It is 29 May 1453. Sultan Mehmed II rides on horseback into Hagia Sophia. It might seem that, symbolically, an era is coming to an end, and indeed, for that part of the world we know as Constantinople, nothing will ever be the same again. Yet for an island lying somewhat off to the side, in the southern Aegean, this was the beginning of something entirely new. Paradoxically, it marked the beginning of a golden age. The fall of a symbol, of an ancient power whose end no one had even imagined, set in motion an unprecedented flourishing of the island.
To understand the reasons behind that flourishing, we need to go back a few hours from the moment of the sultan’s symbolic entry into the most important church of Eastern Christianity.
By the afternoon, the city was already falling. Everyone knew that resistance was futile, and no one was asking any longer whether it would happen, only when. Mehmed was approaching Hagia Sophia. At the same time, fierce fighting was still going on in three towers on the Golden Horn.
The men defending those towers were Cretans, and their presence there was no accident. Crete had belonged to Venice for more than 200 years. The Serenissima had settled on the island for good and had left a deep mark on it. Yet the Cretans had never lost their connection with Constantinople. Whether through tradition or through religion, whose roots reached back there, Crete remained tied to the city by an invisible thread. The men fighting on the Golden Horn were Sfakians, people from the mountainous region of Crete, known for their fierce attachment to their land and identity. According to tradition, it was from Sfakia, at the call of Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, that a force under the command of Manousos Kallikratis set out. Five ships, around 1,500 armed men, with stubborn and unyielding Sfakians supposedly forming the core of the force.
The Sfakian contingent reached Constantinople and fought there for two full months. When the city was falling on 29 May, around 300 of them remained. They withdrew into the towers on the Golden Horn, fortified themselves and, being Sfakians, decided they were not going to sell their lives cheaply. For hours, until nightfall, they beat back furious assaults by Ottoman troops. Mehmed, by then effectively master of the city, heard that someone in the harbour was still putting up fierce resistance and sent a messenger. The message was simple: surrender, or you will all die.
And this is the moment when I laughed, because I did not need to read any further to know what the Cretans would say. Yes, you guessed it, they refused. Only when the sultan promised them freedom and safe passage home did they surrender. One hundred and seventy survived, laid down their weapons, and the sultan kept his word.
I cannot resist a digression here, because it almost writes itself. A handful of warriors, a hopeless defence, the enemy with overwhelming superiority. The comparison with Thermopylae is more than obvious, isn’t it? There is, however, one fundamental difference. At Thermopylae, Leonidas and his Spartans died. In Constantinople, some of the Cretans survived and returned home, to their villages, their families, their island community. And with them returned not only the memory of the fall of the most important city of Christianity. They brought back the knowledge that they had been there, that they had faced Ottoman power and had returned with their shields.
From the point of view of Sfakian collective memory, that return may have been even more important than death. Instead of becoming another name carved on a gravestone, it entered myth, becoming part of Sfakia’s story about itself. It is no accident that this region became famous over the centuries for its stubborn resistance to every form of authority, whether Venetian or Ottoman.
As I mentioned earlier, in 1453 Crete had already been under the Venetian boot for more than 200 years. It was a hard boot, without sentiment and without empathy. Venice treated Crete as a granary and a trading hub. The local population had very limited rights, and its clergy were kept on a very short leash. Pressure towards Latinisation continued, and although full Latinisation never became reality, it remained a constant source of conflict and armed rebellion.
The gradual coming together of the Venetians who had settled on the island and the local population had begun much earlier, but the fall of Constantinople accelerated that process considerably. The Ottoman victory was a geopolitical disaster for the entire region, and especially for Venetian commercial interests in the Mediterranean. The Porte began to control the routes along which valuable goods moved, including silk, spices and grain. Crete changed from a distant possession into a key point on the map. And that is why the Serenissima began to turn a blind eye to what was arriving on the island and to what was happening there. Almost by accident, Crete became one of the centres of the Greek world.
An unprecedented influx of human capital followed. Scholars, manuscript copyists, theologians and painters arrived. Above all, painters. After being released from Ottoman captivity, Michael Apostolios came to Crete, one of the most distinguished Constantinopolitan humanists of his time. He took on different kinds of work, including copying manuscripts for wealthy Italian patrons. On one of his copies he left a note that has survived to this day and, in a single sentence, describes his existence in Candia: “The king of the poor of this world wrote this book for his livelihood.” Apostolios was a star of the scholarship of his age, yet on the island he lived in poverty and hardship. That was the price he paid for freedom and life.
That river of people flowing to the island after the fall of Constantinople brought with it something extraordinary. Something that changed Crete forever. Candia, known today as Heraklion, changed its character within a few decades. From an important Venetian port, it became one of the most important artistic and intellectual centres of the Greek world. The island was relatively safe. One could copy, paint and sell there. Just as importantly for what came next, it also provided access to a different kind of client, from the Latin world.
Today we are able to identify and document around 120 painters working in Candia between 1453 and 1526. They organised themselves into the “Schuola di San Luca”, modelled on Venetian artists’ guilds. That alone says a great deal about artistic life on the island. A document from 1499 survives in the Venetian archives. It records an order for 700 icons of the Virgin, 500 “in forma latina”, as the source so beautifully puts it, 100 “in forma greca”, and 100 first-class icons with robes brocaded in gold. The Cretan icon had become a commodity, and a luxury commodity at that, sought after throughout the Christian world.
It was then that the Cretan School, one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of European art, entered a period of rapid development. Cretan artists lived in an exceptional space, between two traditions. The Eastern iconographic tradition met the Venetian Renaissance here, Bellini, Titian and, later, Veronese. The result of that encounter, unique on a global scale, was art that was exceptional and difficult to fit into any simple category.
It is impossible not to mention the most famous son of this school. Doménikos Theotokópoulos, born on Crete in 1541 and trained in the tradition of Cretan icon painters, later went to Venice, where he encountered the painting of Titian and Tintoretto. Today, we know him as El Greco.
The consequences of the events of 1453 are still visible on Crete today. Literally, physically visible. Cretan sacred architecture, churches and chapels from that period, decorated in the second half of the fifteenth century and in the sixteenth century, bear the traces of this extraordinary fusion. Frescoes from that time retain Byzantine features, but they also show, sometimes cautiously and sometimes with great confidence, a new treatment of light and space in the spirit of the Western Renaissance. Iconostases from Candia decorate monasteries and churches throughout the Greek world. Painters from Candia were often mobile. They worked on Crete, later travelled to Venice or Mount Athos, and often returned to the island. They brought back new ideas, new ways of painting and new ways of thinking about the icon.
The Cretan School of painting, born out of this world, is today widely represented in museum collections across the globe, from the Louvre to the Hermitage. Its traces also survive in Cretan monasteries and in small village churches that have preserved their painted decoration. They have survived centuries, Venetian and Ottoman occupation, wars, earthquakes, rain and the burning Cretan sun. These are exactly the places we are cataloguing in our project.
This beautiful story about the island needs a small postscript.
The part concerning Manousos Kallikratis and the Sfakian defenders of Constantinople is based on oral tradition. It does not belong to the mainstream of research on the Cretan School or post-Byzantine culture either. Yet the story is still alive today, rooted in local tradition, part of the Cretans’ own story about themselves. It became fixed in the name of the village of Kallikratis in the White Mountains and in the rizitika, fighting songs from Sfakia passed down from generation to generation.
The story of five ships and 1,500 volunteers appears in a chronicle attributed to Georgios Sphrantzes, a Byzantine courtier and diplomat present during the siege. Sphrantzes is regarded as one of the most important primary sources for the history of the fall of Constantinople. But here we have a problem, and it is one that has to be described honestly. Modern historiography distinguishes between two texts circulating under his name. The authentic, short and personal memoir known as the “Chronicon Minus”, and the much more extensive “Chronicon Maius”. The latter turned out to be a sixteenth-century falsification by Bishop Makarios Melissourgos, a man inclined to fabricate documents. Sphrantzes witnessed the siege, yet in his own memoir he devotes surprisingly little space to it. He focuses mainly on his own family tragedy and on the events leading up to the fall. The detailed account of the defence of the towers may therefore come from Pseudo-Sphrantzes, a secondary and compilatory source whose information has to be checked against other sources, but which remains an important literary work of the period.
Here I also have to mention a story that is very popular in Greek publications and on social media, according to which a manuscript from 1460 survives in the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos and describes the defence of the towers by Cretans under the command of Captain Grammatikos. The claim appears even in the Greek press, sometimes together with passages supposedly taken from the manuscript.
The problem is that I have not been able to find confirmation of the existence of this document in manuscript catalogues, source editions or academic literature. We have no shelfmark, no critical edition and no provenance that can be verified. Until such confirmation appears, the alleged Vatopedi manuscript should be treated not as a historical source, but as part of the later tradition surrounding the story of the Cretan defenders of Constantinople.
So what are we left with? A beautiful story of Kallikratis and the brave defenders of the towers, deeply rooted in local identity tradition. A tradition that is coherent and, most importantly, internally consistent. We also have chronicles whose status has itself been the subject of fierce academic debate.
I write about this not because the story is false, but because this is a matter of basic honesty towards the reader. Separating what is “certain” from what is “uncertain” gives us all the more reason to keep digging. Many stories have still not been fully told.
What does that mean for me? It means a beautiful story whose sources were lost somewhere in the darkness of history, but whose traces I can still see today in small Cretan churches. The truth, meanwhile, remained in the people of Crete, and for that I do not need one hundred per cent historical proof.