The Venetians Are Back In Town

The Venetians kept losing territory to the Ottomans, until they joined a Holy League and took the Morea. They also blew up the Parthenon, but nobody's perfect.

Show Notes: available at the episode page on the Helonaki website

Transcript

Jen: 0:01

The territory of Vostizza was subdivided into 34 areas containing one or more localities. There was a town of Vostizza itself. 30 inhabited villages and two uninhabited villages. There were also 11 localities name as a zeogolatio, two of which were uninhabited. And there were five monasteries in the territory. Listed for each area was the number of buildings of various types, and the condition of the buildings. Whether they were intact or in disrepair. Numbers of fruit trees, such as olive, lemon and mulberry among many others and the numbers of animals, including oxen, sheep, goats, and interestingly beehives were also included. The number of families in each village or area. And whether they were local to the area or had immigrated. Sometimes also, including where they had immigrated from were also among the listings. In addition, each parcel of land was mapped. And recorded with the name of the owner. And the area of each parcel written down in three measurement systems. Four measurement systems, if the parcel was a vineyard. This is information listed in the detailed cadaster of the villages and areas in the territory of Vostizza created by the order of Francesco Grimani The Proveditor General collected by Francesco Vandeyk, Ingenior Publico in the year 1700. Published in a 1993 book by Dokos and Panagopoulos. I'm Jen Glaubius and this is the Helonaki Deep Dive. A podcast about mapping and analysis for historical and archeological research. In this episode, I'll discuss the continuing story of Ottoman Venetian relations. Culminating in the second period of Venetian rule in the Morea. Let's dive in. We're going to start where we left off in the last episode, just after the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Remember that battle was a crushing defeat for the Ottomans, but afterwards they were able to quickly rebuild their fleets. And the Holy League who are on the other side of the battle, did not press their advantage. And soon that league disintegrated. Venice in a few years, sought peace with the Ottomans. And remember all of this had started when the Ottomans decided to take over the island of Cyprus from the Venetians. In this peace between the Ottomans and Venice, the Venetians had to accept the loss of Cyprus. And they had to pay a large sum of money, to the Ottomans. Things did not really go well for the Venetians, despite being on the winning side of the Battle of Lepanto. But despite coming out ahead by getting Cyprus. The Ottoman empire went through some problems in the last quarter of the 16th century. Earlier, the Ottoman economy had been fueled by expansion of the territory of the empire by adding more and more area to the empire. But there was much less expansion and of much smaller areas from here on out. There was also a financial crisis in the last bit of the 16th century. That was linked to colonial exploitation in the Western hemisphere. And this financial crisis was exacerbated by changes in warfare. That in turn affected landholding across the Ottoman empire. So let's break this down. To start with. Silver that Spain looted from modern day, Bolivia and Mexico flooded into Europe. And this lowered the value of silver all over Europe, including in the Ottoman empire. Over the winter of 1585/ 1586. The Ottoman government debased their silver coin. And that caused instability since the debasement made prices of food and other goods inflated. So they suffered under inflation. This also meant that less real money was flowing into the Ottoman treasury. And so to make up for the shortfalls. The government put new taxes on peasants, which of course made the peasants very angry. Nobody likes having their taxes raised. The Ottomans also extended the system of tax farming. We talked about this, a few episodes back talking about tax farming and the Byzantine empire. But just as a reminder, Tax farming is that the government would take bids for individuals or groups to collect taxes. The tax farmer would pay the bid, which was the amount of taxes that the government was hoping to get. And then that tax farmer would go and extract as much money as they could from the people in the area. They were Trying to collect as much money as they could to profit on top of the amount that they had bid. So obviously this system was rife with corruption. You could bribe an official to get your bid put in. You would try to extract as much money from people as possible. It's just a really horrible system. So, of course this also made people angry. Changes in the Ottoman military also led to immediate and then later on long-term disruptions in the Ottoman empire. In the late 16th century, the nature of warfare had changed. And so now most warfare happened as sieges of forts or towns rather than cavalry charges. Now. The Ottoman military had been based on the cavalry. And that was reflected in the land revenue system. Where tax revenue was allotted to cavalrymen to pay for their upkeep so that they would be able to support themselves and go out on military campaigns. Once the cavalry was less useful in these siege situations, what you really wanted was infantry and you wanted them to have muskets. And for the Ottomans, those musket bearing infantry were the Janissaries. Now, this is a very touchy topic. The first Janissaries were Christian prisoners of war from the Balkans early on in the empire. But then the Ottomans decided to draw youths from Christian villages in the Balkans. So. Ottoman officials would go to Christian villages and select a certain number of youths, probably teens to be trained as soldiers, as administrators, or to serve the Sultan. And so they were taken from their families. They would have to convert to Islam. And. Of course, this is horrific taking kids from their families and forcing them to convert into another religion is very, very awful. This practice, which went out of use later on. Would definitely be a charge against the Ottomans. But for now here in the late 16th century, the Janissaries were very important to the Ottoman military But it's important to note. That the Janissaries were paid a salary rather than being given revenue from the land. Now the Ottomans also tried to enlist peasant Muslim men to serve. So they'd say, okay, you enlist for a short time, you'll serve for one campaign and then return home. This backfired on the Ottomans. However, because once their enlistment was done, these peasant men would end up keeping their guns. And now that they had a little bit of military training. They would go back. To Anatolia where most of them were from. But instead of going back peacefully to farming, They would become brigands. And. They were dangerous because they were unhappy about the high taxes that they were paying. And they had guns and a bit of military training. So, the Ottomans stopped trying to enlist the peasant Muslim men and instead increased the number of Janissaries. And you see this in the numbers. Janissaries increased in number from 8,000 in 1527. To almost 40,000 in 1609. So huge increase within a century. But when you have more Janissaries who are paid a salary. That's more money that had to come out of the Ottoman treasury. And so the treasury became more and more strained. Of course the Janissaries would become unhappy if they were not paid and with their military training and the guns that they had. They would sometimes revolt. This happened in May of 1622 when the Sultan Osman, the second. Was actually killed by Janissaries during this revolt. Most of the time, the revolts did not reach that level, but these revolts would happen periodically continuing forward in the history of the Ottoman empire. So you can see that the Ottoman system had radically changed by 1632 when there were reforms on tax collection and landholding. Timars, those grants of land revenue that were given to cavalrymen. Were supposed to be granted for military service, but through time that had changed and they had then been passed down from father to son. So there were the reforms in 1632 to try to end that hereditary inheritance of land revenue. And they also tried to make it that Janissaries could be given timars. But the Janissaries really preferred to have their salaries. And nothing really changed with the land revenue. It continued to be inherited. After the battle of Lepanto in 1571. The Venetians had tried to stay at peace with the Ottomans. Because they had big, big problems going on in Italy. So there were a few minor incidents between the Venetians and Ottomans, but nothing big until the 1640s. At this point, the Venetians still controlled the island of Crete. In 1644, an Ottoman galley was bound for Mecca. But it was attacked and captured by the Knights of Malta. This captured ship was taken to Crete. And this is where we end up in a, he said, she said situation. So the Venetians, when asked to explain what happened to the Sultan said that, okay, the ship tried to stop a few places, docked very briefly, but they were ordered to leave by the Venetian governor. They definitely did not do anything on the island of Crete, which the Venetians held. The other side of the story was from Ottoman sailors who had survived and made their way to the Sultan. And these sailors said, okay, this captured ship went to Crete, and that's where the stories agreed. But they said, instead of being turned away immediately, this ship was on Crete for at least 20 days. And that a bunch of goods and people on that ship who had been enslaved were sold off on the island. I don't know which story is true, and that doesn't really matter. Because what really matters is that the Sultan believed the Ottoman sailors and decided to attack Venetian held Crete. The Venetians had had create as a colony, since 1211 after the fourth crusade. The Venetians called the island Candia after the name of the capital city, which is modern day Iraklio. The Venetian government of Crete was supposed to be like the government of the Venetian Republic itself. Where they had a governor who would be called a doge and a great council. But instead of being elected locally, the governor had a two year term and was appointed by Venice. And really all of the decisions were made in Venice. To make things even worse, the best land on the island had been snapped up by prominent Venetian families. And so they owned these large estates in the area with the best land on the island. And so over the centuries that the Venetians had held Crete, there were many uprisings by local people. Since They had no autonomy and they were not especially happy with the Venetians. So the Ottoman Sultan had decided to attack Crete and at the end of April 1645. An Ottoman fleet of 400 ships passed through the Dardanelles into the Aegean Sea. This fleet sailed past Crete. So it did not directly go to Crete, but instead went to the southwestern Morea and docked at Navarino. Where they gathered supplies and reinforcements. The fleet then left Navarino in late June and landed west of the city of Chania in the northwestern part of Crete a few days later. And this Ottoman conquest at first went quickly. Chania surrendered to them after a couple of months. And within a year, the town of Rethymno, and various smaller strongholds were under Ottoman control. By October of 1647, so two years in, the Ottomans began the siege of Candia the capital city, modern Iraklio. The siege of Candia continued into 1648. And meanwhile, the Ottomans gained basically all of Crete except for Candia and a few minor forts. The siege of Candia however, would continue for 22 years until 1669. So the Venetians tried various things to help out their holdings on Crete. They tried to blockade the Dardanelles to prevent travel to and from Istanbul. And this blockade worked for about a year. But then the Ottomans were able to break through. There were naval battles between the Venetian Ottoman fleets, but those were inconclusive. July, 1655. So a decade into the conquest of Crete, the Venetians tried to besiege Monemvasia, that really strong fortress on the southern coast of the Morea. But they were not able to actually take Monemvasia, because it was super difficult to conquer. A few years later in 1659 there was a newly named Venetian Captain-General of Crete. So the man in charge of the Venetian military on Crete. And his name was Francesco Morosini. He encouraged an uprising in the southern Morea. And was able to capture the town and citadel of Kalamata in the southern Peloponnese. But this revolt really went nowhere and they didn't hold Kalamata for long. So the siege of Candia went on and on and on. Until September of 1669. And this is when the Venetian Captain General was once again Francesco Morosini. So he had been Captain- General for a while and then not. And now he was back as Captain General again. Morosini as Captain General agreed to a treaty that the Venetians would leave Candia but keep a few small islands and forts. Basically he gave up the Venetian position because it was hopeless that he could either stay there and they could be pushed out and his men could suffer or they could leave alive. And so Morosini went back to Venice. Where he was charged with exceeding his powers and other charges such as treason. For giving up Candia. But he was found not guilty. We'll hear more about Morosini in just a little bit. So the war between Venice and the Ottomans is basically over. The war on Crete had been super expensive for the Venetians. The Venetians were very much in debt and the once powerful fleet was fairly weak at this point. And so they made peace with the Ottomans and the Venetians stayed at peace with them through the 1670s. In 1683 the Ottomans laid siege to the city of Vienna. They had tried to take Vienna a century earlier in 1529, but had failed. This attempt was also a failure. To keep up momentum after repelling the Ottomans. Austria, the Pope, and the Venetians formed another so-called Holy League. Although Venice was not, especially eager to take part by some accounts. So the Austrians focused on fighting the Ottomans in the area of Hungary. The Venetians were led by our old friend, Francesco Morosini. The same man who had surrendered Candia on Crete, to the Ottomans in 1669. Venetian forces captured the island of Santa Maura, which is modern Leucas. Then the castle of Preveza in 1684. The next spring in 1685. 9,000 men including Venetian, Tuscan, and Germans were all landed at Coroni that old Venetian port. By that fall, this force had taken most of the southern Morea and a Swedish general Count Otto William von Konigsmark was sent to take command of the troops while Morosini was still in charge of the fleet and of the overall force. Now the League got together and tried to decide between targets before starting the campaign season in 1686. Their choices were. Should they target the island of Chios? The island of Evia, which the Venetians had held and then lost to the Ottomans before. Crete. Which the Venetians had within the last century. Or should they just go on and take the entire peninsula of the Morea? They chose to focus on the Morea. And over the next two campaign seasons in 1686 and 1687. were able to take most of the remaining fortresses. At Argos, Nauplia, Lepanto, which is actually across the Gulf of Corinth, they were able to take Patras and finally Corinth at the isthmus. There was still resistance in the mountains near Mystra which Konigsmark was working on. When in September of 1687. Morosini took the fleet across to Attica and besieged Athens. Now, this means that the Venetians laid siege to the Acropolis in Athens, which was one of the most defensible parts of the city. It isn't clear whether the Venetians knew that the Parthenon, the temple of Athena Parthenos, which had become a Christian Church during the Byzantine period and was briefly a mosque. But in 1687, it was being used by the Ottomans to store gunpowder on the Acropolis. On Monday, the 26th of September 1687. The Venetians lobbed a shell from a nearby hill, into the Parthenon. And with the gunpowder that was stored there. The shell blew up the building. And it should be noted that up to that point, the Parthenon and the sculpture, the very, very famous sculpture on the Parthenon, which was thousands of years old. Had been in pretty good condition. Until the Venetians blew up the building. So the Venetians were able to take the Acropolis. And then since pieces of the Parthenon, were laying on the ground, it was destroyed. Anyway. They decided to try to take pieces of the Parthenon back to Venice, but weren't able to get good pieces. But Morosini was able to grab two lions from the nearby port of Piraeus and send them back to Venice. And those lions were placed in front of the Arsenal in Venice. This is a great victory for Morosini had conquered the entire Morea and taken Athens. And so when the doge of Venice died in 1688, Morosini coming off of his great victories was unanimously elected as the new Doge. Now Morosini was still in command of the fighting. And in July of 1688. He tried to take the island of Evia, but they were not successful. The Venetian forces were decimated by a disease, perhaps dysentery or malaria. Which killed a third of their forces. Including the Swedish general Konigsmark. And so the Venetians had to retreat, and they were so destroyed by disease, actually that they ended up leaving Athens as well. And they retreated to Corinth in the Morea. So in the meantime, things had not been going well for the Ottomans. They had lost practically all of the Morea, except for Monemvasia, that very difficult fortress to take. And there was an uprising going on within the Ottoman military. The Sultan had lost control of military, basically. And within three years, commanders of three fortresses, including Iraklio. So the Venetian Candia on Crete. The commanders of these three fortresses were murdered by their own troops. And this is not a sign of a healthy military. So the fighting continued on. Morosini tried to take Monemvasia in 1688. But, it was very difficult to take. And when Morosini came down with an illness in January of 1690, he ended up sailing back to Venice. The next captain general was successful in taking Monemvasia, however. And there had been ongoing fighting in Hungary between the Austrians and Ottomans the entire time. So all this fighting continues until 1699. So it's ongoing for about 15 years. When the treaty of Karlowitz was signed. The Austrians, basically they got Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans while the Venetians got to keep the Morea and some strongholds, they had taken along the coast of modern Albania. But Francesco Morosini did not live to see this treaty because he died in 1694. The Venetians who had been in control of the Morea basically since 1687, over a decade later in 1699, finally gained formal control of the area. Before the Treaty of Karlowitz was formalized in 1699, the Venetians had already started setting up their administration in the Morea. They divided up the Morea into four provinces. Each one containing a number of territories. The territory of Vostizza was in the province of Achaia. And each province had Venetian officials for administration, defense, judicial affairs, and a treasurer. These officials would serve for two to three years and then be replaced, which was the usual Venetian system. One major thing that the Venetian officials worked on was compiling records to take stock of what revenue they could collect through taxes. The war with the Ottomans, like most wars was expensive and the Venetians needed to fill the empty treasury. The Venetians also intended to change the system of taxation from being based on the amount of produce from the land to a tax on land itself. So they were going to entirely change the system that had been under the Ottomans. One problem was that there was a lot of uncultivated land. Due to both general depopulation of the region. So partly from the recent wars, but also a general trend of low population numbers. And then there is also the issue that land was uncultivated because the Ottoman owners had fled. Although, not all of the Ottomans had fled. Some of them were still in the Morea. So the Venetians invited people from areas still under Ottoman control, including Athens and a few other areas that the Venetians had briefly taken and then retreated from. And they invited these peoples to come settle in the Morea. To sweeten the deal, the Venetians gave these immigrants land tax-free for a set number of years. At first, it was supposed to be about eight years. Tax-free. But this land was not distributed to all immigrants equally. Immigrants who came from the elite were given large amounts of land, and very nice land corresponding to their social rank. While other immigrants, more peasants were given far less land. But before the Venetians could actually tax anybody based on their land, they needed to know how much land each per person owned and where that land was located. And so the Venetian officials started compiling cadastral records of land ownership. This process had two stages. First a general cadaster with general information about how many houses, other buildings, such as churches, infrastructure, such as mills and olive presses, and numbers of various fruit trees and agricultural animals were recorded. These data were recorded based on a unit called a Villa, which might have one or more villages or other types of units within it. The second stage was recording all the parcels of land onto maps and indicating the owner of each parcel. They also included all the information from the first stage in this more detailed cadaster. And that's what I read about in the intro. Only two territories in the Morea had this more detailed cadaster completed. Nauplio and Vostizza. The cadastral records for Vostizza are today located in the state archives in Venice. And were published in a book in 1993 by Dokos and Panagopoulos. So in addition to looking at land, the Venetians also had taxes on various products. So they taxed wine, olive oil, tobacco, other things like that. In addition to just wanting to make sure there was money in the treasury. The Venetians were also worried about the Ottomans coming back and trying to take the Morea away from them. So the Venetians spent large sums, refortifying, various fortresses, such as Corinth. And they even constructed a new fortress called Palamidi above the town of Nauplio. And it turns out the Venetians were right to be worried. By 1714, 15 years after the treaty of Karlowitz, the Ottomans were once again in a stable position. And they decided to retake the Morea from the Venetians. Using a pretext, the Sultan declared war on Venice in December of 1714. They actually attacked in 1715, and that attack had two prongs. First there was a fleet that sailed through the Aegean Sea. And the second part was a land force that marched south through Thessaly to the Morea. So they reached the isthmus and besieged Corinth. Which was captured by the Ottomans after a siege of only five days. Most of the other fortresses in the Morea followed swiftly. It was a total collapse. The Venetians decided to only defend a few places and they didn't keep those strongholds either. And this is despite all the money that the Venetians had spent to strengthen their fortifications. So such as building their new fortress of Palamidi in Nauplio. To add insult to injury, the Ottomans also took the last two remaining Venetian forts on Crete that summer. And by the end of 1715, the Venetians only had the island of Corfu left out of all the places they had actually captured in the 1680s, 1690s, all they had left was the island of Corfu. And so fighting then moved to Corfu. In 1717, the Venetians were able to fight off the Ottomans at sea and capture two ports, but otherwise they really weren't making any gains. Their Austrian allies from the 1680s were concerned with other matters. And instead of helping the Venetians fight. They instead said, Hey, make peace with the Ottomans. And they helped them negotiate the Passarowitz treaty. Which was signed in 1719. The loss of the Morea in 1719 was Venice's last hurrah as a player on the world stage. And the Morea along with the rest of Greece. Was entirely in Ottoman hands again. Where it would stay for about a century. But we'll talk about that next time. Now The end notes. One thing. If you're interested in some of the various castles and fortifications in the Peloponnese, there's a book by Kevin Andrews called Castles of the Morea, which is a really good source. The book was originally published in 1953, but was re-released in 2006. You can even get it as an ebook. I also want to say. I probably put a bit more detail in this episode than in some of the others. And that's because I know this period very well. This is the period that my MA thesis was focused on. And so I already had a lot of information and knowledge about this period. Anyway, thanks for listening. Email questions or comments to deepdive@helonaki.com or ask them on the Helonaki Deep Dive Facebook page. Show notes with links to resources mentioned in this episode will be available at helonaki.com. That's H E L O N A K I.com. You can also find ways to support the show now, including merch such as t-shirts mugs and stickers with the Helonaki Deep Dive logo at helonaki.com/support. My thanks to Patreon supporters at the geospatial analyst level, Leah Varrell and Janice and Jerry Farrell. Your support keeps the Helonaki Deep Dive going. The Helonaki Deep Dive is written and produced by me, Jen Glaubius of the Helonaki. The theme music is Deep Ocean Instrumental by Dan-o of danosongs.com additional sounds from zapsplat.com. Thanks for listening.