The Middle Sea by Norwich John Julius

Author:Norwich, John Julius [Norwich, John Julius]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307387721
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

In 1570 Venice had held Cyprus for eighty-one years. In 1489 Queen Caterina had been replaced by a Venetian governor–known as the Lieutenant–based in Nicosia. The military headquarters, on the other hand, was at Famagusta, where both the standing garrison and the Cyprus-based fleet were under the command of a Venetian captain. Famagusta, unlike Nicosia, was superbly fortified. Historically it was the island’s principal harbour, although by 1570 Salines (the modern Larnaca) had overtaken it in terms of commercial traffic. The total population was about 160,000, still living under an anachronistically feudal system which the Republic had made little or no effort to change. At the top was the nobility, partly Venetian but for the most part still of old French crusader stock like the former royal house of Lusignan; at the bottom was the peasantry, many of them still effectively serfs. Between the two was the merchant class and urban bourgeoisie, a Levantine melting pot of Greeks, Venetians, Armenians, Syrians, Copts and Jews.

Cyprus, in short, cannot have been an easy place to govern, though it must be admitted that the Venetians–whose own domestic administration was the wonder and envy of the civilised world–might have governed it a good deal better than they did. By the time the Turks landed in the summer of 1570 the Republic had acquired a grim record of local maladministration and corruption, and had made itself thoroughly unpopular with its Cypriot subjects. Thus, even if the allied expedition for the relief of Cyprus had arrived on time and fought valiantly, it could scarcely have saved the island. A major victory at sea might perhaps have proved temporarily effective, delaying the inevitable for a year or two, but since the Turkish invasion fleet that dropped anchor on 3 July at Larnaca numbered not less than 350 sail–more than double Colonna’s estimate–such a victory would have been, to say the least, unlikely. The truth is that, from the moment that Sultan Selim decided to incorporate the island into his empire, Cyprus was doomed.

It was doomed for the same fundamental reason that Malta, five years before, had been saved: the inescapable fact that the strength of any army in the field varies inversely with the length of its lines of communication and supply. Since Cyprus had neither the means, the ability, nor–probably–the will to defend itself, it could be defended only by Venice, from which all military supplies, arms and ammunition and the bulk of the fighting men and horses would have to come. But Venice lay over 1,500 miles away across the Mediterranean, much of which was now controlled by the Turks. They, on the other hand, had only fifty miles to sail from ports on the southern coast of Anatolia, where they could count on an almost limitless supply of manpower and materials.

Their success seemed the more assured in that the Cypriot defences, apart from those of Famagusta, were hopelessly inadequate. Nicosia, it is true, boasted a nine-mile circuit of medieval walls, but they enclosed an area considerably larger than the town and needed a huge force to defend them.

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