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The Fall of Candia
Cretans thought they were harbouring Turks in the Candia ghetto.
Jewish policy was to lie low and avoid trouble. They suffered from
Venetian discrimination as well as Greek prejudice; for instance, their
share of the taxes was unfairly high. In Candia, where in the early
1600s there were eight hundred Jews out of a total population of about
11,500, they paid usually over 20 per cent of the taxes. The Jews made
their living by moneylending and the export of wine and household
goods. There were complaints from the Greeks about a Jewish ‘monopoly’
in the wine trade; and from the nobles about the extortionate
practices of Jewish usurers.
Dapper reports that among the few who remained in Candia when
the Turks moved in in 1669 were three Jews. By 1700 there were about
a thousand Jews in Candia again.
After four years of unremitting labour in which he tried to restore
not only the pristine military defences and discipline of Crete, but also
its antique morals, Foscarini returned to Venice and was duly thanked.
His work did not last; for even though he himself was in most respects a
humane and prescient man, the system he re-imposed contained the
evils which must cause its own destruction. Only ten years later the
Proveditor Garzoni found the same evils rampant; he reports of the
peasant contadini:
The women are dressed in rags, the children naked, the men half-naked. Yet
these wretched men are obliged according to ancient custom to perform two
angarie per annum for their feudarch: (i) a twelve-day stint of unpaid work,
and (ii) further work for as long as the knight requires at the same rate as was
paid two hundred years before.
The peasant pays his feudarch every year the terziaria – a fixed amount,
whether the harvest succeeds or fails. And on top of this, he is forced to pay so
much else in kind that the feudarch appropriates almost all his oil, wine,
produce and even livestock.
For the government of the island, Castellani, Secretaries, and ‘Captains
against robbers’ (capitani contra fares) are sent to the eparchies. All these are
vultures insatiable . . . devouring whatever remains over from the extortions of the
feudarchs.
The peasant is in constant fear, day and night, lest he be taken and thrown
into the galley and sent to do service far away; a service from which few
return; most are slaughtered in battles, or drowned at sea, or die from epidemics
and privations. The peasant is forced, if he has some small property,
vines, land or livestock, to sell them at knockdown prices in order to raise the
amount required to buy him off this terrible angaria. If he cannot raise this fee,
he takes to the mountains. . . .
Thus Garzoni, reminding the Republic that under the present
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