The fall of Negroponte to the Turks on July 12, 1470 is mournful episode in Venetian and Christian history. The most iconically tragic moment was the death of the Venetian heroine Anna Erizzo, the beautiful daughter of the former bailo Paolo Erizzo, one of the last defenders of the last tower still in the hands of Venetian forces, a woman who chose to be a martyr rather than succumb to the lustful desires of Sultan Mehmet II. Anna Erizzo is widely celebrated in Venetian culture. A novel featuring Anna Erizzo was published in 1783 by Vincenzo Antonio Formaleoni. Her story was adapted to opera (or “ballo serio”) for Carneval 1836-37 by Antonio Montacini under the title “Anna Erizzo, ovvero la Presa di Negroponte”. The story of Anna Erizzo was the subject of paintings, such as Tranquillo Cremona’s depiction of 1860 in which Maometto II, angered by the resistance of Anna Erizzo to his desires, is about to decapitate her. She remains today a heroine of Venice and of Christianity.
The Sultan Mehmet II himself led the attack and conquest of Negroponte, the most important Venetian colony that remained in the Aegean after the fall of Constantinople, after careful preparation and planning. He was motivated by a strong desire of revenge and vendetta after the Venetian assault on Aenus (today Enez) near Constantinople on July 14, 1469. The daring and successful attack, conducted by a Venetian fleet under the command of Captain General Nicolò da Canal, personally enraged Mehmet, the same who had conquered Constantinople sixteen years earlier.
The Turks, led by Mehmet, besieged and captured Negroponte on July 12, 1470. After conquering the city, the Turks perpetrated terrible massacres against the inhabitants. The slaughter of adult males and defenders of the city, and the tragic fate of the surviving women and children of the Venetian colony are little known by casual readers of history. First a word about the young Christian boys: many were enslaved and brought up as janissaries in the Muslim religion. One of these was the eye-witness Giovanni Maria Angiolello, born in Vicenza, whose brother Francesco had been killed while he was defending one of the gates of the city. Others were Nicolò Zorzi, Marchese of Bodonitsa, and his son Marchesotto, who returned to Venice only at the end of the century.
The women too began trickling back to Venice: some had escaped, most redeemed by money payments to their captors. Many of them, even the nobles, were purely colonials: they were descendants of Italian settlers, born in Negroponte, and many of them had never seen Venice before. The women and orphans arrived in dire poverty: once wealthy, they now had nothing at all on which to survive in what was for them a new city. Some were welcomed by members of the Giustiniani family, feudatories of the castles of Caristo and Stura (Karistos and Styra in Greek) on the island of Negroponte and often members of the Venetian colonial government there.
Almost five years after the fall of the city, some 15 adult women survivors, many accompanied by minor children (a total of 27 souls), penned the most moving petition ever recorded in the deliberations of the Venetian Senate. The women recounted the tragedy they had been forced to witness when their menfolk – husbands, sons, brothers, in-laws – were executed before their eyes, and how their own survival had itself been a miracle. Pennyless, they requested the basics of life, namely, lodging, food and firewood, and they listed their names. Despite the financial straits in which the government found itself in the midst of the longest war to date against the Turks (1463-1479), the senators found a way to come across with aid to these survivors. Dowries for entering a convent and annuities were granted, even though parsimoniously. The petition indicated that “all the world” already knew of their fate, reflecting the fact that they had learned of the “Lamentations” in prose and epic poetry that had been printed and distributed in Italy and the rest of Europe by a nascent printing industry. Noteworthy is the fact that the reigning doge at the time of the petition was Pietro Mocenigo, Nicolò da Canal’s successor as Captain General.
Some of the women were put up in the monastery of Santi Filippo e Giacomo across the canal behind the ducal palace, others in the Vioni Hospice along the Riva degli Schiavoni, dedicated since 1409 to female pilgrims waiting to embark to the Holy Land. And it was in the latter hospice that some of the survivors, including two on the list of the petitioners, founded the convent of the San Sepolcro for the Observant Franciscan Third Order. The two were the elderly Polissena Premarin and the young and beautiful Beatrice Venier, members of the largest noble families resident in Negroponte. We know about them from the “Vita beatae Clarae Monachae Sancti Sepulchri Venetiarum” (a biography of Blessed Chiara Bugni, 1471–1514, a Franciscan tertiary and visionary from Venice, and one of their consorelle) written by Francesco Zorzi, an Observant Franciscan of the nearby convent of San Francesco della Vigna.
Beatrice’s story was this: she was about to hang herself by her long blond hair in order to save her virginity from the military license of the barbarians, but was led – by the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary – to a Venetian ship aboard which she found Polissena Premarin, whom she knew as a fellow villager. The story is vaguely and tenuously similar to the story of the heroine Anna Erizzo, daughter of Paolo Erizzo. Very likely the two women Polissena and Beatrice, together with many other of the survivors and refugees, had taken a vow that they would lead a life of chastity as nuns if they were saved from death. Locally they found two other holy women, the noble Maria da Canal and the citizen Orsa Usnago, who joined them as co-founders of the convent. Beatrice, Maria and Orsa (Orsola), together with their young consorella Chiara Bugni, performed many miracles in their lifetime and were duly beatified by the Franciscan hagiographers.
If to these we add Antonio Pizzamano, bishop of Feltre and administrator of the miraculous convent of Motta di Livenza, perhaps designed by Francesco Zorzi, and Antonio Contarini, patriarch of Venice and reformer of female convents, both of whom were involved in the life of suor Chiara, that makes six “beati” (“blesseds”), all of whom were acquainted with one another; perhaps that constitutes a record; it is surely sufficient for a Vita... and a life-time.