The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (51 page)

But his heroism, inspiring as it had been, had in no way improved Venice’s basic position in Crete. Of the four principal strongholds ranged along the northern coast of the island–the fifth, Sitia, was so far away to the east that it could for the moment be ignored–two were already in enemy hands; of the other two, Soudha had been blockaded from the sea for well over a year and was desperately short of food, and both it and Candia itself had now been struck by plague, which not only destroyed morale but made adequate garrisoning impossible. The Turks, however, outside the walls, remained free of the disease, and it was in the summer of 1647 that they first laid serious siege to Candia–on which, as the capital, the whole future of the colony depended.

The siege of Candia was to last for twenty-two years, during which Venice, virtually single-handed, defended the little town–its civilian population numbering only some 10–12,000–against the combined military and naval force of the Ottoman Empire. In former times so long a resistance would have been inconceivable, if only because the interdependence of Turks and Venetians in commercial matters demanded that all hostilities between them should be short and sharp. But now that most of the carrying trade was in English or Dutch hands, such considerations no longer applied; the Sultan could afford to take his time. That Venice was able to hold out for so long was due less to the determination of the defenders within the walls–though that was considerable–than to her fleet which, by maintaining a continuous patrol of the eastern Mediterranean, not only frustrated every Turkish effort to blockade Candia from the sea; it actually increased its control over the Aegean to the point where, for the last ten years of the siege, the Turks were doing everything they could to avoid direct naval confrontation.

This is not to say that such confrontation never occurred; the story of the war is a national epic in every sense of the word, a story of innumerable battles, large and small, deliberate and unsought, their locations ranging from the mouth of the Dardanelles, where the Venetian fleet gathered every spring in the hope of blockading the enemy within the narrows, right through the Aegean archipelago to the roadstead of Candia itself. It is rich, too, in tales of heroism: of Giacomo Riva in 1649, pursuing a Turkish fleet into a small harbour on the Ionian coast and smashing it to pieces; of Lazzaro Mocenigo in 1651 off Paros, sailing in defiance of his admiral’s orders to attack a whole enemy squadron and, though severely wounded by several arrows and a musket-shot through the arm, putting it to flight; of Lorenzo Marcello leading his ships right into the Dardanelles in 1656, but not surviving to witness one of the most complete and overwhelming victories of the entire war; and in 1657, of Lazzaro Mocenigo again, now Captain-General, his squadron of twelve vessels driving thirty-three of the enemy still further up the narrow straits and pressing on through the Marmara towards the walls of Constantinople itself.

And yet, however glorious the achievements, however superb the seamanship and the courage, one somehow feels that there was always lacking an overall plan: that a more organised defence of the immediate approaches to the beleaguered town might have been more successful in cutting off the assailants from their reinforcements and supplies. Despite all Venetian efforts, these continued to get through, and even in their most triumphant moments the defenders must have known in their hearts that the fall of Candia could be only a question of time.

One thing alone could have saved it: the unstinting and enthusiastic support of the European powers. It is arguable that the whole history of Ottoman expansion in Europe can be attributed to the perennial inability of the Christian princes to unite in defence of their continent and their faith. They had not done so, in all the fullness of their heart and soul, since the Third Crusade nearly five hundred years before; and they did not do so now. Again and again Venice appealed to them, emphasising always that it was not the future of an obscure Venetian colony but the security of Christendom itself that hung in the balance: that if Crete were lost, so too was half the Mediterranean. Again and again they refused to listen, just as they always had. From Germany the Emperor pointed out that he had recently signed a twenty-year truce with the Porte; from Spain, to the astonishment of all, His Most Catholic Majesty was actually sending an ambassador to infidel Constantinople; France, true to her double game, passed occasional small and secret subsidies to Venice with one hand but continued to extend the other in friendship to the Sultan. England–whence little was expected, since she was not yet a power in the Middle Sea–was prodigal with promises, but with little else. Successive Popes, seeing Venice’s plight as a useful means of gaining some advantage for themselves, offered assistance only in return for concessions: Innocent X for the control of Venetian bishoprics, his successor Alexander VII for the readmission of the Jesuits, banned from the territory of the Republic since Paul V had laid it under an interdict in 1606.

Admittedly, as the years went by and the continuing resistance of Candia became the talk of Europe, foreign aid in the form of men, money and ships was a little more forthcoming, but such aid was invariably too little and too late. A typical example was the force of 4,000, under Prince Almerigo d’Este, sent out from France in 1660. It arrived not in the spring, when it might have been useful, but at the end of August; its first sortie against the enemy, over terrain which it had not troubled to reconnoitre, ended in panic and flight; a week or two later, laid low by dysentery, it had to be sent
en masse
to other more restful islands to recover its strength, after which the survivors–whose number did not, regrettably, include the Prince–returned to their homes having achieved precisely nothing.

So many, and so memorable, were the exploits of the Venetian commanders at sea that one all too easily forgets the still more heroic defence of Candia by the garrison itself, doomed to face twenty-two years of attrition–of all forms of warfare the most hopelessly discouraging–and to suffer constant disappointment when promised reinforcements from Venice’s so-called allies proved time and time again to be worthless. Such forces as did appear always seemed intent either on saving their skins or–almost as bad–gaining personal glory for themselves, thus risking not only their own lives but also many others that, with the chronic shortage of manpower, could ill be afforded.

This latter phenomenon became more and more frequent in the last stages of the siege. By now the name of Candia was famous across Europe, and among the French in particular the young scions of noble families flocked to the island, determined to make proof of their valour on so glorious a field of battle. The most remarkable influx came in 1668, when Louis XIV was at last persuaded to take a personal interest in the siege. Even now he did not enter the war, or even break off diplomatic relations with the Sultan; French merchants in the Levant had taken full advantage of the sudden departure of their Venetian rivals, and were doing far too well for the King to dream of any open rupture. He did, however, compromise his principles to the point of allowing Venice to raise troops from within his dominions, under the overall command of the Lieutenant-General of his Armies, the Marquis of Saint-André Montbrun; the result was a 500-strong volunteer force, the list of which sounds less like a serious professional army than the roll-call at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Foremost under Montbrun was the Duc de la Feuillade who, though by no means a rich man, had insisted on personally bearing the lion’s share of the cost; then there were two more dukes, of Château-Thierry and of Caderousse, the Marquis of Aubusson, the Counts of Villemor and Tavanes, the Prince of Neuchâtel (who was barely seventeen) and a quantity of other young noblemen bearing names which numbered them among the proudest families in France.

On their arrival in Crete at the beginning of December the young French nobles were entrusted by the new Captain-General, Francesco Morosini, with the defence of one of the outer ramparts on the landward side of the town. They refused. They had not, they pointed out, made the long and uncomfortable journey to Crete only to be told to crawl through the mud to some advanced outpost–there to wait, patiently and in silence, until the Turks should decide to launch their next attack. Instead, they demanded a general sortie which would ‘oblige the enemy to raise the siege’. Morosini very sensibly forbade any such thing. He had already made dozens of sorties, none of which had produced lasting results. His remaining men–there were by now fewer than 5,000–were barely enough to defend the breaches in the walls that the Turkish sappers were regularly opening up. But his arguments went unheard. As one of France’s own historians was to put it:

Monsieur de la Feuillade sought only vigorous action and glory for himself; he would have concerned himself little over the loss of seven or eight hundred of the Republic’s men so long as he could enjoy, on his return to France, the honour of having made a valiant sortie on Crete. Once out of the place, its subsequent loss through want of men to defend it would have occasioned him little distress.
¹⁶⁰

When he saw that the Captain-General would not be moved, La Feuillade, complaining loudly of Venetian timidity, announced his intention of making an unsupported attack on his own; this he did on 16 December, symbolically armed with a whip, at the head of a force whose numbers, we are told, had already been reduced from the original 500 to 280. The Turks resisted fiercely, but the Frenchmen, for all their foolhardiness, showed an almost superhuman courage, driving them back a full 200 yards and accounting for some 800 of them before, with the arrival of a fresh battalion of janissaries, they were finally forced to retire. The Counts of Villemor and Tavanes and some forty others were killed and over sixty badly injured, including the Marquis of Aubusson. La Feuillade himself, streaming with blood from three separate wounds, was the last to return to safety.

It was magnificent, but it was no help to Crete or to Venice. When the moment of glory was past, the surviving young heroes could not get off the island quickly enough. They were gone within a week, though many of them–even those who had somehow escaped unscathed–never saw France again. They had taken the plague bacillus with them.

Soon after the survivors landed at Toulon another force, far larger, more professional and better equipped, set sail from France for Candia. At last Louis XIV had been persuaded by the Venetian ambassador–Giovanni Morosini, a kinsman of the Captain-General–to take his Most Christian responsibilities seriously, and in the spring of 1669 his first important contribution was ready: 6,000 men, 300 horses and fifteen cannon, all carried in a fleet of twenty-seven transports, with fifteen warships as an escort. But even now Louis tried to conceal his breach of faith from his Turkish friends; the fleet did not sail under the banner of the fleur-de-lys, but under that of the crossed keys of the Papacy.

The bulk of the army, some 4,000 strong, commanded jointly by the Ducs de Beaufort and de Noailles, arrived at Candia on 19 June. They were appalled at what they saw. One of the officers wrote:

The state of the town was terrible to behold: the streets were covered with bullets and cannonballs, and with shrapnel from mines and grenades. There was not a church, not a building even, whose walls were not holed and almost reduced to rubble by the enemy cannon. The houses were no longer anything more than miserable hovels. Everywhere the stench was nauseating; at every turn one came upon the dead, the wounded or the maimed.

At once the story of La Feuillade began to repeat itself. So eager were the new arrivals for the fray that, refusing even to wait for the remainder of the army, they launched their own attack at dawn on 25 June. It began badly: the first body of troops on whom they opened fire proved to be a recently arrived detachment of Germans, marching up to give them support. Once order had been re-established they charged the Turkish emplacements, at first with considerable success. Then, suddenly, a stray Turkish shot ignited the powder barrels in one of the hastily abandoned batteries. The skill of the Turkish sappers was renowned; their mining operations had been a feature of the siege, and much of the damage to the defences of the town had been the result of subterranean explosions. The word now suddenly spread through the ranks of the French that the whole terrain on which they stood was mined, that the battery was a concealed blast-hole and that the detonation they had just heard was the first of a chain of similar explosions that would blow them all to smithereens. With the rumour went panic. They fled in terror, tripping over each other as they ran. Seeing this sudden and to them utterly unaccountable flight, the Turks regrouped and counter-attacked. Five hundred Frenchmen lost their lives; within minutes their heads, impaled on pikes, were being paraded in triumph before the Grand Vizir Ahmed. They included those of the Duc de Beaufort and of a Capuchin monk who had accompanied the army as its almoner.

Five hundred men out of 6,000 is not an intolerable loss; four days later the rest of King Louis’s army arrived and Morosini started planning a fresh attack on Canea in the west. But the spirit of his new allies was already broken. On 24 July a French man-of-war of seventy guns approached too near a Turkish shore battery and was blown out of the water; a few days later Noailles coldly informed the Captain-General that he was re-embarking the army and returning home. Protestations, entreaties and threats, appeals from the surviving civilian population, even thunderings from pulpits were of no avail; on 21 August the French fleet weighed anchor. In the general despair that followed, the few auxiliaries from the Papacy, the Empire and even the Knights of Malta likewise set their sails for the west. Morosini and his garrison were left alone–and the Grand Vizir ordered a general attack.