Dandolo welcomed the knights warmly, examined their letters of credence carefully and, being satisfied with their authority, proceeded to the business. The matter was unfolded in a series of meetings. First to the doge and his council, ‘inside the doge’s palace, which was very fine and beautiful’, according to Villehardouin. The barons were highly impressed with the splendour of the setting and the dignity of the blind doge, ‘a very wise and venerable man’. They had come, they said, because they ‘could be confident of finding a greater supply of ships at Venice than at any other port’ and they outlined their request for transport – the number of men and horses, the provisions, the length of time for which they requested them. Dandolo was evidently taken aback by the scale of the operation that the envoys outlined, though it is unclear exactly how detailed their projections were. It was a week’s work for the Venetians to size up the task. They came back and named their terms. With the thoroughness of experienced workmen quoting on a job they stipulated exactly what they would supply for the money:
We will build horse transports to carry 4,500 horses and nine thousand squires; and 4,500 knights and twenty thousand foot soldiers will be embarked on ships; and our terms will include provisions for both men and horses for nine months. This is the minimum we will provide, conditional on payment of four marks per horse and two per man. And all the terms we are setting out for you will be valid for a year from the day of departure from the port of Venice to serve God and Christendom, wherever that may take us. The sum of money specified above totals ninety-four thousand marks. And we will additionally supply fifty armed galleys, free of charge, for as long as our alliance lasts, with the condition that we receive half of all the conquests that we make either by way of territory or money, either by land or at sea. Now take counsel among yourselves as to whether you are willing and able to go ahead with this.
The per capita rate was not unreasonable. The Genoese had asked for similar from the French in 1190, but the aggregate sum of ninety-four thousand marks was staggering, equivalent to the annual income of France. From the Venetian point of view it was a huge commercial opportunity, shadowed by considerable risk. It would require the undivided attention of the whole Venetian economy for two years: a year of preparation – shipbuilding, logistical arrangements, manpower recruitment, food sourcing – followed by a second year of active service by a sizeable section of the male population and the use of all its ships. It would commit the Venetians to the largest commercial contract in medieval history; it would mean the cessation of all other trading activity during the span of the contract; failure at any point would mean disaster for the city, because all its resources were involved. It was small wonder that Dandolo had studied the letters of authority so closely, drawn the contract so carefully and asked for half of the proceeds. The two dimensions were time and money; both had been scrupulously weighed. The Venetians were seasoned merchants; contracting was what they did and they believed in the sanctity of the deal. It was the gold standard by which Venetian life operated: its key parameters were quantity, price and delivery date. Such bargains were hammered out on the Rialto every day of the trading year, though never on this scale. The doge might have been surprised that the crusaders agreed so readily after only an overnight consideration. The envoys were particularly impressed by the Venetian offer to contribute fifty galleys at their own expense. It was not without significance. Nor was the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘wherever that may take us’ inserted in the contract without purpose.
The interior of St Mark’s
The doge might have been driving the deal, but Venice defined itself as a commune, in which all the people theoretically had a say in the major decisions of the state. In this case their whole future was at stake. It was critical to obtain wide consent for the deal. Villehardouin recorded the process of Venetian democracy at work. The transaction had to be sold to an ever widening audience: first the Great Council of fifty, then to two hundred representatives of the Commune. Finally Dandolo called the general populace to St Mark’s. According to Villehardouin, ten thousand people were gathered together in expectation of dramatic news. In the smoky darkness of the great mother church, ‘the most beautiful church that might be’, wrote Villehardouin, who was evidently as susceptible as anyone to the atmosphere of the place, glimmering like a sea cave shot through with shafts of obscure light and the smouldering gold of its mosaic saints, Dandolo constructed a scene of mounting drama, using ‘his intelligence and powers of reason – which were both very sound and sharp’. First he requested ‘a mass to the Holy Spirit and to beg God that he might guide them concerning the request the envoys had made to them’. Then the six envoys entered the great doors of the church and walked down the aisle. The Frenchmen, doubtless wearing their surcoats emblazoned with the scarlet cross, were the object of intense interest. People craned and jostled to catch a glimpse of the foreigners. Clearing his throat, Villehardouin made a powerful address to his audience:
My lords, the greatest and most powerful barons of all France have sent us to you. They have begged your mercy to take pity on Jerusalem, which is enslaved by the Turks, so that, for the love of God, you should be willing to help their expedition to avenge Jesus Christ’s dishonour. And for this, they have chosen you because there is no nation so powerful at sea as you, and they have ordered us to throw ourselves at your feet and not to get up until you have agreed to take pity on the Holy Land overseas.
The marshal flattered their maritime pride and their religious zeal, as if they had been personally called upon by God to perform this mighty deed. All six envoys fell weeping to the floor. It was an appeal direct to the emotional core of the medieval soul. A thunderous roar swept through the church, along the nave, mounting to the galleries and up into the swirling heights of the dome. People ‘called out with one voice and raised their hands up high and cried “We agree! We agree!”’ Dandolo was then helped to the pulpit, his sightless eyes sensing the moment, and sealed the pact: ‘My lords, behold the honour God has done you, because the finest nation on earth has scorned all others and asked your help and co-operation in undertaking a task of such great importance as the deliverance of Our Lord!’ It was irresistible.
The Treaty of Venice, as it came to be known, was signed and sealed the following day with all due ceremony. The doge ‘gave them his charters … weeping copiously, and swore in good faith on the relics of saints to loyally hold to the terms in the charters’. The envoys responded in kind, sent messengers to Pope Innocent and departed to prepare for crusade. Under the terms of the treaty, the crusading army would be gathered on the auspicious St John’s Day, 24 June the following year, 1202, and the fleet would be ready to receive them.
Despite the fervent assent of the population, the Venetians were, by nature, a cautious people, in whom the mercantile spirit had bred shrewd judgement, not given to flights of fancy, and Dandolo was a cautious leader. Yet any measured risk analysis of the Treaty of Venice would suggest that it involved hazarding the whole economy of the Commune on one high-stakes project. The number of men and ships required, the sums of money to be laid out – the figures were breathtaking. Dandolo was probably over ninety years old with presumably only a few years to live. He personally was responsible for pushing through this enormous project. On the face of it he had much to lose. Why on earth should he risk his declining years in this gamble?
The answers lay in the Venetian character, its peculiar admixture of the secular and religious, and in the treaty itself. Venice continuously looked back to the precedents of its history for received wisdom to steer the ship of state. Its rise over the previous century had been deeply entwined with the adventure of the crusades. The Venetians had participated in the First Crusade and again in 1123. From both they had profited in material terms; they had acquired a third of the city of Tyre in 1122, ruled directly from the lagoon on terms of tax-free trade, which marked the start of Venice’s overseas empire, as well as a foothold in a string of other harbours.
The brilliant Levantine light had exposed Europeans to a tumbling world of bright colours and vivid scents. New tastes in goods, clothes, foods and flavours permeated the crusader kingdoms and were carried back in the holds of merchant ships to an increasingly wealthy Europe. In return Venice, and its rivals, also provisioned the crusades; they brought the kingdom of Jerusalem (as well as its enemies in Egypt) the resources of war – arms, metal, wood and horses – and the necessary goods to sustain colonial life on a foreign shore, and ballasted their ships with pilgrims eager to witness the holy places. For Venetian merchants the crusades had proved highly profitable. In the process they deepened their knowledge of how to trade across a cultural divide, which would make them, in time, the interpreters of worlds.
The expeditions to previous crusades had entered the national memory as triumphant episodes in the litany of Venetian glories. They reinforced the city’s sense of itself and its expectations. Venice had always looked east into the rising sun: for trade and booty, for material objects with which to embellish the city, for the stolen bones of Christian saints, for the possibility of wealth and military glory – and not least for the remission of sins. Venice’s attachment to the East was aesthetic, religious and commercial. The returning argosies set a pattern of expectation: that what would be unloaded at the Basin of St Mark would enrich, ennoble and sanctify the city. A hundred years earlier a doge had raised to the status of patriotic duty the demand that merchant ships returning from the East should bring back antiquities, marbles and carvings for the decoration of the newly rebuilt Church of St Mark. A successful expedition in 1123 had given the Republic lively expectations of the commercial benefits that might be derived from crusade. In the new treaty of Venice, the maritime contract alone would give a good profit, and half of all the spoils might yield unknown wealth.
As a youth, Dandolo had probably personally witnessed the religious fervour and national that had accompanied the departure of crusading fleets and heard the impassioned words of the doge of his childhood, extolling their spiritual and material glory:
Venetians, with what immortal glory and splendour will your name be covered from this expedition? What reward will you gain from God? You will win the admiration of Europe and Asia. The standard of St Mark will fly triumphantly in far-off lands. New profits, new sources of greatness will come to this most noble city … Roused by the holy zeal of religion, excited by the example of all Europe, hurry to arms, think of the honour and the prizes, think of your triumph – with the blessings of heaven!
Dandolo had other personal reasons. He came from a family of crusaders; probably a desire to emulate his forefathers struck a deep chord in him. And he was an old man: concern for his soul would also have weighed heavily. The promised absolution of sins was one of the most powerful incentives for crusades. He had impelling national, personal, spiritual and family motives for signing the treaty.
The blind but percipient doge had evidently glimpsed a moment of destiny – as if everything in Venetian history led up to this extraordinary opportunity. But there was something else, buried at the heart of the treaty, which would have lent it considerable appeal. What was kept from all but a handful of signatories and the crusading lords back in France and Lombardy was that the expedition, which had stirred the rank and file vaguely to ‘take pity on the Holy Land overseas’, had no intention initially of going there. It was bound for Egypt. As Villehardouin confessed in his chronicle, ‘It was secretly agreed in closed council that we would go to Egypt, because via Cairo one could more easily destroy the power of the Turks than by anywhere else, but publicly it was just announced that we were going overseas.’
There were sound strategic reasons for this. It had long been recognised by shrewder military tacticians that the wealth of Egypt was a reservoir of resource for the Muslim armies in Palestine and Syria. Saladin’s victories had been built on the riches of Cairo and Alexandria. As Richard the Lionheart had realised, ‘the keys to Jerusalem are to be found in Cairo’. The problem was that such an oblique approach to recapturing the Holy City was unlikely to stir the popular imagination. The ardently pious sought salvation by fighting for the ground on which Jesus had stood, not strangling Islam’s supply lines in the souks of the Nile Delta.
But to the Venetians this offered a further extension of commercial opportunity. Egypt was the wealthiest region in the Levant and another natural access point to the highly lucrative spice routes. It promised richer commercial prizes than the harbours of Tyre and Acre could ever provide. ‘Whatever this part of the world lacks in the matter of pearls, spices, oriental treasures, and foreign wares is brought hither from the two Indies: Saba, Arabia, and both the Ethiopias, as well as from Persia and other lands nearby,’ wrote William of Tyre twenty years earlier. ‘People from East and West flock thither in great numbers, and Alexandria is a public market for both worlds.’ In fact Venice had a poor share of this market, despite the recent permission from Pope Innocent. Genoa and Pisa dominated the trade with Egypt. Dandolo had been to Alexandria; he knew at first hand both its wealth and its defensive frailties, and the city held a powerful emotional attraction for the Republic. It was here that St Mark had died and whence Venetian merchants had spirited away his bones. In essence, a victorious campaign in Egypt with half the proceeds as reward gave Venice a glimpse of riches that might far exceed all its previous commercial triumphs. It could, at a stroke, deliver a large part of the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean into its grasp, and permanently discomfit its maritime rivals. Tax-free monopoly trading was an irresistible lure. The potential returns were evidently worth the risk, and this was why the Venetians had thrown in fifty war galleys at their own expense. They were not designed to fight sea battles off the coast of Palestine, but to nose their way up the shallow reedy deltas of the Nile for a strike against Cairo.
This secret agenda was just one worrying co-ordinate of a treaty that was destined to exert a malign influence on the crusade. The others were time – the Venetians had committed themselves finally to a nine months’ finite maritime contract, from St John’s Day, 24 June 1202 – and crucially, money. It seems likely that the final agreed sum was knocked down to eighty-five thousand marks, still a staggering amount. Even if the per capita rate was reasonable, Villehardouin’s estimate of thirty-three thousand crusaders was exceptionally high. Villehardouin had experience of estimating crusader armies but his overnight acceptance of the doge’s terms would prove a colossal blunder. He had dramatically miscalculated the number of crusaders who could be assembled; he had also failed to realise that those on whose behalf he had signed the treaty were not themselves bound to it: they were under no obligation to sail from Venice. The crusade was under financial pressure from the start: Innocent had attempted, and failed, to raise funds through taxation. The six delegates had to borrow the first down payment on the deal – two thousand marks – on the Rialto. Though no one knew it at the time, the Treaty of Venice contained the active ingredients for serious trouble, which would render the Fourth Crusade the most controversial event in medieval Christendom.
Villehardouin jingled his way back over the Alpine pas
ses. The crusaders of France, Flanders and northern Italy – the Franks, as the Byzantines referred to them – made their vows and their wills, donned their surcoats and laboriously began the long-winded preparations for departure; in the lagoon, the Venetians set to work preparing the largest fleet in its history.
Thirty-four Thousand Marks
1201–1202
The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city’s previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial activities and to recall merchant vessels from overseas as the whole population threw itself into the preparations. They had thirteen months to complete the work.
The shipbuilding and refurbishment alone were a huge project, which required immense quantities of wood, pitch, hemp, ropes, sailcloth, and iron for nails, anchors and fixings. The Italian mainland was scoured for resources. Quantities of fir and larch were floated down the rivers that fed into the lagoon; oak and pine came from the Veneto and the Dalmatian coast. The state arsenal, established in 1104, was the industrial hub of the work, but much of it was carried on in private yards scattered across the islands of the lagoon. The air rang with the sound of hammering and sawing, the blows of axes and the rasping of adzes; cauldrons of pitch bubbled and steamed; forges glowed; rope makers paid out hundreds of yards of twisted hemp; oars, pulleys, masts, sails and anchors were shaped, hewed, sewn and forged. Ships started to grow from the keel up; others were refitted or adapted. In the arsenal war machines were under construction – stone-throwing catapults and siege towers in kit form which could be dismantled for the voyage.
City of Fortune Page 4
