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

outlet for trade on the Greek mainland, but was also an invaluable staging point for shipping moving in and out of the Dardanelles, and a naval base commanding the whole of the Aegean. Khalkis itself became Venetian in the division of the crusaders’ spoils: later, by successive stratagems the Venetians acquired the rest of the island too, and made it a bastion of their maritime strength, with castles all over it, and a Bailie who was their most important official in the Aegean. To the courts and offices of Euboea came appeals, complaints or disputes from the other islands: from its harbours the galleys sailed out to keep the troublesome feudatories in order. When the Greek emperors returned to Constantinople in 1261, ending the Latin empire, the Catholic Patriarch transferred his see to Khalkis, and so it became a kind of spiritual pro-consulate too.
    Khalkis was the show-place of the Venetian Aegean, and in old
    Negroponte, today’s Khalkis, on Euboea
    prints it is drawn bristling with towers and turrets, surrounded entirely by moat and sea-wall, and tight-stacked upon the water’s edge. Its site remains extraordinary. The Euripos is one of the world’s enigmas, for through it there rush, as through a mighty funnel, as many as fourteen powerful tides a day, in alternate directions. This is a weird spectacle. So narrow is the channel there, so immense is the weight of water rushing through, with the force and pace of a mountain torrent, that it feels as though all the water of the Aegean is being pumped that way. Nobody seems quite sure even now why it happens, and tradition says that Aristotle, infuriated by his failure to explain the mystery of the Euripos, drowned himself in it. The Venetians built actually on top of the channel, in the middle of a double drawbridge, a fortified tower that marked their imperial frontier. It was a romantic, Rhenish-looking construction, if we are to believe the old pictures, and so remarkable was the place, so suggestive the movement of the waters beneath it, that local rumour held it to be an enchanted castle, guarded by fairies or demons.
    Beyond this magic tower Venetian Khalkis thrived. Besides itsVenetian rulers and its Greek indigenes, it attracted sizeable communities of Italians, Albanians and Jews, while a colony of gypsies made their base beneath its walls. The banking-house of Andrea Ferro, transferred here from Venice, did a booming business throughout Frankish Greece, while the Jewish financiers of Khalkis were advisers and money-lenders to improvident barons and prodigal princelings from Thebes to Thira. The patriarch became a great figure, with huge estates in the island countryside, and hundreds of serfs. The church of St Mark, the cathedral of the town, was handsomely endowed by the monastery-church of San Giorgio Maggiore, beside the Basin at Venice. Khalkis was powerfully fortified at the expense of the Jews and had two deep-water harbours, one on each side of the Euripos.
    Through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Euboea was to figure constantly in the annals of the Republic. The job of Bailie went to men of great stature in the state, and the colony’s flag was one of those that flew on ceremonial occasions from the bronze flagstaffs before the Basilica of St Mark. But even as it reached the climax of its success, and the Venetian empire itself approached some kind of apogee, the luck of Khalkis changed. By then the Ottoman Turks had advanced far into Europe, around the northern flank of Greece. In 1453 they took Constantinople, and soon they were pressing into Greece itself, destroying the ramshackle Frankish kingdoms one by one. It was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to Euboea. Already their corsairs were brazenly raiding the island in search of Greek slaves and booty, and life in the remoter country parts was becoming so hazardous that some islanders actually petitioned the Bailie for permission to go over to the Turkish