Once upon a time,
in Kalathenes, a small village south of Kastelli (Kissamos) in the Mediterranean island of Candia, there stood a modest rural house where a grief-stricken mother was kneading bread for her son.
She kneaded it with her tears and her lamentations. She stoked the fire with the breath of her sobs: ‘My son,’ she murmured through her mournful weeping, ‘you are going so far away, to distant lands, and who knows if I shall ever see you again…’, ending in inconsolable crying.
That day, the eldest of the four children was taken from the farmhouse on the tenure by serjeanty and led, along with other young men, to the port of Chania, to be enlisted as a κωπηλάτης—a forced rower―on one of the eight galleys prepared for the long voyage to Venice and, subsequently, to the even more distant Flanders…
Through this fairy-tale-like narrative, I have sought to capture the atmosphere during the early stages of the Venetian Republic’s rule over the Duchy of Candia—the present-day island of Crete—which lasted for almost five hundred years from the early 13th century. The inspiration came from the lyrics of Μια μαύρη μάνα, a ριζίτικο (a form of folk vocal music from western Crete, specifically the area around modern-day Chania), whose slow, repetitive lyrics evoke the forced labour on galleys (the ancient Venetian ships), the ultimate expression of vexation to which the peasants of the recently occupied island were then subjected. As Renata Salvarani explains in her insightful essay, Crete, the Origins of Venetian Colonisation, “control of the ports and strongholds in Crete was, in fact, crucial to the very survival of the city as a commercial and maritime power, which often brutally suppressed the uprisings of the local population”.
E fo delibera di partir la dita isola tra zentilhomeni e populari, che volesse andar ad habitar in quella isola con le so femene.1
During the early phase (1210–1252) of Venetian rule (Ενετοκρατία) in Candia—previously acquired by Boniface I, Marquis of Monferrato in 1204, following the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade—there was an initial wave of immigration by Venetian settlers: nobles, knights, infantrymen and ordinary citizens. Initially, the Most Serene Republic of Venice was not interested in ruling the entire island, but rather in the three northern ports, which served as secure bases for its fleet and enabled it to control trade routes, as Alberta Galla and Michele Buonsanti mention in their travelogue Candia veneziana. Venetian itineraries through the historical memory of Crete.
This theory is supported by expert Byzantinist Freddy Thiriet in his treatise On the Disputes arising between the City of Venice and its Feudatories in 14th-century Crete, adding that “the indomitable spirit of the Cretans and their resistance made the conquest of the island necessary, … this “knight of the Archipelago”, to use the fine expression of the Candian historian Andrea Corner” in his History of Candia.
The colony’s administrative structure was based on the division into territories (sestieri or sexsteria)—a feature that still characterises Venice today—just as the other dominions belonging to the Stato da Màr (‘Domains of the Sea’) mirrored the mother country: every aspect was modelled in the image and likeness of the Republic.
Thiriet continues: “Thus, Doge Pietro Ziani and Giacomo Tiepolo, the first Duke of Venetian Crete and a man of great expertise in Eastern affairs, decided to proceed with the conquest; […] the island was divided into sestieri, which bore the same names as those in Venice. The Cretan sestieri were, in turn, divided into turmas, and the turmas into castellanies. Following the division of the land, the plots purchased were allocated to the citizens who had arrived from Venice in 1211. The noble feudal lords were assigned the cavallerie (tenures by cavalry), whilst the common people were granted the so-called serventerie (tenures by serjeanty or infantries); in the documents, the nobles are referred to as milites and the common people as pedites.”
In the architectural field too, as Joëlle Dalègre explains in her work Venise en Crète: Civitas venetiarum apud levantem, particularly in the chapter ‘Une Venise architecturale’, the Republic of Venice’s interest focused primarily on the structures upon which its economic development and defence depended: this was evident in the renovation of ports, shipyards, warehouses and ramparts, transforming or reshaping the appearance of the cities of Candia—today Heraklion, even then the capital of the island of the same name—Chania, Rethymno and, to a much lesser extent, Sitia.
In late 1282, the capital, Candia, received funding from the Venetian Republic to build its first shipyard. By the early 17th century, the number of shipyards had risen to nineteen – a truly impressive complex for the Eastern Mediterranean of that time.
As for Chania, a document dating from 1255 mentions a port and a shipyard. In 1302, the Rector Marino Gradenigo requested improvements to the port, which were eventually funded some twenty years later. As for the arsenal, there was a lack of funds despite the decisions that had been taken: work on two vaulted shipyards began in 1467, but they did not become operational until sixty years later. At that point, work was stepped up, as the Turkish threat was growing. Further vaults were quickly constructed, bringing the total to seventeen by the end of the 16th century, alongside major digging work at the foot of Kastelli Hill. In 1607, as part of the works to extend the port to the north-east, plans were drawn up for a further five arches, of which only three were actually built: these form the present-day Moro Arsenal complex (Νεώριο Μόρο), which today houses both the Museum of Ancient Shipbuilding, and the Chania Sailing Club.
Dalègre seems to have made a miscalculation in her meticulous documentation: she refers to ‘twenty-five operational shipyards’, whereas on paper there were twenty-three (eighteen, counting the double entry for the Great Arsenal (Μεγάλο Αρσενάλι), plus five), but only twenty-one were actually completed.
The other two ports on the northern coast did not offer the necessary conditions for a shipyard, neither at Sitia nor at Rethymno, where, subsequently, four vaults were set up on the western side of the fortress, serving merely as shelters.
The shipyards were a series of vaulted spaces, 49 metres long (enough to accommodate a galley), over 8–9 metres wide and 10 metres high. In Chania, they were topped with triangular gables and closed by heavy wooden gates, which allowed just enough water in to facilitate the easy mooring of the galleys.
The primary function of the shipyards was to shelter the galleys from the treacherous winter seas and to permit the construction of new vessels intended solely for coastal navigation, given that, for a very long time, the Venice Arsenal would hold the exclusive right to build galleys.
There was also a need to repair and maintain the military galleys which, in peacetime, were ‘in reserve’ but always ready for a possible attack: two or three in the capital Candia, two in Chania and one in Rethymno. In times of war, Candia had to be able to supply and equip the crews of thirteen galleys, Chania eight and Rethymno four. At the height of the wars against the Turks, up to eighty galleys had to be stationed in Crete.
Technical requirements were therefore crucial, as was the availability of skilled labour. On several occasions during the 16th century, the provveditori—Venice’s highest-ranking officials and military commanders—complained about the difficulty of recruiting the workers they needed: epidemics, people leaving for ‘the land of the infidels’ in search of higher wages, and a shortage of apprentices.
We know that the island’s shipwrights worked at the Venice Arsenal, and many in Constantinople, where the sultan, who needed to rebuild his fleet following the disaster at Lepanto (1571), offered better wages. In his report of 1589, the Provveditore Generale Zuane Mocenigo proposed, in order to attract them, that such skilled workers would be hired, apprentices paid, and elderly or disabled workers assisted.
In her PhD dissertation in Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick, entitled Maritime Communities in Late Renaissance Venice: The Arsenalotti and the Greeks 1575–1600, Ioanna Iordanou describes the close relationship between the Greek and Dalmatian minorities—who had arrived in the Venetian Republic from the colonies of the Stato da Màr—and the Arsenal area in Venice.
“The sestiere of Castello was not only home to the manual workforce of Venice; it was also the locus of settlement for some of the most distinct foreign communities hosted by the Republic, especially those of the Greeks and the Dalmatians, quite a few of whom found employment in the areas of shipbuilding, as well as other maritime activities. The Greeks had clustered nearby the Greek church of San Giorgio dei Greci in the parish of Sant’ Antonin, and the surrounding neighbourhoods. Not far away was the Scuola of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the cultural centre for the Dalmatian community. […] Castello was, indeed, home to one of the most renowned industries in late medieval and early modern period: the celebrated Arsenale. […] It was there where the great Venetian galleys were built, armed, and launched into water, contributing to the Republic’s economic prosperity, commercial and territorial expansion, as well as its defensive purposes.”
As regards the sources for my research, in some cases where necessary, I have provided my own translation and adaptation from the various original versions. I believe that my contribution to the study of Venetian arsenals in present-day Crete may serve to illustrate both the complexity and the great fascination of these ancient ‘factories’ of shipbuilding expertise, so admirably described by Dante Alighieri in Canto XXI of his Inferno2:
“And just such sticky pitch as that which boils
in the Venetians’ Arsenal in winter,
for calking up again the unsound ships,
which cannot then be sailed; – instead of which,
as one a new one builds, one plugs the ribs
of that which many voyages has made;
one hammers at the stern, and at the prow another;
one fashions oars, another cordage twists,
while still another mends a jib or mainsail;–
such was the coarse, dense pitch, which, not by fire,
but by an art divine, boiled there below,
and limed the bank on every side.”2
© Tiziana Cossignani – All rights reserved (text and photographs).
1A Venetian decree of 1211 concerning the colonisation of Candia. It stipulated the division of the island between nobles and commoners willing to move there with their families.
2The lines quoted in the English version are taken from the translated and commented edition of The Divine Comedy’s Inferno by Courtney Langdon.
