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

houses as it chills the ruins today, and the office of Rector in this comfortless and perilous outpost of empire was looked upon by likely appointees, so the Frenchman says, as a mortification.
    Huddled here then at daybreak on 5 June 1715, the last of the Venetian rulers of the Aegean saw, far in the bay below them, a Turkish fleet off-shore. A lonely moment! There were forty-five warships down there, and transports enough to carry an army of 25,000 men. The islanders rushed up to Exombourgo for safety, taking their weapons with them. The Turks advanced inland with artillery, mortars and scaling-ladders and, surrounding the mountain, began a bombardment of the fortress. At first the garrison fought back strongly, and Turkish casualties were heavy. There was plenty of food and ammunition up there, and the Greeks, we are told, were perfectly ready to fight it out to the end. It was the Venetians who surrendered. They are thought to have been bribed, and certainly the terms they arranged were disgraceful. Every Venetian on the island would be allowed to leave. Every Greek must remain. The Rector, Bernardo Balbi, agreed without argument, and he and his men were allowed to march out of the fortress with all the honours of war. They sailed away unharmed, leaving all their subjects, the most faithful they ever had, to the mercy of the Turks.
    So the long Venetian presence in the sea of legend ended miserably, not at all as Dandolo, Sanudo and their bravos could have foreseen. Balbi, returning shamefaced to Venice, was accused of accepting bribes from the Turks, and imprisoned for life. His officers are said to have been punished for their venality by having hot silver poured over their bodies. The Turks blew up most of Exombourgo, and shipped the loyal Greeks of Tinos away to slavery in Africa.

The Great Island
     
    The nature of Crete – the imperial system –
troubles – two memories – ironic benefits –
mixed masonries – the siege – ‘time to go’
     
    A t the southern end of the Aegean, like a breakwater, stands the isle of Crete. It is another world. I first set eyes on Crete from a ship’s deck at the end of World War II, and it seemed to me then, as we lay off-shore in the dark bay of Soudha, to be positively smouldering with the furies of the battle just concluded. In the years since then tourism has penetrated every last cove of the Grecian seas, and ancient lifestyles have been tempered from Lemnos to Corfu: but Crete, we shall find as we sail in from the airy Cyclades, is smouldering still – not just at the moment with the embers of any particular conflict, but with its native intensity of temperament, its terrifying landscapes and its always ferocious memories.
    It is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean – the Greeks call it simply ‘The Great Island’ – and it is like no other. It rises in wild mountain ranges directly from the sea, scoured often by savage winds, and nearly half of it is uncultivatable. It is not really very large – 160 miles long, never more than 36 miles wide – but its presence is gigantic. The mass of it is hacked all about with ravines, twisted this way and that, and the deep shadows scored in its mountain flanks seem to double the size of it, and make it all terrific. It is the very opposite of, say, Mauritius, which Darwin once defined as an ‘elegantly constructed island’. Crete is brutally built and full of portent – the birth-place of Zeus, the lair of the Minotaur.
    Even in sunshine this is a landscape daunting and suggestive.During the bitter winter it can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with sudden sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the