The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (6 page)

After a post-plague truce lasting barely two years, Venice soon found its galleys becoming involved in an increasing number of naval skirmishes with its Genoese counterparts. By 1352 the situation had escalated to outright war. Leading adversaries in this lengthy war would emerge from two distinguished families – the Pisani of Venice and the celebrated Doria of Genoa (who had already provided Lamba Doria, the victor of Curzola).

The kingdom of Aragon in south-east Spain, wishing to drive the Genoese from the western Mediterranean, chose to ally itself with Venice, and in February 1352 Nicolò Pisani led their combined fleets north up the Aegean Sea to confront the Genoese fleet in the Bosphorus under the command of Paganino Doria. Here Pisani was provided with further Greek naval assistance by the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, who felt threatened by the fortified Genoese colony just north of Constantinople on the other side of the Golden Horn, the narrow stretch of water leading off the Bosphorus. Making full use of his home-port advantage, Doria withdrew his fleet into a line across the narrow mouth of the Golden Horn, thus ensuring that he could not be outflanked and attacked from the rear, breaking his line. By now a winter storm was raging, and the wind and waves rendered Doria’s position all but impregnable. But to Pisani’s dismay the Aragonese admiral Ponzio di Santa Paola then proceeded to launch his ships into a frontal attack on the Genoese, which soon resulted in catastrophic losses. Pisani realised that he had no alternative but to advance in support of his foolhardy ally; meanwhile his Greek allies hastily retired from the battle. As the storm continued and night fell, the Venetian and Genoese fleets battled it out. Incendiary arrows and missiles had set alight fires in both fleets, and these quickly passed from ship to ship in the high wind. Chaos ensued, with ships grappling and men fighting in the garish glare, often unaware who was friend or foe. As dawn broke, the remnants of the Venetian fleet found themselves battling against wind and current and were forced to flee. By now Paolo was dead, while Pisani had lost most of his galleys and 1,500 men – a colossal loss given the recent predations of the Black Death.

Technically, the Genoese had won the Battle of the Bosphorus, but in terms of men and galleys their losses were on a par with those of the Venetians. On the other hand, they were now in a position to force the Byzantine emperor Cantacuzenus to grant them certain exclusive trading rights, especially in the Crimea and the Sea of Azov – the termination of lucrative trading routes to the Orient. Venice had now lost all access to the Black Sea as well as access to Byzantine ports in the Aegean. Venetian ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean looked to be under threat. Many in Venice wished to see Pisani summoned home and put on trial for his life. Instead he was merely subjected to the interrogation of an official inquiry, which eventually exonerated him. Desperate to regain his honour, in the summer of 1353 Pisani switched his tactics, leading a Venetian fleet into the western Mediterranean. The Aragonese were bent on wresting Sardinia from the control of Genoa and had begun to blockade the port of Alghero on the north-western coast of the island. As luck would have it, Pisani turned up just as the Aragonese were expecting the arrival of the Genoese fleet and they immediately handed overall command of the new joint fleet to Pisani. By the time the Genoese arrived, Pisani was ready for them, and on 29 August 1353 – just eighteen months after his humiliating loss at the Battle of the Bosphorus – he redeemed himself by inflicting an overwhelming defeat on the Genoese fleet. Of sixty galleys, only nineteen managed to limp back to Genoa.

This was a blow from which the Genoese were unable to recover: they had now suffered catastrophic destruction of manpower and galleys in two successive major battles, and Venice controlled the Mediterranean, thus cutting off the city of Genoa from its lucrative trade with the Black Sea and the Levant. Notably in this instance it had been the ambition of an individual, rather than the calculated will of the Venetian authorities, that had reversed the Republic’s fortunes. Just months earlier Venice had stood on the precipice of disaster, and now its bitter rival was crushed.

This defeat was not only disastrous in terms of commerce, but threatened the very lives of the Genoese themselves. The city had by now spread over much of the thin strip of agricultural land between the mountains and the sea, forcing it to rely upon outside trade for its grain supplies. These were usually obtained from the Levant and from the fertile Lombardy
plains in the territory of Milan to the north. But now even Milan had turned against Genoa. Giovanni Visconti, the Lord and Archbishop of Milan, saw this as his chance to overcome Genoa, and in return for supplies the Genoese were forced to sign a humiliating ‘treaty’ with Milan, which virtually made the city a vassal of its powerful northern neighbour. This was a strategic masterstroke by Visconti, who thus denied the Venetians the chance of destroying Genoese power once and for all and threatening Milan in the process. Instead it was now Milan that became the overwhelming major power in northern Italy, and in doing so threatened Venice.

Venice realised this danger and quickly organised a defensive league of inland cities between it and Milanese territory. Gerona, Mantua, Verona and Padua were all bribed to sign up, with Charles IV of Bohemia agreeing to be paid as commander of the league’s forces. According to the Venetian historian Lorenzo de Monacis, writing some sixty years later with access to the relevant documents, all this was accomplished ‘at almost incredible cost’. However, the Venetians underestimated Visconti of Milan, whose even greater financial inducements soon dissolved the league, allowing Charles IV to retire from his command with a further 100,000 ducats in his pocket. Even so, Visconti was not yet ready to take on Venice and despatched a peace mission to the city.

This mission was led by the forty-nine-year-old poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (now known as Petrarch), who would later develop a special relationship with Venice. At this time, he was the most celebrated intellectual figure in Italy since Dante. Twenty years previously he had been crowned ‘poet laureate’, complete with laurel wreath, in a ceremony at the Capitol in Rome that had not been performed since ancient classical times. He was an early champion of the new humanism, which sought a rebirth of classical learning, with its emphasis on human enquiry and action, rather than the religious authority and spiritual aspirations of the medieval era, which he referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’. For this reason Petrarch is often regarded as the father of the Renaissance.

He had a wide circle of humanist friends, which included Guidone da Settimo, the Archbishop of Genoa, as well as the Doge of Venice, the
scholarly Andrea Dandolo.
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Indeed, as early as 1351 Petrarch had written to the Genoese and to Doge Dandolo suggesting that the Venetians and the Genoese should desist from waging war against one another, join forces and sail to the Canaries, the Orkneys, Thule (in Greenland) and the regions of the extreme north and south. But this remarkably prescient advice had fallen on deaf ears – not until two centuries later would gold be discovered in West Africa and serious exploration would reveal the New World and a passage around Africa. And despite Petrarch’s close friendship with Doge Dandolo, his peace mission to Venice would be met with equally deaf ears. Petrarch blamed himself for what happened, but there is no denying the anger he felt at his rejection:

When many words had been wasted, I returned as full of sorrow, shame, and terror as I had come full of hope. To open to reason ears that were stopped and hearts that were obstinate was a task beyond my eloquence, as it would have been beyond that of Cicero.

Yet Venice had good reason to reject Petrarch’s offer from Archbishop Visconti. Despite Genoa’s apparent submission to Milan, it had unexpectedly decided to revive the war of its own accord, carrying the fight right into Venice’s back yard. Early in 1354 Genoese galleys made a lightning strike into the Adriatic, laying waste the Venetian islands of Curzola and Lesina (modern Hvar), before disappearing back into the Mediterranean as swiftly as they had appeared. Venice at once decided to pursue the war with renewed vigour. Over the winter, their depleted fleet had been restored by the production line at the Arsenale, enabling them to mount two separate naval expeditions. The first was a squadron ordered to seal off the mouth of the Adriatic by mounting a constant patrol across the sixty-mile channel between Otranto on the Italian mainland and the island of Corfu, to prevent any repeat of this incident. The second was a fleet of fourteen galleys under the command of Pisani, which were ordered to liaise with nineteen further galleys from Venetian ports along the Dalmatian coast
and as far afield as Crete. Pisani was then to hunt down and destroy the Genoese squadron responsible for the attack, as well as any other Genoese shipping it came across on the open sea. Having picked up his reinforcements, Pisani at once set sail for Sardinia, the scene of his former triumph. He knew that the Aragonese were still blockading Alghero, and surmised that Genoa would soon rally all its available naval forces to relieve the port.

This proved to be a fatal blunder. The arch-tactician Paganino Doria, who had sailed from Genoa with the remnants of the city’s fleet, eluded his rival and completely outmanoeuvred both Venetian fleets. In a superb piece of seamanship, he managed to slip past the Venetian patrol at the mouth of the Adriatic without his ships being detected, and then headed north up the Adriatic towards Venice. In August 1354 he made landfall on the Istrian peninsula, attacking the Venetian port of Parenzo (modern Poreč) less than forty miles south of Venice itself. Here he set fire to buildings and added insult to injury by desecrating the great sixth-century Euphrasian Basilica, carrying off the bodies of St Maurus and St Cyrillus.
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When news of this outrage reached Venice it caused consternation. Yet, as ever, the authorities refused to panic. A skilled captain-general was designated to take charge of the city’s defences, and twelve men of noble family were appointed as his deputies, with each charged to raise 300 men. At the same time the citizens were mobilised, all galleys in the Arsenale were commissioned and, contrary to tradition, even Doge Dandolo donned armour in readiness to defend the city. At the same time, a large boom constructed of galleys and massive tree-trunks linked together by chains was strung across the narrow 300-yard channel between San Nicolò on the Lido and the Sant’Andrea fort, the main entrance from the sea into the lagoon.

Doria now sailed for Venice, where he arrived off the Lido. Onshore,
Venetians lining the beach watched in horror as the Genoese galleys hunted down a defenceless merchantman, capturing it and setting fire to it less than a mile from where they stood. Thus Doria demonstrated that Genoa now had control of the Adriatic, yet he quickly saw that he would be unable to pass the boom and attack Venice itself. And such an attack would have been largely symbolic, for he did not have the manpower to take the city. He also realised that the Venetian navy was bound to return soon, and decided to set sail for the safer waters of the open Mediterranean.

Sure enough, Pisani soon returned from his fruitless searching in the eastern Mediterranean. Upon being told what had happened, he tried to deduce what Doria’s next move would be. By now autumn was approaching, and Pisani guessed that Doria would most likely put in for the winter at the Genoese island stronghold of Chios, which lay off the Aegean coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey). He knew that here Doria would be able to stock up on provisions and repair his ships in a safe, protected harbour. Pisani duly sailed east into the Aegean and eventually spied Doria’s ships at Chios.

Yet Doria would not be drawn to leave harbour; he was expecting a reinforcement squadron of twelve galleys, and it seemed likely that he would sit out the winter in Chios. The notorious October storms were now sweeping down the Aegean, and Pisani decided to retire for the winter himself. He embarked for the south-western tip of the Peloponnese, calling in at the Venetian fortress of Corone to pick up fresh despatches from Venice. These warned him not to launch any precipitate attack on the Genoese, as peace negotiations were to be renewed. He then rowed his galleys to the nearby small harbour of Porto Lungo.

By now Doria’s reinforcements had arrived, and he decided against sitting out the winter at Chios. He and his fleet, which at this point consisted of twenty-five galleys, would be needed at Genoa. In the last week of October he embarked on a southerly course, hoping to round the Peloponnese before the worst of the winter storms. But this time his luck did not hold, and he was forced to take shelter in the south-west Peloponnese. By chance, the bay in which his ships anchored lay just over a mile down the coast from the place where Pisani’s fleet was wintering. As the storm abated, Doria despatched his nephew Giovanni in a light
trireme to reconnoitre. Giovanni returned to report that the Venetian fleet was ripe for the taking, with just fourteen galleys guarding the bay and the other smaller ships, together with twenty-one galleys all lashed together by the shore. Despite having fewer galleys at his disposal, Admiral Doria seized his opportunity and on 4 November 1354 launched his fleet into the attack. In the ensuing surprise his nephew Giovanni succeeded in eluding the protective line of Venetian galleys, leading a further dozen galleys into Porto Lungo, where the tied-up Venetian galleys were soon captured and their crews taken prisoner. Reflecting patriotic bitterness and the prejudice of his age, the Venetian historian de Monacis remarked of Doria’s victory, ‘He routed them without a struggle, and overcame them without a victory. You would have thought that one side was made up of armed men, while the others were unarmed women.’

In all, the Genoese finally captured more than thirty galleys, and took 5,000 prisoners. The remaining Venetians, together with Pisani, managed to escape ashore and made their way five miles along the coast to Corone. This time Pisani would be granted no leniency. As a result of his humiliating defeat, when he arrived back in Venice he was sentenced to pay a heavy fine and stripped of any further command for life.