Epilogue

 

 

 

RETURN

 

A few miles west of Heraklion on the coastal highway, there is a prominent rocky outcrop above the sea. If you cross the road and follow the path round its base, you pass by an archway and vaulted tunnel onto an open platform with a wide prospect of the Aegean. The Cretans call this place Paleokastro – the Old Fort. It was built by the Genoese in 1206, then developed by the Venetians to guard the seaward approaches to Candia. It’s a lonely spot. At its outer edge the stone bastion falls away steeply down the base of the cliff; there is a smell of thyme on the soft wind; the smack of sea; the ruins of arched magazines; a subterranean chapel. In the distance modern Heraklion sprawls beyond a blue bay.

It was here in the summer of 1669, after the longest siege in world history, that the captain-general Francesco Morosini agreed the surrender of Venetian Crete. For twenty-one years, Venice engaged in a titanic struggle with the Ottomans for its hub of empire, but Priuli had been right. One by one its colonial possessions would be prised away. Cyprus, held for less than a century, was lost in 1570; Tinos, its most northern island in the Aegean, lasted until 1715; by then the rest were gone, and the trade had died. The muda system was in decline by the 1520s. The last galleys anchored in the Thames soon after. Pirates started to choke the sea.

Only Venice’s home waters held firm. Century after century the Ottomans hammered at Corfu but the door of the Adriatic stayed shut, and when Napoleon finally marched into St Mark’s Square, burned the Bucintoro and trundled the bronze horses off to Paris in wheeled carts, there was something approaching grief along the Dalmatian coast. At Perasto, the governor made an emotional speech in the Venetian dialect and buried the flag of St Mark beneath the altar; the people wept.

The siege of Candia 1648–69

 

The visible remnants of the Stato da Mar lie scattered across the sea; hundreds of crumbling towers and forts; the impressive defences of Candia and Famagusta, with their angled bastions and deep ditches, powerless in the end against Turkish guns; neat harbours at Lepanto, Kyrenia and Hania, drawn tightly around pretty bays; churches, bell towers, arsenals and quays; countless Venetian lions, elongated, squat, tubby, winged and wingless, gruff, fierce, indignant and surprised, guard harbour walls, surmount gateways and spout water from elegant fountains. Far away, at the mouth of the Don, archaeologists still dig breastplates, crossbow bolts and Murano glass from the Ukrainian earth, but overall the traces of Venice’s imperial adventure are surprisingly light. There was always something provisional about the Stato da Mar. Like Venice itself, it lived with the idea of impermanence; harbours and ports came and went and the roots it put down on many foreign shores were not deep. The lintel of more than one collapsed Venetian house on Crete bears the Latin motto ‘The world is nothing but smoke and shadows’. As if they knew, deep down, that all the imperial razzmatazz of trumpets, ships and guns was only a mirage.

Over centuries tens of thousands of Venetians engaged in this show – merchants, seamen, colonists, soldiers and administrators. It was mainly a world of men, but there was family life too. Like Dandolo, many never came back; they died of war and plague, were swallowed up by the sea or buried in foreign earth, but Venice was a centrist empire which retained a magnetic hold on its people. The merchant isolated in the fondaci of Alexandria, the consul watching the Mongol steppes, the galeotto working his oar – for all, the city loomed large. The idea of return was potent – the ship at last passing through the lidi again, feeling a different motion to the sea and the familiar skyline rising pale and insubstantial in the shifting light.

People on the quays, watched, idle or intent, for approaching ships. And until a seaman standing in the prow was close enough to shout, those craning to catch his words might wait in trepidation to hear if the news was good or bad – if a husband or son had died at sea, if the deal had been done, if there would be lamentation or joy. Landfall brought all the vicissitudes of life. People returned with gold, spices, plague and grief. Failed admirals came clanking in chains, triumphant ones with trumpets and cannon fire, trailing captured banners in the sea, the gonfalon of St Mark streaming in the wind. Ordelafo Falier stepped down the gangplank with the bones of St Stephen. Pisani’s body came packed in salt. Antonio Grimani survived the disgrace of Zonchio and became a doge; so did Gritti the spy. Marco Polo, wild-eyed and anonymous, burst through the door of his house like Ulysses returned – and no one recognised him. Felix Fabri came on the spice fleet of 1480 with the weather so cold that the oars had to break the ice in the canals. He arrived in the dark, just after Christmas. The night was clear and bright; from the deck the snowy tops of the Dolomites glimmered under a large moon. No one could sleep. As dawn rose, the passengers could see the golden roof of the campanile glinting in the sun, topped by the angel Gabriel welcoming them home. All the bells of Venice were ringing for the fleet’s return. The ships were dressed with banners and flags; the galeotti started to sing and, according to custom, threw their old clothing, rotted by salt and storm, overboard. ‘And when we had paid our fare, and the charges,’ wrote Fabri,