Free The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage by Jan Morris Page A

Adoldo, Lord of Serifos. This tyrant generally lived in Venice, but finding himself paid insufficient taxes by his subjects, in 1397 he went out to his island with a band of Cretan brigands, seized a number of island notables and shut themup in his castle. There they were tortured to make them disclose where they hid their money, but the plan failing (perhaps they had no money) they were thrown off the castle ramparts to their deaths. This was too much even for the pragmatic Republic. Adoldo was imprisoned for two years, deprived of his island and forbidden ever to visit it (but he died in the sanctity of old age, and was buried with every sign of respect in the church of Santi Simeone e Giuda, which he had prudently endowed).
    Or finally there was Francesco III, the Mad Duke of the Archipelago. He was a direct protégé of the Signory, but unfortunately turned out to be a homicidal maniac. He murdered his wife by stabbing her in the stomach with a sword. He tried to kill his eleven-year-old son. He criminally assaulted his aunt the Lady of Nio. The Venetians whisked him away to Crete, where he died under restraint, but his son, growing up to succeed him, proved almost as difficult as his father, once getting himself captured by the Turks, and once forcibly occupying the island of Paros against the wishes of Venice: it did not matter much, however, for within half a century the dynasty was extinct anyway and the Duchy of the Archipelago was a Venetian ward no longer, but was held in fief by a Jewish financier, Joseph Nasi, under the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan, Selim the Sot.
    So went the history of the Aegean, in the days of the Pax Venetica. There were few islands that did not at one time or another fall under the influence of the winged lion. So close was the association of Venice with this sea that for years the very sponge itself, that inescapable familiar of the Aegean waterfront, was known as the enetikos , the Venetian. The free-booting feudalists spread themselves, by skulduggery, matrimony or insinuation, from Tenedos to Karpathos. The merchant-venturers nosed in their cobs from port to port. The war-galleys glided into petty harbours, with awful oar-strokes and intimidating standards, like visitations from on high. Sometimes the Republic took an island peacefully under its protection, sometimes an island was seized in the exigencies of war, and wherever you wander now among those wine-dark waters, traces of Venice show.
    Within the Dardanelles themselves Venetian castles stand at the water’s edge, while far in the south at Thira you may still fancy, inthe thin line of white houses along the volcano’s ridge, the Venetian town that stood there until nineteenth-century earthquakes rattled it into oblivion. In Syros, the hub of the Cyclades, the Venetian citadel stands obdurate and cathedral-crowned on one conical hump, while the Greek Orthodox cathedral and its community stands slightly lower on another. Crumbled small castles on Andros or Paros, harbour moles and ornamental dovecotes, a Catholic bishopric surviving here, an antique snobbery somewhere else, escutcheoned doorways and pronged merlons – all these are the mark of Venice, and the exquisite little row of gimcrack houses on the waterfront at Mykonos, perhaps the most famous and familiar structure in the whole Aegean, is called Enetika to this day.
    Much the greatest of the Venetian possessions was Euboea, which the Greeks call Evvoia nowadays, but which was known to the Venetians as Negroponte, Black Bridge. It is only just an island. About 120 miles long, 35 miles wide at its widest part, it lies so close to the Greek mainland of Boeotia that at one point the intervening channel, the Euripos, is only 130 feet across, and has been spanned since classical times by a bridge.
    Beside the Euripos stood a town, which the Venetians called Negroponte too, but which is now Khalkis. It was of obvious importance to the Republic. It was not only a useful