The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  The fleet set off in October, priests chanting from the mast tops as it left. ‘Never before had such rejoicing or such an armada been heard or seen … verily did it seem that the whole sea was as warm and ablaze,’ wrote one of the crusaders. Progress down the Adriatic was at a stately pace, Dandolo stopping off at ports to display his great fleet to subject cities. Zara was eventually reached and reconquered after a five-day siege. It was now too late in the year to risk a crossing of the Mediterranean, and the crusaders spent the winter of 1202–3 in the city. By now many were becoming uneasy about the enterprise, especially when they learned to their horror that the Pope was threatening to excommunicate them all for their attack on fellow Christians in Zara. In the end, Innocent, who was learning fast about the realities of political life, confined his bull of excommunication to Dandolo and the Venetians alone – and even then the papal legate who was accompanying the fleet, knowing that if the verdict were delivered it would bring the collapse of the crusade, suppressed the bull when it arrived.

  Then another diversion presented itself. The throne of the Byzantine empire was in dispute; one of the contenders was Alexius Angelus, the son of an earlier emperor, Isaac II, who had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned by his own brother, Alexius, now the emperor Alexius III, in 1194. Alexius Angelus naturally felt that his claim to the throne was strong and realized that the Venetians and the crusaders might be able to help him. He put forward his own proposal to them. If aid were given him to take the throne, he would support the crusade with 10,000 troops and 200,000 marks, well above what was needed to settle the Venetian contract. Perhaps the most attractive part of the offer, however, was his promise to reconcile the east to Rome, in effect to accept the supremacy of the pope over the Byzantine church.

  Attractive as they were, Alexius’ promises did not convince everyone. ‘Wild promises of a witless youth’ was the opinion of Niketas Choniates,* an official at the Byzantine court whose record of these years is invaluable. It is probable that Enrico Dandolo, who knew Constantinople, its resources and its ways very well indeed, understood from the outset that all these promises were unlikely to be fulfilled, even if Alexius were enthroned. So did the pope. While the bishops in the fleet, eager to see a reunion of east and west, supported the new enterprise, Innocent condemned it. He recognized that the offer of reunion was likely to get nowhere – a young emperor could not simply slice through the tangle built up by centuries of suspicion and disagreement between east and west over Christian doctrine and sign his church over to Rome – and so he refused to rescind the excommunication of the Venetians. But it was all too late. The fleet, now with Alexius himself on board, had left Zara before the papal condemnation had arrived, and had since reached Corfu. Ominously, however, a demonstration here against Alexius was a forewarning that his elevation to emperor could not be taken for granted.

  Now beyond papal control, the fleet sailed on, round Greece and up through the Aegean. In June 1203 it entered the Hellespont and soon the great walls of Constantinople, built some eight hundred years before by the emperor Theodosius II, were in view. Adorned with icons of the Virgin Mary, which were believed to protect the city in times of crisis, they had repelled all invaders in the past and the ‘sitting’ emperor’, Alexius III, must have hoped they would do so again. He was unpopular with his people, he had little in the way of a fleet and his army was made up largely of mercenaries; but his hopes of survival were raised when Alexius Angelus was ceremonially paraded before the walls in Dandolo’s grand barge. The pretender’s rash promises must have gone before him as he was greeted with abuse from the walls and stones were rained down on him.

  Dandolo now took the initiative in proclaiming that the throne would have to be fought for. This may have been what he was hoping for all along; certainly his was the first barge to land beneath the walls. While the crusaders stayed encamped further from the city, the Venetians stormed the walls and to everyone’s surprise had soon captured many of the towers. This dealt an immense psychological blow to the defenders, and resistance collapsed. Alexius III fled with his jewels and the people brought out Isaac from prison as his replacement. Blind and by now senile after nine years in prison, he had no chance of holding the throne – and so it was that his son, Alexius Angelus, despite being no more popular than his predecessor, became the emperor Alexius IV.

  Now Enrico Dandolo tightened his grip. He insisted that all Alexius’ promises be fulfilled. Alexius scoured the treasury and managed to settle the debt the crusaders owed to Dandolo; but this sum was still far below what had been promised, and the crusaders were left without even the provisions to go further. Alexius found himself in yet deeper trouble when his attempts to bring the Greek church under the authority of Rome were greeted with outrage. Serious rioting broke out between the Catholic Latins – the Venetians and other Italians living in Constantinople – and the Orthodox native Greeks. Alexius could not survive without the support of the crusaders – but they were insisting that he honour his promises before they helped him further. He ended up isolated, and in January 1204 he was in his turn deposed and then strangled. The Greeks proclaimed a new emperor, the son-in-law of Alexius II, who took office as Alexius V. This Alexius decided the only way out of the stand-off was to clear the Latins out once and for all. In the rising tension, many fled the city to the crusaders’ camp.

  The battle lines were now drawn. The crusaders had lost the man they had come to install as emperor, while any religious justification for the expedition to Constantinople had been jeopardized by the determination of the Greeks not to surrender to the supremacy of Rome. Lacking even the means to sail home, the crusaders threatened to fight to win what they were owed. Once again it was Dandolo who saw his opportunity to shape the outcome, in fact to transform the expedition into an instrument for destroying the Byzantine empire itself. It was he who crafted a treaty between the Venetians and the crusaders to provide for its dismemberment. Constantinople would be conquered, the doge would have first call on the spoils of the opulent city, up to three-quarters of what was taken, and a joint committee of crusaders and Venetians would elect a Latin emperor (who would, of course, then transfer the religious allegiance of the empire to Rome). The new emperor would be left in charge of a truncated empire, only a quarter of the existing provinces, while the remaining three-quarters would be distributed between the crusaders and the Venetians. There was never any doubt that the Venetians would select territories which would sustain their trading networks. Any qualms the crusaders might have had in serving the interests of the Venetians were settled by their priests, who told them of the glory they would gain by extracting the many relics of the city from heretics, as the Greek Orthodox Christians certainly were in Roman eyes.

  The attack was launched on 9 April 1204. Despite some resistance by the new emperor, several of the great gates of the city were forced and by 13 April Alexius V had fled. The leaders of the crusade moved into the imperial palaces and gave their men leave to pillage the city. Their booty was supposed to be collected for orderly dispersal, but discipline soon broke down and Constantinople was given over to chaotic looting. Three disastrous fires swept through the city. Churches, including Constantine’s resting place, the Church of the Holy Apostles, were sacked; even the corpse of the great emperor Justinian was violated, the jewels around the well-preserved body snatched from it. Perhaps two thousand died in the violence.

  There is a heart-rending account of the sack from Niketas Choniates. As an official who had worked his way to the top of the imperial household, Niketas had acquired his own palace, three storeys high and embellished with gold mosaics. At first he sheltered there, but it was destroyed in the second great fire. Deserted by his terrified servants, Niketas and his young family (he had one son small enough to need carrying and his wife was pregnant) had to struggle through the streets in the company of a few loyal officials and friends.

  The Fourth Crusade, 1204. The elderly doge Enrico Dandolo urges the crusaders on fr
om his barge as they attack the walls of Constantinople. A sixteenth-century reconstruction in the Doge’s palace by Palma il Giovane. (Palazzo Ducale, Venezia/Scala)

  We were like a throng of ants passing through the streets. The troops [the crusaders] who came out to meet us could not be called armed for battle, for although their long swords hung down alongside their horses, and they bore daggers in their sword belts, some were loaded down with spoils and others searched the captives who were passing through to see if they had wrapped a splendid garment inside a torn tunic or hidden silver or gold in their bosoms. Still others looked with steadfast and fixed gaze upon those women who were of extraordinary beauty with intent to seize them forthwith and ravish them. Fearing for the women, we put them in the middle as though in a sheepfold and instructed the young girls to rub their faces with mud to conceal the blush of their cheeks … We lifted our hands in supplication to God, smote upon our breasts with contrite hearts, and bathed our eyes in tears and prayed that we all, both men and women, should escape those savage beasts of prey unharmed.

  Later Niketas describes how he managed to save one girl from rape by shaming her attacker in front of a leader of the crusaders.

  In a later section of his account Niketas tells how, after he had found refuge and his wife had been delivered of their child, he returned to the city to find a systematic destruction of art treasures under way. The hippodrome appears to have been the scene of the greatest depredations. Many of the statues set up there by Constantine were dragged off by the crusaders to be melted down, among them the Hercules, a she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, and an eagle and serpent. A head of Hera, the wife of Zeus, alone needed four yokes of oxen to cart it off. Nothing seemed able to quell the rapacity of the crusaders – even a most beautiful bronze of Helen, relates Niketas, was unable to exercise her charms on those who consigned her to the flames. Perhaps, he suggested, the Venetians, playing on their supposed Trojan origins, wanted revenge for the destruction of Troy which her presence there had brought about.

  Niketas had no doubt that Enrico Dandolo was the driving force behind the sack and what followed. He was ‘not the least of horrors … a creature most treacherous and extremely jealous of the Romans, a sly cheat who called himself wiser than the wise and madly thirsting after glory as no other’. Dandolo, says Niketas, had grasped the fact that any attack on Constantinople by the Venetians alone would have brought disaster down on his head, and so he involved others ‘whom he knew nursed an implacable hatred against the Romans [i.e. the Byzantines] and who looked with an envious and avaricious eye upon their goods’. From the beginning, Niketas was convinced, the crusade had been a mask for Dandolo’s ambitions for revenge upon the empire that had treated him with contempt nearly thirty years earlier.

  What happened next bore out Niketas’ suspicions. Once again it was Dandolo who took the leading part in enforcing the treaty he had made with the crusaders to Venice’s advantage. He did not wish to become emperor himself, preferring to see an acceptable candidate appointed from among the leading crusaders, and, after some wrangling between rival claimants, Baldwin of Flanders was elected. (Dandolo’s influence is suggested by the use of an election; such a procedure, well established in Venice, was unknown in northern Europe.) The Venetians then insisted that in return for acquiescing in a Latin emperor they should have the right to appoint the patriarch of the city; and a Venetian, Thomas Morosini, ‘of middle age and fatter than a hog raised in a pit’, as Niketas described him, duly took office. The doge was to receive the title of ‘despot’ and to have the privilege of not having to pay homage to the new emperor and his successors.

  Now the conspirators could move on to the division of the empire, and here Dandolo used his intimate knowledge of the Aegean to gain vital staging posts for Venice. Of the city itself three-eighths, including the docks, was to be Venice’s, the other five-eighths the Latin emperor’s. To the west of the city a stretch of Thrace across from Adrianople up to the Sea of Marmara went to Venice, as did all the islands of the west coast of Greece, much of mainland Greece including the peninsulas jutting out from the Peloponnese, and several well-placed Aegean islands: Salamis, Aegina, Andros and, most significant of all, Crete. Supremacy in western Greece gave Venice full control of the entrance to the Adriatic, a vital strategic advantage. The crusaders gained much of the rest of the empire.

  The outside world had to come to terms with these events as best it could. One of Baldwin’s first tasks was to feed the pope with a version of events which stressed the happy reunion of the long-separated Christian churches. Innocent’s initial joy did not survive the details of the terrible destruction that had accompanied the reunion and the news that his own legate had not only lifted the excommunication of the Venetians but absolved the crusaders from continuing to the Holy Land. He was particularly stung by the appointment of Morosini as patriarch by a Venetian doge who had still been under excommunication at the time. But realpolitik soon took over. In 1205, after some sober reflection, Innocent announced that now he had heard the ‘true’ version of events it was clear to him that Morosini had been fairly selected as patriarch, that his legate had had the right to lift the excommunication and that Dandolo had indeed done such great service to the Christian world that God would release him from any further duty to carry on the crusade. Meanwhile many of the subjects of the empire resisted their new overlords and its neighbours took the opportunity to settle old scores. In April 1205 Baldwin was captured by the Bulgars at Adrianople in Thrace, and when news of his death in captivity came through one of Morosini’s first official engagements was to crown Baldwin’s brother, Henry, as the new Latin emperor in 1206.

  With the sack completed, it might have been considered time for Dandolo to return home. He had achieved all he had plotted for and the fruits of victory had been immense, not only in terms of immediate booty but in the consolidation of Venice’s trading empire for the future. His vigour, however, remained undiminished and he even led his own troops in an expedition to help Baldwin’s shattered army extricate itself from its entanglement with the Bulgars. It may be guessed that in these last months of his life Dandolo relished the freedom to dictate events in a way that the Venetian constitution, which, in the middle of the previous century, had reduced the powers of the doge considerably and transferred power to a Great Council, would never have allowed him to do at home; and so he appointed his son Raniero as regent in Venice and stayed in the east. Even after his death in 1205 his body was never returned to Venice, and still lies in the church of Santa Sophia, its burial place marked by a simple engraved slab.

  Before his death Dandolo had made a selection of some of the treasures of Constantinople that he would like to send back to Venice, and these were to be followed over the years by a steady stream of plunder as the Venetians abused their control over their part of the city. Studies of the documentary records and evidence from what actually survives in Venice allow us to compile a list of the loot. First, there were the sacred relics which Constantinople, as the capital of a Christian empire, had accumulated over the previous nine centuries. Dandolo himself is associated with the choice and removal of the head of John the Baptist, drops of Christ’s blood, a nail from his cross, part of the pillar at which he was flagellated, St George’s arm, and a cross carried into battle by the emperor Constantine. (Another relic, the crown of thorns, was used as security for a loan to the crusaders until the saintly King Louis IX of France was persuaded to redeem it. He housed it magnificently in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.)

  Among the bodies of saints that were dispatched to Venice in the next few years were those of St Lucia, St Agatha, St Symeon, St Anastasius, St Paul the Martyr – even, according to some reports, St Helena, the mother of Constantine (although, unlike most of the others, this cannot be traced in Venice). Then there were other items of treasure: jewelled caskets, precious vessels, even ancient Egyptian vases of polished stone, which were probably chosen because of their quality and rarity and the ease w
ith which they could be shipped home. These treasures, many of them pagan, came to rest with the relics in the Treasury of St Mark’s. Other treasures of pagan origin were taken to Venice and then transformed into Christian symbols. A head of the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC) was joined to a Roman torso to form the statue of St Theodore which, as described earlier in this chapter, was later placed with his symbol, a crocodile, on one of the ancient columns from Alexandria in the Piazzetta. The neighbouring column was topped by a winged lion of St Mark which was created from a chimaera brought from Constantinople, possibly of Persian origin and dating from perhaps 300 BC, to which wings were added by the Venetians. Then, in the established tradition of finding marble to embellish Venetian buildings, there were superior ‘building materials’. Two finely decorated columns, later to be placed at the southern entrance of St Mark’s, where they still stand, came from the sixth-century church of St Polyeuktos which, although disused by the twelfth century, had originally been one of the most sumptuous in Constantinople. Excavations in modern Istanbul have discovered similar carvings on the site of the church and have also shown that it was stripped of its marble at just about the time of the Venetian conquest. Then there was a mass of sculptured reliefs, depicting subjects ranging from Hercules to the Christian saints, and pieces of beautiful marble from Santa Sophia and other churches. (The Dandolo family allocated much of the marble to the rebuilding of their family palace in Venice.) With all this went a set of bronze doors, datable to the sixth century, which were to be placed in the central doorway of St Mark’s. The Venetians knew quality when they saw it.