To the Byzantines, Constantinople was the sacred image of heaven on earth, a vision of the divine made manifest to man, a vast sacramental icon. To the crusaders it was a treasure house waiting to be stripped. The previous autumn they had visited Constantinople as tourists and seen the extraordinary wealth of the place. Robert of Clari was one of many open-mouthed at the glimpse of riches afforded to the warrior class of underdeveloped western Europe: ‘For if anyone should relate to you even a hundredth of the richness, beauty and magnificence that was there in the convents, monasteries, abbeys and palaces of the city, he would be taken for a liar and you would not believe him.’ Now it all lay at their mercy.
The two crusader leaders, Boniface and Baldwin, hurried to secure the richest prizes – the sumptuous imperial palaces, the Bucoleon and the Blachernae, ‘so rich and so magnificent that no one could describe it to you’, where the crusader deputations had been repeatedly overawed by the wealth of the Byzantine court. Elsewhere there was indiscriminate plunder. All the vows made before the attack were forgotten. The crusaders targeted both churches and the mansions of the rich. The Greek accounts are vivid with rhetorical anguish:
Then the streets, squares, two-storeyed and three-storeyed houses, holy places, convents, houses of monks, and nuns, holy churches (even God’s Great Church), the imperial palace, were filled with the enemy, all warmaddened swordsmen, breathing murder, iron-clad and spear-bearing, sword-bearers and lance-bearers, bowmen [and] horsemen.
They battered their way into Hagia Sophia and started to strip the place. The high altar, fourteen foot long, ‘so rich that no one could estimate its value’, whose surface was ‘made of gold and precious stones broken and ground up all together’, ‘blazing with every sort of precious material and wrought into an object of extraordinary beauty, astonishing to everyone’ – this was hacked to pieces. The overarching canopy, supported on slim columns, all of solid silver, was dragged down and broken up; the hundred silver chandeliers suspended each by a great chain ‘as thick as a man’s arm’, the columns studded with ‘jasper or porphyry or some other precious stone’, the silver altar rails, the golden censers and sacrificial vessels – ‘and the pulpit, a wonderful work of art, and the gates … completely faced with gold’, all were chopped into transportable lots. Axes, crowbars and swords hacked, wrenched and prised out. Every corner of the church was probed for the valuables it might contain, the monks tortured for hidden treasures, casually despatched for trying to protect a venerated icon or particular relic; women were raped there, men were killed.
To the Greeks it was if these crusaders who had come in the name of God were filled with a kind of terrible madness,
baying like Cerberus and breathing like Charon, pillaging the holy places, trampling on divine things, running riot over holy things, casting down to the floor the holy images of Christ and His holy Mother and of the holy men who from eternity have been pleasing to the Lord God, uttering calumnies and profanities, and in addition tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men.
Mules and asses were led into Hagia Sophia to carry away the loot but were unable to keep their footing on the polished floors of ancient polychromatic marble and slipped and fell; somehow maddened by this difficulty, the looters slashed the terrified animals open with their knives. The floor became slippery with blood and the muck of excrement from their punctured bowels. A prostitute, evidently not expelled from the camp, was set on the patriarch’s throne ‘and started to sing a wretched song and danced about, spinning and turning’.
Some of this ecclesiastical looting was nominally in a religious cause. Abbot Martin of Pairis learned that the Church of the Pantocrator Monastery housed an extraordinary collection of relics. Hurrying there with his chaplain, he entered the sacristy – the depository of the most sacred objects – where he encountered a man with a long white beard. ‘Come faithless old man,’ bawled the prelate, ‘show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.’ The trembling monk showed him an iron chest, containing a trove of treasures, ‘more pleasing and more desirable to him than all the riches of Greece’. ‘The abbot greedily and hurriedly thrust in both hands, and as he was girded for action, both he and the chaplain filled the folds of their habits with sacred sacrilege.’ With their robes stuffed with religious treasure, the two men waddled back to their ship, with the old monk in tow. ‘We have done well … thanks be to God,’ was the abbot’s laconic reply to passers-by.
An extraordinary list of the religious treasures of the Orthodox world made it back to the monasteries of Italy and France: the Holy Shroud, hair of the Virgin Mary, the shinbone of St Paul, fragments of the crown of thorns, the head of St James – the venerated objects were carefully itemised in the chroniclers’ accounts. Dandolo obtained for Venice a piece of the True Cross, some of Christ’s blood, the arm of St George and part of St John’s head. Many of the great icons and valued religious talismans of the Byzantine Church were just lost in the rampage – probably smashed to pieces by men intent only on precious metal. By the Church of the Holy Apostles, where Constantine himself and all the emperors were buried, they plundered all night, ‘taking whatever gold ornaments, or round pearls, or radiant, precious and incorruptible gems were still preserved within’; crowbarring open the tombs, they gazed on the face of the great Justinian, builder of Hagia Sophia, dead for seven hundred years. His corpse was not decomposed in the airtight tomb. They looked upon this sight as if it were a miracle – then looted the body for its valuables. And everywhere there were acts of terrible molestation:
They slaughtered the new-born, killed prudent matrons, stripped elder women, and outraged old ladies; they tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. Mortal blood was spilled on holy altars, and in place of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of the universe, many were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs the wretches slew the innocent. Such was the reverence for holy things of those who bore the Lord’s Cross on their shoulders.
The murders and rapes appalled:
There was no one spared grief – in the wide streets and the narrow lanes; there was wailing in the temples, tears, lamentations, pleas for mercy, the terrible groaning of men, the screams of women, the tearing to pieces, the obscene acts, enslaving, families torn apart, nobles treated shamefully and venerable old men, people weeping, the rich stripped of their goods.
‘Thus it went on,’ continued Choniates, thunderous with rage, ‘in the squares, in corners, in temples, in cellars – everywhere terrible deeds.’ ‘The whole head’, he said, ‘was in pain.’ In a final taunting gibe, he contrasted the generous treatment by Saladin at the recapture of Jerusalem seventeen years earlier. ‘They allowed everyone to go free and left them everything they possessed, content with just a few gold coins’ ransom on each head … thus the enemies of Christ dealt magnanimously with the Latin infidels.’
There were just a few brief moments of human sympathy. The crusaders looting the Church of St George of Mangana were stopped dead in their tracks by the spiritual presence of the saintly figure of John Mesarites, a bearded ascetic, who told the intruders that his purse was so empty that he feared no thieves. They stood before him in silence. Led to the baron in charge, he sat on the floor. The baron placed him in the seat of honour and knelt at his feet. His unearthly sanctity impressed the Norman warriors. He was fed, according to his brother’s sardonic account, ‘like some ancient saint by thievish, man-eating magpies’.
Choniates, who himself showed considerable personal courage, was also the recipient of acts of extraordinary humanity. His palace had been destroyed in the devastating fire of the previous year. At the moment of the sack he was living quite humbly. ‘My house, with its low portico, was difficult to approach be
cause of its cramped location’, hidden away near Hagia Sophia. Despite his detestation of the Venetian invaders, this polished aristocrat obviously had sympathetic personal relations with some resident foreigners. Most had fled before the final attack, but he had taken into his household a Venetian merchant and his wife and protected them. When the looters finally reached the house, Domenico the merchant acted with considerable presence of mind. Donning armour so that he looked like one of the invading Italians, he resisted all attempts to sack the house, claiming that he had already gained possession of it for himself. The intruders gradually became more insistent, particularly the French, ‘who were not like the others in either character or physique’. Realising that he could not hold out indefinitely, and fearing the rape of the women, Domenico moved them all to the house of another Venetian. The net closed on this house too. Domenico moved them again. The servants fled.
The proud Byzantine nobles found themselves reduced to the status of common refugees. Abandoned by their servants, ‘We had to carry the children who could not walk on our shoulders and a baby boy, still a suckling, in our arms; thus we were compelled to make our way through the streets.’ Domenico ingeniously dragged them along as if they were his captives. Choniates realised that it was essential to leave. On 17 April, five days after the siege, a small group of nobles started the dangerous walk up the main thoroughfare towards the Golden Gate – a distance of three miles. They wore ragged clothes to conceal their origins; the patriarch, with no sign of his rank as archbishop, took the lead. It was a wet and windy day. Choniates’s wife was heavily pregnant and some of the young women in the group were temptingly beautiful to the French soldiers lounging about; the men cordoned the girls in the middle of the party, ‘as if in a sheep pen’, and instructed them to rub mud into their faces to disguise their looks. ‘We passed through the streets like a line of ants,’ said Choniates. All went well until they passed a church. Suddenly ‘a lecherous and wicked barbarian’ thrust himself into the band of refugees and snatched a girl, the young daughter of a judge, and dragged her away. The judge, who was ageing and ill, tried to run after him but stumbled and fell in the mud. Lying there he called on Choniates to free the girl.
Choniates took his life in his hands. ‘Immediately I turned on my heels in pursuit of the abductor.’ In tears, he called out to passing soldiers to take pity and help, and even grabbed some by the hand and persuaded them to follow. The whole party and a group of soldiers followed the abductor back to his lodging where he had secured the girl and barred the door. He now defied the crowd to do their worst. And there Choniates made an impassioned speech, wagging his finger at the potential rapist, shaming the crusaders he had gathered with a ringing address, reminding them of their vows before God, appealing to them to remember their families and the precepts of Christ. Somehow it worked. Enough was transmitted across the barrier of language. He incited their anger and won them round. The crowd threatened to hang the villain on the spot. Sulkily he surrendered the girl to her father, who was weeping with joy.
And so they made it out of the Golden Gate. From there they could look back along the rippling line of defensive land walls, intact for eight hundred years, now powerless to prevent this disaster. For Choniates the moment was too much. ‘I threw myself headlong on the ground face down and cursed the walls, because they were completely untouched by the disaster, neither did they weep, nor had they collapsed in a heap, but were still standing, insensible.’
*
In the immediate aftermath, Constantinople witnessed a lewd and grotesque carnival. ‘The beef-eating Latins’, as Choniates dubbed them, roamed through the streets, ‘riotous and indecent’, mimicking the dress and customs of the Byzantines. They dressed themselves in Greek robes, ‘to mock us and placed women’s headdresses on their horses’ heads, and tied the white bands which hang down their backs round their beasts’ muzzles’, and planted the distinctive Greek hats on their horses’ heads and rode through the streets with abducted women on their saddles. Others, ‘holding scribes’ reed pens and inkwells, mimicked writing in books, mocking us as secretaries’. To Choniates’s refined palate, these men were barbarians, guzzling and carousing all day long, gorging themselves on delicacies and their own disgusting, crude, pungent food – ‘the chines of oxen boiled in cauldrons, chunks of pig mixed with bean paste and cooked up with a marinade of garlic paste and foul-smelling garlic’.
To this debauchery would be added the wholesale destruction of a thousand years of imperial and religious art. In the aftermath, the conquerors, with their hunger for precious metals and the copper and bronze from which to mint coins, cast into the furnace an extraordinary catalogue of statuary, much of which was ancient even at the city’s founding in the fourth century, collected from across the Roman and Greek world by Constantine the Great. To Choniates the destruction was endless, ‘like a line stretching out to infinity’. Under the blows of hammers and axes they felled the giant bronze figure of Hera, so immense that it took four oxen to cart the head away, and an enormous equestrian statue from its plinth in the Forum of the Bull, carrying a rider who ‘extended his right hand in the direction of the chariot-driving sun … and held a bronze globe in the palm of his hand’. All these were melted down for coins.
The Venetian role in this rape and pillage goes largely unrecorded, though one German chronicler, keen perhaps to point a finger elsewhere, declared that the Italian merchants expelled from the city, particularly the Venetians, were responsible for the slaughter in a spirit of revenge. Choniates, who loathed Dandolo as a sly cheat largely responsible for the catastrophe, picked out the French crusaders as the most muscular pillagers of his beloved city – and owed the safety of himself and his family to the courage of a Venetian merchant. The Venetians at least had perhaps a more discerning attitude to the works of art that they plundered.
All the parties had solemnly sworn that the booty would be centrally collected and equitably divided according to clearly agreed rules. Baldwin of Flanders wrote that ‘an innumerable amount of horses, gold, silver, costly tapestries, gems and all those things that people judge to be rich is plundered’. Much was never handed in; the poor, according to Robert of Clari, were again cheated. But the Venetians received the 150,000 marks owed to them under the terms of the agreements, and another hundred thousand to share amongst themselves. In material terms Dandolo’s gamble seems to have paid off.
When it came to appointing a new emperor, Dandolo, in his nineties, excused himself from consideration, judging that, apart from his age, the election of a Venetian would be enormously contentious. There were two rival candidates, the counts Baldwin and Boniface. The Venetians probably threw their weight behind Baldwin, judging his rival too closely tied to Genoa. Venice’s prime concern was above all to secure stability for its trading interests in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Latin Empire of Constantinople, as it came to be known, was shaky from the first; it was beset by internal squabbles between the feudal lords and outside pressure from the Byzantines and the neighbouring Bulgarians. For most of the surviving protagonists it would end badly. Murtzuphlus, who had escaped from the city, was treacherously blinded in exile by the other exiled rival, Alexius III; recaptured by the crusaders, he was prepared for a special end, reputedly devised by Dandolo. ‘For a high man, I will detail the high justice one should give him!’ He was taken to the base of the tall column of Theodosius, prodded up the internal steps to the platform at the top; sightless, but grasping his imminent fate, and watched by an expectant crowd, he was pushed off. Baldwin, the first emperor of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, died slowly in a Bulgarian ravine, his arms and legs chopped off at the joints; his rival, Boniface, also killed in a Bulgarian ambush, had his skull despatched to the Bulgarian tsar as a gift.
The blind doge survived, shrewd to the last. With a cool head, he masterminded a successful withdrawal of a crusader army almost encircled by the Bulgarians in the spring of 1205. Everyone who came in contact with the old man
recognised his unique powers of discrimination and prudence. His superior judgement had saved the crusade from repeated disaster. He was, according to Villehardouin, ‘very wise and worthy and full of vigour’ to the end. Even Pope Innocent paid a kind of backhanded tribute to a man whom he heartily loathed. The Venetians had committed to stay at Constantinople until March 1205. A resident population remained to occupy their share of the city, but with the year up many more prepared to sail home. Dandolo, knowing that the end of his life was near, applied to the pope for release from his crusader vows and to be allowed to return too. Innocent had the last laugh – insisting that the aged old doge should proceed with the army to the Holy Land, to which it would never now go. ‘We are mindful’, he began smoothly,
that your honest circumspection, the acuteness of your lively innate character, and the maturity of your quite sound advice would be beneficial to the Christian army far into the future. Inasmuch as the aforesaid emperor and the crusaders ardently praise your zeal and solicitude and among [all] people, they trust particularly in your discretion, we have not considered approving this petition for the present time, lest we be blamed … if, having now avenged the injury done to you, you do not avenge the dishonour done Jesus Christ.
It must have afforded Innocent some impious satisfaction to gain the advantage, though he finally lifted the sentence of excommunication on the old man in January 1205. Dandolo spent his last days a long way from the lagoon. Like his father before him, he died in Constantinople. In May 1205 he breathed his last and was buried in Hagia Sophia, where his bones would remain for 250 years, until another convulsion racked the imperial city.
Innocent had initially applauded the deeds of the crusaders in bringing the Byzantines under the Catholic Church. Dandolo had been dead for two months before the truth about the city’s fall finally reached him. His verdict fell on the crusaders like a scourge. Their enterprise had been ‘nothing but an example of affliction and the works of hell’. The sack of Constantinople burned a hole in Christian history; it was the scandal of the age and Venice was held to be deeply complicit in the act. It would reinforce papal views of the merchant crusaders, who traded unapologetically with Islam, as enemies of Christ. The label would be regularly reapplied down the centuries. But for Venice it was an extraordinary and unlooked-for opportunity. They had set out in the autumn of 1203, banners flying, to conquer Egypt. The fortunes of the sea had carried them away to unforeseen destinations. As for their actual part in the proceedings they kept silent. There are no contemporary Venetian accounts of the crusade that was intended to take Jerusalem via Cairo but ended up in Christian Constantinople.
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