Under Innocent, the medieval Papacy attained the height of its power and prestige. He had ascended the papal throne in 1198, and during the nineteen years of his pontificate he presided over two separate Crusades. One of them–if we are to be strictly chronological, it was in fact the later–was of relatively little international importance, being largely confined to southwestern France. Its objective was to stamp out the Albigensian heretics, otherwise known as the Cathars, who professed the Manichaean belief that the two opposing principles of good and evil are constantly struggling for supremacy. The material world is evil; man’s task is to free his spirit, which is by its nature good, and to restore it to communion with God. This could be achieved only by a life of extreme austerity, avoiding all worldliness and corruption as exemplified by the Catholic Church.
Clearly, such a doctrine struck right to the heart of orthodox Christianity and of the political and pastoral institutions of Christendom, and Innocent moved vigorously against it. In 1209 he ordered the Cistercians to preach a Crusade. It continued throughout the century, though the Cathars never recovered from the capture in 1244 of their great stronghold of Montségur in the foothills of the Pyrenees, after which they were forced underground. By the time the heresy was at last stamped out, Provence, the Languedoc and much of the southwest had been ravaged, many of the inhabitants massacred in cold blood, and the brilliant Provençal civilisation of the troubadours destroyed.
The other Crusade was that which we know as the Fourth. The lack of crowned heads to lead it worried the Pope not a jot; previous experience had shown that kings and princes, stirring up as they invariably did national rivalries and endless questions of precedence and protocol, tended to be more trouble than they were worth. Far more serious were the problems of logistics. Coeur-de-Lion, before leaving Palestine, had given it as his opinion that the weakest point of the Muslim east was Egypt, to which any future expeditions should therefore be directed. It followed that the new army would have to travel by sea, and would need transport in a quantity that could be obtained from one source only: the Republic of Venice.
Thus it was that during the first week of Lent in the year 1201, a party of six knights led by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, arrived in Venice. They made their request at a special meeting of the Maggior Consiglio, and a week later received their answer. The Republic would provide transport for 4,500 knights with their horses, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry, with food for nine months. In addition Venice would provide fifty fully-equipped galleys at her own expense, on condition that she received one-half of the territories conquered. The price would be 84,000 silver marks.
This reply was conveyed to Geoffrey and his colleagues by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo. In all Venetian history there is no more astonishing figure. We cannot be sure of his age when, on 1 January 1193, he was raised to the ducal throne; the story goes that he was eighty-five and already stone-blind, though this seems hardly credible when we read of his energy–indeed, his heroism–a decade later on the walls of Constantinople. But even if he was only in his middle seventies, at the time of the Fourth Crusade he would have been an octogenarian of several years’ standing. He carefully glossed over the fact that his ambassadors were at that very moment in Cairo negotiating a highly profitable trade agreement, as part of which they had almost certainly undertaken not to be party to any attack on Egyptian territory; it was agreed simply that the Crusaders should meet in Venice on the feast of St John, 24 June 1202, when the fleet would be ready for them.
On that day, the number gathered on the Lido under their new leader, the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, numbered less than a third of what had been expected. In some, their enthusiasm for the cause had simply evaporated; others, doubtless, had yielded to family pressures; yet others had heard of the true destination of the Crusade and, seeing Jerusalem as the only legitimate goal, had declined to waste their time anywhere else. With their numbers so drastically reduced, the Crusaders could not hope to pay the Venetians the money they had promised. They did what they could, but there was a shortfall of 34,000 marks. As soon as Dandolo had satisfied himself that there was no more to be got, he came forward with an offer. Zara (the modern Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast) had recently fallen into the hands of the King of Hungary. If the Crusaders would help Venice to recapture it, settlement of the debt might be postponed.
And so, on 8 November 1202, the army of the Fourth Crusade set sail from Venice–480 ships, led by the galley of the Doge himself, which, according to the French Crusader and chronicler Rober of Clary, was ‘painted vermilion, with a silken vermilion awning spread above, cymbals clashing and four trumpeters sounding from the bows’. A week later, Zara was taken and sacked. Fighting broke out almost at once between the Franks and the Venetians over the division of the spoils, and when order was finally restored the two groups settled in different quarters of the city for the winter. Before long news of what had happened reached the Pope; outraged, he excommunicated the entire expedition.
Worse was to follow. Early in the new year a messenger arrived with a letter to Boniface from Philip of Swabia, youngest son of Frederick Barbarossa. Philip had married the daughter of the unfortunate Emperor Isaac, who had been dethroned by Alexius III. Isaac’s young son, however–confusingly, he was also called Alexius–had escaped from the prison in which he and his father were being held and had taken refuge with Philip. Philip’s proposal was simple enough: if the Crusade would escort the young Alexius to Constantinople and enthrone him there in the place of his usurper uncle, Alexius for his part would finance the subsequent conquest of Egypt, supplying in addition 10,000 soldiers of his own and afterwards maintaining 500 knights in the Holy Land at his own expense. He would also submit the Church of Constantinople to the authority of Rome.
To both Boniface and Doge Dandolo, the scheme had much to recommend it; most of their followers, too, were only too happy to lend themselves to a plan which promised to strengthen and enrich the Crusade–enabling it, incidentally, to pay off the debt to Venice–while also restoring the unity of Christendom. So it was that on 24 June 1203, a year to the day after the rendezvous in Venice, the Crusader fleet dropped anchor off Constantinople. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who wrote a highly readable account of the whole affair, reported:
You may imagine how they gazed, all those who had never before seen Constantinople. For when they saw those high ramparts and the strong towers with which it was completely encircled, and the splendid palaces and soaring churches–so many that but for the evidence of their own eyes they would never have believed it–and the length and the breadth of that city which of all others is sovereign, they never thought that there could be so rich and powerful a place on earth. And mark you that there was not a man so bold that he did not tremble at the sight; nor was this any wonder, for never since the creation of the world was there so great an enterprise.
To begin with, the Crusaders met with remarkably little opposition. On 5 July they landed below Galata, on the northeastern side of the Golden Horn. Being a commercial settlement largely occupied by foreign merchants, Galata was unwalled; its only major fortification was a single round tower. This was, however, of vital importance, because in it stood the huge windlass for the raising and lowering of the great iron chain that was used in emergencies to block the entrance to the Horn. The Byzantine garrison put up a spirited defence, but after twenty-four hours the Venetian sailors were able to unshackle the windlass, and the chain subsided thunderously into the water. The fleet swept in, quickly destroying such few seaworthy Byzantine vessels as it found in the inner harbour. The naval victory was complete.
Constantinople, however, was not yet taken. The walls that ran along the shore of the Golden Horn could not compare with the tremendous land ramparts on the western side, but they could still be staunchly defended. The Crusaders directed their attack against the weakest point, where these two defences met, at the extreme northwest corner of the city near the imperial palace of Blachernae.
The first attempt–by the Franks–to make a landing was driven back; it was the Venetians who decided the day–and, to a considerable degree, Enrico Dandolo in person. The story of his courage is told by Geoffrey himself:
And here was an extraordinary feat of boldness. For the Duke of Venice, who was an old man and stone-blind, stood fully armed on the prow of his galley, with the banner of St Mark before him, and cried out to his men to drive the ship ashore if they valued their skins. And so they did, and ran the galley ashore, and he and they leaped down and planted the banner before him in the ground. And when the other Venetians saw the standard of St Mark and the Doge’s galley beached before their own, they were ashamed, and followed him ashore.
Before long, Byzantine resistance crumbled: the Crusaders poured through the breaches in the walls into the city itself, setting fire to the wooden houses until the whole quarter of Blachernae was ablaze. That evening Alexius III fled secretly from the city, leaving his wife and all his children–except a favourite daughter–to face the future as best they might.
Byzantium, at this gravest crisis in its history, could not long be left without an emperor: old Isaac Angelus was hastily fetched from his prison and replaced on the throne. But this was by no means the end of the affair. Thanks to his brother’s ministrations he was even blinder than the old Doge, and had already shown himself to be hopelessly incompetent; and there remained the undertakings made by his son Alexius to Boniface and Dandolo. Only when Isaac had made Alexius co-emperor with him–as Alexius IV–did the Crusaders accord him their formal recognition. They then withdrew to Galata to await their promised rewards.
These rewards, however, were not forthcoming. The imperial treasury was found to be empty; the clergy, already scandalised when Alexius began to seize and melt down their church plate, were incandescent with rage when they heard of his plans to subordinate them to Rome. The continued presence of the Franks, who had no intention of leaving until the Emperor fulfilled his promises, increased the tension still further. One night a group of them came upon a little mosque in the Saracen quarter behind the church of St Irene, pillaged it and burned it to ashes. The flames spread, and for the next two days Constantinople was engulfed in the worst fire since the days of Justinian, nearly seven centuries before. This disaster brought the already fraught situation to breaking point, and when a few days later the Emperor admitted to a delegation of Franks and Venetians that there was absolutely no prospect of their ever receiving the sum owed to them, the result was war.
Ironically enough, neither the Greeks nor the Franks wanted it. The former wished only to be rid of these uncivilised thugs once and for all; the latter had not forgotten the reason why they had left their homes, and increasingly resented their enforced stay among what they considered an effete and heretical people when they should have been getting to grips with the infidel. Even if the promised money were paid in full, they themselves would not benefit; it would only enable them to settle their own outstanding account with the Venetians. The key to the whole impossible affair lay, in short, with Venice–or, more accurately, with Enrico Dandolo. It was open to him at any moment to give his fleet the order to sail. Had he done so, the Crusaders would have been relieved and the Byzantines overjoyed. The fact that he did not was no longer anything to do with the Frankish debt. His mind had turned to greater things: the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of a Venetian puppet on the throne of Constantinople.
And so Dandolo’s advice to his Frankish allies took on a different tone. Nothing more, he pointed out, could be expected of the two hopeless co-emperors. If the Crusaders were ever to obtain their due, they would have to take Constantinople by force. Once inside the city, with one of their own leaders installed on the throne, they could pay Venice what they owed almost without noticing it and still have more than enough to finance the Crusade. This was their opportunity; they should seize it now, for it would not recur. It was a cogent argument, and it gained still greater strength when, on 25 January 1204, Alexius IV was deposed and shortly afterwards murdered, his old father following him with suspicious promptness to the grave. His murderer, a nobleman named Alexius Ducas–nicknamed Murzuphlus on account of his eyebrows, which were black and shaggy and met in the middle–was then crowned in St Sophia as Alexius V, and immediately began to show the qualities of leadership that the Empire had lacked for so long. Regiments of workmen were set to work, day and night, strengthening the defences and raising them ever higher. An all-out attempt on the city, if it were to be made at all, must clearly be made at once; now that the new Emperor had not only usurped the throne but had revealed himself as a murderer, the Crusaders were morally in an even stronger position than if they had moved against his predecessor, who had been at least legitimate as well as their erstwhile ally.
The attack began on Friday morning, 9 April 1204. Murzuphlus led a desperate resistance, but in vain. He in turn fled, and on the 12th the Franks and Venetians finally broke through the walls. The carnage was dreadful; even Villehardouin was appalled. Not for nothing had the army waited so long outside the world’s richest capital; now that it was theirs and the customary three days’ looting was allowed them, they fell on it like locusts. Never since the barbarian invasions had Europe witnessed such an orgy of vandalism and brutality; never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been so wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time. A Greek eye-witness, Nicetas Choniates, wrote:
They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed to mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour…As for their profanation of the Great Church, it cannot be thought of without horror. They destroyed the high altar, a work of art admired by the entire world, and shared out the pieces among themselves…And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.
A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place…nor was there mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God…In the streets, houses and churches there could be heard only cries and lamentations.
And these men, he continues, carried the Cross on their shoulders, the Cross on which they had sworn to pass through Christian lands without bloodshed, to take arms only against the heathen and to abstain from the pleasures of the flesh until their holy task was done.
After three days of terror, order was restored and the Crusaders applied themselves to their next task: the election of a new Emperor. Boniface of Montferrat would have been the obvious candidate, but his association with the deposed Alexius IV had been too close, and he now found himself to some degree discredited. Besides, he had secret links with the Genoese, and Dandolo knew it. The old Doge had no difficulty in steering the electoral commission–half of which was made up of Venetians–towards Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, who was duly crowned on 16 May in St Sophia. But the dominions over which he was to reign were to be dramatically reduced. Already in March the Venetians and the Franks together had agreed that he should retain only a quarter of the city and the Empire, the remaining three-quarters to be divided equally between Venice and the Crusading knights. Dandolo consequently appropriated for the Republic the entire district surrounding St Sophia, down to the Golden Horn; for the rest, he took all those regions that promised to strengthen Venice’s mastery of the Mediterranean and to give her an unbroken chain of trading colonies and ports from the Lagoon to the Black Sea. They included Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and Durazzo (now Dürres); the western coast of the Greek mainland and the Ionian Islands; all the Peloponnese; the islands of Naxos and Andros, and two cities of Euboea;
the chief ports on the Hellespont and the Marmara, Gallipoli, Rhaedestum and Heraclea; the Thracian seaboard, the city of Adrianople and finally–after a brief negotiation with Boniface–the all-important island of Crete. For all this the Doge was specifically absolved from doing the Emperor homage. The harbours and islands would belong to Venice absolutely, but where mainland Greece was concerned, Dandolo made it clear that as a mercantile republic Venice had no interest in occupying more than the key ports.
Thus it emerges beyond all doubt that it was the Venetians who were the real beneficiaries of the Fourth Crusade, and that their success was due, almost exclusively, to Enrico Dandolo. Refusing the Byzantine crown for himself–to have accepted it would have created insuperable constitutional problems in Venice and might even have brought down the Republic–he had ensured the success of his own candidate. Finally, while encouraging the Franks to feudalise the Empire–a step which he knew could not fail to create fragmentation and disunity and would prevent its ever becoming strong enough to obstruct Venetian expansion–he had kept Venice outside the feudal framework, holding her new dominions not as an imperial fief but by her own right of conquest. For a blind man not far short of ninety it was a remarkable achievement.
Enrico Dandolo–who now proudly styled himself ‘Lord of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Roman Empire’–had deserved well of his city; but in the wider context of world events he was a disaster. The Fourth Crusade–if indeed it can be so described, for it never entered Muslim territory–surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. Constantinople in the twelfth century was the most intellectually and artistically cultivated metropolis of the world, and the chief repository of Europe’s classical heritage, both Greek and Roman. By its sack, Western civilisation suffered a loss far greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century–perhaps the most catastrophic single loss in all history.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 19