Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 53, No. 332, June, 1843

The numerous executions which marked the accession of the new vizir, (in accordance, as was believed, with the dying injunctions of his father,) struck with terror the functionaries of government, who anticipated a continuance of the iron rule under which they had so long trembled; but the disposition of Ahmed-Kiuprili was not naturally sanguinary, and few measures of unnecessary severity characterized his subsequent sway. The war in Hungary, meanwhile, had assumed a serious aspect; for though Kemény had perished in battle, the Imperialists still continued to oppose the claims of Abaffi to the crown of Transylvania; and their armies, guided by the valour and experience of Montecuculi, a general formed in the Thirty Years' War, were making rapid progress in the reduction of the principality. War was now openly declared between the two empires; and Kiuprili, assuming the command in person, opened the campaign of 1663, in Hungary, with 100,000 men—a force before which Montecuculi had no alternative but to retreat, as the rapidity with which the Turks had taken the field, had completely outstripped the dilatory preparations of the Aulic Council10. The exploits of the Ottomans, however, were confined to the capture of Ujvar, or Neuhausel, after a siege maintained on both sides with such extraordinary vigour, as to have given rise to a Hungarian proverb—"As fixed as a Turk before Neuhausel,"—after which both armies withdrew into winter-quarters. The campaign of 1664 opened also to the advantage of the Ottomans; but in attempting the passage of the Raab, (Aug. 1,) at the fords near St Gothard, the sudden swelling of the stream cut off the communication between one division of their army and the other; and being attacked at this juncture by Montecuculi, they sustained the most signal overthrow which the Osmanlis had ever yet received from a Christian power—17,000 of their best troops were slain or drowned, and the vizir, hastily drawing on the remains of his forces, sent proposals of peace to the Austrian headquarters. Yet such was the indefinite awe with which the prowess and resources of the Ottomans were at that time regarded, that the Imperialists made no further use of their victory than to conclude a truce for twenty years, the conditions of which, in effect, ceded all the points for which the war had been undertaken. Abaffi was recognised as Prince of Transylvania, and as a tributary of the Porte—the two important fortresses of Great-Waradin and Neuhausel, which the Turks had taken during the war, were left in their hands, and a breathing-time was thus afforded to the two empires for the mortal struggle which was to be decided, nineteen years later, under the walls of Vienna.

Notwithstanding the ill success of his arms, the vizir was received by the sultan, on his return with the army in the ensuing spring to Adrianople, with such extraordinary distinction, that those who had hoped to profit by his expected fall, could explain such continued favour only by the supposition that sorcery had been practised on the mind of the monarch by the mother of the all-powerful minister. Solicitous to retrieve his military reputation in the eyes of the soldiery, Kiuprili now determined to assume in person the conduct of the long-continued war in Crete, and to bring the struggle to a close by the capture of Candia, the siege of which had already reached near twice the duration of that of Troy. To supply the deficiencies of the Turkish marine, which had been almost ruined by the repeated naval victories of the Venetians, an overture was made to the English ambassador, Lord Winchilsea, for permission to hire the services of a number of British vessels; but this strange request being evaded, the expedition was postponed for a year, while every nerve was strained in the building and equipment of galleys; and at length, in the autumn of 1666, the fleet set sail from Monembasia in the Morea, under the command of the Capitan-pasha Mustafa, surnamed Kaplan, or the Tiger, the brother-in-law of Kiuprili, and anchored off Canea in the beginning of November. But before we proceed to narrate the closing scenes of the Cretan war, we must retrace our steps, to give some account of its origin and progress.

The dominions of the Venetian Signory in the Levant, which had at one time comprehended, besides the scattered isles of the Cyclades, the three subject kingdoms (as they were proudly called) of Candia,11 Cyprus, and the Morea, were confined, in the middle of the seventeenth century, to the first-named island—the last relics of the Morea having been wrested from the republic by the arms of Soliman the Magnificent in 1540, and Cyprus having been subdued by the lieutenants of his son Selim, a few months before the destruction of the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto in 1571.12 The sovereignty of Candia had been acquired by purchase from the Marquis of Montferrat, to whom it was assigned on the partition of the Greek empire, after the conquest of Constantinople, in 1204, by the Latins of the fourth crusade: but the four centuries and a half of Venetian rule present little more than an unvarying succession of revolts, oppression, and bloodshed. In pursuance of their usual system of colonial administration, which strangely contrasted with their domestic policy, they had introduced into the island a sort of modified feudal system, in order to rivet their ascendancy over this remote possession, by the interposition of a class of resident proprietors, whose interest it would be to maintain the dominion of the parent state: but the cavaliers, as the Venetian tenants of Cretan fiefs were termed, proved at times even more refractory than the candidates themselves, and made the island for many years a source of endless difficulties to the Signory. In 1363, complaining of their exclusion from the high dignities of the republic, the cavaliers openly threw off their allegiance, elected a doge from among themselves, and raised the banner of St Titus of Retimo in opposition to the standard of St Mark. As they were supported both by the native Candiotes and the Greeks of Constantinople, it was not till after a harassing warfare of two years that they were reduced, and their fortresses razed, by the Provveditori sent from Venice; a second effort at independence, a few years later, was not more successful. The Greek inhabitants were throughout subjected to a degree of merciless tyranny, in comparison of which the worst severities of Turkish rule must have appeared lenient. The Sphakiote tribes in particular, who were strong both from their arms and martial temperament, and from their habitations among the lofty ridges of the Aspro-Bouna, or White Mountains, in the south of the island, acknowledged at all times but an imperfect allegiance to their Venetian lords: and the acts of fiendish barbarity by which their frequent revolts were chastised, can scarcely find a parallel even in the worst horrors of the French Revolution. Unborn infants torn from the womb in pursuance of a judicial sentence solemnly pronounced—the head of the father exacted as the ransom for the life of the son—such were the methods by which the Provveditori of the Most Serene and Christian Republic enforced its authority, and which are related, not only without reprehension, but with manifest complacency and approval, by the chroniclers of the state.13

Though the coasts had often been ravaged in former wars by the Turkish fleet, particularly under Barbarossa in 1538, no attempt appears ever to have been made to effect the conquest of the island by the reduction of the fortified cities of the coast, in which the main strength of the Venetians lay: and since the treaty of 1573, Venice had remained more than seventy years at peace with the Porte. In 1645, however, a fresh rupture arose from the capture of a richly-laden Turkish vessel by the Maltese cruisers,14 who were allowed, contrary to the existing conventions between the Porte and the Republic, to sell the horses which were on board their prize in one of the remote havens of Crete, beyond the surveillance of the Venetian authorities. Slight as was the ground of offence, it produced an instantaneous ferment at Constantinople: the janissaries, calling to mind similar omens said to have preceded the conquest of Rhodes and of Cyprus, exclaimed that the land whose soil had once been trodden by Moslem horse hoofs, was the predestined inheritance of the Faithful: and the flame was fanned by the capitan-pasha Yusuf, a Dalmatian renegade, who, independent of the hatred which from early associations he bore Venice, dreaded being sent on a bootless expedition against the impregnable defences of Malta—an enterprise which, since the memorable failure in the last years of Soliman, had never been attempted by the Osmanlis. Preparations for war, meanwhile, were carried on with unexampled activity, though the destination of the armament was kept profoundly secret; till, on April 30, 1545, the most formidable expedition which had ever been equipped in the Turkish ports, set sail from the Bosphorus. Eight thousand janissaries, 14,000 spahis, and upwards of 50,000 timariots or feudal militia, were embarked on board the fleet, which consisted of eighty galleys, and more than 300 transports, besides the auxiliary squadrons of the Barbary regencies, which joined the armada, May 7, at the general rendezvous at Scio.

From Scio the united fleet sailed to Navarino—a course purposely adopted to spread the belief that Malta was the point of attack; but no sooner were they again at sea, than the capitan-pasha, summoning the principal officers on board his galley, read the khatt sheeref of the sultan, announcing that he had taken up arms for the conquest of Candia. War had, in the mean time, been formally declared against the Republic at Constantinople, and the Venetian envoy, Soranzo, imprisoned in the Seven Towers: but he had previously contrived to communicate to the Signory his suspicions of the impending storm; and supplies and reinforcements had been hastily dispatched from Venice to Andrea Cornaro, the inquisitore, or governor of Crete, in the event of its bursting in that quarter. Little serious apprehension seems, however, to have been entertained; and great was the consternation of the Candiote population, when, on the morning of June 24, the vast armament of the Ottomans was seen rounding Cape Spada, and disembarking the troops near Canea, on the same spot where, according to tradition, the standards of Islam had first been displayed, 820 years before, by the Saracens of Spain.

The strong ramparts of Canea opposed but an ineffectual resistance to the numbers and resolution of the Ottomans, who pressed the siege with all the ardour arising from the confidence of success; and after fifty days of open trenches, and the failure of two assaults, the second fortress of the island capitulated, August 17. The churches and the cathedral of St Nicholas were converted into mosques: and Delhi-Hussein (whose subsequent tragical fate has been already commemorated) was sent out to take the government of this new conquest. The brave Yusuf, returning to Constantinople at the end of the year, was at first received with the highest honours by Ibrahim, but soon after put to death in one of his fits of senseless cruelty; but the Ottomans in Crete, under the gallant leadership of Delhi-Hussein, who now became serdar or commander-in-chief, overran and occupied the inland districts almost without opposition from the Greek inhabitants, in whose eyes any alternative was preferable to the bloody tyranny under which they had so long groaned:15 while the Venitian garrisons, shut up in the fortified towns along the northern shore, depended for supplies on the Christian fleet, which the Turks did not venture to bring to action. The campaign of 1646 was marked by the capture of the important city of Retimo, which surrendered Nov. 15, after a murderous siege of thirty-nine days, in which both the governor Cornaro and the provveditor Molino were slain: but though the Turks received reinforcements to the amount of 30,000 men, including 10,000 janissaries, in the course of the following year, it was not till May 1648 that the trenches were at length opened before Candia, the capital of the island, and the only fortress of importance still in the hands of the Venetians.

The leaguer of Candia was pushed during several months by the Turks, animated by the courage and example of their general, with the same fanatic zeal which they had displayed before Canea and Retimo; but the besieged, whose tenure of Crete depended on this last stronghold, held out with equal pertinacity: and their efforts were aided by the presence of a large body of Maltese auxiliaries, as well as by the succours which the naval superiority of the Venetians enabled them continually to introduce by sea. In one sortie, a detachment of the garrison penetrated even to the tent of the serdar, who owed his safety to his personal prowess; while the outworks of the town were ruined by the constant explosion of mines, and the Ottoman standards were planted on the bastion of Martinengo, and on several of the redoubts which covered the interior defences. But in spite of their repeated assaults, the besiegers failed to make any impression on the body of the place; and the serdar was compelled to withdraw his diminished army into winter-quarters. The anarchy at Constantinople which followed the deposition of Ibrahim, combined with the blockade of the Dardanelles by the Venetians, prevented any reinforcements from reaching the seat of war—yet the siege was renewed in the ensuing summer, and carried on with such vigour, that the garrison, weakened by the loss of half its numbers, including the valiant governor, Colloredo, was reduced to the last extremity; when the arrival of the Maltese squadron, under Balbiani, baulked the Turks of their expected prize; and the janissaries, breaking out into furious mutiny, compelled Delhi-Hussein once more to abandon the hopeless enterprise. All the remainder of the island, however, had now peaceably submitted to the Ottoman rule, and had been organized into sandjaks and districts; so that the garrison of Candia were rather the occupants of a solitary post in a hostile country, than defenders of the soil against the invasion; and the Turkish commanders, ill supplied from Constantinople, during the troubled minority of Mohammed, with siege equipage and munitions of war, contented themselves with blockading the town by the erection of redoubts, and guarding the open country with their cavalry. While the war thus languished in Crete, the events of the maritime contest continued to justify the proverbial saying of the Turks, that "Allah had given the land to the true believers; but the sea to the infidels!" Not only was the blockade of the Dardanelles so strictly kept up, that it was only in winter, when the Venetian fleet was unable to remain on its station, that the Turks could convey reinforcements to their brethren who were waging the holy war in Crete, but repeated and disastrous defeats were sustained by the Ottoman navy, whenever it attempted to dispute the sovereignty of the sea with the Lion of St Mark. In July 1651, a formidable armament with supplies and troops for Crete was almost entirely destroyed off Naxos by Mocenigo: and on July 6, 1656, the same commander inflicted on the Turkish fleet, off the mouth of the Straits, the most decisive overthrow which it had sustained since the fatal day of Lepanto. Seventy sail of ships and galleys were sunk or taken; the Capitan-pasha escaped into the Bosphorus with only fourteen vessels; and the inhabitants of Constantinople, in the first access of consternation, expected the apparition of the Christian ensigns in the Golden Horn; but the victors contented themselves with the occupation of Tenedos and Lemnos, which they held till dislodged in the following year by Kiuprili.

The serdar, Delhi-Hussein, who had for eleven years gallantly upheld the renown of the Ottoman arms in Crete, withstanding with equal firmness the efforts of the enemy, and the mutinous spirit of his own soldiers, had been recalled early in 1656 to assume the vizirat; a fleeting glimpse of honour, which, though cancelled even before he reached Constantinople in favour of the Kaimakam Mustapha, subsequently (as already related) cost him his life from the jealousy of Mohammed Kiuprili. His successors possessed neither his energy nor his military skill; and the Venetians, taking courage from the change of commanders, sallied from Candia, and even ventured, though without success, to attempt the recovery of Canea. Negotiations for peace, meanwhile, had been kept on foot almost from the first; but as the Ottoman pride absolutely refused to listen to any propositions which did not include the total and unconditional surrender of Candia, no pacification could be effected; and the war continued to linger till Ahmed-Kiuprili, secured on the side of Hungary by the peace with Austria, collected all the forces of the empire, to crush this last fragment of Venetian dominion in the Levant.

The advanced season of the year when the vizir disembarked in Candia, and the disorganized state of the forces which he found there, prevented the immediate commencement of offensive operations; but in the course of the winter, the arrival of the contingents of Egypt and Africa, as well as of a squadron with fresh troops from Constantinople, raised his army to between 40,000 and 50,000 effective men; and on the 20th of May 1667, the trenches were once more opened in form on the western side of the city, while 300 pieces of cannon, thundering from the Ottoman lines, covered the approaches of the pioneers.16 Of the seven17 great bastions which formed the principal defences on the land side, those of Panigra, Bethlehem, and Martinengo, were the chief points of attack; the vizir himself taking post opposite the first, while the Beglerbeg of Anatolia and the Pasha of Egypt were stationed against the Bethlehem and the Martinengo. The assault, as on former occasions, was conducted chiefly by the slow process of sap and mine; but the superior skill of the Christian engineers, enabled them frequently to explore and countermine the works of the enemy; and the mining parties were thus surprised and blown into the air, while murderous combats took place under ground, from the accidental rencounters of the soldiers employed in these subterranean galleries. The garrison, which had at first numbered about 12,000, under the command of the Marchese di Villa, a Piedmontese officer of approved skill and courage, received, at the end of June, a reinforcement of 1000 veteran troops, brought by the Venetian Captain-General Morosini, who arrived with the fleet at the Isle of Standia, off the entrance of the port; and a concourse of volunteers, from all parts of Europe, hastened to share in the defence of this last bulwark of Christendom in the Grecian seas; while the Maltese, Papal, and Neapolitan galleys cruised in the offing, to intercept the supplies brought by sea to the Ottoman camp. The Turks, meanwhile, with their usual stubborn perseverance, continued to push their sap under the ravelin of Mocenigo, and the Panigra bastion which it covered; and though their progress was retarded, and their works often ruined, by the sallies of the defenders, the foundations were at length shaken, and the ramparts rent and shattered, by the explosion of innumerable mines; and the janissaries, fired with fanatic zeal, and stimulated by promises of reward, rushed again and again to the attack under the eye of the vizir. "Many and various," says Rycaut, in his quaint narrative, "were the valiant assaults and sallies, the traverses extraordinary, the rencounters bloody, the resistance vigorous, not known or recorded in any siege before;" and the struggle continued with unabated fury on both sides, till the approach of winter; while, after each unsuccessful assault, the Venetians, emulating the ferocity of their enemies, displayed the heads of the slain and prisoners (for no quarter was given or taken) in barbarous triumph from the wall. At length, after a desperate conflict on November 16, the janissaries effected a lodgement in the Mocenigo bastion and the Panigra; and the Ottoman banners, for the first time, were displayed from the summit of the works. But this valiant forlorn hope, in the moment of triumph, was hurled into the air by the explosion of a previously-prepared mine; and Kiuprili, dismayed at this last failure, drew off his troops into their lines, where they lay inactive, till the inundation of the camp by the winter rains compelled them to withdraw to a greater distance.

Great was the rejoicing throughout Europe at the tidings that the pride of the Ottoman battle had once more been driven back discomfited, for the best and bravest of nearly every nation in Christendom were now to be found in the ranks of the defenders:18 and great, on the other hand, was the perplexity of the divan, and the chagrin of the Turkish population, at the apparently endless duration of an enterprise, a speedy and glorious termination of which had been expected from the presence of the vizir. The sultan even dispatched a confidential agent to the seat of war, to examine personally into the state of affairs; and finding from his report that the army was reduced, by the sword and the ravages of disease, to half its original effective strength, he issued peremptory firmans to the pashas of the empire to hasten the equipment of their contingents; and even announced his intention of repairing in person to Crete, to share the perils and glories of the holy war. Kiuprili, meanwhile, was indefatigable in his exertions to reorganize his army, and restore his artillery to efficiency, even casting new guns to fit the Venetian bullets, 30,000 of which are said to have been picked up in the Turkish lines during the preceding campaign! A strict blockade was kept up on the city, while the Venetian cruisers, and the Papal galleys under Rospigliosi, the nephew of Pope Clement IX., were equally vigilant in preventing supplies from reaching the besiegers by sea; and various maritime encounters took place, generally to the advantage of the flag of St Mark. The unworthy jealousy19 entertained by Morosini of Di Villa, led, however, early in the spring of 1668, to the withdrawal of that gallant soldier from his command, in which he was succeeded by the Marquis Montbrun St André, a French volunteer, inferior neither in valour nor diligence to his predecessor.

It was not till the beginning of June that the vizir recommenced active operations against Candia; but the plan of attack was now changed. In order to command the narrow entrance of the harbour,20 and so cut off the constant reinforcements which reached the besieged by sea, the principal batteries were directed against the bastion of Sabionera, (called by the Turks the Kizil-Tabîyah, or Red Fort,) at the seaward extremity of the works on one side, and against that of St Andrew on the other; but the events of the siege during this year present nothing to distinguish them from the endless succession of mines, sorties, assaults, and countermines, which had marked the campaign of last year. The Venetian commanders at length, seeing the Turks preparing to pass the winter in their trenches, and sensible that (concentrated as the forces of the two contending powers were now for the attack and defence of a single fortress) they must eventually be overwhelmed by the ponderous strength of the Ottoman empire, once more made overtures for peace, offering an annual tribute for Candia, and the cession of the rest of the island to the Porte; but the vizir sternly rejected the proffered compromise; and his reply to the envoy, Molino—"The Sultan is not a merchant, nor does he need money—he has but one word, and that is—Candia,"—showed that the long dispute could only be decided by the sword. Elated by the hope of speedy triumph, the Turks now ran their approaches so close to the bastion of St Andrew, which was held by the Maltese knights and militia, that the muzzles of the muskets almost touched each other; and the vizir wrote to the Sultan, that they had only three yards more of ground to win, when, at this critical moment, the spirits of the besieged were revived by the arrival, early in December, of the Duc de la Feuillade and the Count de St Pol, with a gallant band of 600 volunteers, many of them of the best families of France. But the boiling valour of these fiery youths was equally difficult to restrain or direct; and, after losing two-thirds of their number in desperate, but irregular, sallies against the Turkish lines, the survivors of this piece of knight-errantry re-embarked for Christendom in January, leaving the heads of their fallen comrades ranged on pikes before the tent of Kiuprili. A stancher reinforcement was received in the spring of 1669, by the arrival of 3000 Lunenburghers, whose commander, Count Waldeck, fell a few days after, in repulsing an assault on the breach of St Andrew, as did also the former governor, Di Villa, whose thirst for glory had brought him back, as general of the Papal auxiliaries, to the scene of peril.