The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (35 page)

The attacks came in wave after wave: first the irregular
bashibazouks
–untrained and with little staying power, but readily expendable and ideal for demoralising the defenders and making them easier victims for the more sophisticated fighters that would follow them; then the regiments of Anatolian Turks, fully trained and superbly disciplined, pious Muslims to a man and determined to win eternal rewards in paradise by being the first to enter the greatest city in Christendom; finally the janissaries, advancing across the plain at the double, their ranks unbroken and dead straight despite all the missiles that the defenders could hurl against them. Soon after dawn, a bolt struck Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and smashed through his chest. Confusion spread through the ranks of the Genoese, many of whom fled, but by now it hardly mattered. Within an hour the Turks had made a breach in the wall and were streaming into the city. The Emperor, seeing that all was lost, plunged into the fray where the fighting was thickest. He was never seen again.

By now it was morning, with the waning moon high in the sky. The hours that followed were horrible indeed. By noon the streets of Constantinople were running red with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped and impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their golden frames, books ripped from their silver bindings. In the Church of the Holy Wisdom, matins were already in progress when the berserk conquerors were heard approaching. The poorer and more unattractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot, the remainder lashed together and led off to the Turkish camps for their captors to use as they liked. The officiating priests continued with the Mass for as long as possible before being slaughtered where they stood, at the high altar; there are among the Orthodox faithful those who still believe that at the last moment one or two of them gathered up the most precious of the sacred vessels and mysteriously disappeared with them into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they will remain until the day Constantinople becomes once again a Christian city, when they will resume the liturgy at the point at which it was interrupted.

The Sultan had promised his men the three days of looting to which by Islamic tradition they were entitled, but the orgy of violence had been on such a scale that there were no protests when he brought it to a close on the same day as it had begun. He himself waited until the worst excesses were over before entering the city. Then, in the late afternoon, he rode slowly down the principal thoroughfare, the Mese, to St Sophia. Dismounting outside the central doors, he stooped and picked up a handful of earth which, in a gesture of humility, he sprinkled over his turban; only then did he enter the building. At his command the senior imam mounted the pulpit and proclaimed the name of Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate: there was no God but God, and Mohammed was his Prophet. That was the moment. Cross gave way to Crescent; St Sophia became a mosque; the Byzantine Empire was supplanted by the Ottoman; Constantinople became Istanbul. At twenty-one, Mehmet II had achieved his highest ambition.

The news of the fall of Constantinople, and with it the Byzantine Empire, was received with horror throughout Christendom. As the refugees spread westward they carried the epic story with them, and the story doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed. The two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in making the best terms they could with the Sultan.

The Venetian relief fleet–which had in fact been largely equipped by Pope Nicholas V–was anchored off Chios, waiting for a favourable wind to continue its journey to Constantinople, when some of the Genoese ships that had escaped from Galata drew alongside with the news. Its captain, Giacomo Loredan, promptly withdrew to Euboea, there to await further orders. Meanwhile, a special envoy, Bartolomeo Marcello, was sent at once to congratulate Mehmet on his victory, to emphasise the Republic’s firm intent to observe the peace treaty concluded with his father and confirmed by himself, and to request the restitution of all Venetian ships remaining in Constantinople, pointing out that these were not warships but merchantmen. If the Sultan agreed to renew the treaty, Marcello was to ask that Venice should be allowed to maintain her trading colony in the city, with the same rights and privileges that she had enjoyed under Byzantine rule. Mehmet proved a hard bargainer. After the best part of a year’s negotiation the ships and prisoners were released and the Venetian colony allowed to return; no longer, however, would it enjoy those territorial and commercial concessions on which its former power and prosperity had depended. The Latin presence in the east was already on the decline.

The Genoese had even more at stake than the Venetians, and had continued to play their double game. In Galata, their
podestà
had opened the gates the moment the Turks appeared, and had done everything he could to prevent his countrymen’s unseemly exodus. After a time he was given assurances that the Genoese of Galata would remain in possession of their property and might practise their religion unhindered as long as they rang no bells and built no new churches, but they must surrender their arms and destroy their fortifications and citadel. Theoretically the Genoese trading colonies along the northern shore of the Black Sea–including the prosperous port of Caffa in the Crimea–would be allowed to continue, but since the death of Antonio Rizzo few sailors ventured through the straits and few merchants were prepared to pay the immense tolls demanded. With the exception of the island of Chios–which was to remain Genoese until 1566–by the end of the century Genoa’s commercial empire was gone.

In Rome, Pope Nicholas showed none of the cynicism and self-interest of the merchant republics. He did his utmost to galvanise the west for a Crusade, a cause which was enthusiastically supported by the two Greek cardinals, Bessarion and Isidore, as also by the papal legate in Germany, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. But it was no use. Two or three hundred years before, Christian zeal had been enough to launch military expeditions for the rescue of holy places of pilgrimage; with the advent of Renaissance humanism, however, the old religious fire had been extinguished. Europe had dithered, and Byzantium had died. With the Ottoman army stronger than it had ever been, the old Empire was beyond all hope of resurrection.

The decade following the fall of Constantinople saw a number of mopping-up operations, notably in Greece, where the Latin Duchy of Athens ended in 1456 with the Turkish capture of the city. The last duke, Franco Acciajuoli, was murdered four years later when the Despotate of the Morea, in which he had taken refuge, came to a similar end. The Venetian colony of Negroponte–better known to us as the island of Euboea–fell in 1470. The still remaining Christian outposts included Crete, Cyprus, one or two strongholds in the Morea and a few of the Ionian Islands–notably Corfu, Cephalonia and Zante–together with a narrow strip of the Dalmatian coast. All of these remained Venetian. But in the Balkan hinterland, part of Bosnia had fallen as early as 1438 and the rest, together with Herzegovina in the south, was to crumble between 1463 and 1480.

There was, however, one other stronghold: the island of Rhodes, where since 1306 the Knights of St John had been simultaneously running their hospital and waging their own war against the infidel. For the west, they were now the first line of defence against the march of Islam: no longer a medieval anachronism but conceivably the very saviours of Christendom. For Sultan Mehmet, on the other hand, they were a permanent irritation, and in the spring of 1480 he moved against them. His army was probably about 70,000 strong, carried to the island by a fleet of some fifty ships. Also on board was a number of those formidable cannon which had served him so well at Constantinople. Against this huge host the Knights opposed about 600 members of their order, together with perhaps 1,500 paid foreign troops and local militia. They could also count on the active cooperation of the Rhodiots themselves, Christians to a man. They were commanded by their Grand Master, the fifty-seven-year-old Pierre d’Aubusson. Several years before, knowing that attack was inevitable, he had summoned the greatest military architects of the day to make the city of Rhodes as nearly impregnable as any city could be. Now that the Turks were at last on their way, he was ready for them.

The siege began on 23 May. Already by the middle of June parts of the city wall, pounded by nearly 1,000 cannonballs a day, were beginning to crumble, but somehow the Knights held firm. On 27 July came the final assault. As usual, the
bashi-bazouks
, untrained and expendable, led the way, followed by the janissaries. Bursting through what was left of the wall by the so-called Italian Tower, they managed to hoist the standard of the Prophet within the city; but then the Knights staged a massive counter-attack. The Grand Master was badly wounded a moment later, but suddenly panic spread through the
bashibazouk
line; they turned and fled. Why they did so remains a mystery. It has even been suggested that they were terrified by the sight of the Christian banners, emblazoned with pictures of the Virgin and saints, twisting and turning in the wind; they were after all Muslims, most of whom would never before have seen two-dimensional representations of the human face or figure. Whatever the reason, it is a rare thing indeed in the history of warfare for a besieging army to take flight after the walls are breached; for the Turkish army, triumph was from one moment to the next transformed into disaster. Probably some 4,000 lost their lives, including 300 janissaries who had invaded the Jewish quarter and had been cut off there.

The Knights had won a battle, but they had not yet won the war. Furious at his defeat, Sultan Mehmet immediately began preparing a fresh army, which he resolved to lead in person against them the following year. Had he done so, they would have stood no chance; the defences could never have been repaired in time. But in the spring of 1481, as he was riding south through Asia Minor on his way to take up his command, the Sultan was stricken by a sudden dysenteric fever. A day or two later he was dead. The Knights of St John were to hold their lovely island for another forty years, but now it was an island in more than just the geographical sense. The eastern Mediterranean had become, to all intents and purposes, a Muslim sea.

CHAPTER XIII

The Catholic Kings and the Italian Adventure

In the western Mediterranean on the other hand, Christianity was once again in the ascendant. The Spanish Reconquista was making slow progress, but the salient date for Spain–perhaps one of the most significant dates in all Spanish history–was 17 October 1469, which saw the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon to his cousin Isabella of Castile. Neither then possessed a crown, nor, technically, did the union at once give rise to a united Spain; the two kingdoms were not yet one. The monarchs–
los Reyes Catolicos
, ‘the Catholic Kings’, to give them the title conferred on them by the Spanish (Borgia) Pope Alexander VI–though soon to be sovereign in their own homelands, were but consorts in each other’s. Of the two, Castile was very much the senior partner. In the marriage capitulations, Ferdinand bound himself to observe the laws and usages of Castile, to reside there (never leaving it without the consent of his wife) and to acknowledge her always as sovereign of Castile, he bearing the title of king by courtesy only. Nonetheless, when he succeeded to the Aragonese throne in 1479 his authority extended also over Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, and included of course the great city of Barcelona, which had developed–since the fall of Constantinople had caused Genoa and Venice to draw in their horns–a commercial importance in all respects equal to theirs, with trading posts and consulates extending as far as Alexandria and even beyond.

Thus, from the beginning of their joint reign, Ferdinand and Isabella ruled over a far larger area of the Iberian peninsula than had been united for many centuries. They took immense pains, moreover, to display the closeness of their relationship: almost all official documents were issued in their joint names, and their propaganda endlessly–and exaggeratedly–stressed the love they bore each other. It seems legitimate, therefore, to see their marriage as the foundation-stone of modern Spain, and the vast conquests that they were to add to the kingdom during their lifetime served still further to emphasise its integrity.

The first of these conquests was that of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, which despite its small size provided an example of civilised luxury which had no equal in Spain, and very few elsewhere. Despite the Arabic roots of its culture, relatively few of its people were in fact Arab; there had been little Arab immigration in recent centuries. In the towns the bulk of the population was composed of Berbers from North Africa; in the country the majority were native Spaniards, whose families had long since converted to Islam. As the Reconquista took its course, the kingdom had steadily diminished in size; Cordoba had been lost in 1236, Seville in 1248. By the end of the fifteenth century it could boast only two important cities: the city of Granada itself, with its population of about 60,000, and the port of Malaga, through which passed all the gold, the troops and the munitions collected from Africa and the Near East to carry on the holy war against Christian Spain.

On 2 January 1492, after ten years of resistance, the last Moorish ruler, Abu Abdullah Mohammed XI–known to Europeans as Boabdil–surrendered his kingdom and retired to Fez (though his wife Fatima and their children took Christian baptism and settled in Madrid). His surrender marked the beginning of the most crucial four months of Spanish history, seeing as they did both the intensification of that relentless course of religious persecution which was to have so disastrous an effect on the strength and vitality of Spain, and the launching of the most celebrated voyage of exploration ever known.

Few rulers in European history have shown themselves narrower or more bigoted than Isabella. Already in 1478 she and her husband had requested a papal bull introducing the Inquisition into Castile. It was at this time principally (and rather surprisingly) directed against the converted Jews–whose popular name,
marranos
(pigs), shows all too clearly how little their conversions had done to better their lot. Three years later all
marranos
charged with heresy were summoned to recant or face death at the stake. The first
auto-da-fé
was held in 1481, with six victims. By the time of Isabella’s death in 1504 there had been more than 2,000.

Less than three months after the capitulation of Granada, the Queen felt strong enough to push her policy further. Encouraged by her Inquisitor-General Torquemada–who was himself originally Jewish–on 30 March she decreed that all Jews remaining unconverted by the end of June would be expelled from Spain, all their property confiscated. More than 100,000 were driven out, resulting in a vast Sephardic diaspora in northern Europe and the Near East. Several countries–notably the Netherlands–gave them a warm welcome; the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit II went further, sending a whole fleet of ships to their rescue.
¹²¹

Now it was the turn of the Muslims. By the terms of their capitulation they had been guaranteed their personal and religious liberty; Isabella had made no attempt to expel them, if only because she had no wish to see the country depopulated, its commerce and agriculture going to ruin. Instead, she had agreed to what was effectively a state within a state: an Islamic community whose faith, laws and customs were to remain inviolate. Many Muslims had nevertheless sought voluntary exile across the straits in Africa, particularly in Oran and Algiers, but to thousands of others the Queen’s concessions must have seemed too good to be true–as indeed they soon proved to be. Isabella moved more carefully this time, only very gradually tightening the screw, but with every month that passed the Muslims found themselves treated more like pariahs, the practice of their religion more difficult and the pressure on them to accept Christian baptism more insistent. These attempts at forced conversion resulted in serious insurrections, and in 1502 a royal decree spelled out the choice once again: conversion, expulsion or execution. Unlike the Jews, the vast majority of the Muslims chose the first. By 1503, at least in theory, there were none left in Castile, but since few people believed in the genuineness of their conversion, the Moriscos (as the converts were called) supplied welcome new fodder for the Inquisition.

The war with Granada had been expensive; with its end spare funds again became available, and it was these that made possible the long-planned expedition by the Genoese Christopher Columbus, which was to end in the discovery of the Americas. Although Columbus had to defend his propositions to two separate commissions of enquiry, the first composed largely of churchmen and theologians, the second of philosophers, astronomers and cosmographers, the reasons for the Catholic Kings’ eventual authorisation to him to proceed were not far to seek: the mopping-up of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks had effectively closed the traditional Mediterranean trade route to the east. Fortunately it was now agreed that the world was round, and that the Indies could consequently be reached by sailing in either direction. The most important question now to be settled was which of the two routes was the shorter. The Portuguese, having learnt their seamanship from the Genoese and now inspired by their brilliant Prince Henry the Navigator, were already putting their money on the eastward route and feeling their way down the African coast.

There was nothing new about the idea of circumnavigating Africa. If we are to believe Herodotus, the Phoenicians had in effect achieved it around 600
BC
,
¹²²
and Genoa had made another attempt in 1291, sending the brothers Ugolino and Guido Vivaldi with two galleys to find their way to India by the ocean route. (Venice had never bothered; her compact with Mameluke Egypt and virtual control of the shipping lane through the Red Sea made it unnecessary.) The Vivaldis had been unlucky–they had foundered off the Canaries–and the fourteenth century had come and gone with no further attempts. In the later fifteenth, however–by which time there had been significant progress in the arts of shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation–it was a different story. The Cape of Storms (renamed by John II of Portugal the Cape of Good Hope) was rounded by the Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz in 1488; after that it was only a matter of time before the route to India was assured.

The age-old rivalry between Spain and Portugal naturally inclined the Spaniards to favour the westward alternative, and when Columbus set about persuading Ferdinand and Isabella of its virtues he was to a very large extent preaching to the converted. But the main purpose of his journey was, as always with the Spanish explorers, twofold: gold and the Gospel. From the Indies (parts of which were believed to have been evangelised by St Thomas) it was thought to be possible not only to open up a profitable trade in the fabled luxuries of the East but, with the help of the Great Khan–a wholly mythical figure who was believed to be friendly to Christians if not a Christian himself–to spread Christianity throughout the unknown subcontinent. Here was a proposal that went straight to the Queen’s heart. True, her own kingdom had been theoretically cleared of the taint of Islam, but in the eastern and central Mediterranean the Ottoman advance showed no sign of slowing down. It had now reached as far as Italy, where bands of mounted Turkish irregulars had overrun the Friuli, laying waste the countryside, approaching so near to Venice that from the top of the campanile of St Mark the flames of the burning villages could be plainly seen. In 1480 the Sultan had launched a fleet of 100 sail against the port of Otranto in Calabria and invested it without difficulty. Naples was now threatened, and even Rome itself. Clearly Christendom must take decisive action, but how? Pope Pius II had tried on two separate occasions to launch another Crusade, but had met with little response. In any case, the Ottoman army consisted of highly-trained professionals. In a direct confrontation it would be effectively invincible.

Here, perhaps, lay the answer to the problem: to approach the Turkish horde from the east, attacking it from the rear, where it would be weak and probably undefended. Isabella hesitated no longer. She was, she believed, financing not just the opening-up of a new and important trade route; she was taking the first exploratory but essential step towards what might be the last Crusade against the infidel. Ferdinand too was enthusiastic; Columbus later claimed to have brought a smile to the monarch’s lips when he suggested that the profits from the great enterprise would pay for the conquest of Jerusalem. That smile may of course have been cynical, but Ferdinand could hardly have forgotten the old prophecy of the ‘promised prince’ who would raise his banner over the Holy City and rule the world. He and Isabella gave their formal approval on 17 April 1492, putting at Columbus’s disposal the three tiny caravels–the largest of them little more than 100 feet long–that were to change that world beyond all recognition.

The story of Christopher Columbus and his epic voyage is not ours. It is important to us, however, in the effect it had on the fortunes of the Mediterranean. Just five years before the
Niña,
the
Pinta
and the
Santa Maria
set sail, Diaz had rounded the Cape; just six years afterwards, on 20 May 1498, his compatriot Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Calicut (Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast of India. Da Gama’s visit was not particularly successful; nobody wanted the distinctly shoddy merchandise he had brought with him, and he seems to have quite unnecessarily antagonised his hosts by his arrogance and quickness to take offence. His return journey, too, was plagued by bad luck. He missed the monsoon, thirty of his sailors died of scurvy, one of his ships had to be scuppered, and we do not even know the date he returned to Lisbon. But return he did, to uproarious acclaim. Not only had he found a continuous sea route to India; he had proved that Portuguese ships were capable–just–of getting there and back.

Another century and more was to pass before the Cape route was in regular use; throughout the sixteenth century there would be plenty of traffic passing through the Mediterranean. But henceforth the writing was on the wall. Even when the Turks did not make trouble–and they usually did–all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan which might take two or three years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from London or Lisbon and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the old, possessed as it was of a fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain–and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, Pope Alexander had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories;
¹²³
within twenty-five years, the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder that the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west. Jerusalem could wait.

It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening-up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralysing blow. Gradually, however, men realised that–at least from the commercial point of view–the Middle Sea had become a backwater. To the east of the Adriatic it was now passable only with great difficulty and much good luck. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other and better fish to fry. Not for another three hundred years, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.