The Glass Ball

 

1400–1453

On 1 June 1416, the Venetians engaged an Ottoman fleet at sea for the first time. The captain-general, Pietro Loredan, had been sent to the Ottoman port at Gallipoli to discuss a recent raid on Negroponte. What happened next he related in a letter to the doge and the Signoria.

It was dawn. As he approached the harbour, a signal to parley was misinterpreted as a hostile attack. The lead ships were met with a hail of arrows. In a short time the encounter had turned into a full-scale battle.

The aftermath was similarly brutal. Retiring fifty miles down the coast to Tenedos, Loredan proceeded to put to death all the other nationals aboard the Ottoman ships as an exemplary warning. ‘Among the captives’, Loredan wrote, ‘was Giorgio Callergis, a rebel against the Signoria, and badly wounded. I had the honour to hack him to pieces on my own poop deck. This punishment will be a warning to other bad Christians not to dare to take service with the infidel.’ Many others were impaled. ‘It was a horrible sight,’ wrote the Byzantine historian Ducas, ‘all along the shore, like bunches of grapes, sinister stakes from which hung corpses.’ Those who had been compelled to the ships were freed.

An Ottoman galley

 

In this first hostile engagement, Loredan had almost completely destroyed the Ottoman fleet – and the means quickly to recreate it. The Venetians understood exactly where the source of Ottoman naval power lay. Many of the nominal Turks in their fleet were Christian corsairs, sailors and pilots – maritime experts without whom the sultan’s embryonic navy was unable to function. The Republic’s policy was to remain unbending in this respect: snuff out the supply of skilled manpower and the Ottomans’ naval capability would wither. It was for this reason that they butchered the sailors so mercilessly. ‘We can now say that the Turk’s power in this part of sea has been destroyed for a very long time,’ wrote Loredan. No substantial Ottoman fleet would put to sea again for fifty years.

The accidental battle of Gallipoli bred a certain over-confidence in Venetian sea power. For decades after, galley commanders reckoned that ‘four or five of their galleys are needed to match one of ours’. Touchy about their Christian credentials, they also used the victory to point out to the potentates of southern Europe their reputation as ‘the only pillar and the hope for Christians against the Infidels’.

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The Ottomans had advanced so swiftly and silently across Asia Minor in the chaotic aftermath of the Fourth Crusade that their progress had passed, for a time, almost unnoticed. They had inserted themselves into the Byzantine civil wars and the trade contests of the Venetians and the Genoese. They were alive to the opportunities of confusion, siding with the Genoese in the 1350s, who shipped them across the Dardanelles to Gallipoli, from which they could not be dislodged. Picking up speed, they struck into Bulgaria and Thrace, surrounded Constantinople and reduced the emperors to vassals. By 1410 Ducas claimed that there were more Turks settled in Europe than in Asia Minor. It was as if the column in the Hippodrome had grown a fourth serpent, whose python-like grasp threatened slowly to squeeze all its rivals to death. Christian Europe, torn by conflicting interests and religious schisms, failed to respond. Successive popes, increasingly aware of the danger of ‘the Turk’, wrung their hands at the enmity between Catholic and Orthodox, and the endless Venetian–Genoese wars; without the naval resources of the maritime republics crusades died at birth in the antechambers of the Vatican.

Venice was watchful of this burgeoning power. By the 1340s they were warning of ‘the growing maritime power of the Turks. The Turks have, in effect, ruined the islands of Romania [the Aegean] and as there are hardly any other Christians to combat them, they are creating an important fleet with a view to attacking Crete.’ The power vacuum which Venice had helped to create in 1204 was now being filled. It was the Republic’s policy never to make military alliances with the Ottomans, as the Genoese did, but neither were they in a position to act against them. Always distracted by other wars and by trading interests, and wary of unstable crusading alliances which could leave them dangerously exposed, they watched and waited. They observed sceptically from the sidelines an ill-fated crusade against the Ottomans by a joint French and Hungarian force in 1396; their sole contribution was a measure of naval support, picking up a pathetically small huddle of survivors from the shores of the Danube after its total defeat at the battle of Nicopolis. Their response to appeals to defend Christendom was stock: they were not prepared to act alone, but whenever they surveyed the idealistic crusading projects of the papacy they politely declined.

By 1400 the Ottomans had reached the edge of their maritime empire and trading zones. For Venice, as for the rest of Europe, the multicultural Ottomans camped in the Balkans were only and ever ‘the Turks’, their sultan referred to as ‘the Great Turk’. Under their respective banners, the lion and the crescent moon, the two imperial powers were polar opposites: the Christian and the Muslim, the sea-going merchant class concerned with trade, the continental warriors whose valuations were counted in land holdings; the impersonal republic that prized liberty, the sultanate that depended on the autocratic whim of a single man. Venice quickly recognised that the Ottomans were different from the sedentary Mamluks: aggressive, restless, expansionist, their empire was built on the premise of continuous growth, whose intertwined and pre-ordained missions, both imperial and religious, were to enlarge Muslim realms and Ottoman lands. The exhausting persistence of the Turks was destined to tax Venice to the limit. ‘Things continue very unhappily with the Turks,’ one later ambassador to the sultan declared after years of experience, ‘because whether they are at war or peace they always wear away at you, rob you, always want justice their way.’ No European power spent so much time, energy, money and resources understanding the Ottomans. Venice would develop an intimate knowledge of their language, psychology, religion, technology, rituals and customs; the personality of each successive sultan would be pragmatically analysed for threat and advantage. No one else understood the nuances of diplomatic performance so finely or played the game of ambassadors with such consummate skill. For Venice diplomacy was always worth a squadron of galleys and it cost a fraction of the price.

As early as 1360 the Republic despatched ambassadors to Sultan Murat I to congratulate him on his new capital at Adrianople, which effectively completed the encirclement of Constantinople. They quickly learned that they were dealing with obdurate opponents. When ambassadors went back to Murat in 1387 to protest about raids on Negroponte they took with them presents: basins and jugs of silver, robes, a fur coat with pearl buttons – and two big dogs, called Passalaqua and Falchon. The dogs were immensely popular; Murat immediately asked for a matching female dog to breed from. He did not however release the prisoners requested and the Venetian senate subsequently received a breathtaking letter declaring that the ambassadors had promised that the Republic would send an army at their own expense to support the Ottomans. They had done no such thing.

The rules of the game were complex, and had to be learned anew. As the Ottomans reduced the Balkans and continental Greece to vassal status, Venice needed to play its hand with care; it was dependent on Greek grain. It could neither give up its role as a defender of Christendom nor be seen as ‘a constant accomplice of the Turk’. Pragmatic, cynical, ambivalent – keener on trade than causes – it needed to maintain good relations with both sides. Diplomatic skill with the Ottomans was tantamount. ‘Negotiations with the Turks were like playing with a glass ball,’ it would later be said. ‘When the other player forcibly threw it, it was necessary not to hurl it violently back or let it fall to the ground, because in one way or another it would shatter.’

The Venetians would in time train their own corps of Ottoman linguists, the giovanni di lingua, but in the fifteenth century they relied on interpreters to conduct negotiations with the Ottomans through the medium of Greek. They worked out who, why and when to bribe. Knowing the attraction of the gold ducat they set aside specified amounts of baksheesh; they professionally valued gifts received from Ottoman emissaries and replied in kind; they matched the splendour of a diplomatic mission to the importance of the occasion. They paid close attention to each sultan’s death; uncertain which son might win the race to the throne, they prepared their letters of accreditation and congratulations in multiple copies, each bearing the name of a different candidate – or left blank for the ambassador to complete on the spot. They judged carefully the balance between threat and promise. During Ottoman civil wars they followed the practice of the Byzantines and supported pretenders to the throne to increase confusion. They sought alliances with rival Turkish dynasties in Asia Minor to squeeze the Ottomans from both sides. They shifted continuously with the wind, balancing threats of force with offers of payments.

It was never easy. As the Ottomans strengthened their hold on Greece, the people of Salonica offered their city to Venice in 1423; the port was a valuable prize – both a strategic and a commercial hub. The senate ‘received the offer with gladness and promised to protect and nourish and prosper the city and to transform it into a second Venice’. Sultan Murat II, however, was insistent that it was his by right and demanded Salonica back. For seven years Venice poured in food and defensive resources whilst trying to work out a solution with the sultan, but he was not to be dissuaded. When they offered tribute it was turned down. When they sent ambassadors, he threw them in prison. When fleets were sent to block the Dardanelles, he merely shrugged. They increased their tribute offer; it was rejected. They sacked Gallipoli; the investment of Salonica went on. They forged an alliance with the rival Karaman dynasty in Asia Minor; Murat sent corsairs to ravage the coast of Greece.

Year after year Venice shuttled back and forth between war and peace, working on the flanks of the Ottoman Empire, but the sultan was immovable:

In 1430 he did just that. The Venetians fought their way back to the harbour and sailed away, leaving the Greeks to their fate. It would have been better, a chronicler said, if the city had been hit by an earthquake or a tidal wave. The Ottomans had eaten up another piece of Greece.

The following year Venice made peace and paid tribute to Murat. If the Stato da Mar was guaranteed official freedom from attack, the Ottoman advance went on, pushing out to the west coast of Greece and southern Albania, at the door of the Adriatic. Unattributable freelance raiding continued. It was the Ottoman method of softening up frontier provinces for future conquest – to unleash unpaid irregulars across the borders. At sea, Turkish-inspired corsairs continued to be a nuisance, even if Venetian maritime hegemony was unchallenged. Negroponte, the next base down the coast from Salonica, was becoming a cause for concern. The island was only separated by a narrow channel from mainland Greece, to which it was linked by a bridge. The senate forbade people from going to the mainland to harvest corn and ordered a detachment of eighteen men to guard the bridge night and day.

The senatorial registers kept a running record of these subtle depredations. Year after year news of raids and troop movements, pirate infestations and abductions poured in. ‘For the past three years,’ it was noted of Negroponte in 1449, ‘the island has been subjected to continuous plundering by Turks, who steal flocks then claim they are acting in the name of the Sultan’s son at war with the Signoria, it’s the work of Turkish irregulars, inveterate plunderers’ – this despite the fact Venice was officially at peace with the sultan. They sent yet another ambassador to protest. The following year the misery of the islands came under scrutiny: ‘Turks and Catalans are plundering the isles; at Tinos, thirty men taken into slavery, fishing boats snatched, cows, asses and mules killed or seized – without boats or animals the Tiniots cannot work, they are reduced to eating their remaining beasts.’ Many of these attacks were directed by disaffected subjects of the imperial system. As early as 1400 it was noted that ‘a great number of Cretan subjects … are fleeing towards the land of the Turks and serve voluntarily on Turkish ships; they are well informed of what’s going on in ports and Venetian territories, they guide the Turks to places to pillage’. It was men such as Giorgio Callergis that galley commanders impaled on stakes or chopped up on their own decks.

In the 1440s the slow, relentless Ottoman advance led to yet another call to crusade. For Venice this required a finely judged assessment of risks and returns. Taking advantage of a disruption in the Ottoman succession, the Serbs, Hungarians and the papacy made a fresh attempt to push the Ottomans out of Europe. Venice was brutally realistic about its chances. In return for blocking the Dardanelles to stop Ottoman troops crossing from Asia, it wanted cash payment for the ships and outright ownership of Salonica and Gallipoli in the case of success. It was clear-sighted about the strategic imperatives: ‘If the money is collected too late, it will be impossible to send the galleys to the Straits at the right moment, the Turks can cross from Asia into Europe and Christian defeat is certain.’ This became the subject of a furious row between the Republic and the papacy that replayed all the old distrusts. The papacy accused Venice of unchristian behaviour; the response was furious: ‘The Signoria spares nothing to defend Christian interests … one deplores these papal accusations, so unjust … Venice considers its honour impugned.’ Venice in the end grudgingly prepared the ships but the money was not forthcoming. ‘For the pope to pay up is a matter of honour … his conduct is pure ingratitude!’ they stormed. The relationship deteriorated from there: ‘Eugene IV pretends that Venice is the debtor to the Holy See. It’s untrue: on the contrary it’s the pope who owes the Republic.’ The gap between the merchant mentality and the pious and unworldly cardinals remained as wide as ever. The unpaid debt was not forgotten. A decade later it would surface again in even more tragic circumstances.

As it was, Venice was right to be sceptical. The crusade was hopelessly botched and the Republic mounted a blockade of the straits too late to prevent the Ottoman army being ferried across the Bosphorus by Genoese merchants. It was rumoured that private Venetian sea captains had also participated. At Varna, near the Black Sea, the crusaders were wiped out. This time there was no Venetian fleet to pick up survivors. The Turks left behind a pyramid of skulls. It was the last attempt to drive them out of Europe.

The noose continued to tighten on Constantinople. When Murat died in 1451, Venice again played a cautious hand. On 8 July, the senate despatched an ambassador to the new sultan, Mehmet II, offering peace and condolences; the following day the ambassador was ordered to proceed to the embattled emperor in Constantinople, Constantine, his new rival. A day later it instructed yet another ambassador to contact Mehmet’s enemy in Asia Minor, the Great Karaman. Galleys were detailed to ensure that the Dardanelles were kept open. Venice played on all sides.

The day after ascending the throne Mehmet had his young half-brother murdered in the bath. The Venetians, sensitive to the times, were quick to grasp the change of tone. Towards the end of his reign Murat had become less aggressive. The new sultan, aged twenty-one, was both ambitious and highly intelligent. He burned for conquests and he had just one objective in mind. By February 1452, the lagoon was receiving ambassadors from the emperor Constantine warning that ‘the enormous preparations of Sultan Mehmet II, both by land and sea, leave no doubt of his intention to attack Constantinople. There is no doubt that this time the city will succumb if no one comes to the aid of the Greeks and the courageous help of the Venetians would be a great prize.’ In the autumn the ambassadors were back again, their pleas more desperate. They begged for help to save the city. The senators vacillated, hedged their bets and palmed them off. They passed them on to the pope and the Florentines, citing their pressing war in Italy and, as a concession, allowed the export of breastplates and gunpowder. They lobbied continuously for joint action; ‘It’s necessary for the Holy See and the other Christian powers to be united.’

During the summer of 1452 Mehmet was busy constructing a castle on the Bosphorus with the intention of closing the passage to the Black Sea. The Ottomans named this new structure the Throat Cutter. Venice was well informed about it. Spies sent back detailed sketch maps of its layout; prominent in the foreground was a splay of large bombards, scanning the straits with the intention of blasting out of the water any passing traffic which failed to stop. The day before its completion, the senate reported that ‘Constantinople is completely surrounded by the troops and ships of Sultan Mehmet’. The Venetians strengthened their maritime arrangements accordingly but remained uncommitted. The uncertainty was reflected by a senatorial motion, defeated, that Constantinople should be left entirely to its fate.

Venice soon had personal experience of the implications of Mehmet’s blockade. On 26 November, a Venetian merchant galley bringing supplies to the city from the Black Sea was sunk at the Throat Cutter by cannon fire. The crew managed to make it to land, where they were captured and marched off to the sultan at Adrianople. By the time an ambassador made it to the court to plead for their lives, the sailors’ decapitated bodies were rotting on the ground outside the city walls. The captain, Antonio Rizzo, hung impaled from a stake.

The European diplomatic exchanges continued shrill, self-justifying and ineffectual throughout the early months of 1453. Venice informed the pope and the kings of Hungary and Aragon ‘of the great Venetian preparations, and asked them immediately to join their efforts with those of the Signoria; if not, Constantinople is lost’. The Vatican wanted to send five galleys and looked expectantly at the Republic – but Venice had not forgotten the Varna debts and would not give credit. In its response on 10 April the senate ‘rejoices at their intention, but one can not fail to remember the painful behaviour of Pope Eugene IV who, in 1444, unceasingly delayed the payment for ships’. All the tensions in the Christian system were on display. In early May, Venice was preparing galleys on its own behalf with contradictory and cautious orders: to proceed to Constantinople ‘if the route does not seem too dangerous … refusing combat in the Straits … but to participate in the defence of Constantinople’. At the same time the ambassador at Mehmet’s court was told to emphasise ‘the peaceful inclinations of Venice; if the Signoria has sent a few galleys to Constantinople, it’s purely to escort the Black Sea galleys and to protect Venetian interests; he will try to lead the sultan to conclude a peace with Constantine’.

It was already far too late. On 6 April Mehmet was camped outside the walls with a vast army and a formidable array of cannon; on the 12th, at one in the afternoon, a sizeable fleet came rowing up the straits from Gallipoli. It was the first time in forty years that the Ottomans had mounted any organised challenge to the naval power of Venice. The Venetians at Constantinople who saw this fleet approaching with ‘eager cries and the sound of castanets and tambourines’ were stunned. Mehmet was a master at logistics and the co-ordination of war. He had quickly realised that Constantinople could not be taken unless it was blockaded by sea. At Gallipoli he had caused the construction of a substantial naval force, which startled and challenged the easy assumptions of Venetian maritime hegemony. For the first time the Venetians clearly grasped the immense reach and resources of the Turks, their ability to innovate and to harness the technical and military skills of subject peoples.

If the state was tardy and ambivalent, the Venetian residents, under their bailo Girolamo Minotto, and the crews of their galleys in the Golden Horn fought bravely for the beleaguered remnants of the Byzantine Empire. The irony of this situation probably escaped them; 250 years after Venice had worked to sack the imperial city, its citizens stood shoulder to shoulder with Greeks to man the walls, guard the chain across the Golden Horn and repel a besieging army coming for conquest – whose advance the crusade of 1204 had done so much to assist. They dug trenches ‘with a will for the honour of the world’, as the patriotic diarist Nicolo Barbaro put it; paraded the banner of St Mark along the city walls to add heart to the defence ‘for the love of God and the Signoria’, kept their ships at the chain to repel the enemy fleet, mounted attacks by land and sea, guarded the Blachernae Palace and fought with stout bravery. In the cycles of Venetian history, the emotional attachment to this city, with which their relationship had been so long and contradictory, was deep and heartfelt. In 1453 they fought for the memory of Dandolo’s bones and the profit and honour of the Venetian Republic. It was Venetian sailors who disguised themselves as Turks and slipped out in a light sailing ship to look for signs of a rescue fleet. After three weeks of searching the approaches to the Dardanelles they realised that no help would come. By now the implications were clear: to return to Constantinople was to risk death. In typical Venetian fashion the crew took a democratic vote. The majority decision was ‘to return to Constantinople, if it is in the hands of the Turks or the Christians, if it is to death or to life’. Constantine thanked them profusely for their return – and wept at the news. 

The deep chafing with the Genoese continued to the last. There were Genoese who fought alongside the Venetians, with whom the relationship was always tense, whilst across the water in Galata the Genoese colony maintained a queasy neutrality, secretly helping each side and earning the opprobrium of both. The low point in this relationship came in mid-April. For all its vaunted strength, the Ottoman fleet did not perform well. It failed to capture four Genoese transport ships sent with supplies by the pope; it was unable to break the chain closing the Golden Horn, guarded by Venetian ships. Frustrated, Mehmet had seventy ships hauled overland at night. When they splashed into the Golden Horn on the morning of 21 April the defenders were stunned. It was a further blow for Venetian maritime self-confidence; ‘We were perforce compelled to stand to arms at sea, night and day, with great fear of the Turks,’ recorded Barbaro. When the Venetians planned a night attack on this enemy fleet now in the Horn it was betrayed, almost certainly by a Genoese signal; the lead galley was sunk by gunfire, the survivors swam to the shore and were captured. The following day Mehmet impaled forty Venetian sailors on stakes in full view of the city walls. Their shipmates watched the last agonised writhings with horror and pointed the finger at their old rivals: ‘This betrayal was committed by the cursed Genoese of [Galata], rebels against the Christian faith, to show themselves friendly to the Turkish sultan.’

The resident Venetians supported Byzantium to the bitter end. The lion flag of St Mark and the double-headed Byzantine eagle flew side by side from the Blachernae Palace. On the day before the final assault, ‘The bailo ordered that everyone who called himself a Venetian should go to the walls on the landward side, for the love of God and for the honour of the Christian faith, and that everyone should be of good heart and ready to die at his post.’ They went. On 29 May 1453, after fierce fighting, the walls were finally breached and the city fell. ‘When their flag was raised and ours cut down, we saw that the city was taken and that there was no further hope of recovering from this,’ recorded Barbaro. Those who could fled back to their galleys and sailed away past the corpses floating in the sea ‘like melons in a canal’. The Venetian survivors proudly listed the roll call of their dead, ‘some of whom had been drowned, some dead in the bombardment or killed in the battle in other ways’. Minotto was captured and beheaded; sixty-two members of the nobility died with him; some of the ships were so short-crewed they could hardly set sail – only the ill-discipline of Mehmet’s new navy, which had abandoned the sea to participate in the sack, allowed the escape.

A small frigate brought the news to Venice on the evening of 29 June 1453. According to eyewitnesses, it sailed up the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge, watched by an expectant crowd:

The senate heard the news in stunned silence. Despite the warnings to the rest of Europe it seemed that the Venetians were as incredulous as anyone that the Christian city that had stood intact for 1,100 years should be no more. For Barbaro, it was the Venetian complacency that had helped the Turks take the city. ‘Our senators could not believe the Turks could bring a fleet to Constantinople.’ It was a warning of things to come.

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As soon as the furore had died down, the city of merchants, pragmatic as ever, sent ambassadors back to Mehmet, congratulated him on his victory, and got a renewal of their trading privileges on reasonable terms.