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without parallel.40 On previous occasions the Ottomans had invariably slaughtered or enslaved the bulk of their captives, sparing only a few for ransom, or to take the news back to their enemies.41 After the battle of Mohacs, Sultan Suleiman had “sat on a golden throne” while his soldiers decapitated thousands of prisoners. The Venetians were playing a grim but well-understood role in a gory traditional drama. The performance was designed to be exemplary, and to satisfy the sultan in Constantinople that the long and costly siege had not been in vain. Bragadino’s officers and staff were beheaded in front of him, so that a rivulet of blood flowed across the hard dry ground and washed over his feet. Then he was ceremonially disfigured, with his nose and ears hacked off like a common criminal.

Surgeons stanched the flow of blood and made sure that the wounds did not become infected. Bragadino was cared for solicitously over a period of two weeks and allowed to recover his strength.42 Meanwhile, his remaining troops, not knowing what had happened to their leader, had marched out of Famagusta to the galleys to leave for Crete, in accordance with the treaty. At the harbor they were taken and enslaved, and chained by hand and foot to the oars in the Ottoman galleys. The final act was designed to make a mockery of the Venetians and to strip their commander of all the attributes of nobility. After prayers on Friday, August 17, the Ottoman army gathered on the siege works that surrounded the city. Bragadino was brought out before them, still wearing his senator’s robe. He was forced to his hands and knees, and a mule’s harness was put on his back, with a bridle and bit in his mouth. Two heavy baskets filled with earth were loaded onto the harness, so that he bent under their weight. He carried them to repair the breaches in the Ottoman earthworks made by the fire from his own guns. Throughout the morning he was led back and forth in front of the troops, in and out among the tents, whipped forward and abused by the mass of soldiers. Each time he passed the Ottoman commander’s tent, he was forced to prostrate himself and eat a mouthful of the dusty soil.

Later in the day the scene transferred to the harbor. The senator was hauled to the topmast of a galley, in front of all his former troops, now galley slaves. He hung in chains without nose and ears, twisting at the masthead under the hot sun. Lowered to the ground, he was taken to the marketplace and tied to a whipping frame, where all the people of Famagusta could witness his humiliation. Then, as the sun fell past its apogee, after he was “hung up by the heels like a sheep,” an Ottoman butcher began the slow process of flaying him alive, removing the skin intact.43 The chronicle recounts that Bragadino died when the skinner’s knives reached the “height of his navel.” The grisly task completed, the butcher scraped the hide clean of fat. Lala Mustafa and his troops watched the whole process in silence. On the next day the skin of Bragadino was stuffed with straw and neatly sewn up like a huge doll. Mounted on his own horse and paraded through the streets under the senatorial parasol, Bragadino’s simulacrum rode in a parody of his departure from the city on August 4. His skin was next hung from the yardarm of Lala Mustafa’s galley, and was still dangling there like a flag, but by now tanned by the weather, when the triumphant conqueror of Cyprus returned to the waters of the Golden Horn. Its final destination was the galley slaves’ prison (bagnio) in Constantinople, where it was hung as a mute warning to any who thought to resist or rebel.

This theater of cruelty was partly, to adopt Voltaire’s phrase, “pour encourager les autres.” The Ottomans ritually degraded not only the body of Bragadino, but Venice herself.44 By showing their power over him, dragging him down from the pedestal of authority, they had humiliated their enemy. All knew that only a comparable act could erase the shame. When six years earlier at the siege of Malta the Turks had cut the hearts from the corpses of the