by Robert Payne
The doge at this time was Enrico Dandolo, descended from one of the most illustrious Venetian families. He had lost the full use of his eyes in an accident in Constantinople and thereafter came to hate the city.
The six envoys were politely welcomed in the Doge’s Palace. After briefly explaining their purpose, they were told to wait for four days until the doge could assemble “the Council of Six,” who would listen to their request at greater length. This delay enabled Dandolo to make enquiries about the envoys through his extensive intelligence service, and to study their behavior in Venice.
On the fourth day the envoys were received by the council. “They had come,” they said, “on behalf of the high barons of France who had taken the sign of the Cross to avenge the shame of Jesus Christ and to reconquer Jerusalem, if God wills it.” The reference to the battle cry of the First Crusade was clear and precise. They asked the doge to act with diligence and to come up with a figure within their means; they were told to come back in eight days.
The doge had twelve days in all to study the envoys and their request. They wanted transport for forty-five hundred horses, nine thousand squires, forty-five hundred knights and twenty thousand foot soldiers, together with fodder and provisions for nine months. He named his price: four marks for a horse and two marks for a man. The total sum, therefore, was eighty-five thousand marks. In addition, the doge promised to provide fifty armed galleys, on condition that Venice would share equally with the Crusaders whatever territory or treasure they succeeded in capturing. The envoys spent the night discussing the proposal, and in the morning they agreed to the harsh terms.
After a high mass at St. Mark’s, attended by thousands of Venetians, the doge invited Villehardouin to speak. He said they had been commanded, as envoys of the baron, to fall on their knees in supplication to the people of Venice. Whereupon the six envoys knelt before the high altar, tears streaming down their faces, their hands lifted in the traditional attitude of suppliants. This was playacting of a not very subtle kind, rehearsed and choreographed, in a brilliant setting, in the light of candles and the gleaming mosaics on the walls. The doge advanced toward them, lifting them up one by one, like a king bestowing mercy, and according to Villehardouin he was weeping with tears of joy. Soon all the people in the church were weeping excitedly, waving their arms, and shouting, “We consent! We consent!” “There was such a great tumult and uproar that it was as though the earth was being torn asunder,” Villehardouin wrote many years later.
We have no reason to believe that he exaggerated the importance of the occasion. He, together with the blind doge, was responsible for the solemn covenant that was signed on the following day. On that day, too, it was announced to the grand council that the Crusade would sail for Cairo, because Cairo offered the best opportunity for destroying Turks, but the general public was not to be informed that the Crusade was bound for Egypt: the public would be told only that the Crusaders would be going overseas. The Venetians had very good reasons for not publicizing the fact that the fleet was bound for Cairo.
They drove a hard bargain: the entire sum of eighty-five thousand marks was to be paid in installments, the last payment of fifty thousand marks to be paid at the end of April, 1202, a year after the covenant was signed. The first payment of fifteen thousand marks was due on August 1, 1201, the second of ten thousand marks on November 1, and the third of ten thousand on February 20, 1202, the Day of the Purification of the Virgin. It was agreed that the Crusaders should set sail on the Day of St. Peter and St. Paul, June 29, 1202, more than a year away, unless the date would be changed by common consent.
There was more weeping when the doge presented the covenant to the councillors. The doge wept; the envoys wept; someone brought holy relics into the council chamber and everyone swore, in the presence of the relics, to observe the terms of the covenant. Messengers were sent to Rome with a copy of the covenant for the pope’s approval.
When Villehardouin returned to France to give the good news to Thibault, Count of Champagne, he was horrified to discover that the count could not possibly lead the Crusade. He was dying. Still, Thibault was so overjoyed that arrangements had been made for the Crusade that he rose from his deathbed and mounted a horse. It was the last time he ever rode on horseback. He died a few days later, leaving in his will a sum of money to be spent as the leaders of the Crusade saw fit and another sum to be divided among friends who had promised to join the Crusade. Villehardouin observed bitterly that a surprisingly large number accepted the money but did not join the Crusade.
With the death of Thibault, Villehardouin sought another great lord to replace him. He went with a small delegation to Odo, Duke of Burgundy, urging him to accept command of the Crusade. The duke refused. Geoffrey of Joinville was sent as an envoy to Thibault, Count of Bar-le-Duc, who also refused. A parliament was held at Soissons to discuss whom they should approach. Villehardouin, who had taken upon himself so many burdens on behalf of the Crusade, suggested that Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, would be an excellent candidate. He had met the marquis somewhere in Italy while he was journeying from Venice to Troyes and he seems to have known already that the marquis would enjoy leading the Crusade. “If you should ask him to come here,” he declared before the parliament, “and if he should take the sign of the cross and assume the place of the Count of Champagne, and if you should offer him command of the army, he would take it soon enough.”
What was needed, in Villehardouin’s eyes, was a man of commanding presence, experienced in arms, belonging to a high order of nobility, perhaps having a connection with the royal House of Jerusalem. The marquis seemed to fulfill all these requirements. His eldest brother, William Long-Sword, had married Sibylla, the daughter of King Amaury of Jerusalem, and fathered King Baldwin V. Another brother, Renier, had married Maria, the daughter of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, who had given him the deeds to the Little Kingdom of Thessalonica. Renier had died of poisoning in Constantinople. A third brother, Conrad, had preceded Henry, Count of Champagne, as the husband of Queen Isabelle of Jerusalem. All Boniface’s brothers were now dead, and he was the inheritor of the marquisate. He had close ties with both Constantinople and the Holy Land.
But where his brothers were strong, Boniface was weak: he was one who would inevitably choose his own advantage above the public good. He was about fifty, given to easy living, gracious toward women and to poets, whom he cultivated at his court, and without any more military experience than could be obtained by skirmishes in Sicily or by stamping out the communes of Lombardy. Villehardouin was attracted to the splendor of his name and person; he could scarcely have chosen a man less capable of leading the Crusade.
In August 1201, Boniface attended the parliament at Soissons to be invested with the command of the Crusade. Some of the ceremonies took place in the orchard belonging to the abbey of Our Lady of Soissons. Boniface promised faithfully to accept the heavy burden now laid on him, and the bishop of Soissons, who had also taken the Cross, then attached the little square of cloth, with the cross sewn on it, to his shoulder. Boniface turned to the assembled counts and barons and asked them where they intended that he should lead the Crusade. They answered that it would be directed against Alexandria or Cairo because these places were “in the very midst of things and where most could be done.” Boniface agreed. He appears not to have heard of the solemn covenant made with the doge for conveying the Crusaders to the East, for he immediately spoke about sending envoys to Genoa, Pisa, and Venice to see where suitable ships could be found. Half the fifty thousand livres left by the count of Champagne toward payment for the Crusade was now given to Boniface to do with as he saw fit.
By this time the Crusade had acquired its own momentum, its own purpose, and its own ambiguities. Its leader was ignorant and almost insanely proud, without faith, without scruples, without remorse. He would lead the Crusaders where he wanted to lead them.
Like many totally unscrupulous people, Boniface could be played upon by those who were
equally unscrupulous; the doge of Venice learned, without too much sorrow, that all the wealth of the Crusaders did not amount to the sum needed for renting and provisioning the ships. By the terms of the shipping agreement the Crusaders were lacking thirty-four thousand silver marks. Instead of paying this sum, the Crusaders were required to help capture the city of Zara, which had rebelled against Venice and now belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary. Zara was a large and important seaport, two hundred miles southeast of Venice on the Adriatic coast, which had previously served as a supply base for the Venetian fleet. Since Zara was rich, the contents of its treasury would serve to balance the Crusaders’ budget, and there would be a good deal left over for the Venetians.
The pope heard of the secret agreement and protested vigorously. It was an unconscionable offense against morality for a Christian city to be attacked by a Crusader fleet. His protests went unheard. The doge, and the Venetians with him, had often angered the pope without suffering any dire consequences. In a state of great excitement, before a high mass in the Church of St. Mark, the doge himself ostentatiously took the Cross, and proclaimed himself the leader of the expedition. At that moment power-real power—had slipped from the Crusaders. The blind doge commanded. The Crusade, which had begun with the young and idealistic count of Champagne, was now falling into the hands of the doge, a man of extraordinary willpower and immense ability, who surpassed the marquis of Montferrat in the arts of war and conspiracy. He was the war leader, but he had not the least intention of attacking Cairo or of aiding the shattered Kingdom of Jerusalem or of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre. His single aim was to establish an empire under the Republic of Venice, which would permit the Venetians to become “Lords and Masters of a Quarter and a Half-quarter of the Roman Empire.” In all this he succeeded brilliantly, and in doing it, he destroyed the Crusade.
The doge had a flair for the drama of conquest. For the Crusaders he became a legend, a mysterious and powerful force capable of commanding the destiny of kingdoms and empires.
About this time another mysterious and powerful force stepped on the stage briefly. The young Prince Alexius Angelus was the son of the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II. The brother of the emperor, also called Alexius, had been ransomed from Turkish captivity, and on his arrival in Constantinople he promptly seized the emperor, blinded him, and threw him into prison. One Alexius became emperor and the other, a fugitive, made his way to Italy and then to Germany, to the court of Philip of Swabia, who had married his sister. Then he settled in Verona, proclaiming himself the rightful emperor. He sent messages to the marquis of Montferrat and to other Crusading princes at Venice, urging them to help him regain his father’s throne, promising great rewards from the treasury of Byzantium.
Prince Alexius Angelus thus provided with superb timing the provocation the doge and the marquis had been looking for. The young prince soon offered a prospectus of the coming rewards. He would offer the Crusaders the money they needed to pay the Venetians, he would assume the entire cost of the conquest of Egypt, and he would provide an army of ten thousand Byzantine soldiers and pay for the maintenance of five hundred knights. Finally, he offered to ensure that the Orthodox Church would submit to Rome. This last offer, if it had been carried out, would have plunged Constantinople into civil war. These breathtaking offers came from a mind at least as conspiratorial as the minds of the doge and the marquis. They were calculated to please the pope and the entire Crusading host. The pope, who had met the young prince and found him to be a braggart and a nincompoop, was not averse to receiving the submission of the Orthodox Church. But he was averse to bloodshed, and wrote that it was intolerable that Christians should kill Christians except under exceptional circumstances. In the eyes of the doge and the marquis, now firmly committed to the destruction of Zara and the sack of Constantinople, the “exceptional circumstances” already existed.
The Christian army, now fretting under close guard on the island of Lido, knew nothing about this. They were being manipulated by the doge, the marquis and a Byzantine prince. Most of the knights and foot soldiers believed they would be sailing to Egypt or the Holy Land. Because there were signs that the Crusade was about to begin, the soldiers on the island of Lido tied torches to their lances and paraded around their camp.
But there were more delays. The doge was in a conquering mood, and he decided that the time had come to demand the submission of Trieste and Moglie. Accordingly, part of the Venetian fleet set sail for these cities; they were invested and, finally, they surrendered. Only when they returned could the combined fleet attack Zara. Robert of Clari, standing on the poop of one of the great galleys, was overwhelmed by the sight of the great fleet sailing down the Adriatic, led by the galley of the doge, painted in bright vermilion with a canopy of vermilion silk spread over his throne, the drummers beating on their drums and four trumpeters sounding the notes that could be employed only in the doge’s honor. The noise was deafening, for there were a hundred more trumpeters on the other vessels. When the trumpets died down, the priests and clerks sang Veni creator spiritus, weeping with joy at the prospect of sailing to the Holy Land. Even at this late stage there were very few who were in on the secret.
Long before the fleet dropped anchor in the harbor, the people of Zara had been warned of the coming invasion. They had taken precautions. The walled city had crosses set up along the whole length of the walls, to remind the invaders that the city belonged to Christians. In addition, they acquired from the pope a formal statement that anyone who made war on them would be excommunicated. With its strong walls and its navy, Zara could, in the ordinary course of events, keep invaders at bay, but the Crusader fleet led by the doge represented force on a massive, unprecedented scale. The Zarians saw they would have to capitulate. The doge had set up a pavilion outside the walls, and here came ambassadors from the city, offering to surrender on condition that their lives be spared. The doge was not content with their answer. The people must be punished for having deserted the Venetian cause; a suitable number of people must be massacred, a vast indemnity must be paid, Zara must never again be in a position where it could defy the power of Venice.
The chiefs of the Crusading army were of two minds: those who had no trouble with their conscience were all for attacking Zara; those with a more tender conscience asked themselves how they could avoid taking part in the conflict. What the Crusading soldiers thought of making war against a city whose battlements were crowned with crosses may only be guessed at, but they cannot have been pleased to discover that they had been lured into an adventure over which they had no control whatsoever.
The attack on the city was organized by the Venetians, who brought up wooden towers and mangonels for hurling huge stones at the city walls. Sappers mined the walls. From the masts of ships in the harbor, ladders reached out to the top of the walls. For five days the Venetians battered the city into submission; the city fathers, realizing that further resistance was impossible, surrendered. Their property and valuables now belonged to the conquerors, who formally entered the city and took possession of it. The Venetians kept the lion’s share: the port, the warehouses, the shipyards, and the ships. To the Crusaders was granted the rest of the town, and they lodged in the houses of the citizens, who were reduced to slaves. Three days later, toward evening, the Crusaders, feeling that they might be the next victims, because they were hemmed in by the Venetians, rose in rebellion, and attacked the Venetians wherever they could find them. There was scarcely a street in Zara where there was not fierce fighting with swords, lances, crossbows, and javelins. The fighting lasted all night. By morning the doge and the Crusader knights had established a kind of peace, but there was sporadic fighting for another week. The expedition was in danger of wasting all its energies in civil war within a conquered city. “This was the greatest misfortune to overtake the army,” wrote Villehardouin, “and it very nearly resulted in the total loss of the army. But God would not suffer it.”
By harsh measures the rebellion was stamped o
ut, the doge reestablished his position as commander, and two weeks later Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, arrived to conduct discussions with the doge. A few days later, Philip of Swabia, brother-in-law of Alexius, sent a message to Boniface with the terms of a treaty to be agreed upon by Alexius and the leaders of the expeditionary force. The treaty was not signed immediately, and was kept secret until the last possible moment. The Crusading soldiers had no way of knowing what was happening, but they were restless and querulous in their winter quarters, while supplies ran low and there were limits to the exploitation of the Zarians.
Villehardouin, who consistently took the side of the doge, says there were forces at work to disband the Crusading army. Five hundred soldiers escaped from Zara by ship, and Villehardouin notes with satisfaction that the ship capsized and they were all drowned. Others escaped into the hinterland, and again Villehardouin notes with satisfaction that the peasants massacred them. In order to escape from Zara, some knights begged to be allowed to go to Syria on an embassy in one of the vessels belonging to the fleet; they never returned. Villehardouin was incensed by their ingratitude. The army was rapidly dwindling, for the good reason that the soldiers did not trust their commanders, and because the papal ban of excommunication was taken very seriously indeed. Accordingly, four ambassadors, two knights and two clerks, were sent to Rome to urge the pope to grant absolution to the conquerors of Zara. In a moment of weakness the pope granted it.
The long winter was followed by a short spring. Alexius arrived at Zara on April 25 and was received with the honors due an emperor. He seems to have been a youth of about fourteen, handsome, modest, easily manipulated. With his coming, there was no longer any doubt that the doge was determined to sack Constantinople as he had sacked Zara, using the young claimant to the Byzantine throne merely as a tool. The huge fleet, led by the doge’s vermilion galley, sailed out of Zara with a fair wind, while the pipers and the trumpeters filled the air with their tumultuous music. They put in at Durazzo for provisions, and here, according to Villehardouin, Alexius received the acclamation of the people as the true emperor of Byzantium. Then they put in at Corfu, where the army rested in tents and the horses were removed from the transports and put out to pasture.