The Mocenigo War: Part One

In 1470, after Nicolò da Canale helped lose Negroponte to Mehmed II, Venice replaced him as Captain General of the Fleet with Pietro Mocenigo.  In 1474, after a series of military and diplomatic successes along the coast of Asia Minio and Cyprus, Venice elected Mocenigo doge.  One of the sopracomiti -- ship commanders -- Coriolano Cippico, a Dalmatian in his 50s, wrote an account of these ventures for Marcantonio Morosini, Venetian ambassador to Burgundy,.  Burgundy was theoretically an ally of Venice in this war that Pius II had got going -- he called it a crusade against the infidel but he died before the ships sailed -- and this document was most likely intended to encourage Burgundian participation and financing by reassuring them about the Venetian leader.

The document is printed in the 7th volume of Konstantine Sathas' invaluable collection of Venetian documents for 15th-century Greece which you can download here. Cippico's description of the stratioti seems to be the basis of the famous description Sanudo gave later.  Cippico writes:

The Venetians, in all the cities of the Morea that are under their dominion, have hired many Albanians on horseback, who are called by the Greek name stratioti.  These with their swift raiding have so wasted the part of the Morea that is under the Turks that is is almost a desert and a solitude.  These people are by nature intensely rapacious, and more apt to raid than to give battle.  They use a shield, sword, and lance; few have breastplates; the others wear a bombazine cuirass as protection against the blows of an enemy.  The most valorous of all are those from Nauplion.

Mocenigo's tactics were exceptional for that time: he took took the stratioti with the fleet, and not in roundships and towed hulks, but on the war galleys, carrying ten horses on each galley.  Depending on how many allies were sailing with him, this allowed him 400 mounted stratioti.  Without heavy, slower ships, he was able to attack with exceptional speed, which was increased by his having the fleet sail to its target by night so the attack could begin dawn.  Cippico describes that over and over in this account.  Mocenigo had certain principles: he would not attack Greek islands held by the Turks, because the residents were Christians, but only sites on the Turkish mainland.

After a brief description of an attack on the mainland opposite Lesbos.  Cippico describes the division of the spoils, a few comments in parentheses:

The stratioti brought the General the heads of their dead enemies, to have a ducat each, as the General had promised them: this has always been their custom.  The General loaded the galleys with the spoils, and came to a deserted island with good landings, between Chios and the mainland, which is now called Panagia.  Here were put all the spoils. Three arbitrators were selected from the sopracomiti, two Venetians and the third a Dalmatian, which is the custom always used in such circumstances.  The arbitrators, according to ancient Venetian custom, gave one tenth of all the spoils to the Captain General. (1/10)  The stratioti for their part kept two-thirds (6/10), and the arbitrators one-third (3/10).  The General had promised them this.  All the prisoners were consigned to the arbitrators: these were sold at auction.  (It appears from various reports in Cippico that slave dealers followed the fleet.)  The money was divided in this way.  First, all the soldiers who had brought in an enemy prisoner were given three ducats.  Then, the sopracomiti were paid for the expense of the stratioti's horses. The rest was divided equally among the galleys.  The galley of the provveditori was given double what was given to the other galleys.  The sopracomiti kept one third, and distributed the rest among the soldiers and oarsmen, according to rank.

The next division of the spoils was made on Delos, where Cippico noted columns, statues, remains of temples, an amphitheater, and a colossus of 15 cubits with the inscription

                                  ΝΑΞΙΟΙ ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΙ

The people of Naxos to Apollo

The next island episode was on Samos, :

Samos at present is a deserted island and has always been celebrated for its fertility.  Now it is full only of all sorts of animals, an abundance of woodland honey which one can find all around in the forests, and springs of sweet and living water that rise in all parts.  The horsemen and soldiers were disembarked to drill and refresh themselves.  The soldiers and others went hunting and while they were taking various prey, a youth of the Dalmatian nation and language encountered a bear of marvelous size.  The bear avoided his blow, went behind the boy and knocked him to the ground.  The boy, without losing spirit, jammed his fingers into both the bear's eyes and held its head so that it would not lacerate him, long enough for another youth of the same nation to kill the bear from behind with a sword.  On all sides there was a great killing of animals, and the whole army was employed in the hunt.  Several days were spent  in festival, with a great deal to eat and drink.  More than anyone else, the Schiavoni, of whom there were a great many among the oarsmen, sang drinking songs.  After everyone was sated, they boasted about the great deeds they had done, and how they had prospered so successfully against such vile men.

More from Cippico in another entry.

The top image is a detail from a Genoese tapestry of the Battle of Lepanto; the bear is from a medieval bestiary, and is actually licking her cub into shape rather than eating something.

A Fate Worse than Death

Rossini's opera, The Siege of Corinth--L'assedio di Corinto, is not an experience to be undertaken lightly, say, the way one would go blithely to one's seventeenth or twenty-seventh performance of Barbiere. Even when it was written, in 1820, audiences stayed away in droves, possibly because it was entitled Maometto II, somewhat lifted from someone else's opera, and possibly because it was pretty awful.

Maometto told the story of the 1470 siege of Negroponte and its capture from the Venetians, but even in Venice--or especially in Venice--it was not much appreciated. The story is vaguely that of Anna Erizzo, daughter of the Venetian commander, with whom the tyrant -besieger, Maometto (brooding operatic portrait to the right), becomes smitten. Anna Erizzo's story filled Venetian propaganda after the capture, and she was said to have taken her own life rather than submit to his brutal lusts. (It may or may not be of interest to note that rape is not reliably recorded among his more unattractive characteristics.)

It is true that after the capture of Negroponte, the women, children, and boys under the age of 18, were taken off as slaves, but there never was an Anna Erizzo. The Venetian commander Paolo Erizzo was killed before dawn on the final day of the siege. All men of military age, about eight hundred, were beheaded after the capture. More had been killed, a few escaped. The loss of the women and children was its own tragedy, and documents survive of men like Eustachio who, although able to track down and ransom his wife and some of his children, was grieving ten years later for the two daughters still missing. But with the exception of Dialogues des Carmélites, tragedy in opera is not like tragedy in real life and Anna needs little sympathy.

Six years after Maometto flopped, Rossini reissued it in French, and with ballets, as The Siege of Corinth (which Maometto had beseiged, briefly and without violence in 1458). It was an immediate hit. Europe had been following the 1826 siege of Messolonghi (where Byron died of malaria in 1824) and the massacre there of the women and children who had tried to escape. There had also been the 1822 siege and massacre at Chios.

A couple of passages from the Baltimore Opera program illustrate the general tenor of the opera. Anna and Paolo Erizzo have become Pamira and Cléomène. It begins:

In the vestibule of the Senate palace, the men of Corinth are ready to defend their city (“Signor, un sol tuo cenno”), but Cleomene, the governor, tells his people that their situation is hopeless: the Turk Maometto II refuses to relent in his siege of the city (“Del vincitor superbo di Bisanzio”).

and ends:

As the men march off to fight, Pamira and the women pray again, readying themselves for death (“L'ora fatal s'appressa”), even as the Turks are heard exulting in victory. Maometto enters triumphantly hoping at last to gain Pamira, but she threatens to kill herself if he approaches. With a roar, the building crumbles, revealing the city consumed in flames, as the Turks slaughter the people of Corinth .

This time the opera worked, audiences wept in droves for tragic oppressed Greece, and everyone, especially Rossini, was quite gratified.

We were in Negroponte the other day, now Halkis, trying to identify aspects of the siege. In the years before and after 1900, the city fathers of Halkis went to uncommon trouble to eliminate all traces of medieval fortifications, and it is now difficult to envision what must have happened. With one exception:

Looking to the north, you can see where Nicolò da Canale sat with the Venetian fleet that August, out of danger, but not out of the sound and sight of the besieged. Mehmed-Maometto was besieging Negroponte as vengence for da Canale's stupidly gratuitous siege and massacre of Ainos in 1468. But da Canale's Negroponte behavior duplicated what happened earlier, when the Venetian fleet waited off-shore at Patras in August 1466 and so enabled the slaughter of Jacopo Barbarigo and his troops, and the impalement of Michali Rallis.