The doges’ assumption of their new title, Dux Dalmatiae, marked a moment of unparalleled change in the sea power of the eastern Mediterranean. For four hundred years the Adriatic itself had been ruled from Rome; for another six hundred the sea, and Venice itself, had been subject to its Greek-speaking successor, the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. By the year 1000, this power was starting to wane and the Venetians were engaged in a stealthy act of substitution. In the small stone cathedrals of Zara, Spalato, Istria and Trau, the Venetian doge was remembered in prayers only after the name of the emperor in Constantinople, but it was purely a ritual formula. The emperor was far away, his power no longer stretched much north of Corfu, at the gates of the Adriatic, and along the Italian shore. The lords of Dalmatia were in all fact the Venetians. The power vacuum created by weakening Byzantine control would allow Venice to move up the scale progressively from subjects, to equal partners and finally, in tragic circumstances, to usurpers of the Byzantine sea. The lords of the Dalmatian coast were embarked on the ascent.
The relationship between Byzantium and Venice was one of intense complexity and longevity, chafed by mutually contradictory views of the world and subject to wild mood swings, yet Venice always looked to Constantinople. This was the great city of the world, the gateway to the east. Through its warehouses on the Golden Horn flowed the wealth of the wider world: Russian furs, wax, slaves and caviar, spices from India and China, ivory, silk, precious stones and gold. Out of these materials, Byzantine craftsmen fashioned extraordinary objects, both sacred and profane – reliquaries, mosaics, chalices chased with emeralds, costumes of shot silk – that formed the taste of Venice. The astonishing basilica of St Mark, reconsecrated in 1094, was designed by Greek architects on the pattern of the mother church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople; its artisans recounted the story of St Mark, stone by stone, in imitation of the mosaic styles of St Sophia; its goldsmiths and enamellers created the Pala d’Oro, the golden altarpiece, a miraculous expression of Byzantine devotion and art. The whiff of spices on the quays of Venice had been carried a thousand miles from the go-downs of the Golden Horn. Constantinople was Venice’s souk, where its merchants gathered to make (and lose) fortunes. As loyal subjects of the emperor, the right to trade in his lands was always their most precious possession. He, in turn, used it as the bargaining chip to rein in his uppity vassals. In 991 Orseolo gained valuable trading rights for Venetian support in the Adriatic; twenty-five years later they were tetchily withdrawn again in a spat.
Differing attitudes to commerce marked a sharp dividing line. From early on the amoral trading mentality of the Venetians – the assumed right to buy and sell anything to anyone – shocked the pious Byzantines. Around 820 the emperor complained bitterly about Venetian cargoes of war materials – timber, metal and slaves – to his enemy, the sultan in Cairo. But in the last quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire, such a durable presence in the Mediterranean basin, started to decline, and the balance of power began tilting in Venice’s favour. In the 1080s the Venetians defended the empire in the Adriatic against powerful Norman war bands, intent on taking Constantinople itself. Their reward was sumptuous. With all the imperial pomp of Byzantine ritual, the emperor affixed his golden seal (the bulla) to a document that would change the sea for ever. He granted the city’s merchants the rights to trade freely, exempt from tax, throughout his realms. A large number of cities and ports were specified by name: Athens and Salonica, Thebes and Antioch and Ephesus, the islands of Chios and Euboea, key harbours along the coasts of southern Greece such as Modon and Coron – invaluable staging posts for Venetian galleys – but above all Constantinople itself.
Here Venice was given a prize site down by the Golden Horn. It included three quays, a church and bakery, shops and warehouses for storing goods. Though nominal subjects of the emperor, the Venetians had effectively acquired their own colony, with all the necessary infrastructure, in the heart of the richest city on earth under extremely favourable conditions. Only the Black Sea, Constantinople’s grain basket, was barred to the avid traders. Quietly echoing among the solemn, convoluted lines of the Byzantine decree was the sweetest Greek word a Venetian might ever want to hear: monopoly. Venice’s jostling rivals in maritime trade – Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi – were now put at such disadvantage that their presence in the city was almost futile.
The Golden Bull of 1082 was the golden key that opened up the treasure house of eastern trade for Venice. Its merchants flocked to Constantinople. Others started to permeate the small ports and harbours of the eastern seaboard. By the second half of the twelfth century Venetian merchants were visible everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Their colony in Constantinople grew to around twelve thousand and, decade by decade, the trade of Byzantium imperceptibly passed into their hands. They not only funnelled goods back to an avid market in continental Europe, they acted as intermediaries, restlessly shuttling back and forward across the ports of the Levant, buying and selling. Their ships triangulated the eastern seas, shipping olive oil from Greece to Constantinople, buying linen in Alexandria and selling it to the crusader states via Acre; touching Crete and Cyprus, Smyrna and Salonica. At the mouth of the Nile in the ancient city of Alexandria they bought spices in exchange for slaves, endeavouring at the same time to perform a nimble balancing act between the Byzantines and the crusaders on one hand and their enemy, the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, on the other. With each passing decade Venice was sinking its tentacles deeper into the trading posts of the East; its wealth saw the rise of a new class of rich merchants. Many of the great families of Venetian history began their ascent to prominence during the boom years of the century. It heralded the start of commercial dominance.
With this wealth came arrogance – and resentment. ‘They came’, said a Byzantine chronicler, ‘in swarms and tribes, exchanging their city for Constantinople, whence they spread out across the empire.’ The tone of these remarks speaks a familiar language of xenophobia and economic fear of the immigrant. The upstart Italians, with their hats and their beardless faces, stood out sharply, both in manner and appearance, in the city streets. The charges levelled against them were many: they acted like citizens of a foreign power rather than loyal subjects of the empire; they were fanning out from their allotted quarter and were buying properties across the city; they cohabited with or married Greek women and led them away from the Orthodox faith; they stole the relics of saints; they were wealthy, arrogant, unruly, boorish, out of control. ‘Morally dissolute, vulgar … untrustworthy, with all the gross characteristics of seafaring people’, spluttered another Byzantine writer. A bishop of Salonica called them ‘marsh frogs’. The Venetians were becoming increasingly unpopular in the Byzantine Empire and they seemed to be everywhere.
In the larger geopolitics of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Byzantines and their errant subjects was marked by ever more violent oscillations between the poles of love and hate: the Venetians were insufferable but indispensable. The Byzantines, who complacently still saw themselves as the centre of the world, and for whom land ownership was more glorious than vulgar commerce, had given away their trade to the lagoon dwellers and allowed their navy to decline; they became increasingly dependent on Venice for maritime defence.
The imperial policy towards the pushy foreigners veered erratically. The emperor’s one throttle on them was control of trading rights. Repeated attempts were made over a century to loosen Venice’s hold on the Byzantine economy by playing the Republic off against its commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa. In 1111 the Pisans were also granted trading rights in Constantinople; forty-five years later the Genoese were similarly admitted. Each was awarded tax breaks, a commercial quarter and landing stages in Constantinople. The city was a crucible for fierce rivalry between the Italian republics that would, in time, flare into full-scale trade wars. When the Spanish Jew Benjamin Tudela came to the city in 1176 he found ‘a tumultuous city; men come to trade there from all countries by land and by sea’. The ci
ty became a claustrophobic arena for competition. Ugly brawls broke out between competing nationalities, hemmed into adjacent enclaves along the banks of the Golden Horn. The Venetians were jealous of their monopolies which they felt had been earned in the Norman wars of the last century; they deeply resented the manner in which successive emperors rescinded them or favoured their rivals. The Italians had become, in the eyes of the ruling Greeks, an uncontrollable nuisance: ‘a race characterised by a lack of breeding which is totally at variance with our noble sense of order’, they pronounced with aristocratic hauteur. In 1171, the emperor Manuel I took the whole Venetian population in his empire hostage and detained it for years. The crisis took two decades to resolve and left a bitter legacy of mutual mistrust. By the time Venetian merchants were readmitted to Constantinople in the 1190s any special relationship was dead.
It was against this background that the pope called for a new crusade in the summer of 1198.
The Blind Doge
1198–1201
The Fourth Crusade opened with a furious blast:
After the miserable destruction of the territory of Jerusalem, after the mournful massacre of the Christian people, after the deplorable invasion of the land on which had stood the feet of Christ and where God, our Father, had seen fit before recorded time to work out salvation in the middle of the earth … the apostolic seat [papacy], disquieted by the misfortune of such a great calamity, was sorely troubled … [it] cries out and raises its voice like a trumpet, desiring to arouse the Christian people to fight Christ’s fight and to avenge the outrage against Him who was crucified … Therefore, my sons, take up the spirit of fortitude, put on the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, trusting not in numbers nor in brute force, but rather in the power of God.
The ringing call to militant Christendom, launched by Pope Innocent III in August 1198, came an ominous century after the successful capture of Jerusalem. In the interim the whole crusading project had slid towards collapse. The decisive blow fell in 1187, when Saladin shattered a crusader army at Hattin and retook the Holy City. Neither the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned in a Syrian river, nor the English king, Richard the Lionheart, had come close to regaining it. The crusaders were now confined to a few settlements along the coast such as the ports of Tyre and Acre. It fell to the pope to breathe life back into the project.
Innocent was thirty-seven years old – young, brilliant, determined, pragmatic, a master of religious rhetoric and a skilled jurist. His call to arms was both a military venture, a campaign of moral rearmament in a secularising world, and an initiative to reassert papal authority. From the start he made it clear that he intended not only to raise the crusade but to direct it himself, through the offices of his papal legates. While one went to stir up the warrior lords of northern France, the other, Cardinal Soffredo, came to Venice to ask about ships. A century of crusading had taught military planners that the land route to Syria was an arduous trudge and that the Byzantines were hostile to large numbers of armed men tramping across their terrain. With the other maritime republics, Pisa and Genoa, at war, only Venice had the skill, the resources and the technology to transport a whole army to the east.
The immediate Venetian response was startling. They sent their own legates back to Rome to request, as a preliminary, the lifting of the papal ban on trading with the Islamic world, specifically Egypt. The Republic’s case framed at the outset the collision of faith and secular necessity that was to haunt the Fourth Crusade. It rested on the prototype definition of Venetian identity. The legates argued the city’s unique situation. It had no agriculture; it depended entirely on trade for its survival and was being badly hurt by the embargo, which it faithfully observed. The legates might also have muttered under their breath that Pisa and Genoa had meanwhile continued their trade in defiance of the papacy, but Innocent was not impressed. The city had long existed at an oblique angle to pious Christian projects. Eventually he gave the Venetians a carefully worded permission, framed to exclude transaction in any war materials, which he proceeded to enumerate: ‘[we] prohibit you, under strict threat of anathema, to supply the Saracens by selling, giving or bartering, iron, hemp, sharp implements, inflammable materials, arms, galleys, sailing ships, or timbers’, adding with a lawyer’s eye, to snuff out any legal loopholes the devious Venetians might seek to exploit, ‘whether finished or unfinished …’
… hoping that because of this concession you will be strongly moved to provide help to the province of Jerusalem, and making sure that you do not try any fraud against the apostolic decree. Because there can not be the slightest doubt that he who tries fraudulently, against his own conscience, to cheat this order, will be bound tight by divine sentence.
This was not a good start. The threat of excommunication was heavy and Innocent did not trust Venice at all, but practically he had no choice but to bend a little: only the Republic could supply the ships.
So it was that when six French knights arrived at Venice in the first week of Lent 1201, the doge probably had a good idea of their mission. They came as envoys of the great crusading counts of France and the Low Countries – from Champagne and Brie, Flanders, Hainaut and Blois – with sealed charters that gave them full authority to make whatever agreements they saw fit for maritime transport. One of these men was Geoffroi de Villehardouin of Champagne, a veteran of the Third Crusade and a man with experience of assembling crusader armies. It was Villehardouin’s account that would form a principal, but highly partial, source for all that followed.
Venice had a long tradition of equating age with experience when it came to appointing doges, but the man the counts had come to see was remarkable by any measure. Enrico Dandolo was the scion of a prominent family of lawyers, merchants and churchmen. They had been intertwined in nearly all the great events of the past century and had built up an impressive record of service to the Republic. They had been involved in reforming the city’s church and state institutions in the middle years of the twelfth century and participated in Venice’s crusading ventures. By all accounts the male Dandolos were a clan of immense wisdom, energy – and longevity. In 1201 Enrico was over ninety. He was also completely blind.
No one knows what Enrico looked like; his physical image has been shaped by numerous anachronistic portrayals, so it is easy now to imagine a tall, thin, wiry man with a white beard and piercing but sightless eyes, steely in his resolve for the Venetian state, sagacious with experience of many decades at the heart of Venice’s life during a century of rising prosperity – an impression for which there is no material substance. Of his personality, contemporary impressions and subsequent judgements have been sharply divided. They would match the divergent views of Venice itself. To his friends Dandolo would become the epitome of the Republic’s shrewdness and good government. To the French knight Robert of Clari he was a ‘most worthy man and wise’; to Abbot Martin of Pairis, a man who ‘compensated for physical blindness with a lively intellect’; the French baron Hugh of Saint-Pol called him ‘prudent in character, discreet and wise in making difficult decisions’. Villehardouin, who came to know him well, declared him to be ‘very wise, brave and vigorous’. To the Greek chronicler Niketas Choniates, who did not, he was destined to a counter-judgement which has also passed into the bloodstream of history: ‘a man most treacherous and hostile to the [Byzantines], both cunning and arrogant; he called himself the wisest of the wise and in his lust for glory surpassed everyone’. Around Dandolo would gather accretions of myth that would define less the man than the way that Venice would be seen both by itself and its enemies.
Dandolo had always been destined for high office, but some time in the mid-1170s he started to lose his sight. Documents that he signed in 1174 show a firm, legible signature well aligned along the page. Another in 1176 bears the tell-tale signs of visual impairment. The words of the Latin formula (‘I, Henry Dandolo, judge, have signed underneath in my hand’) slope away downhill to the right, as the writer’s grasp of spa
tial relationship falters across the page, each successive letter taking its stumbling position from an increasingly uncertain guess as to the orientation of its predecessor. It appears that Dandolo’s eyesight was slowly fading and in time utterly extinguished. Eventually, according to Venetian statute, Dandolo was no longer permitted to sign documents, only to have his mark attested by an approved witness.
The nature, the degree and the cause of Dandolo’s loss of sight were destined to become subjects of much speculation and to be held as a key explanation for the events of the Fourth Crusade. It was rumoured that during the Byzantine hostage crisis of 1172, when Dandolo was in Constantinople, the emperor Manuel ‘ordered his eyes to be blinded with glass; and his eyes were uninjured, but he saw nothing’. This was held to be the reason why the doge harboured a profound grudge against the Byzantines. In another version he lost his sight in a street brawl in Constantinople. Variants of this tale perplexed the medieval world in all subsequent considerations of Dandolo’s career. Some held that his blindness was feigned, or not total, for his eyes were attested to be indeed still bright and clear, and how otherwise was Dandolo able to lead the Venetian people in peace and war? Conversely it was said that he was adept at covering up his blindness, and that this was a proof of the treacherous cunning of the man. It is certain, however, that Dandolo was not blinded in 1172 – his signature was still good two years later – nor did he himself ever apportion blame for it. The only explanation that he subsequently gave was that he had lost his sight through a blow to the head.
However it happened, it did nothing to dim the clarity of his judgement or his energy. In 1192 Dandolo was elected to the position of doge and swore the ducal oath of office to ‘work for the honour and profit of the Venetians in good faith and without fraud’. Despite the fact that Venice, always profoundly conservative in its mechanisms, was never given to a heady admiration of youth, the blind man who had to be led to the ducal throne remained an unusual choice; it is possible he was viewed as a stop-gap. Given his advanced years the electors could feel reasonably confident that his term of office would be short. None of them could have guessed that it had thirteen years to run, during which time he would transform the future of Venice – or that the arrival of the crusader knights would be the trigger.
City of Fortune Page 3
