the fierce gale and was swept away flaring and guttering into the dark. The wind, the biting cold, the splintering of wood, the confused cries, the men staggering along their decks, trying to fight, driven forward by an appalling madness: it looked like a version of hell. There was no strategy or control. Outcomes were decided by luck. Locked together, ships crashed onto the coast; their crews leaped ashore and continued to batter and stab at each other so that in places the sea battle became a land battle. The men from seven Catalan galleys just ran away; the Greeks, perhaps more wisely, hardly engaged at all and retreated into the Golden Horn. Men fought to the death with demented fury. They killed their own side as often as the other.

Dawn broke on a scene of devastation. Empty hulls floated on the water or lay wrecked on the shore; the sea was littered with corpses, spars, the detritus of battle. No one could tell who had won. Both sides claimed the victory. The casualties were huge. Franciscan friars from Galata tried to arrange a prisoner exchange. When they visited the Venetian fleet, they found so few captives that they decided not to return, fearing that when the Genoese learned of their losses they would slaughter their own prisoners out of hand.

Yet in the aftermath advantage remained with Genoa. The Venetian and Catalan fleet withdrew, unable to sustain the assault on Galata. And the Genoese now had military aid from the Ottoman sultan, Orhan. The Byzantines had no choice but to sign a peace treaty with Genoa, under the terms of which Greek ships should have no entry to the Black Sea without Genoese permission. In addition, the Genoese were confirmed in their possession of Galata, which they now fortified more strongly as a sovereign colony. Byzantium was being slowly strangled, not only by the avid maritime republics, but also by the advancing Ottoman Turks. For Venice, the strategic consequences were severe. What they learned from the Battle of the Bosphorus was that without a strategic fall-back point at the approaches to the Black Sea they would never be able to exercise any concerted pressure on the trade to the furthest East. They cast an acquisitive eye over the small island of Tenedos, strategically positioned at the mouth of the Dardanelles.

There was little rejoicing in Genoa either. ‘I saw no annual commemoration of this triumph,’ wrote the Genoese chronicler, ‘nor did the doge visit any churches to give thanks, as is the normal custom; perhaps, because so many brave Genoese fell in the fight, the victory of that day is best forgotten.’

*

The war went on. It moved west and continued, through a series of oscillating mood swings that drove each republic in turn from manic joy to the brink of despair, like the dip and lurch of a huge sea. With smaller fleets and diminished resources of manpower, the effects of naval defeat were more keenly felt. When Pisani and the Aragonese wiped out a Genoese fleet off Sardinia the effects inside the city were dramatic. People wept in the streets; with Genoa cut off from its sources of wealth and grain, humiliation, starvation, and abject surrender seemed at hand. The citizens resorted to desperate measures. They made voluntary submission to Venice’s terrestrial rival, Giovanni Visconti, the powerful lord of Milan, as a protective shield. Victory was snatched from Venice’s hands. Visconti despatched Petrarch, at this time a diplomat in his court, to attempt to woo the Venetians. Using all his literary skill, he called flatteringly upon ‘the two most powerful peoples, the most flourishing cities, the two Eyes of Italy’ to make peace. And he pointed out that Venetian over-confidence might yet be punished: ‘the dice of fortune are ambiguous. It cannot but be that if one of the Eyes is put out, the other will be darkened. For to hope for a bloodless victory over such an enemy, beware less it betoken a fatuous and fallacious confidence!’

The warning went unheeded. The doge, Andrea Dandolo, sent a blunt reply:

Petrarch was left to mutter at the mercantile republic’s uncouth response: ‘No words of mine, not even of Cicero himself, could have reached ears that were stubbornly stopped, or opened obstinate hearts.’ And he repeated his warning about the dangers of internecine war: ‘Do not fool yourself that if Italy disintegrates Venice will not also fall: for Venice is part of Italy.’ Venice would beg to differ – it held itself distinct from the mainland, though by now more deeply involved than it liked to admit.

But as the contest went on the dice did indeed start to roll the other way. It was now Venice’s turn to be infected with fear. The Genoese constructed a new fleet and Doria returned to inflict a shattering defeat on Pisani at Porto Longo on the island of Sapienza, near Modon in the southern Peloponnese. It was a catastrophe as total as the Republic had ever experienced. All its galleys were lost. Six thousand men, the flower of Venice’s seafaring people, were taken prisoner and a huge amount of booty lost. Nicolo Pisani, his son Vettor and a detachment of sailors made it to Modon. Pisani was deprived of all further public office and lived the remainder of his days a broken man. Vettor was acquitted, but memory of the defeat at Porto Longo would cling to the family like a dark stain and return to haunt the Venetian lagoon twenty-five years later. The doge died two months before this disaster, ‘sparing him’, Petrarch wrote, with the smug satisfaction of a man who had been proved right, ‘the sight of his country’s bitter anguish and the still more biting letters that I should have written him’.

Unlike in Genoa however, defeat did not create civil unrest or constitutional collapse in Venice, though within a few months Doge Dandolo’s successor, Marino Faliero, had been executed for an attempted coup. In June 1355, the duke of Milan imposed a new peace on the warring republics, to the relief of Venice and the fury of Genoa. It amounted, in effect, to little more than a ceasefire. Both parties agreed to keep out of the Sea of Azov for three years – a short-term setback to Venice, unable now to use Tana, but welcome to Genoa, whose primacy at Caffa was restored. Venice counted down the months to June 1358 with intense interest; meanwhile it embarked on a new round of diplomatic initiatives with all the trading nations of the hemisphere – the great khan of the Golden Horde, Flanders, Egypt and Tunis.

The war had proved indecisive but both sides had in turn glimpsed the possibility of an elusive final victory, only to have the ultimate prize snatched away by the meddling duke of Milan; each had penetrated deep into the other’s waters and taken its opponent to the brink. Twenty-five years later the same war would be refought with the same tactics, reversals, hopes and fears, in the same waters but with magnified consequences. Next time it would be fought to a finish.

In the Vatican they wrung their hands in exasperation at the running hostility of the maritime republics. Successive papal attempts at crusading ventures were repeatedly stymied by their rivalry, as only the protagonists possessed the resources to transport troops. What outsiders realised, and Venice herself was keenly aware of, was that in the interstices of these exhausting wars and the Byzantine collapse, the Ottoman Turks were inexorably advancing. The worst day’s work the Genoese ever did themselves, or the rest of Christendom, came in November 1354 when they ferried an Ottoman army across the Dardanelles into Europe. They charged a ducat a head. It was a handsome rate but a terrible bargain. Once established in Gallipoli, the Turks became impossible to dislodge. They were in Europe for good – a fourth snake entwined in the politics of Constantinople and its hinterland.

*

These wars also had deepening repercussions in the Stato da Mar. The Republic’s maintenance of its seaways and maritime defences, under the pressure of competitors, drew increasingly heavily on the resources of its colonies. All its outposts, ruled directly from the centre, felt the weighty presence of the Dominante – especially in fiscal matters. The Venetians were masters of a complete vocabulary of taxation, refining and implementing with obsessive scrutiny models derived from their Byzantine predecessors. They levied the capinicho, the acrosticho and the zovatico – direct taxes – on households, land holdings and animals; indirect taxes, the arico, the commerclum and the tansa, fell on the sale of oil and wine, on exports of cheese and iron, on skins and salted fish and the mooring of ships (according to function and tonnage), on the transport of wine even within Crete, and countless other commodities and economic functions. The angariae – taxes in kind levied for the construction of fortifications, guard duty, the supply of fodder and firewood – were particularly irksome to the townspeople of Crete; monopoly purchase by the state of core commodities, especially wheat below the market rate, aggravated landowners. There were also special levies to cope with military emergencies and pirate attacks. Wherever the banner of St Mark flew, the Republic’s economic demands were felt. Taxes were levied impersonally on all its colonial subjects. They fell on Venetians and indigenous people alike, on foreigners, on clergy and laity, on peasants and townspeople – though Jews were taxed with singular zeal.

Images of empire: the Venetian domination of Crete

 

Nowhere felt these fiscal burdens more keenly than Crete. The island was the nerve centre of empire. Every commercial and maritime enterprise to the east passed through its harbours. It lay in the front line of crusade and maritime war. Its wheat was vital to the lagoon. It was responsible for arming galleys and levying their manpower, for supplying double-baked biscuits for the Republic’s war fleets, for soldiers and oarsmen. When Venice participated in a crusade to Smyrna in 1344 to discomfit the Turks, it was Crete that paid for it. It was Cretan wheat that was monopolised by the Republic at discount prices. Furthermore the island was expensive to run. The increasing predations of Turkish pirates from the coast of Asia Minor called for military defence, fortifications and galley patrols. The walls of Candia were repeatedly damaged by earthquakes, and its vital man-made harbour and long protecting mole were subject to furious battering from the sea. All this required money and Crete had to pay. Decade after decade a slowly accumulating grudge against the tax demands of the distant mother city grew in strength – not just amongst the Greek population, who had rebelled frequently, but also amongst their landed Venetian overlords, the feudatories, now settled in the island for generations. In the summer of 1363 this dissatisfaction plunged the Venetian imperial project into turmoil.

*

On 21 July 1363, the Venetian records noted a judgement by the Council of Ten, one of the state’s powerful governing bodies. It was against one Marco Turlanio, who had ‘permitted an armourer, not named, to go to Padua to practise his craft, notably the making of crossbows. This action is extremely damaging to Venetian interests. The Ten therefore condemn Turlanio to permanent exile and banishment to the island of Crete.’ Padua was a hostile city and the defection of craftsmen with specialised military or industrial skills was taken extremely seriously in Venice – salt- or glass-workers risked having their right hands cut off or their lips and noses (in the case of women), or being hunted down and assassinated. Three months later, the registers record that Turlanio was still in Venice: the punishment had been suspended. What happened in between was a convulsion that shook Venice’s empire to the core.

On 8 August, the Venetian feudatories learned that the senate was intending to introduce a new tax for the maintenance and cleaning of the harbour at Candia. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The feudatories objected strongly; it was felt that the work was being undertaken solely for the benefit of the merchant fleets passing through Crete to the shores of Egypt and Syria. They assembled at Candia and demanded the right of appeal to the doge in Venice. The duke of Crete, Leonardo Dandolo, refused to budge; the tax must be paid. He despatched heralds across the city to proclaim this – pointedly to the Church of St Titus, Crete’s patron saint, where the chief objectors were gathered. The duke’s message was blunt: pay the tax or face confiscation of property and death. There were nineteen Venetian ships in the harbour and around five hundred sailors; Dandolo was advised to call on these men to seize control of the main square and disperse the demonstration. He refused, fearing that this might add fuel to the fire. The sailors stayed in the port.

But Dandolo’s edict failed to cower the landlords. The following day they gathered in the central square, backed by an aggrieved mob of townspeople, servants and soldiers, and attempted to storm the ducal palace. The doors held firm. The duke inside was obdurate but personally brave and ordered the gates to be opened. He commanded the feudatories to disperse or face death. Enraged, one of the ringleaders, Tito Venier, cried out, ‘It is you who will die, traitor!’ Dandolo was saved by his courage. Several other protesters stepped forward and shielded him, but by the end of the day he was under arrest, along with other leading dignitaries of the administration loyal to Venice.

Within a week, the rebels had created a mirror government for an independent Crete, with the Venetian landowner Marco Gradenigo appointed governor and rector, supported by four advisers and a council of twenty. Crete had risen repeatedly in revolt against its Venetian masters for 150 years, but the rebellion of 1363 exposed a far deeper fault line in the Republic’s maritime empire. Previously all uprisings had been the work of dispossessed Greek landlords. This was different. For the first time, the Venetian colonists rebelled. They included some of the great names of the Republic’s history, noble families such as Gradenigo, Venier, Grimaldi, Querini and Dandolo, which had provided doges, administrators, admirals and merchant princes during the upward curve of expansion. The Republic had always pursued a strict policy of segregation between subject peoples and Venetian colonists and administrators, whom it hedged about with restrictive clauses and prohibitions. Its watchword was ethnic purity; its deepest fear assimilation. In the time-honoured phrase, however far-flung Venetian citizens might be – in Tana, London, Alexandria, Constantinople, Bruges, Lisbon or Candia – they were ‘flesh of our flesh, bones of our bones’ – loyal and patriotic participants in the communal venture that comprised the Most Serene Republic of St Mark, and whose magnetic north was the lagoon.

Yet on Crete, after 150 years of occupation, in which generations had lived on the island, this aloofness had softened. They spoke Greek as well as their own Venetian dialect, some had intermarried into the leading Greek clans, a few had leant towards the mystical beauty of the Orthodox rite: Crete was starting to conquer the conquerors. The tenor of this revolt was set by the debate over the standard that should now fly over the newly independent island, in an episode related by the heavily anti-Cretan Venetian chronicler de Monacis:

The events became known as the Revolt of St Titus. It marked the emergence of a new yearning for independence. But its inception was also marked by ill-omen. ‘That same day, the flag of St Titus was raised up high at the top of the campanile to the shouts of the crowd, but upside down with the feet of the saint’s image higher than his head. This portent frightened many of the faithful.’

Despite this portent, the ‘administration of the magnificent Marco Gradenigo, governor and rector, and his council’ proceeded with a surge of optimism. The Venetian feudatories reached out to the Greek population. Greeks were admitted to the ruling council and restrictions on the ordination of Greek Orthodox clergy, who had been tightly controlled by Venice, were lifted.

Sixty miles west, in the small Venetian harbour town of Canea, there was no immediate overthrow of the Republic’s administration. The rector (governor) there was Vettor Pisani. The noble Pisani family were no strangers to both glory and disgrace in Venice’s service; Vettor’s father, Nicolo, had won and lost battles in the previous war with Genoa and been permanently excluded from public office after the disaster at Porto Longo. Vettor himself, an experienced sea captain and naval commander, was also under a cloud. The previous year he had been arrested in the streets of Venice, sword in hand, trying to murder a magistrate. He was fined two hundred gold ducats and stripped of the plum post of provveditore of Candia. As rector of Canea, Vettor began to rehabilitate himself; his management of the local Venetian population seems to have been astute. They refused to rise against St Mark; he wrote back to Venice accordingly that ‘the landlords of this district have remained faithful to the motherland, resisting all appeals put to them by the rebels of Candia’. It was only when the rebels descended on the town that opposition crumbled and Pisani found himself imprisoned, along with all the other figures of the Venetian administration. Yet the episode revealed him to be a man who could command loyalty. Eighteen years later the proud and temperamental sea captain would emerge as one of the great heroes of Venetian history.

Within a short time the whole of Crete was in the rebels’ hands. The banner of St Titus flew from turrets and the masts of ships; in an attempt to shore up its military defences against a Venetian backlash the council took the fateful decision to release from prison men described unflatteringly by de Monacis as ‘murderers, thieves, brigands, plunderers and others who had carried out terrible deeds’, in return for six months’ unpaid military service. It introduced a further unstable element into the revolutionary mix. There were feudatories who began to wonder at the wisdom of the revolt; one Jacobo Mudazzo dared to voice opposition. His house was fired. A few days later his only son was set upon in the street and killed. The Venetian sailors who had been persuaded to lay down their arms under truce were robbed and imprisoned; three galleys of the Venetian fleet were detained along with their crews and oarsmen. Giovanni of Zara, proprietor of a merchant galley, abandoned his vessel and slipped away to Modon in a light cutter. From there the news was sped up the Adriatic. On 11 September the Venetian senate realised that their principal colony, ‘the pivot of empire’, was in full revolt.

Venice was incredulous. That day the doge outlined an appeal to be made to the feudatories:

The next day a delegation was appointed with a precise twelve-point remit and a further layer of secret instructions: not to let slip any information on the senate’s intentions. Simultaneously Venice was preparing for the eventuality of war. It should have become apparent to this mission as soon as it stepped ashore at Candia that a patronising tone would not go down well. The ambassadors walked the three hundred yards up the long sloping thoroughfare from the harbour to the ducal palace under armed guard. As they passed, the populace leaned out from the flat roofs of their houses and rained curses down on their heads, ‘which struck the ambassadors with terror’. Pulling themselves together they delivered an oily oration to the rebel council, trotting out the stock phrases: they understood that children might chafe against their parents … but as flesh of their flesh they could return to their former obedience … the prodigal son could be forgiven … the kindness of the doge, etc., etc. They were met with intransigence. Surrounded by armed men and with the cries of the mob still ringing in their ears, they beat a hasty retreat to their ships and the long sea miles home.

Venice was rocked by the true state of affairs on Crete. The crisis was as serious to its colonial interests as the contest with Genoa. The loss of Crete spelled potential catastrophe for the Stato da Mar. Without its hub, the whole imperial venture might disintegrate. Two particular possibilities haunted them: firstly that the Genoese might find Crete advantageous to their interests – and the rebels were already exploring this avenue; the second was that the revolt might spread across the Aegean and trigger uprisings across all Venice’s Greek-speaking possessions. This was also soon confirmed. On 20 October the senate learned that ‘the rebels have sent representatives to Coron and Modon, also to Negroponte, to encourage the inhabitants of these territories to join them’. What had seemed at first like a small local difficulty was developing into a major crisis.

The executive apparatus of the Venetian Republic swung into a state of emergency. Increasingly, Venice was replacing the description of its government as a commune with the grander notion of a signoria, implying lordship over wide realms. Its response was determined and unequivocal: ‘The Signoria cannot give up the great island, pivot of its overseas empire: an expedition will be organised to reconquer it.’ A flurry of terse orders was despatched from the doge’s palace. The first was to seal Crete off from the world. A series of clipped memoranda to the Collegio (the Venetian council concerned with the day-to-day dissemination of information) set down the plan. On 8 October:

The state registers bristle with urgency and tension. Ambassadors’ and messengers’ boats were sent to Rhodes, Cyprus, Constantinople, the baili of Coron, Modon and Negroponte – and above all to the pope, who was hoping that the Venetians would support a crusading project. And they sent envoys to the Genoese, in the belief that the pope would also pressurise their rival into staying its hand in the name of Catholic unity. Additionally ten galleys were ordered to blockade Crete from the outside world. In Coron and Modon, people were expressly forbidden to buy Cretan goods already available there. The island was to be strangled.

With brisk efficiency the Republic set about preparing an armed response. It publicly declared that ‘Crete will be besieged and conquered as quickly as possible’. It cast about for a suitable condottiere to lead an army. While Venice only ever managed naval expeditions itself, land wars were sub-contracted by law. One candidate, Galeotto Malatesta, was rejected on cost grounds – ‘his pretentious demands are exorbitant’, the senate complained. They finally secured the services of a skilled Veronese soldier, Luchino dal Verme, and raised a professional army: two thousand foot soldiers, mining engineers from Bohemia, Turkish cavalry, five hundred English mercenaries, siege engines, thirty-three galleys including horse transports, twelve round ships laden with supplies and siege engines. Venice was accustomed to being paid to carry other people’s armies across the eastern seas. Raising and transporting its own was highly costly – ‘the perfidious revolt of the Cretans is highly damaging to the goods and resources of Venice’ was the complaint – but the Republic was determined to strike fast and with an iron fist. It still took eight months to ready the fleet. On 28 March 1364 dal Verme swore his oath of office and received his war banner from the doge in an elaborate ceremony. On 10 April, after a grand review of troops on the Lido, the fleet set sail. By 6 May it was rocking at anchor in a small bay six miles west of Candia.

Long before dal Verme stepped ashore, news of Venice’s armada had begun to throw the rebellion into disarray. Some of the dissident Venetians started to think again. Murderous rifts appeared between factions: town against country, Venetian against Greek, Catholic against Orthodox. One of the Gradenigo clan, Leonardo, who had embraced Orthodoxy with the zeal of the convert, hatched a plan, in conjunction with a Greek monk called Milletus, to kill the waverers. Its remit widened to the murder of all Venetian landlords living outside the safety of the city walls. Milletus prepared a night of the long knives, targeting the isolated farms and country houses of the Italians. De Monacis gave a vivid description of this new wave of terror:

The scene was repeated across the Cretan countryside: the knock on the door, the gasp of surprise, the sudden blow. ‘That night right through until morning they killed Gabriele Venerio in his house at Ini, Marino Pasqualigo, Laurentio Pasqualigo, Laurentio Quirino, Marco and Nicolo Mudazzo, Jacobo and Petro Mudazzo …’ The list was long. A shiver ran through Venetian Crete. It was no longer safe to live outside the walls of Candia, Retimo or Canea. The rebellion threatened to spiral out of control. Candia itself lapsed into confusion, stirred by the combustible mixture of Greek patriotism and the newly formed rabble army. A mob attempted to storm the prison and kill the duke of Crete and the Venetian sailors. It was restrained by the city’s administration. Even Leonardo Gradenigo was alarmed by the turn of events. It was decided that the monk Milletus was too dangerous an ally for the Venetian rebels. He was lured to a monastery near Candia, captured and hurled off the roof of the duke’s palace, where the fickle mob finished him off with swords.

With the gathering news of a Venetian fleet and a growing fear of the Greeks, the debates inside the palace became more intense. What the Venetians and the urban Greeks of Candia feared alike was the stirring of a peasants’ revolt – the flaring of centuries of oppression by a downtrodden people. To manage an uprising they could no longer control, an extreme solution was put forward: ‘in order to rein in the Greek rebellion, to subject Crete to an external lord, namely the Genoese’. To many of the Venetian lords this was a betrayal too far; tugged by conflicting loyalties, some proposed that it was time to beg for Venice’s mercy. One of the proposers, Marco Gradenigo, was summoned back to the duke’s palace to discuss the matter – in fact to an ambush. Twenty-five young men had been hidden in the palace chapel. Gradenigo was killed. All the others who opposed the Genoese initiative were rounded up and imprisoned. The council was packed with additional Greek members and the vote carried. A galley flying the flag of St Titus set sail for Genoa, but eight dissenters managed to smuggle a message back to Venice, warning that their rivals were now being invited to enter the fray.

All this was in train when dal Verme anchored his fleet on 6 or 7 May 1364 and disembarked a few miles west of Candia. The terrain ahead was broken and rocky, cut by rivers and gorges, through which only narrow paths led to the city. In this landscape the rebel army lay in wait. Dal Verme despatched an advanced guard of a hundred to scout the terrain. Picking their way through the rocky passes, they were quickly ambushed and massacred. When the main force followed up behind, they stumbled upon a ghastly scene. The bodies had been horribly mutilated. According to de Monacis, keen to colour up Greek atrocities, the rebels had left the bodies with ‘their genitals in their mouths and had cut off their tongues and pushed them up their backsides. This atrocity greatly enraged the Italians.’ Both sides drew up their forces to gain control of the pass, but it soon became clear that the rabble army was no match for professional soldiers who had fought their way through the city wars of northern Italy – and who were now bent on avenging their fallen comrades. The rebels quickly broke and ran. Many were killed and captured; others took to the mountains. Within a few hours the army was plundering the suburbs of Candia; shortly after, the city surrendered. The keys were carried out by penitent officials to dal Verme. The towns of Retimo and Canea rapidly followed suit. Tito Venier, one of the original instigators of revolt, joined the Greek Callergis clan in the mountains. The revolt of St Titus had collapsed almost as abruptly as it arose. Its flag was torn down; once again the lion of St Mark fluttered gruffly from the ducal palace. In the main square of Candia, the executions began.

The news reached Venice on 4 June. Its arrival was recorded in a memorable letter written by Petrarch.

There was an explosion of festive joy within the city. Everyone understood how much Crete mattered. It was the hub of the whole colonial and commercial system, on which Venice depended for trade and wealth. There were church services and processions to give thanks for the victory, and expressions of civic generosity. Convicts were released from prison; dowries allotted to poor servant girls; the whole city, according to de Monacis, was given over to days of ceremonial and spectacle. Petrarch watched tournaments and jousting in St Mark’s Square, sitting beside the doge on the church loggia under an awning with the four horses breathing down his neck:

Celebrations after the recapture of Crete

 

There was even a visiting party of English noblemen present to enjoy the proceedings.

With victory came retribution. The senate was determined to eradicate the guilty parties from its domain. Punishment came with many refinements: death by torture or decapitation; the tearing apart of families; the exile not just from the island of Crete but from ‘the lands of the emperor of Constantinople, the duchy of the Aegean, the Knights of St John on Rhodes, the lands of the Turks’. Venice sought to expunge Cretan branches of families such as Gradenigo and Venier from its records. For home consumption, some were brought back to Venice in chains. Paladino Permarino had his hands chopped off and was hanged between the twin columns as an inspiration and a warning.

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Both celebration and exemplary punishment proved to be premature. The towns of Crete had been restored to fealty; in the countryside the embers of revolt kept bursting into flames that proved hard to stamp out. In the mountains of western Crete a small rump of dissident Venetian rebels, including Tito Venier, one of the original ringleaders, joined forces with the Greek clan of Callergis, backed by a truculent peasantry, to continue guerrilla warfare against the Venetian state. They targeted isolated farms, killing their occupants, burning their vineyards, destroying fortified positions so that Venetian landlords were forced back into the towns and the countryside became a zone of insurrection and danger; small military detachments were ambushed and wiped out. Venice had to devote increasing numbers of men and rotate their military commanders in a search for closure. It was a dirty, protracted war eventually won by cruelty and perseverance. It took four years. The Venetians employed a scorched-earth policy, backed by rewards for turning in rebels. As the Greek peasants starved, they began to co-operate, handing over captured rebels, their wives and children – and sacks of bloody heads. With their support base shrinking, the rebels were forced further and further back into the inaccessible recesses of mountain Crete. In the spring of 1368, Tito Venier and the Callergis brothers made a last stand at Anopoli, the most remote fastness in the south-west. Patiently they were tracked down by the Venetian commander and betrayed by the local populace. In a cave on a rocky hillside, Cretan resistance lived its final moments. Holed up and surrounded, Giorgio Callergis continued to fire defiant arrows at the Venetian soldiers, but his brother realised that further resistance was pointless. In a symbolic act of defeat, he broke his bow, saying that it was no longer needed. Venier, wounded in the ear, stumbled out to surrender. When he asked for a bandage, someone replied: ‘Your wound doesn’t need treatment; it’s utterly incurable.’ Venier realised what was being said and just nodded. Shortly afterwards he was beheaded in the public square in Candia.

Crete, exhausted and ruined, sank back into peace. There would be no further major rebellions. The Venetian lion would fly from the duke’s palace in Candia for another three hundred years; the Republic ruled it with an iron hand. Those areas that had provided centres of rebellion, the high, fertile upland plateau of Lasithi in the east, Anopoli in the Sphakian mountains, were desertified. Cultivation was forbidden on pain of death. They remained in this state for a century.

In all this turmoil, Genoa stayed its hand. When the rebel galley reached the city in 1364 and begged for aid, it was refused. Venice had sent ambassadors to request a united front against rebellion; Genoa probably resisted the temptation more because the pope had demanded Catholic unity than because of any active spirit of co-operation between the two rivals. It was only a temporary ceasefire. Five years after the final surrender war broke out yet again.