An empire in decline rarely admits it. The republic of Venice, whose trading empire once dominated the Mediterranean, sustained a nearly mortal blow in the Candian War (1645-69). During a quarter-century of bitter fighting with the Ottomans, Venice lost her prime colony of Crete, much of her navy, and a good part of the public treasury. Rather than retrench and recover, La Serenissima sought revenge and new conquests. The chance for both came in the 1680s, when most of Central Europe’s fighting men (including George of Hanover, future King of England) defeated a Turkish army outsides of Vienna. In 1684 Venetian leaders opportunistically joined the Christian powers’ war on the wounded Ottoman Empire. Crete was the objective, but it proved a prize out of reach; Venice lacked the ships and men to take it. Instead the republic fought a bloody campaign on the Greek mainland, briefly occupying Athens (where Venetian artillery wrecked the Parthenon) and capturing the principal towns of the Peloponnese. After a few desultory attempts to recapture Greece’s southern peninsula, the Ottomans in 1699 ceded the region to Venice. The republic now had a strategic base to develop and a large new colony to govern.
Venice soon revealed itself as the proverbial dog who had caught the car. It lacked the resources to defend Morea, and its officials lacked the inclination to govern its people fairly. The republic did encourage western Christian farmers and merchants to settle in the colony, offering them land grants and protected markets for silk and foodstuffs. Morea’s indigenous majority, however, did not prosper under Venetian rule. Many lost their land, fell more deeply into debt, or found themselves pressed by heavy taxes or corvee labor demands. At least one-sixth of the population (as measured by village abandonment) had died or fled during the Venetian conquest, and others, both Muslim and Christian, ran away to Turkish-occupied Greece in the early 1700s. The province’s overlords had to institute sea patrols to prevent their subjects from running away to greater freedom in the Ottoman Empire.
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| Venetian fortifications at Acrocorinth, Wikimedia Commons |
Turkey’s re-conquest, one might say liberation, of Morea came less than two decades after the peace treaty with Venice. Partial credit for the success of Turkish arms goes to Charles XII of Sweden, who after the Battle of Poltava took refuge in Ottoman territory. His overconfident Russian adversary Peter I gave chase, only to find himself surrounded by a Turkish army. In subsequent negotiations the tsar traded his freedom for the surrender of several Russian border fortresses. With the Russians at bay, Ottoman officials could contemplate a rematch with Austria and Venice, and as the weaker of the two powers the republic made a better first choice. In 1714, the same year that George of Hanover became King of Great Britain, Grand Vizier Silahdar Damat Ali Pasa arranged a declaration of war. Morea was the closest and softest target, as Venice had only 3,000 troops in the entire kingdom and few locals wanted to fight for the colonizers. Silahdar brought an army to the Isthmus of Corinth in Jun 1715, reduced the impressive but undermanned citadel of Acrocorinth in a five-day siege, and occupied Morea’s most important strategic town. The remaining fortresses on the peninsula fell to Turkish troops a few months later.
Not everyone in the reconquered province benefited from the renewal of Ottoman rule: the Grand Vizier rounded up and executed any Muslim apostates who had converted to Christianity. Most Moreans found that the Ottoman “yoke,” so-called, lay more lightly on their shoulders than the Christian Venetian one. The province’s population and economy recovered, and even Christian merchants prospered in subsequent decades, even as their former protectors’ fortunes continued to decline.
Sources: Alexis Malliaris, “Population Exchange and Integration of Immigrant Communities in the Venetian Morea,” in Siriol Davies and Jack Davis, eds., Between Venice and Istanbul (Amer. School of Classical Studies in Athens, 2007), 97-108; Kenneth Setton, Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century (American Philosophical Society, 1991), 400, 426-38; J.M. Wagstaff, “War and Settlement Desertion in the Morea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1978): 295-308
This reminds me of a the Spanish officers Geoffrey Parker discusses in "The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road". As the Eighty Years wars against the Dutch was going poorly, they concluded that an exit strategy would be too costly for Spain's prestige, hence the only choice was to keep pushing forward. The book was first published in 1972, so I don't doubt there was an intentional comparison to the US strategy in Vietnam by including these comments.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the end of the British Empire provides a somewhat more optimistic prospect, in view of the Labour party's success in creating a welfare state for average people after the second world war, and sacrificing the military budget to do so. The result, of course, was not accepted by all, as evidenced by British military actions during the Suez crisis or other places during its final days. One almost wonders if Margaret Thatcher's Falklands strategy was based off the same kind of nostalgia Putin has for the old Russian empire.
Do you think empire is a fact of life for most human societies since antiquity, or is there a viable alternative for the future?