‘If Negroponte Is Lost’

 

1464–1489

The war opened brightly enough with a successful invasion of the Peloponnese but quickly became unsustainable. The mercenary troops, commanded by the Wolf of Rimini, proved unreliable, though this was perhaps not surprising given that Venice failed to pay them reliably either. Venice’s galleys controlled the seas but could inflict little damage in a land-based war, while the Ottoman fleet, remembering the debacle of 1416, refused to fight. And the war was expensive: by 1465 it was costing seven hundred thousand ducats a year. A decade later that figure would have almost doubled.

Venetians within the Ottoman Empire suffered badly. The bailo died in a Constantinople prison; captive soldiers and resident merchants were publicly executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets. Trade in the Ottoman Empire was dying; commercial establishments collapsed. The Venetian advance in the Peloponnese was checked, then reversed. The inspirational captain of the sea, Vettor Capello, was unable to prevent the recapture of Patras on the western coast. The failure cut him deeply: Capello had been leader of the party that had promoted the war. After Patras, he was never seen to smile again; when he died of a heart attack at Negroponte in March 1467, the appetite for war began to wane. By July of that year Mehmet was five miles from the Venetian port of Durazzo on the Albanian coast. Only sixty miles of Adriatic sea separated the Ottomans from Brindisi on the Italian shore; shiploads of destitute refugees started to arrive there. In Naples it was common knowledge that Mehmet ‘hated the Signoria of Venice and that if he found a suitable harbour in those parts of Albania, he would carry the war into its territory’. By 1469 raiders had reached the Istrian peninsula, considerably closer to Venice. Mehmet’s scheme of bridging the lagoon seemed not impossible.

The Republic shuttled restlessly between spirited defence, peace initiatives and diplomatic alliances with Mehmet’s Islamic rivals in Asia Minor, in an attempt to find a solution to a drawn-out fight. The war would lull and reignite, depending on Mehmet’s strategic imperatives, and his health. When he crossed the Bosphorus to campaign in Asia or on the Black Sea, Venice breathed a temporary sigh of relief. His returns were always ominous. Intermittently bouts of morbid corpulence would afflict the sultan; unable to haul himself into the saddle, he shut himself away in the Topkapi palace and the campaigns would pause.

And he played the diplomatic game with consummate skill. His knowledge of Italian politics, supplied courtesy of Florentine and Genoese advisers at his court and paid informers, was excellent. He dallied expertly with Venetian hopes, encouraging their ambassadors then dropping them, accepting gifts then reverting to silence, periodically buying time to regroup, or proposing peace on terms he knew they would refuse. From time to time unattributed emissaries would approach Venetian outposts with suggestions that peace negotiations might be possible, then vanish. Mehmet probed their resolve, tested their war-weariness and spread disinformation, leaving the senate to pick painstakingly over one piece of data after another. Strategically he kept his cards close to his chest, making spies second-guess the objective of each new season’s campaign. He was famously secretive. When asked about a future campaign he was reported to have replied, ‘Be certain that if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had learned my secret, I would pull it out and consign it to the flames.’ The Rialto was a cockpit of rumours.

The Venetians soon grasped his methods. Considering yet another peace initiative in 1470, the senate resolved that

Venice was at the height of its powers; trade with the Mamluks continued to boom but the war was ruinous, its effects doubled by the snuffing out of trade in the Byzantine lands and the Black Sea. ‘The present state of affairs’ was always the Republic’s power deficit against the larger, better resourced Ottoman Empire.

Towards the end of the 1460s the voices of alarm were becoming increasingly shrill in diplomatic circles. Death and hardship fell heavily on the Greeks, Serbs and Hungarians – everyone on the continuously eroding frontiers of the Ottoman advance. Venice begged the pope for material aid, crusading tithes and support, ‘for when [the sultan] has occupied the coast of Albania, which God forbid, nothing else remains but for him to cross over into Italy, whenever he wishes, for the destruction of Italy’.

When Vettor Capello died at Negroponte in 1467, Venice appointed a new captain-general of the sea, Jacopo Loredan. Intelligence from Constantinople made it certain that sooner or later Mehmet would strike at Negroponte, ‘the shield and base of our estate in the east’. The imperative was to hold the island at all costs. It appointed a new provveditore to Negroponte with the self-same instructions. He was Dr Nicolo da Canal, previously ambassador at the Vatican. As a fail-safe, da Canal was given a further set of instructions:

It was a fateful decision. Da Canal was a highly learned lawyer, the best-educated man ever to be entrusted with the command of Venice’s fleets, but he was no Pisani or Carlo Zeno. Unfortunately, by the time that Mehmet did strike, it was da Canal at the helm.

In February 1469 a Venetian merchant on the island of Scios, Piero Dolfin, alerted the Republic to significant intelligence. His information was highly specific:

He went on to outline the preparations: so much flour was being diverted for ship’s biscuit that there was a shortage and unrest on the streets; large quantities of charcoal were being prepared for the manufacture of gunpowder; sixty ship’s caulkers had been despatched to the arsenal at Gallipoli; thousands of men were being called up; artillery was being hauled towards Salonica. He restated what everyone already knew about Negroponte: ‘The security of the whole state hangs on it. If Negroponte is lost, all the rest of the Levant will be in danger.’

On 8 March 1469, lawyer-admiral Nicolo da Canal received his commission as captain-general:

Dread news continued to gather pace throughout the months of 1469 and into 1470. The sultan’s force was wildly estimated at a hundred thousand men and 350 ships – a tidal wave of military might. Venice, already exhausted by seven years of war, made desperate preparations; ‘We are squeezing not merely money from every source but even blood, so to speak, from our very veins to aid the aforesaid city, if it is possible, lest such a slaughter and calamity fall upon all the Christians [in Negroponte].’ Again and again the Republic pressed the consequences of its loss on the Italian shore and the need for united action – to no avail. By the spring of 1470, Venice was on red alert. Two patroni of the arsenal were ordered to reside there permanently, the third sent to procure fleet supplies. Two thousand men were sent out on ten round ships with gunpowder and five hundred hired infantry. On 3 June, an Ottoman fleet set sail from Gallipoli.

It was sighted in the northern Aegean by a squadron of Venetian galleys. The galley commander, Geronimo Longo, was shaken by what he saw:

‘We need action now, not words,’ he continued breathlessly, assessing their cannon and other equipment.

Longo was predicting the collapse of the whole Stato da Mar. The Adriatic itself would be in terrible danger: Istria lay at the doorstep of Venice, just a night’s sail away.

In Venice, public prayers were being ordered. Late in the day, the danger was at last being perceived on the Italian mainland. Everyone now understood what defeat might bring. ‘The Turkish navy will soon be at Brindisi, then Naples, then Rome,’ wrote Cardinal Bessarion. ‘With the Venetians defeated, the Turks will rule the seas as they do the land.’ Pope Paul directed prayers be said throughout Italy. On 8 July a penitent procession of cardinals wound its way barefoot from the Vatican to St Peter’s; a Turk was baptised as a morale-raiser; everyone was exhorted to pray; indulgences were granted to people who fought or paid another to fight. Despite the vast fleet and Longo’s urgent words, the memory of Gallipoli buoyed Venetian confidence. Its naval supremacy had never been challenged in battle.

*

Negroponte – the Black Bridge – was the name the Venetians had given to both the principal town and the whole of the Greek island of Euboea. The island is a freak in the geological history of the Mediterranean. It lies so hard up against the eastern coast of Greece that it is hardly an island at all: a long ribbon of land, mimicking the rhythm of the mainland into which it interlocks, but separated from it by a drowned valley, the Euripus, which comprises a minor wonder of the marine world. The narrow channel acts like a hydraulic ram, pumping the water through in a series of tidal bores at the rate of fourteen a day, seven in each direction. At its narrowest point, where the island and the mainland are separated by a strait only fifty yards wide, the water surges with the speed of a mill race. It was here that the Venetians had their town, on the site of the ancient Greek settlement of Chalkis. This was the Italian state in miniature, impressively bastioned, with a harbour and a bridge linking it to the mainland that was surmounted, halfway, by a fortified tower and a double drawbridge to seal the island from intruders.

After the fall of Constantinople the strategic importance of the island was inestimable. Its population was never large – probably no more than three thousand – but it was Venice’s hub in the northern Aegean. ‘The place was well stocked with wealthy men and great merchants … so that it was in its greatest splendour and prosperity,’ according to a flattering contemporary account.

Negroponte, separated from mainland Greece by the Euripus. The Ottomans built their bridge to the right of the island’s black bridge. Da Canal’s fleet came down the strait from the north, to the left of the bridge.

 

Some time around 8 June, the Ottoman fleet reached Negroponte and anchored downstream from the city, disembarking men and guns on the shore. As intelligence had predicted months earlier, they immediately started constructing their own bridge of boats across the straits, south of the Black Bridge, whose drawbridge was now pulled up. What was obscured from the defenders was that this naval force was just one arm of a pincer movement. The shouts of defiance died on their lips on 15 June when a large army was spotted cresting the skyline on the mainland opposite, led by Mehmet himself. The personal presence of the sultan lent weight to a campaign; Mehmet only took to the field to win. Reining in his horse on the ridge, he spent two hours telescopically appraising the panorama below him: the narrow strait, the causeway with the fortress at its midpoint, then the moated and fortified city beyond, with the lion of St Mark carved on its outer walls and fluttering from its towers; his own fleet rocking at anchor. The immaculately co-ordinated operation was a trademark of Mehmet’s style. His aim was to deliver a knockout blow before the Venetian fleet could respond.

His army of perhaps twenty thousand jingled down the slope to the banks of the Euripus, followed by a long train of camels and mules with all the impedimenta of a beseiging army. He crossed the pontoon bridge, erected his tents and started to draw his forces tightly around the city. The stock request to surrender was shouted over the walls: none of the inhabitants would be harmed; they would be free from all taxation for ten years; ‘To any nobleman who own a villa, he will give two. And the magnificent bailo and captain he will appoint as lords if they want to stay here; if not he will give them great honours in Constantinople.’ Mehmet was well aware that no Venetian governor could tamely surrender a city and return home alive.

The response was spirited. The bailo, Paolo Erizzo, conscious that da Canal’s fleet was on its way, declared that the place was Venetian and would remain so. He promised that within a fortnight he would burn the sultan’s fleet and root up his tents, then warming to his theme, invited the sultan ‘to go and eat pig’s flesh and come and meet us at the ditch’. When this insult was translated, Mehmet narrowed his eyes and resolved that no one would come out alive.

What followed was a miniature re-enactment of the siege of Constantinople, a pitiless spectacle of cruelty and blood. Mehmet had brought a battery of twenty-one large bombards that pounded the high medieval walls of the town without ceasing, day and night, terrifying the population and gradually reducing their bastions to rubble. The Venetian cannon had some success of their own, knocking out guns and killing their crews, but the weight of Ottoman firepower was relentless. Incendiary bombs and mortars, which lobbed missiles into the heart of the city, compelled the terrified population to shelter in the lee of the outer walls, ‘since the firing for the most part hit the centre of the city’. ‘There was so much artillery and because the firing was so continuous,’ wrote Giovan-Maria Angiolello, a survivor of the siege, ‘it was impossible to make lasting repairs, since so many of our men were killed by the gunfire which scoured the city both frontally and from the flanks.’ The Turks inched their ladders and siege trenches forward into the rubble of the outer walls; on 29 June, accompanied by a wall of noise – the blaring of horns and the deep rhythmic thud of drums – Mehmet ordered a general assault. It was beaten back with much loss of life.

The bailo soon had to contend not only with continuous attacks but also the presence of a fifth column within his walls. Critical to the Venetian defence were five hundred mercenary infantry recruited largely from the Dalmatian coast under their commander Tommaso Schiavo. It was discovered that Schiavo had been sending envoys to the Ottoman camp; the administration covertly unpicked the plot, arresting and torturing his associates to expose a web of spying and intrigue that stretched years back and all the way to Venice. Mehmet had agents planted deep within the state. Under torture Schiavo’s brother revealed a plan to let the Turks into the city at the next attack. He was quietly killed.

The bailo now had to deal with Schiavo himself. It required extreme stealth as the traitor commanded a substantial force. Erizzo summoned him to the loggia – the administrative centre of the town – to discuss details of the defence. Doubtless suspicious, he came to the central square with a large and fully armed retinue. Entering the loggia, his fears were allayed by the bailo’s cordial manner. After some lengthy discussion, Schiavo dismissed his men back to their posts. With his back turned, twelve concealed men fell upon the commander and struck him down. He was strung up in the square by the foot.

Mehmet, meanwhile, was unaware of this turn of events. He was awaiting a pre-arranged signal to indicate that a certain bastion would surrender without a fight. The bailo prepared a trap. The signal flag was hoisted; when the Ottomans rushed forward, they were slaughtered, according to a chronicler, ‘like pigs’.

In the aftermath, the authorities in the town moved to kill many of the other ringleaders but the whole event had a deeply destabilising effect on the citizens’ morale. There was uproar in the streets and fighting between the townspeople and some Cretans on one side and the Dalmatian mercenaries on the other. An increasing number of the hired Slavs had to be put to death. With the supply of manpower ebbing away, public criers went round the streets ordering all boys of ten and over to the arsenal. Five hundred were chosen, rapidly trained in the use of handguns and sent to the walls, with the promise of a reward of two aspers for every Turk shot dead. ‘Each day in the evening,’ according to an eyewitness, ‘the bailo distributed to these boys three to five hundred aspers.’ A further major attack was beaten off.

The Ottomans continued to pound the walls, killing men on a daily basis, but Erizzo knew that if he could just hold out a little longer, da Canal would come. By the same token, Mehmet became increasingly anxious. To shore up his position, he had boats dragged over land and a second bridge constructed on the other side of the Black Bridge, as a defence against a rescue attempt down the channel from the north. He stepped up the bombardment, pulverising the walls and mounting attacks day and night to wear down the defence. He interspersed these with promises of safe conduct for a peaceful surrender. On the morning of 11 July, after three days of heavy gunfire, Mehmet was about to launch what he hoped might prove the final assault when he was stopped dead in his tracks.

Ottoman lookouts suddenly became aware of the Venetian fleet sweeping down the Euripus channel from its northern end. There were seventy-one ships, short of Longo’s recommended hundred, but still a sizeable force, including a powerful squadron of fifty-two war galleys and one weighty great galley, much feared by the Turks. They were under sail, making strong headway down the strait with the breeze and the tidal bore behind them. At a stroke Mehmet was horribly vulnerable. The fleet had only to smash the pontoon bridges to sever the Ottoman line of retreat and isolate it on the island. Mehmet was said to have shed tears of impotent rage at the imminent ruin of his plan; he mounted his horse ready to escape from the island. On the walls of the citadel the defenders’ spirits rose. Relief seemed certain. Another hour and the bridges would be broken.

Then, quite inexplicably, the fleet stopped and anchored upstream. And waited.

Nicolo da Canal, captain-general of the sea, was a scholar and a lawyer rather than a seaman, more used to carefully weighing legal options than to decisive action. At that moment the lawyer’s instinct came into play. He was worried for the safety of his ships against gunfire and unnerved by the strange shifts of the current. He ordered the fleet to pause. His captains urged him forward; he resisted. Two Cretans begged to charge the first pontoon bridge in the great galley with the momentum of the wind and the tidal bore. Some of the sailors had family in the city; the will was there to do or die. Reluctantly permission was granted. The galley raised sail, but just as it was underway, da Canal changed his mind. It was commanded back by cannon shot.

On the walls, the defenders watched all this – first with joy at the prospect of rescue, then with disbelief, finally with horror. They sent increasingly desperate signals to the static fleet – torches were lit and extinguished, then the standard of St Mark was raised and lowered. Finally, according to Angiolello, ‘a great crucifix, the size of a man, was constructed and carried along the side of the city facing towards our fleet, so the commanders of the fleet might be moved to have some pity on us in ways that they could well imagine for themselves’. To no avail. Da Canal took his fleet back upstream and anchored. ‘Our spirits sank,’ remembered Angiolello; ‘and [we] were left with almost no hope of salvation.’ Others cursed: ‘May God forgive the individual who failed to perform his duty!’

Mehmet was quickest to react. Responding to this surprising turn of events, he immediately announced an all-out attack early next day and personally toured the camp on horseback promising the troops everything in the city by way of plunder. He then commanded a large detachment of hand gunners to the upper bridge to protect it from da Canal’s fleet. In the dark hours before dawn, to the customary din of drums and trumpets, he ordered forward his least reliable troops – ‘the rabble’ – to wear down the defence. As they were shot down, the regulars advanced over the trampled corpses and stormed their way in. The whole population, men, women and children, participated in a last-ditch defence, barricading the narrow lanes and hurling scalding water, quicklime and boiling pitch on the enemy as it battled forward, foot by foot, street by street. By mid-morning they had reached the central square; from the fortress on the bridge, the defenders hoisted a black flag as a last despairing plea for help. Da Canal responded too little and too late. A half-hearted assault was mounted on the pontoon, but when the sailors saw the Ottoman flag fluttering from the walls, the captain-general raised his anchor and sailed off, leaving the despairing populace to a ghastly fate. Alvise Calbo, commander of the city, was killed in the Church of St Mark, Andrea Zane, the treasurer, in the Church of St Bastiano. Heaps of bodies were piled up in the streets. Mehmet remembered the jibes about pig meat and issued stern orders: no prisoners. Those who surrendered were slaughtered on the spot. Others were pointedly taken to the Church of the Holy Apostles to be killed. Their heads were piled up outside the patriarch’s house. In cold fury, Mehmet ordered any of his men hiding profitable captives to be beheaded along with their victims; he had the galleys searched accordingly.

So many tried to escape over the bridge that it collapsed, hurling them into the sea, but the fort in the middle was unreachable and still holding out. Eventually the defenders surrendered with a promise of safe conduct. When this was reported to Mehmet, he turned furiously on the pasha responsible: ‘If you gave your word [to spare their lives], you did not remember my oath.’ They were all killed. In some accounts, it was reported that the bailo was among those on the bridge and that Mehmet had agreed to spare his head. He complied to the letter: the bailo was sandwiched between planks and sawn in half. More likely he had died at the walls. It does appear that the sultan exacted terrible revenge. Particularly enraged by the mere boys who had shot down his men so effectively, he had all the male survivors ten years and above, about eight hundred, brought into his presence. Their hands were tied behind their backs; they were made to kneel in a large circle, then beheaded one by one, creating a pattern of corpses. The bodies were thrown in the sea, the surviving women and children marched off into slavery.

Despite Mehmet’s oath, a few did survive, among them Giovan-Maria Angiolello, taken off as a slave, and a monk, Jacopo dalla Castellana, who was probably able to disguise himself. His short account ends autobiographically: ‘I, Brother Jacopo dalla Castellana, saw all these events, and escaped from the island because I speak both Turkish and Greek.’

The Venetian fleet ineffectually tracked the enemy convoy back to Gallipoli, then trailed home in disgrace.

*

The news from Negroponte was, if anything, more devastating than that from Constantinople seventeen years earlier. First there were just rumours. On 31 July a shipwrecked sailor turned up with some damp letters from the rector of Lepanto: fires had been seen along the enemy coast – ominous signs of a victory. It was quickly followed by confirmed reports. The senate was struck dumb with shock.

Bells rang throughout the city; penitential processions wound through the squares; preachers lamented Christian sin. ‘The whole city is so struck with horror that the inhabitants seem dead,’ wrote the Milanese ambassador. The fall of Negroponte was the first intimation of imperial decline; it felt like the beginning of the end. ‘Now,’ wrote the chronicler Domenico Malipiero, ‘it seems that the greatness of Venice has been humbled and our pride destroyed.’ In that second, far-seeing commentators glimpsed the future decline of the Stato da Mar and its sea power. The shocking news was spread across Italy by new-fangled Venetian printing presses.

The senate attempted to maintain a stiff upper lip. The messages it sent out to the states of Italy were resolute:

However it was soon transmitting a more desperate appeal for help, unity, money and men. ‘All Italy and all Christendom are in the same boat,’ wrote the doge to the duke of Milan. ‘No coastline, no province, no part of Italy, no matter how remote and hidden it may seem, can be considered safer than the rest.’ The pope preached crusade again but it made no difference. There was not one state reluctant to enter into agreement with Mehmet. As for da Canal, he avoided the mandatory death sentence. The senate recognised that the mistake had been in the original commission – he should never have been appointed. He was banished permanently to the dusty town of Portogruaro, thirty miles from Venice. For the educated lawyer, ‘born to read books but not to be a sailor’, it might have been as distant as the Black Sea. But the lessons of his appointment had not been learned: the mistakes would be repeated a generation later.

*

Venice fought on alone, losing ground little by little. Most of the fortresses gained early in the war were lost again; Coron, Modon and Lepanto held out because they could be continuously supported by sea. Peace initiatives came and went; alliances within Italy and with Hungary and Poland proved fruitless. After Mehmet crushed Uzun Hassan in 1473, Venice’s ally on the Persian frontier, his full attention was turned to the Venetian possessions in Albania. In 1475 he finally snuffed out Genoese and Venetian colonies in the Black Sea. By 1477, the mood had become grim indeed.

There were small victories in an otherwise unhalted decline. In early 1472 the new captain-general of the sea, Pietro Mocenigo, was approached by a Sicilian called Antonello with a proposition. The young man, who had been taken away as a slave after the fall of Negroponte, offered to sabotage the arsenal at Gallipoli. Mocenigo agreed. Antonello was provided with a small boat, six volunteers, barrels of gunpowder, sulphur, turpentine, and a large quantity of oranges. Sailing up the Dardanelles with their materials hidden under the fruit, they approached Gallipoli at night on 20 February. The defences of the arsenal were evidently slack, a fact that Antonello well knew. Creeping ashore, each man carrying a sack of gunpowder on his shoulder, they forced the lock on the arsenal with pliers and made their way into the magazines. They stacked gunpowder amongst the sails, weapons and rigging, laid trails of gunpowder, then set light to them from outside. Nothing happened. The powder had got damp on the voyage. Finally they managed to set fire to a large quantity of pitch and tallow. The night sky erupted in flame; Antonello began firing the galleys as the Turks came running, then took to the boat.

Pulling away, the saboteurs were overtaken by disaster; a sack of powder set fire to their vessel. They managed to row back to shore and scuttle it, but were caught and hauled off to face Mehmet’s wrath. Antonello was fearless to the last. He admitted freely to the deed without the need for torture and boldly confronted the ‘Terror of the World’, declaring

Mehmet’s response to the bravery of a doomed man was somehow typical. ‘The sultan listened to his words with patience and much admiration – then ordered his decapitation.’ The fire at Gallipoli burned for ten days. It gutted the arsenal and caused a hundred thousand ducats’ worth of damage.

Elsewhere Venice fought resolutely to stem the Ottoman tide. Antonio Loredan, a Venetian commander of the old school, conducted a heroic defence of the Albanian fort of Scutari against overwhelming odds. The same feat was repeated in 1478 when Mehmet came in person to supervise the capture of this irritating but strategic obstacle, but the expense of war was mounting steadily. By the mid-1470s the annual cost had risen to 1,250,000 ducats a year. Venice was war-weary and demoralised; hope would be raised from time to time by the prospect of peace, then dashed again. There were repeated rumours that Mehmet had died, only to be confounded by a new campaign. Year after year the sultan raised fresh armies and set out for unpredictable destinations. And in the Venetian response there was a creeping loss of nerve. They were still superior at sea but failed repeatedly to engage the Ottomans in open battle. Maybe, by now, the consequences of failure were so daunting that no captain of the sea dared take the risk. Like Mocenigo, they preferred saboteurs to sea battles.

The Ottomans kept drawing nearer. In 1477 freelance Ottoman cavalry entered the plains of Friuli, plundering and killing, burning houses, woods, crops and farms. Captives were carried back to the sultan. In the city these strikes induced terror. From the top of the campanile in St Mark’s Square the Venetians could see a line of flame marching across the landscape just thirty miles beyond their lagoon. Mehmet’s appetite for war seemed inexhaustible. When the Venetians agreed peace with him the following year, he changed his mind, ordered another attack on Friuli and went in person to the siege of Scutari. The king of Naples offered Mehmet his ports for a final assault on the Republic. In Constantinople, the sultan was coining gold ducats in imitation of Venice’s unassailable currency. They bore the legend ‘Sultan Mehmet, son of Murat Khan, glorious be his victory!’ and on the reverse an assertion of imperial power across all terrains: ‘The Coiner of Gold, the Lord of Power and Victory, on Land and Sea’.

*

Venice had reached the limits of endurance. It had fought to the point of despair. Pessimism and plague infected the stagnant backwaters of the city. The sight of burning Friuli terrified the populace. Heretofore Venice had been too proud to negotiate on any but reasonable terms. Now it was prepared to concede almost anything; dignity was abandoned, peace essential. The senate despatched their most capable statesman, the Cretan Giovanni Dario, with almost limitless freedom to negotiate. He was ordered only to protect Venice’s commercial interests as best he could; almost anything else could be conceded. Mehmet demanded harsh terms. Scutari, so bravely defended, was given up; Negroponte was gone for ever and all other territories taken in the war returned to the Turks. After 1479, the Republic controlled just twenty-six forts in the Peloponnese; the Ottomans had fifty. In addition they paid the sultan a hundred thousand gold ducats outright and a further ten thousand a year for the right to trade in the Ottoman Empire. The bailo was restored to Constantinople. With him went the painter Gentile Bellini as part of the peace settlement, to decorate his palace and to produce an imperial portrait of the conqueror.

Venice was relieved and exhausted. The war had lasted for sixteen years. The Venetians considered it an exceptional event in their history and referred to it as the Long War, but they were mistaken. It was just the overture, an opening skirmish.

They had fought alone and had gained no help or credit from Christian Europe. The following year, Mehmet did what Venice had already predicted he would if unchecked: he sent an invasion force to Italy. Venetian squadrons were ordered to track the fleet but not to interfere in any way; diplomats were to keep silent about all the preparations that they had observed. This armada attacked and sacked the town of Otranto, massacred its population and felled the bishop at his altar. This strike into the heart of Christendom, just three hundred miles from Rome, caused utter consternation. Terror was palpable, blame apportioned. The Venetians, who had assumed intermittently the role of Christendom’s shield, were held accountable for watching the Ottomans sail by. In the aftermath it was declared that ‘this business arises from the Signoria of Venice’. The Venetians were excoriated by their fellow Christians for their inactivity, or connivance – ‘traders in human blood, traitors to the Christian faith’, the French howled – but they had fought alone for sixteen years and would take no lectures from anybody, nor would they any longer entertain talk of a Christian league. They had paid a fortune in money and blood for Ottoman peace. In reality the lords of a quarter and half a quarter had been squeezed into neutrality by more powerful forces. No one burned with a fiercer joy when an emissary arrived in Venice on 19 May 1481 with the news of Mehmet’s death. The cry ‘The great eagle is dead!’ rang through the city. Church bells clanged; there were services of deliverance and fires in the streets. The Otranto beachhead was abandoned – and with it the fickle notion of crusades.

*

Meanwhile the trade with the Mamluks, for all its difficulties, was at its peak. The Venetians were assiduous in their collection of commercial intelligence about trading conditions and political disturbances that might disrupt the spice business, but there were forces at work in world trade that had escaped their gaze. During the muda season of 1487, while Venetian spice traders were buying ginger and pepper in Alexandria, elsewhere in the city two Moroccan merchants were dying of fever. The city’s governor was so certain of their fate that he had already appropriated their property, according to right. Miraculously the two men survived, demanded the return of their goods and departed for Cairo.

In fact they were not Moroccans nor were they merchants. Their names were Pero da Covilha and Afonso de Paiva and they were Portuguese spies. Fluent Arabic speakers, they had been sent from Lisbon to explore the spice route to India. For seventy years Portuguese navigators had been inching down the west coast of Africa, leaving stone crosses on the headlands to mark the extent of their voyages as an encouragement to their successors. The following year Bartolomeu Dias would round the southern tip of Africa, which he named the Cape of Good Hope, but was unable to go on; his men refused, fearing they might sail off the edge of the world. The two spies were to try to discover all they could about the routes to India across the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa. The secrecy of their mission was not just to avoid the Arab gaze – discovery would mean certain death – but also to conceal their interest from Christopher Columbus and the Spanish king, who had competitive interests. The prize was to win the race to cut out the Arab and Venetian middlemen and to buy spices in bulk and at source.

For two years Covilha criss-crossed the Indian ocean disguised as an Arab merchant, passing between the ports of India and the coasts of Africa, learning about the pattern of the monsoon winds, the currents, harbours and spice bazaars, and recording his findings on a secret chart. By the time he returned to Cairo, Paiva was dead, in unknown circumstances. In 1490 Covilha handed over his chart and his report to Jewish agents who had come to Cairo to find him. The master spy never made it home. Addicted to travel, he went to Mecca as a Muslim pilgrim, then to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, from where the king of the country refused to let him depart. Thirty years later a Portuguese mission found him still alive, living like an Ethiopian. His information, however, did make it back to Lisbon. It resolved vital blanks in the Portuguese navigators’ maps.