The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

VENICE

[1600-1685 A.D.]

While Genoa was either wholly subservient to the influence of Spain, with difficulty repulsing the machinations of the princes of Savoy, or enduring all the insulting arrogance of France, her ancient rival was holding her political course with more pretensions to independence and dignity. Throughout the age before us, Venice seemed roused to the exertion of the few remains of her ancient spirit and strength. Starting with renewed vigour from the languor and obscurity of the preceding century, the republic evinced a proud resolution to maintain her prescriptive rights, and even in some measure aspired to assert the lost independence of Italy. Her efforts in this latter respect, indeed, deserve to be mentioned, rather for the courage which dictated them, than for their results. The relative force of the states of Europe had too essentially changed; the commercial foundations of her own prosperity were too irretrievably ruined to render it possible that she should rear her head again above other powers of the second order, or become the protectress and successful champion of the peninsula. But, in the seventeenth century, the annals of Venice were at least not stained with disgrace. Even her losses, in a protracted and unequal contest with the Turks, were redeemed from shame by many brilliant acts of heroism in her unavailing defence; and the unfortunate issue of one war was balanced by the happier results of a second. But the firmness of the republic was conspicuous, and her success unalloyed.

[1600-1606 A.D.]

The first of the struggles, in which Venice was called upon to engage in this century, was produced, soon after its opening, by that violent attempt of Pope Paul V, to which we have before alluded, to revive the monstrous and exploded doctrine of papal jurisdiction and supremacy over the temporal affairs of the world (1605). The Venetians had, even in the dark ages, been remarkable for their freedom from the trammels of superstition, and consistent in repelling the encroachments of ecclesiastical power. Upon no occasion would the senate either permit the publication or execution of any papal decree in their territories, until it had received their previous sanction; or suffer an appeal to the court of Rome from any of their subjects, except by their own authority, and through the ambassador of the republic. The jurisdiction of the Council of Ten was as despotic and final over the Venetian clergy as over all other classes in the state; and while ecclesiastics were rigidly excluded from all interference in political affairs, and from the exercise of any civil functions, the right of the secular tribunals to judge them in every case not purely spiritual was a principle, from which the government never departed either in theory or practice. Of all the extravagant privileges claimed by the Romish church for its militia, the exemption of the ecclesiastical body from taxation (unless as the immediate act of the popes) was the only one recognised by the Venetian government; and, to annul this, immunity was a project which had more than once been entertained.

A Venetian Beggar

(Many of these were people in straitened circumstances, who wore a mask to disguise their features.)

With a spirit similar to that which retained the clergy under due subjection, universal religious toleration was a steady maxim of the Venetian senate. The public and peaceable worship of the Mussulman, the Jew, the Greek, the Armenian, had always been equally permitted in the republican dominions; and in later times even the Protestant sects had met in the capital and provinces with a like indulgence. The iniquitous principles of the oligarchical administration forbid us from attributing to its conduct in these respects any higher or more enlightened motive than the interested and necessary policy of a commercial state. But it is a striking proof of the ability and stern vigilance of this government, that, notwithstanding its universal toleration and rejection of ecclesiastical control, no pretence was left for the popes to impugn its zealous fidelity to the Romish church; and that, at a time when all Europe was convulsed by the struggle of religious opinions, Venice alone could receive into her corrupted bosom the elements of discord, without shaking the foundations of her established faith or sustaining the slightest shock to her habitual tranquillity.

The fierce temper with which Paul V seated himself on the papal throne, and the systematic determination of the Venetian senate to submit to no ecclesiastical usurpations, could not fail to bring the republic into collision with so rash and violent a pontiff. Accordingly Paul V had scarcely commenced his reign, when he conceived offence at the refusal of the senate to provoke a war with the Turks, by assisting the Hungarians at his command with subsidies against the infidels. His dissatisfaction with the republic was increased by her obstinacy in levying duty upon all merchandise entering the papal ports in the Adriatic—a matter in which, assuredly, religion was in nowise interested; and it reached its height when the senate passed a law, or rather revived an old one, forbidding the further alienation of immovable property in favour of religious foundations; which indeed, even in their states, were already possessed of overgrown wealth.

At this juncture the Council of Ten, acting upon its established principle of subjecting priests to secular jurisdiction, caused two ecclesiastics, a canon of Vicenza, named Sarraceno, and an abbot of Nervesa, to be successively arrested and thrown into prison, to await their trials for offences with which they were charged. Their alleged crimes were of the blackest enormity: rape in one case; assassination, poisonings, and parricide in the other. The pope, as if the rights of the church had been violently outraged by these arrests, summoned the doge and senate to deliver over the two priests to the spiritual arm, on pain of excommunication; and he seized the occasion to demand, under the same penalty, the repeal of the existing regulations against the increase of the ecclesiastical edifices and property. But the doge and senate, positively refusing to retract their measures, treated the papal menaces with contempt; and Paul V then struck them, their capital, and their whole republic with excommunication and interdict (1606).

The Venetian government endured the anathemas, so appalling to the votaries of superstition, with unshaken firmness. In reply to the papal denunciations of the divine wrath against the republic, they successfully published repeated and forcible appeals to the justice of their cause, and to the common-sense of the world. The general sentiment of Catholic Europe responded to their arguments; and their own subjects, filled with indignation at the unprovoked sentence against the state, zealously seconded their spirit. In private the doge had not hesitated to hold out to the papal nuncio an alarming threat that the perseverance of his holiness in violent measures would impel the republic to dissolve her connection altogether with the Roman see; and the open procedure of the senate was scarcely less bold. On pain of death, all parochial ministers and monks in the Venetian states were commanded to pay no regard to the interdict, and to continue to perform the offices of religion as usual. The secular clergy yielded implicit obedience to the decree; and when the Jesuits, Capuchins, and other monastic orders endeavoured to qualify their allegiance, between the pope and the republic, by making a reservation against the performance of mass, they were immediately deprived of their possessions, and expelled from the Venetian territories.

The pope, finding his spiritual weapons ineffectual against the constancy of the Venetians, showed an inclination to have recourse to temporal arms. He levied troops, and endeavoured to engage Philip III of Spain and other princes in the support of his authority. At the same time, both the Spanish monarch and Henry IV of France, the ally of the republic, began to interest themselves in a quarrel which nearly concerned all Catholic powers, and threatened Europe with commotion. In reality, both sovereigns aspired to the honour of being the arbiter of the difference. But the feint of arming to second the pope, by which Philip III hoped to terrify the republic into submitting to his mediation, had only the effect of determining the senate to prefer the interposition of his rival; and Henry IV became the zealous negotiator between the pope and the republic.

[1606-1615 A.D.]

Paul IV discovered at length that Spain had no serious resolution to support him by arms, and that, without the application of a force which he could not command, it was vain to expect submission from so inflexible a body as the Venetian oligarchy. He was therefore reduced to the most humiliating compromise of his boasted dignity. Without obtaining a single concession on the point in dispute, he was obliged to revoke his spiritual sentences. The doge and senate could not even receive an absolution; they refused to alter their decree against the alienation of property in favour of the church; and though they consigned the two imprisoned ecclesiastics to the disposal of Henry IV, they accompanied this act with a formal declaration, that was intended only as a voluntary mark of their respect for that monarch their ally, and to be in no degree construed into an abandonment of their right and practice of subjecting their clergy to secular jurisdiction. Even their deference for Henry IV could not prevail over their resentment and suspicion of the banished Jesuits: they peremptorily refused to reinstate that order in its possessions; and it was not until after the middle of the century that the Jesuits obtained admission again into the states of the republic. Thus, with the signal triumph of Venice, terminated a struggle, happily a bloodless one, which was not less remarkable for the firmness of the republic than important for its general effects in crushing the pretensions of papal tyranny. For its issue may assuredly be regarded as having relieved all Roman Catholic states from future dread of excommunication and interdict—and therefore from the danger of spiritual engines, impotent in themselves, and formidable only when unresisted.

With the same unyielding spirit which characterised their resistance to papal and ecclesiastical usurpation, the Venetian senate resolved to tolerate no infringement upon the tyrannical pretension of their own republic to the despotic sovereignty of the Adriatic. Before the contest with Paul V, their state had already been seriously incommoded by the piracies of the Uscochi. This community, originally formed of Christian inhabitants of Dalmatia and Croatia, had been driven, in the sixteenth century, by the perpetual Turkish invasions of their provinces, to the fastness of Clissa, whence they successfully retaliated upon their infidel foes by incursions into the Ottoman territories. At length, overpowered by the Turks, and dispersed from their stronghold, these Uscochi, or refugees, as their name implies in the Dalmatian tongue, were collected by Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (afterwards emperor), and established in the maritime town of Segna to guard that post against the Turks. In their new station, which, on the land side, was protected from access by mountains and forests, while numerous inlets and intricate shallows rendered it difficult of approach from the sea, the Uscochi betook themselves to piracy; and, for above seventy years, their light and swift barks boldly infested the Adriatic with impunity. Their first attacks were directed against the infidels; but irritated by the interference of the Venetians, who, as sovereigns of the Adriatic, found themselves compelled by the complaints and threats of the Porte to punish their freebooting enterprises, they began to extend their depredations to the commerce of the republic.

[1615-1617 A.D.]

It was to little purpose that the senate called upon the Austrian government to restrain its lawless subjects; their representations were either eluded altogether, or failed in obtaining any effectual satisfaction. The Uscochi, a fearless and desperate band, recruited by outlaws and men of abandoned lives, became more audacious by the connivance of Austria; and the republic was obliged to maintain a small squadron constantly at sea to protect her commerce against them. At length, after having recourse alternately, for above half a century, to fruitless negotiations with Austria, and insufficient attempts to chastise the pirates, the republic seriously determined to put an end to their vexatious hostilities and increasing insolence. The capture of a Venetian galley and the massacre of its crew in 1615, and an irruption of the Uscochi into Istria, brought affairs to a crisis. The Austrian government, then directed by the archduke Ferdinand of Styria, instead of giving satisfaction for these outrages, demanded the free navigation of the Adriatic for its vessels; and the senate found an appeal to arms the only mode of preserving its efficient sovereignty over the gulf. The Venetian troops made reprisals on the Austrian territory; and an open war commenced between the archduke and the republic.

The contest was soon associated, by the interference of Spain, with the hostilities then carried on between that monarchy and the duke of Savoy in northern Italy respecting Montferrat. For protection against the enmity of the two branches of the house of Austria, Venice united herself with Savoy, and largely subsidised that state. She even sought more distant allies, and a league, offensive and defensive, was signed between her and the seven united provinces. Notwithstanding the difference of religious faith, which, in that age constituted in itself a principle of political hostility, the two republics found a bond of union, stronger than this repulsion, in their common reasons for opposing the Spanish power. They engaged to afford each other a reciprocal assistance in money, vessels, or men, whenever menaced with attack; and in fulfilment of this treaty, a strong body of Dutch troops arrived in the Adriatic. Before the disembarkation of this force, the Venetians had already gained some advantages in the Austrian provinces on the coasts of that sea; and the archduke was induced by the appearance of the Dutch, and his projects in Germany, to open negotiations for a general peace in northern Italy.

Lion, supporting the pillar of the Pulpit, St. Mark’s

The same treaty terminated the wars of the house of Austria respecting Montferrat and the Uscochi. Ferdinand of Austria gave security for the dispersion of the pirates, whom he had protected; and thus the Venetian republic was finally delivered from the vexatious and lawless depredations of those freebooters, who had so long annoyed her commerce and harassed her subjects (1617). It does not appear that the force of this singular race of pirates, who had thus risen into historical notice, ever exceeded a thousand men; but their extraordinary hardihood and ferocity, their incessant enterprise and activity, their inaccessible position, and the connivance of Austria, had rendered them formidable enemies. Their depredations, and the constant expense of petty armaments against them, were estimated to have cost the Venetians in thirty years a loss of more than 20,000,000 gold ducats; and no less a question than the security of the dominion of the republic over the Adriatic was decided by the war against them.

[1617-1618 A.D.]

Although Spain and Venice had not been regularly at war, the tyrannical ascendency exercised by the Spanish court over the affairs of Italy, occasioned the Venetians to regard that power with particular apprehension and enmity; and the spirit shown by the senate in the late contest had filled the Spanish government with implacable hatred towards the republic. By her alliances and her whole procedure, Venice had declared against the house of Austria, and betrayed her disposition to curb the alarming and overspreading authority of both its branches in the peninsula. The haughty ministers of Philip III secretly nourished projects of vengeance against the state, which had dared to manifest a systematic hostility to the Spanish dominion; and they are accused, even in apparent peace, of having regarded the republic as an enemy whom it behoved them to destroy. At the epoch of the conclusion of the war relative to Montferrat and the Uscochi, the duke of Osuna was viceroy of Naples, Don Pedro de Toledo, governor of Milan, and the marquis of Bedmar, ambassador at Venice from the court of Madrid. To the hostility entertained against the republic by these three ministers, the two former of whom governed the Italian possessions of Spain with almost regal independence, has usually been attributed the formation, with the connivance of the court of Madrid, of one of the most atrocious and deep-laid conspiracies on record. The real character of this mysterious transaction must ever remain among the unsolved problems of history; for even the circumstances which were partially suffered by the Council of Ten to transpire were so imperfectly explained, and so liable to suspicion from the habitual iniquity of their policy, as to have given rise to a thousand various and contradictory versions of the same events. Of these we shall attempt to collect only such as are scarcely open to doubt.

The Venetians had no reason to hope that the exasperation of the Spanish government, at the part which they had taken in the late war in Italy, would die away with the termination of hostilities; and it appeared to the world a consequence of the enmity of the court of Madrid towards the republic that the duke of Osuna, the viceroy of Naples, continued his warlike equipments in that kingdom with undiminished activity, notwithstanding the signature of peace. The viceroy, indeed, pretended that his naval armaments were designed against the infidels; and when the court of Madrid recalled the royal Spanish fleet from the coasts of Italy, the duke of Osuna sent the Neapolitan squadron to sea under a flag emblazoned with his own family arms. But it was difficult to suppose, either that a viceroy dared to hoist his personal standard unsanctioned by his sovereign and would be suffered to engage in a private war against the Ottoman Empire, or that he would require for that purpose the charts of the Venetian lagunes, and the flat-bottomed vessels fitted for their navigation, which he busily collected. The republic accordingly manifested serious alarm, and sedulously prepared for defence.

Affairs were in this state, when one morning several strangers were found suspended from the gibbets of the square of St. Mark. The public consternation increased when, on the following dawn, other bodies were also found hanging on the same fatal spot—also of strangers. It was at the same time whispered that numerous arrests had filled the dungeons of the Council of Ten with some hundreds of criminals; and there was, too, certain proof that many persons had been privately drowned in the canals of Venice. To these fearful indications that the state had been alarmed by some extraordinary danger, the terrors of which were magnified by their obscurity, were shortly added further rumours that several foreigners serving in the fleet had been poniarded, hanged, or cast into the sea. The city was then filled with the most alarming reports: that a conspiracy of long duration had been discovered; that its object was to massacre the nobility, to destroy the republic, to deliver the whole capital to flames and pillage; that the Spanish ambassador was the mover of the horrible plot. Venice was filled with indignation and terror; yet the impenetrable Council of Ten preserved the most profound silence, neither confirming nor contradicting the general belief. The life of the marquis of Bedmar was violently threatened by the populace: he retired from Venice; the senate received a new ambassador from Spain without any signs of displeasure; and, finally, it was not until five months after the executions that the government commanded solemn thanksgiving to be offered up to the Almighty for the preservation of the state from the dangers which had threatened its existence.

[1618-1619 A.D.]

On the extent of these dangers nothing was ever certainly known; but amongst the persons executed the most conspicuous was ascertained to be a French naval captain of high reputation for ability and courage in his vocation, Jacques Pierre, who, after a life passed in enterprises of a doubtful or piratical character, had apparently deserted the service of the viceroy of Naples to embrace that of the republic. This man, and a brother adventurer, one Langlade, who had been employed in the arsenal in the construction of petards and other fireworks, were absent from Venice with the fleet when the other executions took place; and they were suddenly put to death while on this service. Two other French captains named Regnault and Bouslart, with numerous foreigners, principally of the same nation, who had lately been taken into the republican service, were privately tortured and executed in various ways in the capital; and altogether 260 officers and other military adventurers are stated to have perished by the hands of the executioner for their alleged share in the conspiracy. The vengeance or shocking policy of the Council of Ten proceeded yet further; and so careful was that body to bury every trace of this inexplicable affair in the deepest oblivion, that Antoine Jaffier, also a French captain, and other informers, who had revealed the existence of a plot, though at first rewarded, were all in the sequel either known to have met a violent death, or mysteriously disappeared altogether. Of the three Spanish ministers, to whom it has been customary to assign the origin of the conspiracy, the two principal were distinguished by opposite fates. The marquis of Bedmar, after the termination of his embassy, found signal political advancement, and finished by obtaining a cardinal’s hat, by the interest of his court with the holy see. But the duke of Osuna, after being removed from viceroyalty, was disgraced on suspicion of having designed to renounce his allegiance, and to place the crown of Naples on his own head; and he died in prison.

Whether the safety of Venice had really been endangered or not by the machinations of Spain, the measures of that power were observed by the senate with a watchful and jealous eye; and, for many years, the policy of the republic was constantly employed in endeavours to counteract the projects of the house of Austria. In 1619, the Venetians perceived with violent alarm that the court of Madrid, under pretence of protecting the Catholics of the Valtelline against their rulers, the Protestants of the Grison confederation, was labouring to acquire the possession of that valley, which, by connecting the Milanese states with the Tyrol, would cement the dominions of the Spanish and German dynasties of the Austrian family. The establishment of this easy communication was particularly dangerous for the Venetians, because it would envelop their states, from the Lisonzo to the Po, with an unbroken chain of hostile posts, and would intercept all direct intercourse with Savoy and the territories of France. The senate eagerly therefore negotiated the league between these last two powers and their republic, which, in 1623, was followed by the Grison war against the house of Austria. This contest produced little satisfactory fruits for the Venetians; and it did not terminate before the Grisons, though they recovered their sovereignty over the Valtelline, had themselves embraced the party of Spain.

[1619-1645 A.D.]

The Grison war had not closed, when Venice was drawn, by her systematic opposition to the Spanish power, into a more important quarrel—that of the Mantuan Succession, in which she of course espoused the cause of the Gonzaga of Nevers. In this struggle the republic, who sent an army of twenty thousand men into the field on her Lombard frontiers, experienced nothing but disgrace; and the senate were but too happy to find their states left, by the Peace of Cherasco in 1631, precisely in the same situation as before the war; while the prince whom they had supported remained seated on the throne of Mantua. This pacification reconciled the republic with the house of Austria, and terminated her share in the Italian wars of the seventeenth century. Her efforts to promote the deliverance of the peninsula from the Spanish power can scarcely be said to have met with success; nor was the rapid decline of that monarchy, which had already commenced, hastened, perhaps, by her hostility. But she had displayed remarkable energy in the policy of her counsels; and the recovery of her own particular independence was at least triumphantly effected. So completely were her pretensions to the sovereignty of the Adriatic maintained that, when in the year 1630, just before the conclusion of the Mantuan War, a princess of the Spanish dynasty wished to pass by sea from Naples to Trieste, to espouse the son of the emperor, the senator refused to allow the Spanish squadron to escort her, as an infringement upon their right of excluding every foreign armament from those waters; but they gallantly offered their own fleet for her service. The Spanish government at first rejected the offer; but the Venetians, says Giannone, boldly declared that, if the Spaniards were resolved to prefer a trial of force to their friendly proposal, the infanta must fight her way to her wedding through fire and smoke. The haughty court of Madrid was compelled to yield; and the Venetian admiral, Antonio Pisani, then gave the princess a convoy in splendid bearing to Trieste with a squadron of light galleys.

Venetian Wars with the Turks

[1645-1657 A.D.]

Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, the affairs of Venice had little connection with those of the older Italian states; and in tracing the annals of the republic, our attention is wholly diverted to the Eastern theatre of her struggles against the Ottoman power. It was a sudden and overwhelming aggression which first broke the long interval of peace between the Turkish and Venetian governments. Under pretence of taking vengeance upon the knights of Malta, for the capture of some Turkish vessels, the Porte fitted out an enormous expedition; and 348 galleys and other vessels of war, with an immense number of transports, having on board a land-force of fifty thousand men, issued from the Dardanelles with the ostensible design of attacking the stronghold of the order of St. John (1645). But instead of making sail for Malta, the fleet of the sultan steered for the shores of Candia; and unexpectedly, and without any provocation, the Turkish army disembarked on that island. The Venetians, although the senate had conceived some uneasiness on the real destination of the Ottoman expedition, were little prepared for resistance; but they defended themselves against this faithless surprise with remarkable courage, and even with desperation. During a long war of twenty-five years, the most ruinous which they had ever sustained against the infidels, the Venetian senate and all classes of their subjects displayed a zealous energy and a fortitude worthy of the best days of their republic. But the resources of Venice were no longer what they had been in the early ages of her prosperity; and although the empire of the sultans had declined from the meridian of its power, the contest was still too disproportionate between the fanatical and warlike myriads of Turkey and the limited forces of a maritime state. The Venetians, perhaps, could not withdraw from the unequal conflict with honour; but the prudent senate might easily foresee its disastrous result.

The first important operation of the Turkish army in Candia was the siege of Canea, one of the principal cities of the island. Before the end of the first campaign, the assailants had entered that place by capitulation; but so gallant was the defence that, although the garrison was composed only of two or three thousand native militia, twenty thousand Turks are said to have fallen before the walls. Meanwhile, at Venice, all orders had rivalled each other in devotion and pecuniary sacrifices to preserve the most valuable colony of the state; and notwithstanding the apathy of Spain, the disorders of France and the empire, and other causes, which deprived the republic of the efficient support of Christendom against a common enemy, the senate were able to reinforce the garrisons of Candia, and to oppose a powerful fleet to the infidels. The naval force of the republic was still indeed very inferior in numbers to that of the Moslems; but this inferiority was compensated by the advantages of skill and disciplined courage; and throughout the war the offensive operations of the Venetians on the waves strikingly displayed their superiority in maritime science and conduct. For many successive years, the Venetian squadrons assumed and triumphantly maintained their station, during the seasons of active operations, at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and blockaded the straits and the port of Constantinople. The Mussulmans constantly endeavoured with furious perseverance to remove the shame of their confinement by an inferior force; but they were almost always defeated. The naval trophies of Venice were swelled by many brilliant victories, but by five in particular: in 1649 near Smyrna; in 1651 near Paros; in 1655 at the passage of the Dardanelles; and, in the two following years, at the same place. In these encounters, the exploits of the patrician families of Morosini, of Grimani, of Mocenigo emulated the glorious deeds of their illustrious ancestors; and their successes gave temporary possession to the republic of some ports in Dalmatia, and of several islands in the Archipelago.

But, notwithstanding the devotion and courage of the Venetians on their own element, and their desperate resistance in the fortresses of Candia, the war in that island was draining the life-blood of the republic, without affording one rational hope of ultimate success. The vigilance of the Venetian squadrons could not prevent the Turks from feeding their army in Candia with desultory and perpetual reinforcements of janissaries and other troops from the neighbouring shore of the Morea; and whenever tempests, or exhaustion, or the overwhelming strength of the Ottoman armaments compelled the republican fleet to retire into port, the numbers of the invading army were swollen by fresh thousands. The exhaustless stream of the Ottoman population was directed with unceasing flow towards the scene of contest: the Porte was contented to purchase the acquisition of Candia by the sacrifice of hecatombs of human victims. To raise new resources, the Venetian senate were reduced to the humiliating expedient of offering the dignity of admission into their body and the highest offices of state to public sale: to obtain the continued means of succouring Candia, they implored the aid of all the powers of Europe. As the contest became more desperate, their entreaties met with general attention; and almost every Christian state afforded them a few reinforcements. But these were never simultaneous or numerous; and though they arrested the progress of the infidels, they only protracted the calamitous struggle.

[1648-1669 A.D.]

In 1648 the Turkish army had penetrated to the walls of Candia, the capital of the island; and for twenty years they kept that city in a continued state of siege. But it was only in the year 1666 that the assaults of the infidels attained their consummation of vigour, by the debarkation of reinforcements which raised their army to seventy thousand men, and on the arrival of Akhmet Kiupergli, the famous Ottoman vizir, to assume in person the direction of their irresistible force. This able commander was opposed by a leader in no respect inferior to him, Francesco Morosini, captain-general of the Venetians; and thenceforth the defence of Candia was signalised by prodigies of desperate valour, which exceed all belief. But we, in these days, are surprised to find that the Turks, in the direction of their approaches, and the employment of an immense battering train, showed a far superior skill to that of the Christians. The details of the siege of Candia belong to the history of the military art; but the general reader will best imagine the obstinacy of the defence from the fact that, in six months, the combatants exchanged thirty-two general assaults and seventeen furious sallies; that above six hundred mines were sprung; and that four thousand Christians and twenty thousand Mussulmans perished in the ditches and trenches of the place.

The most numerous and the last reinforcements received by the Venetians was six thousand French troops, despatched by Louis XIV under the dukes of Beaufort and Navailles. The characteristic rashness of their nation induced these commanders, contrary to the advice of Morosini, to hazard an imprudent sortie, in which they were totally defeated, and the former of these noblemen slain. After this disaster, no entreaty of Morosini could prevent the duke of Navailles from abandoning the defence of the city, with a precipitation as great as that which had provoked the calamity. The French re-embarked; the other auxiliaries followed their example; and Morosini was left with a handful of Venetians among a mass of blackened and untenable ruins. Thus deserted, after a glorious though hopeless resistance which has immortalised his name, Francesco Morosini ventured on his sole responsibility to conclude a treaty of peace with the vizir, which the Venetian senate, notwithstanding their jealousy of such unauthorised acts in their officers, rejoiced to confirm. The whole island of Candia, except two or three ports, was surrendered to the Turks; the republic preserved her other possessions in the Levant; and the war was thus terminated by the event of a siege, in the long course of which the incredible number of 120,000 Turks and 30,000 Christians are declared to have perished (1669).

[1669-1687 A.D.]

Notwithstanding the unfortunate issue of this war, the Venetian republic had not come off without honour from an unequal struggle, which had been signalised by ten naval victories and by one of the most stubborn and brilliant defences recorded in history. Although, therefore, a prodigious expenditure of blood and treasure had utterly drained the resources of the republic, her courage was unsubdued, and her pride was even augmented by the events of the contest. The successes of the infidels had inspired less terror than indignant impatience and thirst of revenge; and the senate watched in secret for the first favourable occasion of retaliating upon the Mussulmans. After the Venetian strength had been repaired by fifteen years of uninterrupted repose and prosperous industry, this occasion of vengeance was found, in the war which the Porte had declared against the empire in 1682. An offensive league was signed between the emperor, the king of Poland, the czar of Muscovy, and the Venetians. The principal stipulation of this alliance was that each party should be guaranteed in the possession of its future conquests from the infidels; and the republic immediately fitted out a squadron of twenty-four sail of the line, and about fifty galleys.

There appeared but one man at Venice worthy of the chief command—that Francesco Morosini, who had so gallantly defended Candia, and whom the senate and people had rewarded with the most flagrant ingratitude. A strange and wanton accusation of cowardice was too palpably belied by every event of his public life to be persisted in, even by the envy which his eminent reputation had provoked, and by the malignity that commonly waits upon public services, where they have been unfortunate. But a second and unprovoked charge of malversation had been followed by imprisonment. Still, however, devoting himself to his country’s cause, and forgetting his private injuries, Morosini shamed his enemies by a noble revenge; and, once more at the head of the Venetian armaments, he led them to a brilliant career of victory. The chief force of the Ottoman Empire was diverted to the Austrian War; and the vigorous efforts of the republican armies were feebly or unsuccessfully resisted by the divided strength of the Mussulmans. In the first naval campaign, the mouth of the Adriatic was secured by the reduction of the island of Santa Maura, one of the keys of that sea; and the neighbouring continent of Greece was invaded. In three years more, Morosini consummated his bold design of wresting the whole of the Morea from the infidels. In the course of the operations in that peninsula, the count of Königsmark, a Swedish officer who was entrusted with the command of the Venetian land-forces under the captain-general, inflicted two signal defeats in the field upon the Turkish armies. Modon, Argos, and Napoli di Romania, the capital of the Morea, successfully fell after regular sieges.[c]

The year 1687 was not so propitious for the Venetians; nevertheless Morosini rendered himself master of Lepanto and Corinth. The conquest of the Morea was nearly completed. At this time the senate voted for the great captain a bust in bronze, bearing the inscription: “Francisco Maurocenico Peloponnesiaco adhuc viventi Senatus.” This honour redoubled the ardour of Morosini. After conquering Sparta he turned to Attica, and laying siege to Athens easily took it. It was in this assault on Athens that a shell struck the Parthenon, of which the Turks had made a powder magazine, and reduced that celebrated edifice to ruins. Morosini, who to skill in war and love of country added admiration for the great and beautiful, did his best to save what he could of this venerated relic, and exclaimed: “Oh Athens, protector of Art, to what art thou reduced!” Thus was ancient Greece avenged on ancient barbarism. But different rulers had left too deep furrows on this sacred soil to enable the republic of Venice, already enfeebled, to recall it to life; there reigned the silence of a past which could never be renewed.

[1687-1695 A.D.]

In 1688 the Venetian fleet leaving the Gulf of Ægina operated against the island of Negropont (Eubœa), but was unable to take it, not only on account of the resistance offered by the Turks, but because sickness had begun to decimate the ranks, and a band of Germans fighting for the republic were withdrawn. The Venetians were however continually gaining victories in Dalmatia, while the Turks were frequently discomfited in Hungary; so that the latter began to make proposals for peace. The demands of the allies, however, were so exorbitant that the negotiations failed, and the Turks decided to continue the war to the utmost of their power, a decision which was influenced by the turbulent state of Europe. Morosini was not discouraged by this new boldness on the part of the Turks; he had now been raised to the supreme dignity of the dogeship, and wished by some fresh, great deed to prove that the republic had done wisely in reposing complete faith in him. He had in his mind the design of attempting once more the conquest of Negropont; but the forces there being already under other leaders, he decided to take Monembasia, which would make the conquest of the Morea quite complete. But the siege had scarcely begun when Morosini fell ill, and he was obliged to surrender his command to Girolamo Cornaro and return to Venice. The porte brought forward fresh proposals for peace, but they were rejected.

The emperor wished to employ all his forces against the French; he was not disinclined to listen to suggestions for an agreement. Knowing this, the Venetians understood how much it was to their interest to conduct carefully the enterprise which they had in hand, so that if peace should be concluded it might be to their advantage. So Cornaro assailed Monembasia with great ardour until he finally mastered it, after which he attacked the Ottoman fleet and defeated it at Mytilene. After the taking of Vallona, which was dismantled, an illness ended Cornaro’s honoured life. Domenico Mocenigo who succeeded him in his command was very different from his predecessor. An attempt made by him to conquer Candia failed through his cowardice; he was punished by the senate, who deprived him of his command and begged Morosini to place himself once more at the head of the army. Morosini, though well on in years, started at once from Monembasia the 24th of May, 1693. On this occasion, however, he did nothing very remarkable beyond acquiring possession of some islands—among others Salamis; partly because the season was unfavourable, and the Turks were strongly fortified in the Hellenic territory which still remained to them. He died not long after (January 9th, 1694), and was succeeded in his command by Antonio Zeno.

The new commander, while the troops were gaining fresh victories in Dalmatia, took Scio; but he afterwards allowed a favourable opportunity of defeating the Turkish fleet to escape him, and did not even trouble to keep Scio which he had conquered. He was called upon to give an account of his conduct, and thrown into prison where he died before sentence had been pronounced against him. His successor, Alessandro Molin, was more fortunate. It seemed as though the star of Venice was once more declining, and the enemy’s forces again became threatening. The Turks, recovering from the defeats they had sustained, again attempted the reconquest of the Morea. But not only were they unsuccessful in this, but Molin determined to meet them off Scio and there gained over them a signal victory. Equally auspicious for Venice were the years 1696, 1697, 1698, in which last, on September 20th, the purveyor extraordinary, Girolan Dolfin, gained another naval victory by which supremacy of the sea was secured to the republic and the dominion of the Archipelago guaranteed. But already the other great victory of Zenta, within the military boundaries, was gained by Prince Eugene of Savoy on September 11th; and as the Turks lost their grand vizir, seventeen pashas, thirty thousand soldiers dead and three thousand prisoners, the sultan was convinced that the only thing which remained for him to do was to sue once more for peace, the more so as Cornale, who succeeded Molin as commander, had in various encounters defeated the Ottoman army and, closing the passage of the Dardanelles, had several times reduced Constantinople to starvation. The Christian powers were not this time deaf to the request of the sultan. They perceived the necessity of making peace with the East, since the hopes and fears growing out of the war of the Spanish Succession had given rise to contentions of all kinds among the three cabinets.

[1695-1699 A.D.]

Through the mediation of England and Holland—after the overcoming of many difficulties brought forward principally by the Venetians, who feared that they might lose in peace what they had gained in war, or that they would not receive from the empire, a rival power, all due regard for their interests—on the 13th of November, 1693, the imperial plenipotentiaries, with those of Poland, Russia, Venice, and the Turks, assembled in congress at Karlowitz, a town on the Danube to the south of Peterwardein.[d]

By the Treaty of Karlowitz, which the republic, in concert with the empire, concluded with the Ottoman Porte, Venice retained all her conquests in the Morea (including Corinth and its isthmus), the islands of Algina and Santa Maura, and some Dalmatian fortresses which she had captured; and she restored Athens and her remaining acquisitions on the Grecian continent (1699).[c]