Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (24 page)

Another thought school was simply a waste of time:

These schools may have been basic, but initially Crete was enriched by educated refugees from Constantinople, fleeing the city before 1453 as the Turkish threat grew. Many worked as copyists of classical Greek texts by Thucydides, Apollonius Rhodius and others. Enoch Powell, professor of Greek as well as controversial politician, maintained that fifteenth-century Cretan scholarship made a unique contribution to the study of classical Greek texts. But the general level of education was low, even among the clergy: ‘An uneducated priest is simply an impostor,’ thundered a Cretan abbot.
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From then on the Catholic Church was the main instigator of education in Crete, but frequently bedevilled it. Cardinal Vissaríon, a Greek converted to the Catholic Church, founded a Greek school in Iráklion in the mid-fifteenth century, but it was distrusted by the Cretans because it propagated Vissaríon’s support for the unification of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Seminaries to train Cretans as Catholic priests were established in Iráklion in 1592 and later in Chaniá and Réthimnon. The Jesuits established a school in Iráklion in 1585, but their extreme views scandalised the Cretan Orthodox, and twenty years later the Venetian authorities expelled them. A worse fate befell the Calvinists, champions of the Reformation, who started a school at Iráklion in the same period. The Catholic archbishop of Crete called for the public burning of their
books, and the three teachers of the school were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in Venice, the principal for life.

As schooling was uncertain, there was a demand for private tutors, and troops of the Venetian garrison were often employed to teach Cretan children. But such tutors were sometimes hard to find: a writer in 1579 said that teachers were rare, and then corrected himself: ‘But why do I say rare – there isn’t a single one.’
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Only in the last century of Venetian rule was higher education properly established, with the founding of academies at Réthimnon in 1562, Iráklion in 1590 and Chaniá in 1637. This not only contributed to the Veneto-Cretan renaissance but produced a steady flow of Cretan students to universities in Italy, principally Padua. There, in the decades before the fall of Crete in 1669, 234 Cretan students are recorded as attending the medical school and 290 the law school, and other Greeks studied the same subjects. No wonder that the university of Padua was regarded as the alma mater, not only of Cretans but of Greeks throughout the regions of Venetian or Turkish rule.

It is clear, however, that this shared world was not without friction, and one cause of it was Venetian recruitment of oarsmen for the galleys. Until the time of Lepanto enough free oarsmen could be recruited, for a limited period and for pay, but as the number of Venetian galleys grew and as service on them became increasingly unpopular there were not enough free oarsmen. Venice tried to solve the problem in various ways: by recruiting oarsmen abroad, in Dalmatia as early as the thirteenth century, and in Venice itself by using convicts. In Crete they drew on the pool of Cretan peasants who were registered for a period of compulsory labour for the state as a form of taxation. The pool was large, some 40,000 in 1629, but it was difficult to recruit even the 400 men needed for two peacetime galleys. Recruitment was brutal, as a report by the provveditor-general in 1594 makes clear: ‘The provveditor gave the order for all those who were to be enlisted to come forward and present themselves. So the men of the village aged between fifteen and fifty came along, and all those who seemed to be the most suitable for service were enlisted in the usual way. Then they were rounded up in the barns or churches and when fifty or sometimes a hundred had been gathered they were chained up to each other in pairs so that they couldn’t get away, and in the custody of the local noble and some horses they were promptly escorted to the galleys.’
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Some villagers fled to offshore islands to escape galley service, some ruined themselves paying substitutes to replace them, and a recruit from Anópolis on the south coast hanged himself rather than serve.

Another cause of friction between Venetians and Cretans was the question of what crops the island should grow. As on other islands, there was
a conflict between grain for self-sufficiency and other crops – in this case vines and olives – for profitable export. In the fifteenth century Crete produced plenty of grain, especially on the fertile plain of Mesará in the centre of the south coast. There was enough to feed Crete and to export large quantities to Venice. But the same century saw a massive increase in vine growing at the expense of grain, and Crete soon came to depend on imports of grain for three or four months of the year. These imports at first came from Ottoman territory until they were banned in 1555, and piracy made grain shipments from any source hazardous. In the following decades vine growing became increasingly profitable. The extra troops stationed on Crete after the fall of Cyprus drove up wine prices, and pirates, especially English ones, came to Crete and bought up all the wine they could, paying fancy prices because they were so rich.

The Venetian authorities tried a forcible solution to the problem. In 1575 they ordered vines to be ripped up to encourage grain cultivation instead, and there were more such orders in 1584 and 1602, which suggests that the policy was not working. Even when it did force a change of crops this was not necessarily to grain but often to olives, and in 1589 the provveditor-general reported that: ‘The planting of olive trees increased after the [recently issued] prohibitions on viticulture, and is increasing still. I am afraid that if things continue as they are measures will have to be taken to discourage such cultivation, because otherwise olive tree cultivation will intrude on the growing of wheat, just as has happened with viticulture.’
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The destruction of vines provoked an outcry that was a warning for the Venetians; the landowners declared that they would make ‘no distinction between being subjects of Venice or of the Turks’,
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that is that Venice’s harsh measures risked losing Cretan support against any Turkish invasion. But there were still advocates of Venetian rule by force. In 1616 the priest Paolo Sarpi, adviser to the Venetian state, addressed the Senate on how Venice could keep perpetual dominion over Crete. His ferocious polemic read, in part:

As for the gentlemen of those Colonies,’ Sarpi went on:

Venetians on the spot saw things differently, and were well aware of the need for Cretan support against a Turkish attack, which was becoming ever more probable. In 1639 the provveditor-general wrote that the Cretan people ‘must always be treated well so that they will remain faithful and devoted. Because when they are oppressed and used too much in forced labour by the fief holders and sometimes even by the representatives of the state, and subjected to extraordinary harshness, they are driven to despair. Then they abandon the kingdom and go to the Turkish territories. They incite the enemy and open the way toward attacks, which perhaps the enemy would not otherwise have thought of.’13 But it was very late in the day for the Venetians to adopt a conciliatory policy towards their Cretan subjects, and too late to win their general support against the imminent Turkish invasion.

12

1669 – The Turks Take Crete

T
here was an interval of 75 years between the Ottoman annexation of Venetian Cyprus in 1570 and their attack on Venetian Crete in 1645. Also it took them only one year to take Cyprus, but 24 years to take Crete. This contrast prompts two questions. Why did the Ottomans wait for 75 years before consolidating their control over the whole of the eastern Mediterranean? And why was the annexation of Crete so prolonged while the annexation of Cyprus – an island of almost exactly the same size – was so quick?

One reason for the long wait between the attacks on Cyprus and on Crete was that Ottoman forces were occupied meanwhile with other wars – against the Habsburgs in Europe, and on their eastern frontier against the Persian Safavid Empire in Iran and Iraq. But the Persian war ended in 1639, and in 1644 the Turks made peace with the Habsburgs. Another and perhaps more telling reason for the long interval was turmoil at the centre. The Sultans who succeeded Selim II (1566–74), conqueror of Cyprus and himself reported to be an alcoholic, were perhaps the least competent series of rulers who have ever been at the head of a major state. These Sultans were dominated by court factions of grand viziers, eunuchs and women of the Sultan’s family, even those Sultans who came to the throne as adults – and three acceded as children. Some historians maintain that competition between factions made the adoption of any forceful and consistent policy virtually impossible.

In 1644 under Ibrahim I, perhaps the most unstable Sultan of the series, there were two opposing factions, one for war to drive Venice from Crete and one for peace. An incident at sea provided a casus belli. In the autumn of that year a raiding vessel from Malta, the base of the Knights of St John, seized three Turkish ships on their way from Constantinople to Egypt. These were prestigious prizes as they carried two eminent Turks from the Sultan’s court, with their retinues and a considerable amount of treasure. Of the passengers 350 men and 30 women were seized as slaves or for ransom, and the rest were killed. The corsairs took their prizes into Venetian territory at the small secluded port of Kalí Liménes halfway along the south coast of Crete. The Venetians had lookouts on this long and rocky south coast, but it was impossible for
them to watch, let alone guard, the whole of it. Nevertheless Venice was blamed for sheltering pirates, and the Turkish war party had its justification for invasion. It was thought in some quarters that the task would be easy. The English consul in Smyrna, Paul Rycaut, wrote that the whole possession of Crete ‘was imagined, at the beginning of the war, would upon a bare demand be quietly presented’.
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In June 1645 an Ottoman fleet landed troops near Chaniá, the area chosen nearly three centuries later by invading German paratroops. Within weeks the Ottoman forces had taken Chaniá, within a year Réthimnon, and within two years were masters of the whole island except Iráklion – then called, as was Crete, by the Italianate name of Candia.

Iráklion lies on the sea, and was then ringed on both its landward and seaward sides by a formidable defensive wall. The siege, lasting from 1645 until 1669, was the longest siege ever recorded, though the early years were more a period of attrition and it was only in the last two years that the fighting became active. The battle for Iráklion was so protracted for a number of reasons. First, the harbour remained open for the Venetian defenders, since the Ottoman fleet was now much weaker than at Lepanto in the previous century. Then their fleet numbered 230 vessels, but despite the rebuilding effort after Lepanto only 78 ships put to sea against Crete. So the Ottomans were not strong enough to blockade Iráklion effectively from the sea. But the naval power of Venice, now without naval support from any of the European powers, had also declined, and Venice, despite a blockade of the Dardanelles, was unable to prevent Ottoman ships supplying their troops through Cretan ports other than Iráklion. Foreign vessels profitably supplied both sides. Venice’s appeals for troops from other powers – Spain, the Habsburgs and France – brought only a limited response.

There was also stalemate at Iráklion on land. This was a period when, broadly speaking, defensive walls had become stronger than the guns used to attack them. The new technique in fortification was the bastion, projecting in a half-diamond shape from the line of the walls. This allowed defenders to fire in a 180-degree arc, and the diamond shape presented only a glancing surface to enemy fire from the front. The Venetians had built the major part of Iráklion’s walls in the 1520s and 1530s, and by the time of the siege the walls had been strengthened by seven of these crucial bastions.