Free The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage by Jan Morris

after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.
    A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away. Sometimes the intervention of Venice was resented by her subjects on the spot, but sometimes it was devoutly welcomed: ‘They look upon our Admiral,’ reported a Venetian diplomat of one particularly tormented community, ‘as the Messiah.’
    Sanudo, his colleagues and his successors behaved, as often as not, with a reckless impropriety. Sometimes they were absentee landlords – for years the lord of Andros governed it from his palace in Venice – but more frequently they lived life as a sort of game in their sunlit and storm-swept fiefs. All their islands were fortified, and they frequently went to war with each other, theirpetty navies fighting it out between the headlands, their minuscule armies hurling themselves at each other’s citadels. The Lady of Mykonos was abducted once by the Duke of Naxos, while Syros and Tinos once went to war over the ownership of a donkey.
    For the Signory itself Aegean suzerainty must sometimes have seemed more trouble than it was worth, especially when problems of succession arose, and the judgement of Venice was called for. When in 1361, for instance, the reigning Duke of Naxos died without an heir, the Republic had to make sure that his daughter, who was young and beautiful, found herself a husband sufficiently compliant to Venetian interests. So uncooperative was she, and so unsuitable were the candidates for her hand, that in the end the Venetians sent a commando force to Naxos to kidnap her. They took her away to Crete, where they confronted her with a fiancé of their choice, a bold military man nicknamed ‘The Host Disperser’: fortunately she fell instantly in love with him, so we are assured, married him splendidly in Venice and lived with him happily ever after in the citadel on the hill.
    Or there was the problem of the Duke Niccolò III. He was so ungrateful a vassal that he actually tried to steal Euboea from the Republic, and antagonized his Venetian peers as much as he oppressed his Greek subjects. He was conveniently murdered by a rival claimant to the dukedom, Francesco Crespi. Crespi seized the Kastro and proclaimed himself Francesco I, and the Venetians, who saw no contradiction between criminal tendencies and a talent for government, promptly and gratefully recognized him.
    Then there was Giovanni III, at the end of the fifteenth century. Everyone loathed him, too. He encouraged pirates to use Naxos as their base. He taxed his people disgracefully. He affronted the Turks unnecessarily and took no notice of the Venetians. The Archbishop of Naxos himself appealed to Venice for his removal, but once again they were saved the trouble, for the Naxians themselves assassinated him.
    There was Niccolò