The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (55 page)

Where he must stand condemned is in his treatment of the Catalans. Despite the fact that they had been staunch champions of Charles of Habsburg, in Article XIII of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty Philip formally accorded to them, by reason of his respect for the Queen of Great Britain, a complete amnesty and all the privileges at that time enjoyed by the Castilians, ‘of all the peoples of Spain, that which the King cherished most’. It was plain from the start, however, that he had no intention of forgiving them for what he considered their disloyalty, and early in 1713 he had demanded their unconditional submission. They not surprisingly had refused, and had set up a provisional government of their own; whereupon in July 1714 Philip had sent a detachment of troops to invest Barcelona. The city fought back, and indeed held out for nearly two months; even after the besiegers had been joined by a French army under the Duke of Berwick and a French fleet, it refused to surrender. On the night of 11 September there was a general assault. The Catalans doggedly defended every street, often every house, until they could fight no more. The survivors were sold into slavery, and the standards of Catalonia were, by the King’s orders, burned in the public market by the common hangman.

Whether Philip V ever felt remorse for his treatment of the Catalans is doubtful. He soon, however, had cause to regret his surrender of Spanish Italy. Soon after the death in 1714 of his first wife, Maria Louisa of Savoy, he married the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Farnese, niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma. The new Queen–undistinguished by beauty, education or experience–began as she meant to continue. Before she even reached Madrid she picked a quarrel with the Princesse des Ursins–who had travelled half-way across the country to meet her–on the stairs of a wayside inn and bundled her unceremoniously, alone and shivering, over the snowy Pyrenees and back to France. On arrival in the capital she immediately summoned her uncle’s agent, a highly intelligent if unscrupulous churchman named Giulio Alberoni, the son of a gardener in Piacenza. From that day all French influence vanished from the Spanish court; it became Italian through and through, and Alberoni–whom just three years later she persuaded Pope Clement XI to appoint a cardinal–quietly set to work on the general reconstruction of Spain, with particular reference to the creation of a fleet.

Since Queen Maria Louisa had left three sons, Elizabeth could have little hope of the Spanish throne. Her long-term objective was therefore to ensure her succession after her uncle’s death to Parma and Piacenza, and also perhaps to Tuscany by virtue of her descent from the Medici. Nor was she alone in desiring it. The Emperor Charles was still unhappy with the recent dispensations. He was particularly riled by the grant of Sicily to the house of Savoy, and was known to be in contact with Victor Amadeus with a view to exchanging it for the island of Sardinia. Elizabeth and Alberoni were equally determined that he should do nothing of the kind: Sicily, once it had become part of the Empire, would constitute a permanent threat to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. They first moved, however, against imperial Sardinia. In August 1717 an expedition sailed from Barcelona to Cagliari, and by the end of November the island was theirs. Only then, emboldened by this easy success, did they decide to move directly on Sicily. On 1 July 1718 Spanish troops were landed near Palermo, where they received a warm welcome–giving strength to the Spanish argument that both islands, having been in the possession of Aragon since the thirteenth century and thus for more than a hundred years before that kingdom’s union with Castile, were far more Spanish than much of Spain.

And so at that time they were; but the argument was unlikely to appeal to Charles VI, and Charles had just concluded what was rather misleadingly described as the Quadruple Alliance with Britain and France.
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The Empire had no navy, but Britain did; and so it was that a British fleet under Admiral Sir George Byng hastened to Sicily, where it totally destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passero, at the island’s southeast corner. Unfortunately Britain was not at that time at war with Spain; she was acting only on behalf of her ally the Emperor. Byng’s action thus created a tidal wave of violence, the effects of which were felt throughout Europe, as far away as the Sweden of Charles XII and the Russia of Peter the Great. Victor Amadeus, too, was loud in his protests, but he had to submit to the inevitable. The Kingdom of Sicily was taken from him and given to Charles; that of Sardinia was granted to him in its stead. Where Britain was concerned, Alberoni’s rage was such that he launched a second Armada, a threat which in London was taken very seriously indeed. On 17 December 1718 Parliament declared war; less than a month later France followed suit.

The Armada, when it sailed in the summer of 1719, proved no more successful than its famous predecessor: it ran into storms in the Bay of Biscay and was wrecked off Finisterre, never even reaching English waters. A separate expedition headed for Scotland and actually landed a Spanish force in the Western Highlands–of which, however, the clans soon made short shrift. More serious for Spain, and a good deal more surprising, was the arrival of a French army under the Duke of Berwick. Philip V had difficulty in believing that his own country would take up arms against him, or that Berwick would march against his old friend, but he was soon disillusioned. There was nothing much he could do about it, since his army was away in Sicily. He had to watch, powerless, while Catalonia was invaded and Vigo occupied.

Alberoni, the ultimate author of all these misfortunes, could no longer hold out. In December 1719, the victim of a conspiracy led by his old patron the Duke of Parma, he was dismissed and banished from Spain. In foreign affairs he had been an adventurer and an intriguer, impatient and over-ambitious; domestically, on the other hand, he had shown himself a fine administrator, and although primarily a patriotic Italian he had worked hard and on the whole effectively for the benefit of his adopted country. After his departure there seemed no reason to continue hostilities, and Philip hoped for favourable terms. He was disappointed. Britain, France and the Empire refused absolutely to listen to him until Spain too had joined the Quadruple Alliance–which on 17 February 1720, with extreme reluctance, she did.

When all those international agreements collectively known as the Treaty of Utrecht were signed during the first four months of 1713, Venice had been in possession of the Peloponnese for just over a quarter of a century. Her new experiment in empire had not been a success. The years of Turkish occupation that had preceded her reconquest had reduced a once prosperous land to a place of poverty and desolation; all too soon she had realised that the task of administration would be expensive and largely thankless. The downtrodden local populations, their patriotism nurtured and sanctified as always by the Orthodox clergy, dreamed of a nationhood of their own and saw little advantage in having their infidel overlords replaced by Christian schismatics who showed no greater sympathy with their aspirations. Defence was another problem. In former days, when the Venetian presence had been confined to a few important commercial colonies and garrison towns, it had been manageable enough; but how could nearly 1,000 miles of serrated coastline be made safe from invaders? Even such new defences as were deemed indispensable, like the lowering fortress of Acrocorinth–still today one of the most impressive examples of Venetian military architecture in existence–served only to antagonise still further the local inhabitants, with whose taxes it was paid for and with whose conscript labour it was built. No wonder that when in 1715 Turkish troops appeared once again on the soil of the Peloponnese, they were welcomed as liberators.

Damad Ali, Grand Vizir to the Sultan Ahmet III, had planned a combined operation, in which a land force would march down through Thessaly while a fleet sailed simultanously southwest through the Aegean; in the course of the summer both prongs of the attack scored success after success. By the time the fleet reached its destination it had already forced the surrender of Tinos and of Aegina, while the army captured Corinth after a five-day siege. Nauplia followed, then Modone and Corone, Monemvasia (Malvasia) and the island of Cythera. Meanwhile, the Turks in Crete, encouraged by reports of their compatriots’ success, had attacked and seized the last remaining Venetian outposts. By the end of 1715, with Crete and the Peloponnese both lost and all the great victories of Francesco Morosini set at naught, the Turks were once again at the gates of the Adriatic. For Venice only a single bulwark remained: Corfu.

The army that, early in 1716, the Grand Vizir flung against the citadel of Corfu consisted of 30,000 infantry and some 3,000 horse. For the Venetians, estimates differ. They were certainly outnumbered; but in siege warfare comparative strengths are less important than the sophistication of offensive and defensive techniques, and here Venice could count on the knowledge and skill of one of the leading soldiers of his day. Marshal Matthias Johann von der Schulenburg had fought under Marlborough at Oudenarde and Malplaquet, then after the peace had sought service with Venice. He had spent much of the winter improving the fortifications of Corfu, and though he could not prevent the Turkish army from disembarking, he was able to confront it with a defensive system far superior to anything it had previously encountered.

All through the heat of the summer the siege continued. Early in August, however, there arrived reports that gave new encouragement to the defenders and struck gloom into Turkish hearts. Venice had concluded an alliance with the Empire, which had entered the war. The almost legendary Prince Eugene was once again on the march. He had routed a Turkish army, appropriately enough at Karlowitz–the very town in which, eighteen years before, the Turks had signed that treaty which they had now so shamefully broken–and shortly afterwards had won a still more crushing victory at Peterwardein, where he had killed 20,000 of the enemy and seized 200 of their guns at the expense of fewer than 3,000 of his own men.

This unexpected necessity of fighting simultaneously on two fronts probably convinced the Turkish commander that if he could not take Corfu quickly he would be unlikely to take it at all. On the night of 18 August he ordered a general assault, to the usual accompaniment of an ear-splitting din of drums, trumpets, rifle and cannon fire and hideous shrieks and war-cries–psychological warfare of a primitive but by no means ineffectual kind. Schulenburg was instantly at his post, summoning every able-bodied Corfiot–women and children, the old and infirm, priests and monks alike–to the defences. After several hours the fighting was still desperate, and he decided to stake all on a sudden sortie. Shortly before dawn, at the head of 800 picked men, he slipped out of a small postern and fell on the Turkish flank from the rear. His success was immediate–and decisive. The Turks were taken by surprise and fled, leaving their rifles and ammunition behind them. Their bewildered colleagues along other sections of the wall saw that the assault had failed and also retired, though in better order. The next night, as if to consolidate the Venetian triumph, a storm broke–a storm of such violence that within hours the Turkish camp was a quagmire, the trenches turned to canals, the tents torn to ribbons or, with their guy-ropes snapped, lifted bodily into the air and carried off by the gale. Out in the roadstead many of the Turkish ships, similarly driven from their moorings, crashed into each other, splintering like matchwood.

When dawn broke and the full extent of the damage was revealed, few of the erstwhile besiegers wished to remain another moment on an island where the very gods seemed to be against them; indeed, within a matter of days the Turkish commander received orders to return at once. Corfu was saved; Schulenburg was awarded a jewelled sword, a life pension of 5,000 ducats, and the honour of a statue erected in his lifetime in the old fortress.
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The Turks withdrew, never again to seek to enlarge their empire at the expense of Christian Europe.

The effect on Venetian morale was enormous. Early the following spring a new fleet of twenty-seven sail set out from Zante for the Dardanelles under the command of a brilliant young admiral, Ludovico Flangini. On 21 June 1717 it met the Turks head-on, and after a battle that lasted several days won a splendid victory, marred only by the death of Flangini who, mortally wounded by an arrow, insisted on being carried up to his quarterdeck to watch, through glazing eyes, the last stages of the conflict. A month later, off Cape Matapan, the Ottoman fleet was again beaten and put to flight. By then Prince Eugene had reoccupied the all-important river fortress of Belgrade, and the Turks were retreating on all fronts.

Had the war continued another season and the Venetians managed to sustain their momentum, the Peloponnese might have been theirs once more–though whether this would have been in their long-term interests is open to doubt. But the Turks decided to sue for peace, and it was now that Venice was to discover how ill-advised she had been to conclude her Austrian alliance. The Empire, faced with new threats from Spain, was anxious to reach a quick settlement and paid little heed to Venetian territorial claims, on the entirely spurious grounds that the victory of Corfu and the subsequent upsurge of Venice’s fortunes were the direct results of Prince Eugene’s victory at Peterwardein. Thus, when the parties met in May 1718 at Passarowitz–together with representatives of England and Holland as mediators–the Venetian envoy, Carlo Ruzzini, found that he could make little impression on his colleagues. For six hours he pleaded, calling for the restitution to Venice of Soudha and Spinalonga, of Tinos, Cythera and the Peloponnese–or, in default of this last, an extension of Venetian territory in Albania as far south as Scutari and Dulcigno, a pirate stronghold that she was eager to eliminate. But his appeal coincided with the news that 18,000 Spanish troops had landed in Sardinia, and he was overruled.