Venetian rule

Venice held Cyprus for just eighty-two years and treated it not as land to develop but as a frontier fortress to be held. The Ottoman empire was at the door, and everything the republic invested in the island went into walls.

The walls

Nicosia was rebuilt drastically. Between 1567 and 1570 a ring of eleven bastions went up around the city — the Venetian walls still standing today. To clear a field of fire, whole quarters, palaces and churches outside the new perimeter were demolished, and the Pedieos river was diverted. Three gates led in: Famagusta, Paphos and Kyrenia.

At Famagusta the city walls were strengthened and the citadel remodelled — Othello’s Tower, which got its name much later, from Shakespeare’s play. Kyrenia Castle was rebuilt too: its squat bastions are designed against artillery rather than arrows.

The economy

The island lived on sugar, cotton and salt. Taxes were heavy and the peasantry tied to the land, so when the Ottomans came there was little local appetite for dying on Venice’s behalf.

In the Paphos forest the stone bridges survive — Kelefos, Elia, Roudias, Skarfos: caravans carried copper and timber down these tracks from the mountains to the sea.

Yet the Venetian century also produced some of the finest painted churches of the Troodos: Panagia Podithou of 1502, the church of Archangelos Michail at Pedoulas of 1474, and Metamorfosis tou Sotiros at Palaichori. The Italian influence in them is plain to see.

1570–1571

In the summer of 1570 the army of Lala Mustafa Pasha landed near Larnaca. Nicosia held for forty-five days and fell on 9 September. Famagusta resisted for eleven months — a siege that entered the history of warfare — and capitulated in August 1571 on terms of honourable surrender which the victors broke: the commander Marcantonio Bragadin was put to death by torture.

Cyprus became Ottoman and remained so for three hundred and seven years. The Ottoman period begins.