Chapter Eight: In Which We Contemplate Serenity, Privacy, and the Fourth Crusade

I remember being struck by two things almost immediately on our first night in Astypalaia: the quiet and the stars. 

For the past decade, Ángel and I had been living in the San Francisco Bay Area and for our first two months of our sailing adventure, we had been in Crete, which while hardly a global metropolis is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands with about 630,000 residents plus many more tourists and visitors. Sure, over the past years we’d spent nights at my parents’ house in the hills of West Marin or the occasional holiday in a secluded locale. But overwhelmingly, we had lived in noisy, urban, well-lit places. 

In many ways, this served us well. When the thudding beat of the nightclubs floated across the water in Agios Nikolaos, I never lost a wink of sleep. For years we had slept with the constant noise of Mission Street’s late night taquerias, bars, and Muni buses, and for me these types of noise just fade into an agreeable burble in the background. The bright streetlights in the Agios Nikolaos marina may have dimmed the stars, but they never kept me awake.

But now in Astypalaia, we were surrounded by the type of tranquility that leads many people to choose the cruising life in the first place. The entirety of Astypalaia boasts fewer than 1,500 inhabitants and most of these live in the main town. We were tied up in the bay outside a sleepy fisherman village that couldn’t have had more than a hundred or so residents. 

At night, above this barely inhabited island in the middle of the dark sea, the stars came out in a tapestry so diverse and varied that I laid out on the stern and just stared up at the sky for nearly an hour, something I had not done probably since childhood. Some stars were diamond-like, clear and bright, while others turned out not to be stars at all: the glowing red orb was actually Mars and the smaller, luminous yellow one was Venus. The name for the Milky Way made sense to me for the first time as that opaque milky smear stood out more dramatically than I’d ever seen it. 

We each relished the serenity of this place in our own ways: Héctor did beachside yoga and went for a long run around the island; I went for daily swims and polished off several books; and Ángel watched the fishermen and chatted with the neighbors.

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We took the bus to Chora, the town nestled atop a hill above the island’s main harbor that had taunted me on our endless approach into the island (see Chapter 7).  

Chora is a classically Aegean town, complete with the white buildings, blue doors, and windmills that enchant so many sunset-seekers in Santorini. Perched at the very top are the ruins of Querini Castle, which we reached after following steep winding streets filled with stray cats, fig trees, and endless picturesque doorways–all of which I insisted NEEDED to be photographed. Ángel was of course thrilled by this. 

I remember looking around at the ruins of the Querini Castle and thinking “A Venetian castle? On this tiny island?”

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Then I remembered that in Crete, we had seen Venetian harbors and forts all over the island in Chania, Rethymnon, Heraklion, Ierapetra, and Spinalonga. So why had Venice controlled so much of Greece?

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I began digging and it turns out the short answer is that after the Fourth Crusade, Venice gained control of many of the Aegean islands. But if you’re like me, you probably haven’t the faintest idea what the Fourth Crusade (or really the First, Second, or Third Crusades) was really about. So I kept digging, and it turns out that not only does the Fourth Crusade have incredible implications for the history of the Greek islands, it’s one of the most wild historical events I’ve ever learned about. So without further ado, let’s launch briefly (or not so briefly, I’ll be honest) into the Fourth Crusade!

…. Except first, to understand the Fourth Crusade, one must first understand the Third Crusade (and while I could claim that one must also understand the First and Second Crusades, I think we can reasonably stop peeling back the onion here before I literally lose all my readers). 

In 1187, Jerusalem was captured by the Ayyubid dynasty, a Sunni Muslim dynasty centered in Egypt that conquered and controlled much of the Levant and Middle East in the 12th and 13th Centuries. This prompted the Third Crusade which lasted from 1189-1192. The crusade was not successful in recapturing Jerusalem and, importantly for our purposes, it led to deteriorating relations between the Crusaders of Latin Christendom (England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick I) and the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. Though theoretically allied against their Muslim enemy, the two Christian forces began to distrust each other. Frederick I accused Byzantium of failing to protect his passage through the Dardanelles and the Byzantines suspected the Latin Christians of conspiring with Bulgaria and Serbia to fracture the Byzantine empire. England’s Richard I did not help matters: when he captured Cyprus after it had broken with Byzantium, he didn’t return it to the Byzantines but instead sold the island to the Knights Templar.  

So, with this background in mind, I give you: The Fourth Crusade. 

In 1198, Pope Innocent III assumed the papacy and began immediately to rally support for a Fourth Crusade to weaken the Ayyubid sultanate by attacking its center at Cairo. Such an expedition would need naval support he began shopping around for a naval empire to support the cause. After being turned down by Genoa, Venice agreed to build the hundreds of ships needed to transport over 30,000 crusaders to Egypt and it stopped its very lucrative trading operations for over a year to focus exclusively on building the enormous warships.

Venice completed their end of the bargain in 1202: 50 warships and 450 transport ships now awaited the crusaders. But unfortunately only about a third of the expected troops showed up. Since the crusaders were generally nobility who were meant to bring the funds for the expedition, the gathered forces found themselves far short of the amount owed to Venice. 

Now things began to unravel pretty badly. On completely pretextual terms, the crusaders attacked the city of Zara in Dalmatia (modern day Zadar in Croatia) seeking to raise the needed cash. But Zara was a Christian–even Catholic– city. The townspeople hung banners of the cross outside their homes to try to dissuade the crusaders from attacking them, but to no avail. The crusaders basically claimed that they were forced to do this for the greater good of the crusade and they sacked Zara, looting the city and killing many fellow Catholics. The Pope was horrified but also still wanted the Crusade to go forward, and he “condemned” the action but not so forcefully as to actually mean anything and eventually settled for just blaming the Venetians and forgiving the crusaders for their participation. Not an auspicious beginning.

And from here, everything goes completely off the rails. 

Venice refused to let the crusaders leave until they had finished paying their debt (even the riches stolen from Zara were not enough) and while the crusading force remained encamped at Venice, their leader Boniface de Montferrant met up with the Byzantine prince Alexios IV Angelos, whose father had recently been toppled from the Byzantine throne by his own brother. Alexios offered an impossibly rich prize to Boniface: if the crusaders would attack Constantinople instead of Egypt and depose his uncle, he would pay 200,000 silver marks to the crusaders in addition to the debt owed to Venice, and he would assign 10,000 Byzantine troops for the Crusade, pay for the maintenance of 500 knights in the Holy Land, transport the Crusader Army to Egypt, and most incredibly, would reunite the divided Church by placing the Eastern Orthodox Church back under the authority of the Pope. 

Now, this offer was about as credible as Trump’s claim that he would build a border wall paid for by Mexico, but when the Doge of Venice learned of the offer, he pressured Boniface to accept. It’s unclear if the Doge believed in these promises or was perhaps just tempted by the possibility of having a pseudo-credible reason to sack one of the richest cities in the world. And at this point, the crusaders were so beholden to Venice, that they could hardly refuse. So instead of sailing for Egypt, the crusaders sailed for Constantinople. 

Alexios IV had made it seem that he would be greeted as a liberator by the people of Constantinople, but when they arrived, they realized that they had been misled. Constantinople resisted the crusader forces and was only eventually conquered because Alexios III (the uncle) turned out to have no stomach for fighting and fled the invasion, allowing his brother (Alexios IV’s father) to regain the throne. 

The crusaders were flummoxed: Alexios III was off the throne but they hadn’t succeeded in installing Alexios IV. Unwilling to let their prize slip away, the crusaders insisted that Alexios IV be crowned co-emperor along with his father. Now that they’d met their end of the bargain, they demanded the riches promised to them, and this is when Alexios IV discovered that his uncle was not only a coward but a thief and had made away with a good portion of the Byzantine treasury. 

Alexios IV began melting down Byzantine icons to pay his debts, but unsurprisingly, this did not endear him to his new subjects. Violent clashes between Byzantine and Latin Christians began cropping up until one of the leaders of the Byzantines rallied the support of the military, overthrew and murdered Alexios IV, and installed himself as (guess what!) Alexios V (it’s like the “Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, and Nicki” scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding). 

The crusaders still hadn’t been paid what they had been promised by the dead Alexios IV, and when Alexios V refused to pay, the crusaders attacked Constantinople and eventually in April of 1204, they breached the city walls and proceeded to sack Constantinople. While it is claimed that the Venetians spared the churches, the Latin crusaders, especially the French crusaders, were said to rape nuns, rob churches, and indisriminately lay waste to centuries of pricesless Byzantine icons and artwork, including the icons and holy books of the Hagia Sofia, the jewel of Constantinople. 

The Fourth Crusade was a complete catastrophe. The Pope was furious. Byzantines now regarded Latin Christians as perfidious barbarians. And the greatest irony of all is that the Byzantine empire, which had long stood as a bulwark between the Islamic East and Christian West, had been dealt a paralyzing blow by their own Christian brethren, doubtlessly hastening the eventual victory of the Muslim Ottomans– the exact opposite outcome of the Crusade’s original intention. 

Following the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Venice laid claim to the islands of the Aegean and established the Duchy of the Archipelago (also called the Duchy of Naxos or Duchy of the Aegean). Astypalaia was ceded to the Venetians as part of this new territory. 

Crete– though originally claimed by Boniface of Montferrat (the one who started all this trouble by meeting with Alexios IV in the first place)–  also ended up under Venetian control when Boniface proved unable to protect and hold onto Crete and sold it to the highest bidder. After some squabbling between Genoa and Venice, Venice claimed Crete in 1212 and proceeded to build the harbors and forts that are still visible all over Crete. 

The Venetians used their series of strategic island holdings for centuries to protect their lucrative sea trading empire from pirates and Ottoman raiders, both of which were common in the Aegean Sea during the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. And thus it is that a small Greek island like Astypalaia comes to have a Venetian castle perched at its top and Crete came to have numerous fortified harbors lined with distinctive Venetian waterfront arcades.

Alright, you’ve all been very patient. I hope you enjoyed that brief foray into the Crusades, but you’ll be pleased to hear we didn’t spend all our time in Astypalaia contemplating centuries-old power struggles. There was also plenty of time for delicious food, stunning beaches, and time well-spent with friends.

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After a blissful week, we spotted a good opportunity to sail the 120 miles west to our next destination, the island of Milos. We said goodbye to our friends, prepared for the passage, and set off around 10:00 in the morning. The first day’s sailing was some of the most exhilarating of the whole season. Brilliant twenty knot winds across the beam and glistening, calm seas allowed Gradisca to slice through the water at one point reaching our new speed record of a thrilling 9.2 knots. This is what sailors call champagne sailing: swift, smooth, and breezy with the wind coming across the beam and no chop or swell to spill the drinks. 

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We’d learned a lot from our first sail and we tried to put these lessons into action. We had meals pre-prepared and our spirits were soaring. 

By night, it wasn’t quite so idyllic, but it was still a far cry from the washing machine conditions of our first passage so we counted our blessings. Unfortunately by about 2 a.m., we had completely lost the wind and the seas had grown pretty rolly. We had to motor, but unlike our passage to Crete where we had just sailed through endless empty ocean, this passage took us past many islands and so it was a bit easier to hold a course since we could at least steer toward some lights or looming land mass in the distance.

The three of us took turns hand-steering the whole night. Both Ángel and Héctor are quite capable sailors, and while I still struggled to hold a course at night, my zig-zaggy correction-over-correction steering was improving sliiightly. My eyesight though would play tricks on me: I thought many a lighthouse or low hanging star were the lights atop a mast, and I confirmed that my unfortunately quite poor sense of direction on land was no better (and possibly worse) at sea. By the end of the night, it felt like a bit of a slog, and I was grateful to have Héctor aboard to split the watches so we could all get some sleep.

By about nine in the morning, we arrived in Milos’s main port of Adamantas, and we began strategizing for our first experience with that most dreaded of docking maneuvers: Mediterranean mooring. 

“Med mooring” as it’s called, is a way of docking where the stern (back) of your boat is tied to the dock and the bow (front) of your boat is secured by dropping an anchor. Theoretically, this is executed by dropping your anchor beginning about 3 boat lengths from the dock while reversing into your spot and then securing the stern dock lines. This is quite different from the American style of pulling up alongside a dock, and we had never done it before. It’s a bit nerve-wracking because not only are you worried about reversing into the often very tight spot between two boats, you also have to pay attention to the angle of where you lay down your anchor chain so you don’t lay it down on top of the other boats’ anchors and prevent them from being able to pick up their anchor when they leave. In busy harbors like this with twenty boats lined up at the dock, it begins to feel a bit like boat-Tetris.  

We thanked our lucky stars that at least there was no wind and we motored toward the dock. When we thought we were about three boat lengths from the dock, we began laying out chain. 

“Twenty-five meters” I shouted, as the chain spooled noisily out of the windlass.

“Thirty-five”

“Forty-five”

“Ummm…fifty-five”

Shoot. 

We realized that we were still probably a boat length (or two) away from the dock and we’d already put out far, far too much chain. 

Someone began to yell at us from their boat.

“Pull it up! We have to do it again!” Ángel called to me.

“What’s that guy yelling?”

“I think he’s saying they have laid moorings”

We began peering at the boats to see if they were tied at the bow to moorings secured to the sea floor. It didn’t look like it, but the pilot guide had said there was a mixture of laid moorings and Med moorings in the harbor so we couldn’t be sure. 

Embarrassed, we began picking up the fifty-five meters of chain, and Angel motored over to the boat that had signaled us.

“What did you say?”

“I said, don’t cross my anchor”

Oh. Right. Yes, thank you, sir. Very helpful. 

We rolled our eyes and motored away from the scene of our disgrace. Ángel was very tired at this point after captaining our nearly 24 hour passage, and Héctor offered to make coffee and breakfast before attempting the maneuver again. We dropped anchor out in the harbor and had a fortifying breakfast, but Ángel’s energy continued to flag. He laid down for a nap, and then, of course, the wind began to pick up. I checked the forecast on Windy and saw that it was meant to keep blowing all day and it was only going to increase in intensity. I woke Ángel up and asked him,

“Should we try again to moor before the wind gets even worse?”

We both looked at the forecast and realized that if we didn’t want to be stranded out on anchor with wind that would probably be too much for our little two-stroke dinghy to bring three of us ashore, and we might even have trouble getting Hector to his ferry on Sunday. It was now or never. 

We piled the breakfast dishes in the sink, took our positions, and steeled ourselves for another try. Our prior spot had been snapped up by a seasoned cruising boat who made the operation seem effortless, and we’d watched them enviously, taking notes on their technique and realizing that they were about half as far from the pier as we had been. Lesson number one: three boat lengths is a lot shorter than you’d think. 

We pulled up to the new spot, began reversing at a far more reasonable distance, laid out the chain successfully and Ángel gauged the wind perfectly and backed masterfully into our spot. 

We were elated. I broke open our solitary cold beer and split it three ways, a sadly inadequate reward, but we nonetheless cheers-ed happily. 

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Suddenly everything seemed doable. We were no longer stuck out on anchor fretting about how to get ashore. We had nailed Med mooring, Gradisca was tied up, and now we could explore! We celebrated with a walk around Adamantas, a fabulous meal ashore, and then very early bedtime. We had, after all, been awake for much of the last 36 hours. 

The next morning, we awoke refreshed and excited to see more of the island. We decided to first visit the nearby beach of Sarakiniko, and we were rewarded with an even more astounding lunar landscape than had been promised by the tourist brochures. 

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The wind had kicked up waves too violent to do much swimming so we confined our swim to the protected shallows and read by the beach. That evening we explored the lovely towns of Pollonia and Plaka before returning to Gradisca.

I’ll note here that the serenity of Astypalaia was now a distant memory. In Milos, we were tied up right alongside the road that runs alongside the public harbor. Holidaymakers dragging rolling suitcases disembarked from the ferry and walked right by us, some gawking at the boats, others blithely unaware of us only a few feet away, already nose-deep in Tripadvisor. 

When you live in a boat, in many ways your life suddenly becomes quite public. And not just to other boaters but to the people who are drawn by the instinctive, undeniable beauty of boats on the water.

We’ve been stared at openly as we eat dinner in the cockpit or work on the boat. (We’ve actually had people take photographs in front of our boat, most memorably and most embarrassingly in Siracusa when wedding guests were taking photos in front of Gradisca while I tried to duck out of the pictures.)  

Our laundry hangs outside for all to see as it dries in the wind. We carry our trash to public trash bins. We bathe either in marina-provided shower blocks or we keep our bathing suits on for modesty and shower on the back of the boat, often in full view of passersby. In Milos, I basically showered with a cafe full of people across the street for an audience.

Each night in Agios Nikolaos, as I’d take my towel and toiletries to the shower block, I’d walk by groups of laughing, flirting teenagers and I’d wonder what they thought of the scruffy foreigner, sweaty from days of boatwork in glued-together flip flops walking to the public bathrooms. (I eventually decided that if my own self-centered and myopic teenage years were any guide, they probably never even noticed me, much less gave me a second thought.)

It’s a very small price to pay for incredible freedom and opportunity that boat life brings, but a bit of dignity and privacy is lost when your unmentionables are outside drying on the line or you are trying to maintain a serene, nonplussed expression as you shave your legs on the back of the boat in full view of a family with their two small children, all of whom are openly staring. 

But I digress yet again (at least this time about something from this century!). 

Our second day in Milos was even more magical than the first. We visited more of Milos’s incredible beaches and this time we were able to go swimming since the southern shores of the island were protected from wind and waves.

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My favorite beach was not one of the famous ones, but a small, protected cove where the grooves that ran down the cliffs continued into the sea, leaving long channels and tunnels going deep into the water and through which we could swim. I felt like a mermaid, gliding through underground passages and into dark caves that reached far back into the folds of the cliff face. 

I cursed myself for forgetting the GoPro. I wanted to capture the beauty of swimming through these magical caves and crevices, but it was also freeing to not have to capture the moment and instead to just live it.

With growing sadness, we watched the clock tick toward five p.m. and toward Héctor’s departure. Luckily, we had time for one last fabulous lunch. 

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After lunch, we crammed in one final excursion to one of Milos’s famous brightly painted fisherman villages. Here, we went for a final swim (the third that day) and then finally admitted that our little crew was now going to consist of only two. 

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Dropping Héctor at the ferry consisted of walking with him several hundred meters down the pier, and after our farewells, Ángel turned to me, 

“So, here’s the thing. Tonight is the perfect weather to sail to the mainland. If we don’t go tonight, it will probably be at least five more days before we can leave Milos.”

I paused. Milos is gorgeous. And we’d just gotten here! And we hadn’t seen the catacombs yet! 

But on the other hand, we’d gotten a late start and we still had a LOT of ground to cover to get to Sicily by September, especially if we wanted to go around the Peloponnese peninsula instead of through the Corinth Canal.

I looked at my husband and realized with gratitude how much I relied on him to make this plan of ours even possible and how much responsibility he shoulders. 

“Which do you think we should do?” 

“I think we should go if we want to have time in the Ionian.”

“Then we go.”

We pulled up the departure checklist that we’d drafted after our first passage and began ticking off tasks to prepare for the overnight sail to Monemvasia, our first destination on the Greek mainland. And after paying the Milos docking fees (7 Euros per night plus 5 Euros to fill up our fresh water tanks- a steal!), we were ready to go around nine p.m. As we started motoring out of our spot, I held my breath, hoping the chain would continue to pull up cleanly and dreading having to disentangle crossed anchors in the growing darkness. But everything went smoothly and I exhaled loudly as our anchor finally clattered into place.

The training wheels were off now. We had no more Héctor to help. It was now just the two of us tackling our first night sail alone, and I learned two things that first night: one, I have a wonderfully kind husband (I suppose I already knew this) and two, autopilot is a gift from God. 

To explain, you need to understand that my primary concern while sailing is how to be as helpful as I can to keep all the pressure and work from falling onto Ángel’s shoulders since he does literally all things sailing-related better than me. Ángel spent years racing sailboats, whereas I spent several sets of torturous lessons getting the minimum-required certifications to be a helpful partner to him. 

Don’t get me wrong- I love sailing- but I didn’t love it in the San Francisco Bay where it somehow always seems to be freezing cold and a day out on the water often felt more like an endurance slog of how long I could pretend to enjoy myself while actually just counting the minutes until I could be warm. In fact, I only learned that I loved sailing in Mexico and French Polynesia when an extremely generous friend let us sail with him, and I saw what living aboard a sailboat could be in a warmer climate. In short, I have far, far less experience. 

(I must also admit that I don’t display a great deal of natural talent for steering, and while my theoretical understanding of sail trim is sound, I’m neither as fast nor as strong as Ángel with the lines.)

Anyway, just after we had taken out the sails and were enjoying a smooth 7 knots with 15 knots of breeze, a 30 knot gust of katabatic wind suddenly blew down on us from an outcropping on our starboard side. Katabatic winds pick up the heat from the land and send gusts down from land to the sea. Our sails were fully out and Ángel grabbed the helm from me to steady the boat and steer us through the powerful, sudden gust. 

It was over pretty quickly since it was only a very small island, but it had spooked us both a little. After monitoring and seeing nothing above 15 knots for twenty minutes, he passed the helm back to me. 

But though the winds were now fine, we were soon plunged into darkness. There were no more islands or land in between us and the mainland and I began struggling to hold my course with nothing to steer toward. And the more my frustration mounted, the more I struggled. Finally Ángel looked over at me and was shocked to see that in the serene calm of the night, as he had been staring up into the stars perfectly content, I had streams of hot tears coursing down my face. 

“Kate! What’s wrong?”

I sobbed in a jumble that I felt like I’d never be good at sailing and that I couldn’t steer and he would always have to do all the work and it wasn’t fair to him and how guilty I felt that I wasn’t more help.

He hugged me and tried to reassure me of all the things I was good at on the boat and then said, 

“Let’s see if you like it better with the autopilot on.”

Best. Decision. Ever. 

Ángel doesn’t really use the autopilot much because steering isn’t hard for him and he finds the noise it makes annoying. But for me, it was like suddenly being handed a magic wand. Instead of sitting hunched, tense and terrified, steering toward darkness and beating myself up as the little neon lights displayed an ever-more erratic course, I could sit back and just watch for ships or hazards and let Gradisca do the work. I didn’t mind the noise she made as the autopilot corrected course, and I watched with wonder as the wheel that had tormented me so much now crisply moved side to side, emitting little beeps and whirring noises to reassure me that she was holding steady to our destination.

The rest of the night was a revelation. I actually enjoyed being on watch. I brought my Kindle and some snacks and a cozy blanket up to the cockpit, and I read while looking up every minute or so to scan the horizon. Suddenly, I felt secure that I could let Ángel get some rest while I monitored the traffic on AIS. 

In the morning, we saw land and we began drawing closer to the looming rock of Monemvasia. For Ángel, this was probably a pretty uneventful, even forgettable, sail. But for me, this was the first time I began to feel like I could do this without it being a struggle. I could have fun, even during the more grueling longer passages and night sails. 

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When we pulled into the Monemvasia harbor and executed a perfect unassisted Med mooring including me hopping to shore to secure our dock lines after laying down the anchor, I felt like a million bucks. I felt like a sailor, like a salty dog, like a pro. 

And then I saw two sea turtles swimming in the harbor and my throat tightened and my eyes welled up for the second time in 24 hours as I watched these ancient majestic creatures gliding serenely through the water. What a life we were living! What highs and lows and struggles and joys! 

I felt awash in gratitude for all of it. 

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