Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (16 page)

There was a widespread belief in Constantinople that Venice would not fight to defend Cyprus, and that she would ‘tolerate any injury however great rather than go to war again’.
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The war party at the Sultan’s court was dominant, and the only proponent of a peaceful solution was the grand vizier Mehmed Sokollu, who by subtle manoeuvres tried to hold back the rush to war. Sokollu, a Bosnian conscripted by the devshirme, was grand vizier for 28 years under Suleyman, Selim II and Selim’s son Murad III. ‘What an apprenticeship in self-control and dissimulation he must have served!’ exclaimed Braudel in his history of the period.
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Sokollu also tried to persuade the Venetian representative in Constantinople that Venice should not fight to keep Cyprus. ‘What do you want’, he asked, ‘with an island so far off that it is useless to you and is the cause of such disorders? Leave it to us, who have so many provinces neighbouring it. And in any case the Sultan is determined to have it.’
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Sokollu was probably exploring, on the Sultan’s behalf, the possibility of acquiring Cyprus cheaply by diplomacy rather than expensively by war, but his efforts failed. In February 1570 a Turkish envoy, Kubad, left Constantinople for Venice to demand the cession of Cyprus, but it seems that even before his arrival Venice was determined to resist. The demand that Kubad presented to the Venetians was: ‘Selim, Ottoman Sultan, Emperor of the Turks, Lord of Lords [followed by Selim’s other titles], to the Signoria of Venice: We demand of you Cyprus, which you shall give us willingly or perforce, and do not arouse our terrible sword, for we shall wage most cruel war against you everywhere; nor should you trust in your treasure, for we shall cause it suddenly to run away from you like a torrent. Beware of angering us.’
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The Signoria drafted defiant answers to both the Sultan and the grand vizier and submitted them to a vote in the Venetian senate. On 25 March 1570 the reply to the Sultan was approved by 199 votes to 5, and that to the grand vizier by 202 votes to 4. These majorities were unprecedented.
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Any assumption that Venice would not fight for Cyprus was now overturned. A Venetian fleet was immediately sent to the Venetian province of Crete under Marco Quirini, described as ‘a man trained from his youth in naval skills, energetic and never fatigued.’
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Venice also appealed for help to Philip II of Spain and to the Pope, and it was mainly thanks to the Pope’s call for action that a combined fleet was assembled. Pope Pius V, elected in 1566, was a rigorous opponent of the Reformation – he excommunicated Elizabeth I of England – and was a champion of a renewed Christendom against the infidel Turk. Pius V
had material as well as religious influence on both Venice and Spain, since an annual grant from ecclesiastical revenues supported the navies of both.

The combined fleet – a league, but not yet the Holy League of the following year – was gradually put together during the spring and early summer of 1570. At the end of March, only two days after Venice rejected the Turkish ultimatum, the 79-year-old Girolamo Zane was appointed captain-general of the Venetian contingent, leaving Quirini’s Venetian fleet, which had been sent to Crete, to operate largely independently. In June the Pope appointed Marcantonio Colonna, a Neapolitan aristocrat, as commander of the papal ships, and commander-in-chief of the combined naval force. Some weeks later Philip II appointed as commander of the Spanish contribution Gianandrea Doria, great-nephew of the renowned Genoese naval commander and statesman Andrea Doria. The combined fleet would consist of 205 ships, of which Venice contributed 144 (nearly three quarters of the total), Spain 49 and the Papal States 12. But it would be many months before the ships of the allies finally came together.

The fleet had a common purpose, to save Cyprus from the Turks, but it was far from being unified. Philip of Spain was in two minds. On the one hand he was prepared to support the league because he was unwilling to refuse the Pope’s call to arms. Also he was keen to check any expansion of the Ottoman influence since Spain was under constant threat from the Sultan’s Barbary outposts, and it was always possible that the Moriscos – the Moors remaining in Spain and nominally converted to Christianity – might again rise in revolt as they had in 1568, and be supported by a Turkish fleet. On the other hand, Cyprus was Venice’s problem, not his. So while Philip instructed Doria, as commander of the Spanish contingent, to obey the orders of Colonna the commander-in-chief, Doria was told to ‘draw the attention of Colonna to what you judge the correct course of action’, that is not to accept Colonna’s orders without question. Doria was also told to ‘look carefully where you put our galleys’,
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and it may be that Philip secretly instructed Doria to slow the progress of the combined fleet whenever possible in the hope that it would not reach Cyprus until it was too late for action.

Spain’s ambivalence was not the only source of friction. The commanders of the different contingents constantly disagreed since, as one historian has put it, ‘No one’s dignity allowed him to take second place; no one was in a position to claim the first.’
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Sickness was another problem. The Venetian fleet under Zane went first to Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, where he waited two months for his allies to join him, and during
that time a disease, perhaps typhus, broke out among his men. The sick were replaced by Greeks from the Venetian possessions of Corfu, Zákinthos and Kephaloniá, some 2,000 in all, but this recruitment simply provided fresh victims of disease.

It was only on 31 August 1570 that the combined fleet of some 200 ships finally assembled at Soúdha Bay in Crete. Three weeks later the fleet learned that the Cyprus capital Nicosia had fallen, and after some debate it was decided to withdraw and go back to their home bases. Storms battered the returning fleets. The aged Zane, while still on his way home with the Venetian ships, sent to Venice his resignation as their commander. When he reached Venice he was prosecuted as responsible for the expedition’s failure but died before he could be tried. Whoever was responsible, the expedition had indeed failed disastrously, which did not bode well for future combined action against the Turks.

The Turkish expedition to capture Cyprus moved much faster than the league fleet moved to defend it. The Turkish fleet was at least as big as the 200-vessel league fleet, and on some estimates twice the size or more. The ships were commanded by Piali, the conqueror of Chíos four years earlier, and the land forces by Lala Mustafa, the fifth vizier. On 1 July 1570 Turkish ships appeared off Paphos in the south-west of Cyprus. Moving along the south coast they attacked Limassol and the neighbouring towns, where they met some resistance, but went on to Larnaka where, to their surprise, they landed unopposed. On 22 July a Turkish force led by Lala Mustafa of 100,000 men – some accounts say even more – set out for the capital Nicosia in the centre of the island, and three days later the siege began.

The defence of Nicosia was the responsibility of Nicolo Dandolo, the lieutenant or civilian governor of Cyprus. Normally in time of war a provveditor-general sent out from Venice would have been in command, but the incumbent had died the year before and two successive replacements never reached the island, so Dandolo had been given the title of vice-provveditor.

No account has a good word for Dandolo. He was described as poor spirited, stupid and irascible, and said to veer between keenness and slackness with every passing rumour. But he was in a virtually impossible position. He was heavily outnumbered, having some 20,000 fighting men, Italians and Greeks, only about half of whom were trained and not sick, to face 100,000 or more besiegers. Nicosia’s defensive walls, in the shape of an eleven-point star, seemed formidable, but had not been properly maintained – for which Dandolo was blamed – and were subject to continuous bombardment. Gunpowder was short. A sortie in
force on 15 August failed, in some accounts because of the indiscipline of the Greek troops, and Dandolo forbade any future sorties. This can be regarded as the turning point of the siege: if there were to be no more attacks, it was only a matter of time before weak defences gave way. On 9 September, after a 45-day siege and a final bombardment of the walls, the Turks entered the city and overwhelmed the defenders. The city never formally surrendered, but a drunken Greek pulled down the flag of St Mark and raised the Turkish flag in its place. A three-day sack followed, said to yield more plunder than any city since Constantinople in 1453. Dandolo was captured and beheaded, and his severed head sent as a statement of intent to Famagusta, now the only town on the island still resisting the Turks, and Lala Mustafa’s next objective.

The response of the Greeks of Cyprus to the Turkish invasion was far from uniform. Greeks played a part in the defence of Nicosia, and later, with sustained courage, in that of Famagusta. Others, however, may have welcomed the invaders. The Greeks of Lévkara, a village some ten miles inland between Limassol and Larnaka, not only yielded at once to the Turks – they could do little else – but also apparently sent messengers to the nearby villagers encouraging them too to submit. In retribution for this support of the Turkish invader, and as a warning to others, the Venetians killed all the inhabitants of Lévkara who were capable of fighting and destroyed the village. One cannot say whether the villagers of Lévkara genuinely supported the Turks or merely submitted to
force majeure
, but the brutal responses of the Venetians suggest their fears that other Greek Cypriots would favour the Turks.

The siege of Famagusta, the last outpost of resistance to the Turks, began on 16 September 1570. Here the Greeks seem fully to have supported the Venetians, and in accounts of the siege are regularly mentioned as serving the guns, repairing the defences or building new ones. In the final assault they made a last stand near the Greek cathedral, where two Greek bishops and many Greek priests and monks were killed.

This Greek support may have been because their Venetian commanders at Famagusta were so much better than the incompetent Dandolo at Nicosia. There were two leaders of the defence of Famagusta. One was Astorre Baglione, who had been sent out from Venice in April 1570 as military governor of Cyprus and commander-in-chief of the island’s defence. He would have been subordinate to a provveditor-general had there been one, and his authority in relation to the vice-provveditor Dandolo was never clear. The other was Marcantonio Bragadino, the civil governor of Famagusta, nominally subordinate to Baglione though in practice they acted in concert.

Under these two commanders the troops were regularly paid, and fed as well as the rationing of short supplies allowed: ‘As long as there was a dram of food, Bragadino distributed it; and when there was none, there still remained his good will.’
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Baglione personally led 26 skirmishes against the Turks, saying ‘I, who love my soldiers, go with them.’
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The only criticism of him was that perhaps he should command more and fight less.

Under Baglione and Bragadino the Famagusta defence held out for almost a year. There was a moment of hope when Marco Quirini, with the Venetian fleet that was operating independently of the ineffective league, arrived at Famagusta from Crete in January 1571. He destroyed three Turkish ships and some Turkish fortifications, and took on board valuables for safe keeping and the children and non-combatants of the town, but after three weeks he left, with promises of future but unspecified help. False hopes that a Christian fleet was about to appear were regularly raised towards the end of the siege – on occasions in May, June and July 1571 – but all were as regularly disappointed.

In June the Turks, after months of bombardment, launched the final phase of the siege, a series of six or seven assaults during the month. The defenders were by now in desperate straits. At the start of the siege there had been 3,000 to 4,000 Italian troops; but by now all but 900 had been killed, and of these survivors some 400 were wounded and the remaining 500 were exhausted. Gunpowder had almost run out. Food supplies were nearly finished, and even all the horses, donkeys and cats had been eaten. But the besieged fought on, and a Turkish despatch to Constantinople acknowledged their heroism, saying that Famagusta was defended not by men but by giants. In the end, though, heroism was not enough. In mid-July the Bishop of Limassol came to Bragadino and Baglione and appealed to them to give up the town for the sake of all the defenders. The commanders delayed a decision for a fortnight but on 1 August 1571 raised on the ramparts the white flag of surrender.

There was no authorised sack of Famagusta as there had been at Nicosia. There was less to plunder at Famagusta, but the main reason for its better treatment seems to have been that Famagusta had formally surrendered whereas Nicosia had not. The terms of surrender too were lenient. Lala Mustafa agreed to send the commanders and all the garrison safely to Crete, promised the people of Famagusta to intercede with the Sultan for them and praised the gallantry of Bragadino and Baglione.

After a few days these amicable relations were shattered. On the evening of 5 August Bragadino and Baglione with other officers went to Lala Mustafa’s camp to discuss the details of the surrender terms. In
the course of the discussion Lala Mustafa was said to have flown into a rage and ordered the visitors to be seized. Baglione was executed on the spot, and Lala Mustafa triumphantly raised his severed head. Bragadino had his nose and ears cut off, and twelve days later, seriously ill from his festering wounds, faced his final humiliation. After being forced to carry sacks of earth and stones round the ramparts he had defended, he was tied naked to a column in the main square and flayed alive, that is his skin was carved from his body. After his death the skin was cured and stuffed with straw, dressed in his clothes and paraded round Famagusta on the back of a cow.