Bridling St Mark

 

1372–1379

The trigger was ominously familiar: the presence of rival merchants in a foreign port, then an exchange of words, a scuffle, a brawl, finally a massacre. The difference lay in the outcome – where previous wars had ended in uneasy truce, the resulting contest was fought to the finish. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century both sides went for the jugular. The War of Chioggia, as it is known to history, brought together all the choke points of commercial rivalry – the shores of the Levant, the Black Sea, the coasts of Greece, the troubled waterways of the Bosphorus – but it was decided within the Venetian lagoon.

The flashpoint was the port of Famagusta. Cyprus, ruled by a fading dynasty of French crusaders, the Lusignans, was a crucial trading hub for both republics. Venice had strong commercial interests there in cotton and sugar growing, and the island was a market for the exchange of goods and a way station on the route to the Levant. Famagusta, lying among palm trees beside a glittering sea, was only sixty miles from Beirut. Here, at the coronation of a new Lusignan king, Peter II, the jostling rivalries of Venice and Genoa suddenly exploded. The issue was petty precedence. The Venetians seized the reins of the king’s horse as he was led to the cathedral; at the subsequent banquet a dispute broke out as to which consul should have the honoured place at the king’s right hand. The Genoese started throwing bread and meat at their hated rivals, but they had also come with concealed swords. The Cypriots turned on them and hurled their consul out of a window, then descended on the Genoese quarter and ransacked it. For Genoa this was an insufferable insult. The following year a substantial fleet descended on the island and seized it.

The Venetians were not expelled from Cyprus but this turn of events ratcheted up the tension. It made them strategically anxious. They were in danger of being squeezed out of crucial trading zones. This feeling was soon compounded by affairs back in Constantinople, where the Italian republics were meddling furiously in the interminable dynastic struggles for the Byzantine throne. They had become rival kingmakers in the city. Venice supported the emperor, John V Palaeologus; the Genoese backed his son Andronicus.

Cyprus

 

Both acted with ruthless self-interest. Venice was particularly keen to maintain its access to the Black Sea, which Genoa continued to dominate. When John visited the city in 1370, they held him prisoner for a year over an unpaid debt. Six years later they demanded the island of Tenedos with menaces – a war fleet in the Bosphorus – in return for his crown jewels, which they held in hock. Tenedos, a small rocky island off the coast of Asia Minor, was strategically critical; twelve miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles, it surveyed the straits to Constantinople and beyond. As such it was ‘the key to the entrance for all those who wanted to sail to the Black Sea, that is Tana and Trebizond’. The Republic wanted it as a throttle on Genoese sea traffic.

The emperor surrendered the island. Genoa’s reply was equally prompt. They simply deposed him, replaced him with his son and demanded the island back. However, when they despatched their own fleet to claim their prize, they were met with a forthright response. The Greek population sided with the Venetians and refused; the intruders were repelled. Andronicus arrested the Venetian bailo in Constantinople. Venice demanded the release of their officials and restitution of John V, now lingering in a gloomy dungeon on the city walls. On 24 April 1378 the Republic declared war.

The fleets that both sides could put out were still small in the long shadow of the Black Death. What amplified the contest were the terrestrial allies that the maritime rivals could now enlist. Venice was increasingly involved in the complex power politics of the city states of Italy. For the first time, the Republic had not only a stato da mar but also a modest stato da terra – holdings of land on mainland Italy, centred on the city of Treviso sixteen miles to the north. From the surrounding area, the Trevigiano, the city derived vital food supplies, floated down the River Brenta to the Venetian lagoon near the town of Chioggia. Three great rivers, the Po, Brenta and Adige, whose alluvial deposits, drawn out of the distant Alps, had formed the Venetian lagoon, debouched into the sea near this strategic point. These waterways, along with an interconnecting web of cross-canals, were the arterial trade routes into the heart of Italy, and Venice guarded them all at their point of exit. The Republic was able to apply vice-like economic pressure on northern Italy, controlling salt supplies, taxing river traffic, pushing its own goods upstream on the slow waters in flat-bottomed boats under monopoly conditions. To its immediate neighbours – Padua to the west, the king of Hungary to the east, nervous for his control of the Dalmatian coast – Venice was too powerful, too rich, too proud. If the Republic was a source of admiration, it also evoked envy and fear. The letters that passed between Genoa, Padua and Hungary voiced the profound disquiet ‘that if [the Venetians] were allowed to establish a firm foothold on the Italian mainland, as they had on the sea, they would in a short time make themselves lords of all Lombardy, and finally of Italy’. Genoa, Francesco Carrara, lord of Padua, and Louis, king of Hungary, signed a pact to encircle Venice by land and sea ‘for the humiliation of Venice and all her allies’.

For Genoa this alliance promised new strategic options. Not only could a land war snuff out vital river traffic to Venice, but access to Louis’s ports on the Dalmatian coasts, particularly Zara, offered Genoese fleets a base from which to strike Venice at close range. The threat was considerable. Venice lined up her own allies; the king of Cyprus constituted no more than moral support. More significant was his prospective father-in-law, the duke of Milan.

To the expense of a new sea war, the Republic now had to add the cost of defending its land territories. For this, as was traditional, it scoured Italy for a competent condottiere. This was always a tricky matter. As Machiavelli would point out, satisfaction from mercenaries was variable. They were both expensive and unreliable: ‘disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, raliant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men … for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy’. Venice would certainly have trouble enough with its hired hands in the months ahead. The city tried to buy the best, the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood – Giovanni Acuto (the Sharp) the Italians called him – a man with a bloody reputation for over-fulfilling his contracts. At Cesena the previous year he had ordered the massacre of five thousand people. Hawkwood however was too expensive for the now cash-strapped Venetians and too closely tied to the lord of Padua; instead they opted for Giacomo de Cavalli of Verona, at seven hundred ducats a month.

The prospect of a land war also introduced the use of new technologies. Two years earlier the Venetians had used gunpowder weapons at a siege for the first time. The cannon was new fangled in Italy: ‘a great instrument of iron,’ one contemporary writer described it, ‘with a hollow bore in its whole length, in which a black powder, made of sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal, is placed, and above that powder, being ignited through a touchhole, the stone is discharged with enormous force’. Giant bombards, enormous hooped tubes of cast iron, highly unreliable, firing no more than one shot a day, would have their part to play in the contest to come.

In the days before the declaration of war, the city chose as its naval commanders two of the most colourful Venetian history. On 22 April 1378 the seventy-two-year-old doge, Andrea Contarini, conferred the office of captaingeneral of the sea (the overall naval commander in time of war) on Vettor Pisani in an elaborate ceremony in St Mark’s. Handing Pisani the Venetian banner of war, the doge declaimed,

The Pisani family knew well the vicissitudes of fortune in the Republic’s service. Vettor had been at his father’s side during the disastrous defeat at Porto Longo twenty years earlier. Vettor himself divided opinion: outspoken, fearless, patriotic, touchy and short-tempered, he was a naval commander who led from the front. He was an immensely effective leader of men, loved by his crews, disliked by some of his fellow nobles in equal measure. Apart from a charge of attempted murder, he had physically attacked one of his fellow officials whilst he was governor of Crete in 1364, yet his experience at sea was incomparable. He would prove to be a controversial but inspired choice.

At the same time, the Republic gave command to another noble adventurer, Carlo Zeno – Zen in the Venetian dialect. By the age of forty-five Zeno had lived a life of extraordinary risk and adventure across the Stato da Mar. Orphaned as a child after his father was killed in battle, befriended by a pope, Zeno had been by turns a scholar, a musician, a priest, a gambler, a soldier of fortune, a married man. He had been left for dead by robbers when a student at Padua. A few years later he was nearly buried alive in Patras: grievously wounded during a Turkish siege, he was considered a corpse, wrapped in a shroud and placed in a coffin. The lid was about to be nailed shut when signs of life were detected. He was reputed, by unreliable family memoir, to have attempted the release of the Byzantine emperor John V by climbing up into the prison in Constantinople on a rope, only to find the emperor unwilling to abandon his sons, who could not be freed. He had been instrumental in the defence of Tenedos. In the popular imagination he was indestructible. If the ordinary people of Venice referred to Pisani as Father, Zeno was the Unconquered. He was despatched to the eastern Mediterranean as governor of Negroponte with eighteen galleys and orders to inflict maximum damage on Genoese shipping. The maritime safety of Venice was to be entrusted to these semi-legendary noble adventurers.

Venice proceeded without hesitation. While vassals of the duke of Milan were closing in on Genoa by land, Pisani worked his way up the west coast of Italy, sacking ports and spreading terror. In late May he met a Genoese fleet off Anzio and routed it. When the news reached Genoa there was panic: any day now Pisani might be at the unguarded harbour walls; Milanese soldiers were ravaging the back country. The doge was deposed and replaced in one of the periodic upheavals that bedevilled the Genoese state. However Pisani judged his fleet too small to follow up this early success and turned east again to attend to the Adriatic. Over the summer he ranged widely over the seas, blindly hunting small squadrons of Genoese privateers, bombarding Famagusta, escorting grain convoys from Puglia, responding to jumpy and contradictory orders from the war committee in Venice.

And that war was moving closer. By June, five thousand Hungarian troops had marched round the Gulf of Venice and joined up with Francesco, lord of Padua; by early July they were besieging Mestre on the shores of the lagoon just ten miles from Venice. They failed to take it; the Venetian defence held firm against overwhelming odds. According to the chroniclers, the Venetians positioned beehives on their ramparts, which discouraged the invaders from the final assault. It was a heartening victory against large odds and the people of the city knew that as long as their enemy was confined to land the lagoon would protect them. When news reached the city that Genoa had launched a new fleet under Luciano Doria, they thought again.

Pisani meanwhile had been tracking restlessly up and down the Dalmatian coast. He bombarded Zara but the city was too well defended to attack; he moved south to reduce other Hungarian bases. The port of Cattaro was stormed and put to the sword with Pisani fighting in the front line ‘like a simple captain’. The booty was shared amongst the whole crew – it was gestures such as this that won the utter loyalty of his men. At this point the orders to Pisani became increasingly insistent: stop Doria entering the Adriatic and above all prevent him from reaching Zara, which would give him both direct contact with the Hungarians and a base just 150 miles from the lagoon. The apparently inexhaustible Pisani positioned his ships in the Sicilian channel to catch Doria’s fleet off the toe of Italy. He was outwitted; the Genoese slipped round the south of the island. Pisani doubled back, trying to second-guess what Doria would do next, trawling for news across the mouth of the Adriatic. Doria was glimpsed repeatedly but could not be caught. The autumn was employed in a game of cat and mouse, Pisani keeping his fleet between the Genoese and Zara, returning to bombard the city again, sacking the port of Sebenico and finally running Doria to ground in the heavily fortified harbour at Trau, from which he could not be winkled out. An attack there was beaten back with great loss of life. Doria was determined to bide his time. Pisani turned north to bombard Zara once more.

It was now the end of a punishing year of naval manoeuvres. The ships had been at sea for nine months. Despite his inspirational leadership, the fleet was frustrated at being unable to get to grips with their elusive foe and exhausted by the attempt; morale was at a low ebb. Pisani requested permission to return to the lagoon. It was refused. The war committee was desperate for Doria to be dislodged, fearful that he might still slip past towards the lagoon and enclose the city in a pincer movement, menaced by land and sea. Pisani was ordered to overwinter at Pola to protect the inner Gulf of Venice.

Trau

 

Sebenico

 

It was a disastrous decision. The winter of 1378–9 was exceptionally cold. Snow fell heavily; frosts were sharp and the incessant winter wind off the Hungarian steppes made conditions wretched. Hunger, disease, cold and fatigue thinned the crews; men lost hands and feet to frostbite; soldiers and crossbowmen deserted; oarsmen languished in the cold. The men begged to be allowed to raise anchor rather than idle and die. Only loyalty to Pisani kept the fleet reasonably intact. The admiral returned the sick to Venice with yet another request for release. It was again refused; well-founded fear of the enemy fleet was compounded by the spite of Pisani’s noble rivals, keen to inflict continuous hardship on the long-suffering commander. The supply of grain to the city was becoming critical; in the dead days of January Pisani was ordered across the Adriatic to Puglia to escort food supplies to Venice. All the weight of expectation lay with him now. The doge wrote personally to beg him to endure. Step by step Genoa’s land allies were snuffing out the arterial supply routes into the city. Treviso itself lay under siege. Pisani careened his galleys and set out from Pola again. Disease, death and desertion continued apace. By the start of February his serviceable galleys had been whittled down from thirty-six to twelve.

That month, despite energetic opposition, Pisani was reelected captain-general of the sea; two new commissioners, Carlo Zeno and Michele Steno, were appointed to assist him. With them came much-needed food supplies and twelve more galleys, some of them built and paid for privately by personal supporters. Throughout the spring the reinvigorated fleet responded to a flurry of conflicting orders: to attack Doria in Trau again, to convoy grain, to damage the Dalmatian coast. The game of hide and seek went on; the Genoese only engaged in skirmishes. Their aim was to throttle Venice’s food supplies. In one incident Pisani took an arrow in the stomach but Doria slipped away. The news from the terra firma worsened. Treviso was hardly holding out; the forces of Padua tightened their grip on the river traffic. In an attempt to loosen the enemy’s hold, Zeno was detached with a squadron of galleys to ravage the coast around Genoa itself. The hope was that a threat close to home would shift the theatre of war and force Doria to withdraw his fleet.

In the short run it made no difference. Doria refused to fight until the moment of his choosing; Pisani, hamstrung by the ongoing deficiencies in his fleet and the plethora of commands, was powerless to act. And then, on 7 May 1379, Doria’s fleet suddenly showed up in the sea road off Pola, where the Venetian fleet was enduring yet another outbreak of disease. The Venetians were completely unprepared. Doria’s fleet advanced in line of battle, taunting the enemy to come out and fight. After months of fruitless search in which the fleet had wasted its strength it was an irresistible provocation; ‘The soldiers and sailors, like chained mastiffs panting to bite the passers by, began to clamour to be led out to fight, and the captains and commissioners added their vote of confidence.’

Moral pressure was applied to the captain-general: not to fight would be a contempt of the Venetian flag. Pisani was cautious – and suspicious. He almost certainly had fewer ships; they were in bad shape; they were tucked into a safe haven and Zeno was away. He soberly remembered the defeat at Porto Longo – the result of taking ill-considered advice – and argued that they bide their time until Zeno’s return. Preservation of the fleet was tantamount. There was a furious debate. Raised voices. Insults. Shouts. Finally Michele Steno taunted Pisani beyond the point of forbearance, ‘that it was not mere opinion, but cowardice and terror that he wanted to avoid battle’. Pisani’s hand flew to his sword hilt. Riled over personal honour, he gave way: they would sail out. Commands were given; ships set in order; hawsers released. With the ringing Venetian battle cry, ‘He who loves Saint Mark, follow me!’ he ordered the attack.

Luciano Doria had prepared his ambush well. He had ten more galleys concealed behind an outer point. His visible fleet fell back little by little before the spirited Venetian advance, drawing his opponent out to sea, then spinning smartly about as the hidden ships caught the Venetians on the flank and from behind – ‘and our men, surprised and terrified, went in a flash from bravery to abject terror’, ran the sober Venetian report. Panic led to a rout. One of the commissioners, Bragadino, formerly eager for battle, now terrified and trying to shelter from bombardment by the entrapping ships, fell overboard. Twelve experienced sea captains were killed or drowned; five were taken prisoner. With the tattered remnants of the Venetian fleet still engaged but close to flight, Luciano Doria over-confidently flipped up his visor and shouted, ‘The enemy are already beaten; we’re only a step away from complete victory!’ A Venetian captain hurtled forward in the blur of battle and pinioned him through the throat. Doria dropped dead on the spot. It was small consolation. Pisani tried to rally the remaining galleys but it was far too late. Seeing them slip away, including Steno, he gave up the unequal struggle and followed. Five ships made it to Parenzo thirty miles up the coast.

On 9 May, the new Genoese commander wrote to Padua totalling the extent of the victory:

On the 11th Francesco, lord of Padua, and all the people made a procession to the mother church ‘singing and thanking God for the victory over the Venetians … and there was great joy and revelry, many great feasts in the city, the ringing of church bells, and in the evening fires and illuminations in the open spaces and throughout the whole district’.

*

To Pisani fell the heavy obligation to report the defeat. There was no time to waste. A ship was despatched to Venice, another to the colonies in the Levant. The news struck the city dumb. There was amazement, consternation, fear. People wept for the loss of their relatives – and for the imminent danger to the city itself. There was now no fleet to protect it. Many of its most highly skilled captains and trained crews were either captives of Genoa or dead; Pisani’s fleet had been all but annihilated; Zeno’s was far out of reach somewhere on the high seas. There was sharp awareness of public calamity, linked to deep-held aristocratic grudges against the Pisani family. A universal chill descended on the lagoon. The order was sent out to Parenzo to arrest him ‘for having lost the Republic not only the backbone of its navy, the freedom of the sea, navigation, commerce, public taxes and the confidence of its citizens … in a single day, even in a single hour’.

On 7 July Pisani clanked down the gangplank on the quay by St Mark’s Square, bound in chains hand and foot. The reception was mixed – from the common people consolation, from the nobility nothing but malevolence. Still chained, he laboriously climbed the steps of the palace, to give his explanation before the doge and senate. There was no opportunity. He was hustled away into the darkness of the state prison. The prosecutors began the case against him. They demanded death – the mandatory sentence for a commander fleeing in battle: he should be led between the two columns and decapitated ‘as an object lesson for the citizens’. The senate rejected the sentence – Pisani had lacked firmness, not courage: it was Steno who had originally incited the attack and then cut and run. The sentence was commuted to six months in prison and five years’ exclusion from public office. If this pleased the wounded nobility, it stirred a sullen discontent within the sailors and ordinary people of the city which would soon burst into open defiance.

While Pisani languished in the dungeons, the Genoese were moving closer. Another Doria, Pietro, succeeded the dead Luciano. With forty-eight galleys, he retook all the Dalmatian cities taken by Pisani; moving north into the Gulf of Venice, he recaptured Rovigno, Grado and Caorle, within seventy-five miles of the city. At the start of August Doria appeared off the Lido of St Nicholas and snatched a merchant ship with a cargo of Egyptian cotton, watched impotently by the population. Working his way down the lidi he attacked other settlements along the sandbanks that protected the lagoon, then departed trailing the banners of St Mark behind him in the water. It was a very potent demonstration of public humiliation; not only had Doria shown that Venice was unable to protect even its home waters, it underlined the certainty that as long as Genoa controlled the sea, Venice might be starved into defeat. On 25 June, Doria captured two grain ships from Puglia, while the Hungarians and Paduans were throttling the river traffic to Venice. Even the lagoon no longer seemed a secure refuge. The Genoese had also taken their time to reconnoitre the channels and take soundings.

The city was gripped by a sense of national emergency. Pisani’s rival, Taddeo Giustinian, was made captain-general of the sea; troops and commanders were apportioned to sectors of the defence. Two of the entrances to the lagoon were blocked with chains. Stout sailing ships were anchored as floating forts. Fortifications, wooden towers, palisades and earthworks were thrown up along the shores of the lidi. Giacomo de Cavalli’s expensively bought mercenaries, who included a quarrelsome troop of Englishmen, were stationed there to man the defences. A war committee was on twenty-four-hour call in the doge’s palace and a system of alarm calls, radiating out from the bells of St Nicholas on the Lido, was put in place, so that at the first sight of a Genoese fleet, peals of church bells rippling across all the parishes of the city would summon the armed militia to St Mark’s Square, the nerve centre of whatever last stand the patriotic citizens of the Republic might be compelled to make. For good measure, the Venetians did what they had done in a similar emergency six hundred years earlier. They removed all the briccole – the stakes which marked the navigable channels of the lagoon – wiping its surface back to a primeval labyrinth in which nothing snagged the eye.

At the same time as military defence, the Republic had already resorted to diplomacy. Was it possible to split the triple alliance of Padua, Genoa and Hungary? Padua was too bitter a recent foe but Hungary, with troubles of its own elsewhere, might be detached. Ambassadors were hurried to Buda. The response was demoralising: the Hungarians had sensed a unique moment to strike down the Republic. They demanded a huge indemnity – half a million ducats – on top of an annual tribute of a cool hundred thousand and the surrender of Trieste, plus the acceptance of the doge and all his successors as vassals of the Hungarian crown. To add insult to injury, they helpfully suggested that if ready cash were in short supply they would accept the keys of half a dozen towns as a down payment, including Treviso and Mestre on the shores of the lagoon, plus the doge’s jewelled cap – the ultimate symbol of a free republic. ‘These demands are completely unworthy,’ reported back the ambassadors, ‘impossible to accept.’ If it were to be a choice between humiliation and death, the Republic would go down fighting. A ship had already been despatched with orders to find Zeno’s fleet and bring it back. The problem was that no one had any idea where he was.

On 6 August, the bells of St Nicholas started to clang ominously. A small fleet of six ships flying the red and white of Genoa had been sighted on the horizon. Taddeo Giustinian decided to sally forth with an equal number to confront the intruders. As the ships closed, the Venetians spotted a man swimming towards them. He was Hieronimo Sabadia, a Venetian sailor captured at Pola, who had jumped overboard from one of the approaching ships to warn his compatriots not to advance; the six Genoese galleys were a decoy for the main fleet of forty-seven vessels lying over the horizon. It was on such patriotic actions that Venice’s hopes now rested. Giustinian turned smartly about; the chain was raised; he sailed back into the lagoon.

There were three principal entrances through the lidi into the lagoon; two had been blocked with chains and anchored hulks; the third, at the southern end of the lagoon, the entrance and exit to Chioggia, had been left open. It was here that Pietro Doria proposed to make his strike. The island of Chioggia was a miniature replica of Venice, protected from the open sea by its own lido, to which it was connected by a wooden bridge. There was another settlement on this lido, known as Little Chioggia, and further south the more substantial village of Brondolo. Chioggia’s strategic importance to Venice was immense; it commanded the mouths of the Brenta and the Adige, which linked Venice by water with central Italy, but which, with every passing day, were passing more firmly into the hands of the advancing Hungarian and Paduan troops. The Paduans had prepared a hundred well-armed barges to float supplies downstream to their naval allies.

By taking Chioggia, Doria hoped both to link up with the advancing land forces and to establish a base from which finally to destroy the rival republic. Set in the fringes of the lagoon, within marshes, saltpans, reed beds, sandbanks, narrow excavated channels, secret waterways, Chioggia was the place where a century of maritime warfare was destined to reach its resolution. Venice’s imaginative world, habitually vast, had now shrunk to the defence of a few square miles of floundering marsh.

At Chioggia, the Venetians determined to make a resolute stand. They armed a series of isolated outlying forts, water mills and towers along the Brenta and on the shores of the lagoon. The podesta (mayor) of Chioggia, Pietro Emo, blocked the river approaches with rocks. Implacably the Paduans overcame all obstacles. With large resources of manpower, they hauled their barges overland, cutting diversionary channels round the obstructions, snuffing out isolated forts. By early August they had secured the strategic Bebbe tower at the mouth of the Brenta, just four miles from Chioggia itself. They established bastions controlling the approach canals and waterways and fought off counterattacks by convoys of small armed boats. Only one fortress held out, that of the Salt Beds, standing on the very edge of the lagoon. Chioggia was effectively cut off, though the Venetian knowledge of the shallow backwaters stood it in good stead: ‘Secretly by night many small boats came and went between Venice and Chioggia by tiny channels towards the castle of the Salt Beds, carrying letters and advice.’

On 8 August, the Paduan soldiers and their armed supply boats joined up with Doria’s fleet standing in the roadstead of Brondolo, bringing thousands of men, large supplies of food, and the promise of much more downstream from Padua. The allies now had twenty-four thousand men. Within Chioggia there were perhaps 3,500 in total, out of a population of twelve thousand, many of whom guarded the bridgehead which linked the island to its lido at Little Chioggia. The Genoese landed on the lido and unloaded their siege equipment – mangonels and bombards. In a short time Little Chioggia was taken; the armed hulk guarding the Chioggia channel was fired and destroyed. On 12 August they started to attack the bridgehead, which was defended by a stout bastion. For four days the fighting continued with the Genoese suffering great losses. On the 16th, desperate for a breakthrough, a reward of 150 ducats was offered to any man who could fire the bridge. According to the Genoese chroniclers, there was one enthusiastic volunteer:

In their haste they failed to raise the drawbridge behind them. ‘We pursued [the Venetians] with fire and with great losses on their side as far as the piazza of Chioggia. There was great destruction … the piazza was stained red with Christian blood and the grievous and cruel massacre of the Venetians.’

Eight hundred and sixty Venetians were killed; four thousand were taken prisoner; the women and children cowered in the churches. Doria brought his galleys into safe anchorage inside the lagoon. The Genoese now had a secure foothold within reach of Venice, to which it was directly connected by the Lombardy Channel, a deep-water arterial route through the lagoon down which even the deeper-draughted Genoese galleys could access the city. Doria was just twelve miles from St Mark’s Square. The flag of St George fluttered in the piazza of Chioggia; the lord of Padua’s from its ducal palace; Hungary’s from an adjacent tower. Francesco Carrara of Padua entered the city and was carried shoulder-high into the main square by Genoese soldiers, shouting, ‘Carro! Carro!’ They eyed the larger prize with the anticipation of a sack to equal that of Constantinople.

The news reached Venice at midnight. The bells of the campanile started to clang loudly; soon all the parishes were repeating the alarm. People came armed, running to St Mark’s Square to learn of the collapse at Chioggia. There was terror and panic, weeping and chaotic shouting, expectations that a Genoese war fleet would come nosing up the Lombardy Channel at any minute. The citizens began to bury their goods in anticipation of inevitable sack. Others were more resolute, declaring that ‘the state would never be lost so long as those who remain can man a galley or handle a weapon’. Gradually the old doge quietened the crowd with calm words and a steadfast face. The following day he sent three ambassadors to Chioggia under safe conduct to sue for peace. After a lengthy oration they handed Doria a piece of paper setting out their conditions for peace. It was blank. The Genoese could write their own terms so long as Venice remained free. But Doria had come to destroy the hated rival. His reply was haughty: ‘There will be no peace until first we have put a bridle on those horses of yours on the portico of St Mark’s … then we shall be at peace. This is our intention and that of our Commune.’ Then, referring to the Genoese prisoners, he casually went on, ‘I don’t want them. Keep them locked up, because I intend to come and rescue all your prisoners in a few days.’ Venice would have to fight to the last gasp.

Within the city the bell was rung to call the popular assembly to hear the response. The gathered crowd was now given an unvarnished account of their plight. A year earlier, Genoa’s defeat at the sea battle of Anzio had nearly torn that city apart. This was to be a similar test of Venice’s character, its patriotism and class coherence. The mood was initially resolute. They would go down fighting rather than die of starvation: ‘Let us arm ourselves; let us equip and mount what galleys are in the arsenal; let us go forth; it is better to perish in the defence of our country than to perish here through want.’ Everyone prepared for sacrifices. There was to be universal conscription. Salaries of magistrates and state officials were suspended; new patriotic state loans were demanded; business and commerce were abandoned; property prices fell to a quarter of their previous value. The whole city was mobilised in a desperate bid for survival, so that its bronze horses, looted in their turn from Constantinople, could continue to paw the humid Venetian air unfettered. Emergency earthworks were hastily thrown up on the Lido of St Nicholas; a ring of palisades erected in the shallow water around the city; armed boats ordered to patrol the canals night and day; signal arrangements redefined. The arsenal set to unceasing work, refitting mothballed galleys.

Yet this show of patriotic unity under the banner of St Mark concealed dangerous fault lines. At the point of sacrifice the unbearable haughtiness of the noble class stuck in the popular gullet. The people wanted to be led by commanders who shared the same conditions and dangers. The crews declared they would not now man the new trenches on the Lido of St Nicholas unless the nobles went too, and the appointment of Taddeo Giustinian as commander of the city’s defences brought the city to the edge of revolt. He was evidently detested; there was only one man they would accept. ‘You want us to go in the galleys,’ went up the cry in St Mark’s Square, ‘give us our Captain Pisani! We want Pisani out of prison!’ The crowd grew in strength and became increasingly vocal in their disapproval. According to popular hagiography, Pisani could hear the cries from the ducal prison. Putting his head to the bars, he called out ‘Long live St Mark!’ The crowd responded with a throaty roar. Upstairs in the senatorial chamber a panicky debate was underway. The crowd put ladders to the windows. They hammered the chamber door with a rhythmic refrain: ‘Vettor Pisani! Vettor Pisani!’ Thoroughly alarmed, the senate caved in: the people would be given Pisani. It was now the end of a nerve-racking day, but when Pisani was told of his release he placidly replied that he would prefer to pass the night where he was, in prayer and contemplation. Release could wait for the morrow.

At dawn on 19 August, in one of the great popular scenes from Venetian history, the unshackled Pisani stepped free from prison to the roar of the crowd. Hoisted onto the shoulders of the galley crews with people climbing up onto ledges and parapets to get a glimpse of the hero, raising their hands to the sky, shouting and cheering, he was carried up the steps of the palace and delivered to the doge. There was an immediate reconciliation; a solemn mass. Pisani played his part carefully, pledging himself humbly to the Republic. Then he was again raised aloft on the shoulders of the crowd and carried away to his house.

It was an exhilarating moment, but also a dangerous one. It was only twenty-four years since a doge had been beheaded for an attempted coup and Pisani was wary of personal adulation. On his way home, he was stopped by an old sailor who stepped forward and called out in a loud voice, ‘Now is the time to avenge yourself by seizing the dictatorship of the city. Behold, all are at your service; all are willing at this very moment to proclaim you prince, if you choose!’ Pisani turned and dealt the man a stinging blow. Raising his voice, he called, ‘Let none who wish me well say “Long live Pisani!” – rather, “Long live St Mark!”’

In fact, the senate, piqued by this popular revolt, had been more grudging with their favours than the crowd at first understood. Pisani was not appointed captain-general, only commander of the lido defences. The crews were still ordered to report to the detested Taddeo Giustinian. When this fact sank in there was a further wave of popular dissent. They threw down their banners and declared they would rather be cut to pieces than serve under Taddeo. On the 20th the senate caved in again. Pisani was declared overall commander of the city’s defence. At an emotional service in St Mark’s he vowed to die for the Republic.

The waterfront at St Mark’s. Recruiting benches were set up on the Molo – the quayside in front of the two columns

 

The confirmed appointment had a galvanic effect on morale. The following day the customary recruiting benches were set up near the two columns; the scribes could not enter the names of volunteers fast enough. Everyone enrolled: artists and cutlers, tailors and apothecaries. The unskilled were given rowing lessons in the Giudecca Canal; stone fortifications were erected by masons on the Lido of St Nicholas at lightning speed; thirty mothballed galleys were re-equipped; palisades and chains encircled the city and closed the canals; every sector of the city’s defences was detailed to particular officers. They were to be manned night and day. Many gave their savings to the cause; women plucked the jewellery from their dresses to pay for food and soldiers.

None of this was a moment too soon. In darkness on 24 August Doria mounted a two-pronged attack. One force attempted a galley landing on the Lido of St Nicholas. A second pushed in a swarm of light boats to attack the palisades that protected the city’s southern shore. Both were beaten back, but the defenders were compelled to abandon other towns along the lidi. Doria established himself at Malamocco, from where he could bombard the islands of the southern lagoon. The red-and-white flag could be seen from the campanile of St Mark’s.

Venice was almost completely cut off; there was now just one land route by which it could receive supplies. The sea was sealed. Yet the balance had shifted slightly. Doria had missed a moment. If he had struck out for Venice as soon as Chioggia fell, the city must have capitulated. The brief hesitation had allowed Pisani to regroup and the failure on the 24th gave Venice brief hope. The lord of Padua, disgusted by the failure to force home the advantage, politely took his troops off to the siege of Treviso. Doria decided on attrition. He would starve Venice to death. With winter coming on he withdrew his men from the lidi back to Chioggia. Within Venice, supplies started to run low; desperate schemes were proposed to abandon the city and emigrate to Crete or Negroponte. They were instantly rejected. Patriotic Venetians declared that ‘sooner than abandon their city, they would bury themselves under her ruins’.