Neither at peace nor at home

Alessio Sopracasa has found a remarkable source for the Venetian-Ottoman war in the Venetian archives. A single page contains a series of 18 dated entries covering 16 months – May 1467 through August 1469 – of the war. The identity of the writer is unknown, beyond the fact that he was a non-Venetian captain with a substantive number of foot and horse serving under him.

There is also a substantive amount of information in these mostly terse entries. If compared with the Barbarigo letters, it will be seen that the Italian foot and horse engaged in open battles and sieges, while stratioti did not. Stratioti for the most part do not come off well in these accounts, but this captain was asking them to do things they did not do. The battle of 14 August 1468 refers to Greek and Albanian gentlemen who did fight: we can probably name them. This is the only source I know for paying stratioti 1 ducat a head in the Morea, and for confirming the 15thC existence of mills at Mistra. Mistra was hard-hit by the Venetians: these 18 entries recount the destruction of the fields and vines in three consecutive years.

The article from which this information was taken, and the translation made, can be found here.

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1467

31 May. I rode with all my foot and horse across the alpe of Mistra and went to S. Niko, or Lacedemonia¹, and won a battle and we burned it and got great booty.

4 July. I again crossed the alpe of Mistra and went to Gradiko², a hostile fortress above the river towards Karitena, where we have agents inside. It was useless because they were double agents.

7 September. I went with the blessing of Christ to make an attack on Kalamata, formerly taken from your people, which no captain nor soldier of yours before me ever [dared]. I repaired it, fortified it, and held onto it, to the humiliation of your enemies and their confusion, and to the reputation and glory of your Most Illustrious Signoria.

1 November. I again crossed the alpe and rode against the Manassi³ in the territory of Zachonia, and took from them great booty and prey. We had Amar Bay at our backs for more than 20 miles and he was with us as far as the river of Longaniko.

1468

31 January. I rode to the plain of Lakkoi at Greveni, a hostile fortress, and gave battle. I was not successful and my contestabile, Zuan of Zara, was killed.

26 March. I went to Arkadia⁴ to keep the enemy occupied and confined, so that they would not go to attack the Magnificent Provveditor and our other people who were walling and fortifying Belvedere.⁵

6 April. I went to waste the grain and vines at Mistra, and then rode to Gardiki and made good prey.

25 ditto. I returned to Gardiki and gave battle at the borgo. It was taken by force and then I burned it.

2 May. There were 2 frambulari ⁶ with 500 horse camped at Goumero and Chelidoni, which they had surrounded and besieged so that the Greeks and Franks⁷ who were inside would lose. I rode to the area and forced/broke through the enemy. I crossed beneath Karitena, a very strong fortress of the Turks, and with great peril crossed into the valley of Liodora⁸, not yet touched or seen by Franks. I burned all that valley, about 40 towns, about 100 men killed, for whom I paid out of my money one ducat a head for the most part. That night I went to the top of the mountain and made an extremely large fire, so the enemy could see, and the enemy learned from their people of the burning of Liodora and of the dead, and seeing the fire would flee and abandon the siege, so that I made this attack, liberated the land, and got good booty which we took away safely.

2 July. I went to Mistra as far as the gate where a number of enemy, and also our men, were killed. We burned the mills and wasted the area.

20 July. I went to Leondari against the Potamitti⁹ about whom we had intelligence, and returned them to the obedience of the Most Illustrious Signoria, with their families and property.

14 August. The Turks were at Kalamata. Sinan Bey, the frambularo, came to confront me with 4000 horse. All your stratioti fled to Mantegna¹⁰ except a few leading Greek gentlemen and Albanians who remained with me. We fought hand-to-hand for five hours, and wounded and killed a great many of them, which we did through the grace of God. The Magnificent Miser Iacomo Loredan was at the port, and if the stratioti had stayed I am convinced we would routed them.

5 November. I rode to Gardiki, a hostile fortress. I took the borgo by force and burned it.

1469

20 April. I went back to Gardiki, which had an agent inside, and it was handed over by this agent.

31 May. I went back to Mistra to lay waste the grain and fines. We raided up to the gates. A number of janissaries (Zaniceri) were killed, also of ours.

15 June. I rode to lay waste to Arkadia, and we went as far as the mills of S. Elia. I stopped there because your stratioti did not want to go on.

July. I went to take Castel Leone.¹¹ I took it and fortified it.

1 August. We went to the attack at Vostitza (Augustiza) with the Magnificent Captain-General¹² and the Magnificent Provveditor, and took it. The aforementioned signori and your Magnificent Sopracomitti¹³ saw my work and my men's.

Thus, I have been neither at peace nor at home.

1The convent of Ag. Nikon at Sparta.

2Gardiki.

3This is intriguing: at least 5 Manassi, or Manessi, were kapetanioi of stratioti for the Venetians. There is a fine icon in S. Giorgio dei Greci in Venice with portraits of three Manessi.

4Kyparissia.

5Pondikokastro. The Provveditor of the Morea was Paoli Priuli.

6Also flamburari = Ottoman provincial governors.

7Italians. “Franks” was a generic term for westerners of the Latin rite.

8Near Isova, between the right bank of the Alphios and the left bank of the Ladon.

9Like the Manassi, a clan of Albanian origin. The name appears in the Ottoman cadaster of the early 1460s at Kalavryta and Vostitza.

10On the coast near Kardaymyli.

11Just inland from the coast, halfway between Koroni and Kalamata.

12The Captain-General was Nicolò da Canal.

13Commanders of the individual ships.

The leading men of the Morea

Detail, Klontzas, Passion

The earliest documentary evidence for Krokodylos Kladas seems to be a letter from Jacopo Barbarigo of 25 July 1465. It is true that Sphrantzes wrote about him in terms of 1460, but Sphrantzes was writing after 1472 when he became a monk.

Barbarigo was provveditor general of the Italian troops in the Morea for a year of the Ottoman-Venetian war. Eighty-seven of his letters survive, written betwen 5 June 1465 and mid-March 1466, and they can be found starting on page 1 of volume 6 of Sathas here.

Twice Barbarigo gives distinct lists of the men who he says are the leading men of the Morea – homini da conto, zentilhomini, i molti principali, le persone de i condition. Combining the two lists, in their spelling, we get:

Petro Bua

Alexio Bua

Gini Bua Protostrator, Isaac Paraspondylos

Michali Rallis “principal homo de questa Amorea”

Michali Rallis Drimi dal Granzas [Graitzes]

Peregrino Busichi & his brother

Matheo Sfranzi [Sphrantzes]

Epiphani & Corcondilo Clada

A few other names can be collected from various Barbarigo letters:

Comes Glava

Comes Comnino

Comes Megara

Nikolaos Boccali and brother

Manoli Clada

5 Manessi kapetanioi

Silas and Zorzi Busichi, principali de Busichi

Ioannis Menaia

 The three counts are not from the Morea,  Komninos and Glava are brothers, from the north side of the gulf of Corinth, and I suppose the Count of Megara is from Megara. They all seem to disappear from the records.

 

Barbarigo calls the men on his lists stratioti, and says that their support will guarantee general Moreote support for the Venetian effort.  He also calls all the Albanian and Greek horsemen stratioti: stratioti was the general Venetian term for the non-Italian soldiers with horses.  In his first letter he says, "Isti paesani sint potentiores gentibus Italicis" -- "These peasants are more effective than the Italians."  The stratioti had certain advantages: their dress and horses were better suited to the climate and the terrain, they already knew the mountain routes, and their numbers had not been debilitated by plague.

Within two months of Sigismondo Malatesta's arrival in the Morea in August 1464 as commander of "crusade" forces against the Turks, 1500 of his 7000 soldiers were dead of the plague, peste, they had brought from Ancona, and by the end of the year only 2,500 remained. He and many of the living were ill. Between October and December, they had walked from Methoni to Mistra to Nauplion, then back across Laconia to Messenia, a formidable mechanism for transmitting plague, and famine, across the heart of the Morea. Plague not only kills, but it leaves survivors physically debilitated and depressed, and sometimes blinded. A number of Barbarigo's letters describe Malatesta's profound depression, as well as his physical weakness.  Barbarigo reported massive losses in the Italian companies – more than 200 dead out of a company of 500, 200 out of 400. The Ottoman army was also severely affected, and whatever original number Omar-Bey was supposed to have had – 3,000 or 8,000 – it was down to 1500 in June 1465.  

Stratioti were auxiliary forces in 1463, and the provveditor of 1464 was directed not to hire them, but  the losses to plague made them essential.  We see Barbarigo trying to persuade the Venetian senate to allow him to give provisioni - pronias -- to the leading men so they would be available.  These provisioni were, for the most part, in cash rather than land, although landholdings can be tracked in the letters. A number of these are the landholdings that were later lost in the Kladas revolt. There was a problem with the cash provisioni, however, in that Venice had not sent out any actual cash for two years, and we find most of these men paying their own soldiers and financing the Venetian effort themselves.

One of the things we see in Barbarigo with Kladas, Rallis, Bua, and the others is the change of the archon class to a military class, from a landholding and sometimes-fighting culture, to a culture of mercenary soldiers.  In the next generation -- Petro Bua's nephew Mercurio is the most famous example -- some of them become condottieri.   In the five years since the final surrenders of 1460, nearly a whole class, with the exception of those on Barbarigo's lists, essentially disappears from the records. Some of those on Barbarigo's list had gone to Corfu with Thomas in 1460, and had returned for the war.  Some were killed in the fighting of 1460.  Two or three were executed.  Quite a few were exported, as Doukas says:   

After taking all of the Peloponnesos, the tyrant installed his own administrators and governors. Returning to Adrianople, he took with him Demetrios and his entire household, the palace officials and wealthy nobles from Achaia and Lakedaimonia and the remaining provinces. 

Certainly some were assimilated into the Ottoman system: Kladas nearly was, except that the "crusade" against the Turks was said to be going to put Thomas Palaiologos on the throne of the Eastern Empire, and that would be centered at Mistra.  Kladas had been loyal to Thomas till the end, and after he escaped from Mani and his failed revolt, he joined Thomas' son.  

Hiring stratioti made language problems for Barbarigo, and he needed to find people to serve as paymasters and record-keepers who could write and speak Greek.  And he had to persuade Venice to provide salaries for them.  He  found a Venetian, an Andrea Corner, who had served his predecessor as an interpreter and secretary, and a Zuane da Ponte.  He thought he should pay Andrea 5-6 ducats a month (there were 10 months in the pay-year) but there was no documentation authorizing pay.  So he found a boy who could stay in his tent, and decided to pay him by skimming the stratioti pay, but since the stratioti were not getting any pay, it was all theoretical.

More on Barbarigo's stratioti here.