The Venetian Winter

There was one interruption in two and a half centuries, and it went badly for absolutely everyone concerned.

In September 1694, in the course of the long Ottoman–Venetian war that followed the failed Turkish siege of Vienna, a Venetian fleet under Antonio Zeno appeared off Chios with a substantial force. The Ottoman garrison was small; it capitulated after a short bombardment; and Venice took the island.

The occupation lasted about five months and was a disaster in nearly every dimension.

The Venetians treated Chios as a conquest, which from their point of view it was. They imposed requisitions and quartered troops. And — most damagingly — they set about asserting Catholic ecclesiastical primacy: converting Orthodox churches to Latin use, installing Latin clergy, and pressuring the Orthodox hierarchy. The Chian Greeks, who had spent a hundred and thirty years under a system of guaranteed privileges administered by a distant and generally uninterested Muslim state, discovered that their Christian liberators were considerably more intrusive in matters of religion than the Sultan had ever been. It is one of the great ironies of Ottoman Greek history and it was not lost on anybody at the time.

The Chian Catholics, who might have been expected to welcome the Venetians warmly, did somewhat better but not much: Venetian policy in occupied territory served Venetian interests, and local Catholic notables found themselves useful rather than favoured.

The Ottoman response was quick. A fleet under the Kapudan Pasha, carrying a land force, arrived in February 1695. There were two naval engagements off the island. The Venetians came off worse in both, and Zeno — having concluded that he could not hold the place against a determined Ottoman effort and could not be sure of relief — evacuated Chios rather than stand a siege.

The consequences were severe at both ends. At Venice, Zeno was court-martialled for abandoning a conquest; he was condemned and died in prison, a scapegoat for a strategic decision that was probably correct. On Chios, the returning Ottomans conducted reprisals against those suspected of having welcomed the occupiers, and the Catholic community bore the weight of it: leading Catholics were executed or imprisoned, property was confiscated, churches were closed, and a substantial number of Latin families emigrated permanently. The Chian Catholics never recovered the position they had held before 1694, though the community endured.

The whole episode taught the island a lesson which it then applied with absolute rigour for the next hundred and twenty-seven years, right up to and including the third week of March 1822: liberation offered by outsiders is a catastrophe waiting to happen, and Chios does better keeping its head down and paying its taxes.

That calculation was entirely rational, and it was based on direct experience. It was also, in the event, no protection at all.