potential rivals in the Adriatic before sailing to Cairo, as this was in line with Venetian crusading tradition. Instead, he went so far as to use the crusading army to conquer the city of Zara.31 He did support both diversions as a means for the crusaders to pay off their debts to Venice; one central thesis of Madden’s work emphasizes the lack of his legal authority as doge to forgive those debts without such a solution.32 The recasting of Alexius and Isaac Angelos as perjurers only occurred after the Angeloi had been overthrown, since they had started as allies. Venetian secular accounts of the Fourth Crusade would come to include an invented papal directive to assault Constantinople, but Dandolo’s core argument did not rely on rewriting history or trying to alter papal perceptions.33 Instead, the concept of God’s will superveniente, which Andrea translates as “overtaking events,” reveals Dandolo’s hermeneutic.34 Events happened. Dandolo could justify his decisions, but such justifications were unnecessary, he claimed. With God’s will “overtaking” those events, the matter was moot. Dandolo did not admit to wrongdoing. He did not ask for forgiveness (Capuano had already absolved him, after all). He asked only for a favorable hearing of his petition. Later, the translatio texts of the Fourth Crusade would follow Dandolo’s approach to addressing morally questionable deeds: deny, blame the Greeks, admit sin when necessary, and invoke divine will. If God had worked a miracle to give Constantinople to the crusaders, should not the pope now treat Dandolo, one of God’s instruments in the affair, generously?
And the victory did seem to be a miracle. Before 1204, Constantinople had never fallen to an outside army. It is true that the Latins were greatly helped by internal dissension, but the city fell chiefly because French and Venetian soldiers made it over the walls. Only after this assault did the Greek army take flight.35 For the crusaders, the success of the whole venture (and the promise it seemed to indicate for future crusades) proved that the deviation was part of God’s providential plan. Medieval authors often argued that God’s plan unfolds through otherwise disagreeable events, a theme to which authors of the hagiographies of 1204 frequently returned.36 Dandolo turned Innocent’s conceptual framework back on the pontiff. Innocent had never denied the presence of God in the conquest of Constantinople; instead, he set himself up as the arbiter of the meaning of God’s presence. Dandolo offered an alternative interpretation.
In responding to the March Pact, the papacy tried to remain firm on certain points while otherwise staying positive and optimistic. The pope found much in which to rejoice when considering the new empire, despite any “confusion” about what should be “rendered” to the Church. Innocent’s writings suggest that he believed, in an apocalyptic sense, that the shocking conquest of Constantinople signified salvation for the Holy Land.37 His letter to the clergy of the crusade in November 1204, produced at the same time that he wrote his first official letter to Emperor Baldwin, contains a wondrous and complex invocation of both the Old and New Testament, including the book of Revelation. This letter argues that once the Greeks enter the Roman Church, “all Israel shall be saved.”38 The invocation of Revelation and the direct link between the conquest of Constantinople and the coming Judgment places the letter firmly in the category of apocalyptic writing. Innocent wrote that God, through the crusaders, had brought the reunification of Christendom to “divine completion.” That reunification was a prerequisite for the salvation of the Holy Land, itself a prerequisite for the end of days. For all this to come to pass, however, Innocent concluded that the new kingdom must be stable and that the Greeks must truly be converted. Only the Apostolic See of Rome could make sure this happened.39 Thus, Innocent’s letter, like Dandolo’s, contains an early attempt at control over the interpretation of the meaning of the conquest.
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