I am an old and weak man and am in need of rest – my body is failing.” There was a pause. “But I see that no one knows how to lead and command you as I, your lord, can do.” His voice grew louder: “If you are willing to consent to my taking the sign of the cross in order to protect and guide you, while my son stays here to defend this land in my place, I will go to live or die with you and the pilgrims!”1111
Geoffrey of Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, in Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Caroline Smith (Penguin, 2008), 20.
The congregation erupted in cheers. Dandolo descended from the pulpit, weeping, and went down on his knees before the high altar, which stood over the tomb of Saint Mark. His ceremonial hat was removed and a cross was sewn onto it, where it would be easily visible.1212 A crowd of Venetians who had previously been reluctant to commit to the crusade knelt with their doge before the Evangelist. “Come with us!” the congregation shouted, as the church bells rang out.1313
Crusaders normally wore a cross on the shoulder of their cloak or tunic.
Geoffrey of Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, 20.
Enrico Dandolo had become doge in 1192 and was continuing the civic reforms of his predecessors, in which his father, Vitale, had played a major part as both counselor and diplomat. Sovereign authority was vested in the Great Council, consisting of elected representatives of the citizens. The council chose officials to serve for short periods of time advising the executive on domestic policy and overseeing diplomatic and military activities, and it appointed the committee that would elect the doge. The process for choosing a doge had evolved over centuries, and the system developed under Dandolo and codified in 1268 would remain in place until the end of the republic in 1797. It was lengthy and complex, involving ten successive votes by select groups of wellborn men over the age of thirty. The whole system appears designed to limit the power of the doge and to ensure that successful candidates had broad support among the qualified voters.1414 Venice was an oligarchy, with voting rights increasingly restricted to wealthy and noble citizens. While its government may not have been widely inclusive, it did have the virtue of concentrating power in the hands of those with the largest stake in maintaining Venice’s prosperity and independence, and they tended to be highly educated.
The doge’s powers are specifically described in Dandolo’s oath of office, which can be found translated in Thomas F. Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (Johns Hopkins, 2003), 96–98.
The Venetians’ decision to supply and bankroll the Fourth Crusade was not exclusively inspired by piety, and they demanded a say in the strategy in return. The existing plan to reach the Holy Land by first attacking the Muslims in Egypt did not really benefit the city. Dandolo was more interested in picking off trade competitors than in attacking trade partners in Alexandria, even if those partners were infidels. The Venetians observed that the passage to Egypt would be dangerous with winter approaching, and they recommended spending the cold months at Zara, a city on the Dalmatian coast that was once a client of Venice but had recently rebelled. Dandolo personally led the charge against Zara in a scarlet galley with gorgeous silk hangings, and with attendants who signaled his instructions to the other vessels on trumpets of solid silver. When they captured Zara in November 1202, it marked the first time that Catholic crusaders attacked people of their own faith, and it earned them excommunication by Pope Innocent III.
The company may not have been aware of this action by the pope when they sailed on to Constantinople. In any case, relations between Venice and the Byzantine Empire had been deteriorating since the Great Schism of 1054 formally divided the Eastern and Western churches, though the reasons were not all theological. Venetians continued to trade with Constantinople and resented incursions into their trade monopoly by rivals (particularly Genoa and Pisa). But they also resented the high-handed treatment of their merchants by the Byzantines, who viewed foreigners as greedy upstarts.
Doge Dandolo had not forgotten the unpleasantness of his diplomatic mission to Constantinople three decades earlier, nor the death of his father there on another failed mission two years afterward. He was therefore receptive to a scheme proposed by Alexius Angelus, the exiled son of the emperor Isaac II Angelus. Isaac had been deposed and blinded by his own brother, also named Alexius. The younger Alexius claimed that he should be emperor by hereditary right, and he promised to pay the crusaders generously if they threw out his uncle, Alexius III, and installed him on the throne. And so the crusaders sailed not for Jerusalem but for the capital of the Byzantine Empire, arriving at its gates in June 1203.
Constantinople: April 12, 1204
“The Queen of Cities” made an awesome sight. It was ten times the size of Venice, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants at the time, while Constantinople had half a million. Its triangular site was bounded on two sides by water, while the third was guarded by some three and a half miles of fortified masonry walls dating back to the fifth century. The city boasted hundreds of churches, huge palaces, libraries, bath complexes, race tracks and amphitheaters that had survived for hundreds of years in proud testimony to the fact that no invader had ever breached its defenses. In Rome, such things had been reduced to rubble.
The crusaders had been in the vicinity of the imperial city for nearly a year, and their patience was wearing thin. At first, things had gone according to plan because the lazy and ineffective emperor Alexius III had not adequately prepared for their arrival. Doge Dandolo led the initial charge, roaring orders from the prow of his galley and ramming the vessel aground in front of the walls, with the banner of Saint Mark streaming over him.1515
Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice, 161.
Dandolo had hoped the Byzantines would rise up in support of the younger Alexius and the deed would be done with little fighting. Alexius III fled in due order, but his nephew, now Alexius IV, was greeted with apathy, and the city showed no signs of producing the hefty payment that had been promised to the crusaders. As negotiations dragged on, the Venetians grew suspicious that they had been dupes in yet another Byzantine plot.
Outside the city, skirmishes began between the Byzantines and the crusaders, or Latins as they were called. Alexius IV was deposed by one of his own nobles and thrown into prison, where he was eventually strangled. The fighting escalated until Constantinople was under siege, and finally the walls were breached.
Thousands of enraged (and starving) crusaders rampaged through the city, which was quickly engulfed in flames thanks to the ceramic vessels of “Greek fire” that were delivered from the Venetian ships by catapult. This highly incendiary substance had once been a Byzantine secret, but now it was turned against the empire. The Byzantines who were not cut down started to flee in large numbers as the Latins divided their time between rape, plunder and devastation. At Hagia Sophia, a prostitute was seated in the high chair of the Orthodox patriarch, where she sang a dirty song and drank wine out of a communion goblet. Anything of value disappeared into the flames, the official inventory of plunder, or the pockets of individual crusaders.
Tintoretto, The Conquest of Constantinople in 1204, 1584.
After three days, some semblance of order returned, although the city was almost unrecognizable – a burned-out shell with a shadow of its former population. The leaders of the crusade began divvying up the spoils, with Venice receiving three-quarters of the booty by prior agreement. This massive haul justified Dandolo’s support for the expedition from the Venetian perspective, even as the rest of the Latin West was shocked at the ravaging of Constantinople by fellow Christians.
Within weeks, the
