The authors of medieval translatio narratives wrote with a profound sense of the community in which they were operating. The community provided these authors with inspiration, audience, guidance, and even funding. As I bring my work on this book to a close, I find myself deeply aware of the debts that I owe to my family, friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutions.
The project owes much to the comments and advice from Alfred Andrea, Bernard Bachrach, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Michael Lower, Susan Noakes, Thomas Madden, Kathryn Reyerson, Jay Rubenstein, Susanna Throop, John Watkins, Brett Whalen, and Diana Wright. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous readers for the Pennsylvania State University Press, as well as to my editor, Ellie Goodman, and to my copyeditor, Julie Schoelles, for their many useful suggestions. In the final stages of compiling the manuscript, I benefited from the assistance of an extraordinarily competent research assistant, Breeanna Watral. Special thanks go to my parents, Lewis and Elisabeth Israels Perry, who by now have become quite expert in medieval Venetian studies.
Funding for research trips to Italy and elsewhere was provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, the History Department at the University of Minnesota, and the Faculty Development Committee at Dominican University. The provost’s office and the Department of History at Dominican University provided support for image rights, maps, and indexing.
I am exceptionally grateful to Kathleen Rhoades, the interlibrary loan librarian at Dominican University, who made it possible for me to access books from libraries across North America and Europe. I am also grateful to the staffs at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidese in Milan, and the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives for their assistance. The Procuratoria of the Basilica of San Marco, the Patriarchate of Venice, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople all opened many doors for me along the way and periodically allowed me to photograph sacred objects.
Last, I would like to thank my family. The research and writing of this book has overlapped with my marriage to Shannon Leslie and the birth of my two children, Nicholas and Elisabeth. Miracles fill the medieval narratives that I study, but none seem as amazing as my family’s enduring love and support.
On April 12, 1204, around midday, a Venetian sailor leaped from the assault bridge of a massive ship called the Paradiso. He grasped the top of a tower on the seawall of Constantinople, where the blades of the Varangians and Byzantines made short work of him. His name is unknown. But as the waves drove the Paradiso against the walls a second time, a French knight, André d’Ureboise, clambered atop the tower. Managing to unsheathe his sword, he cleared a small space for his comrades as they climbed onto the battlements and claimed several towers. Inspired by this success, men from other ships emulated their heroic actions and surged atop the great walls. “Holy Sepulcher!” they cried.
Even with this foothold, the army of Latin-speaking soldiers had not yet won the day; hordes of Greeks still remained in battle dress at the foot of the great walls. But when an armed priest and crusader, Aleaumes of Clari, emerged from a small gate and brandished his sword, the Greek defenders at the scene fled. Soon, other units of the poorly trained Greek army abandoned the defense, followed by their emperor, Alexius V Doukas Mourtzouphlos. The next day, the Latins prepared to subdue the civilian population but instead found Greek citizens lining the streets, ready to welcome a new Latin emperor. The crusaders, however, had not yet chosen one, and without an emperor no single leader could keep the army in check. The troops overran the gathered citizens and the sack of Constantinople began.1
The battle of April 12 and the coronation of Count Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin emperor of Constantinople on May 16, 1204, closed the long, complex saga of the Fourth Crusade. This book concerns itself with the contest over memory and meaning that followed.
Here, I trace the ways in which that contest shaped the emergence, development, and cultural influence of a distinct body of hagiographical texts known as translatio narratives. These texts all describe the movement of relics from the East to the West in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. I argue that as the new Latin Empire failed to cohere, critics of the crusade, especially Pope Innocent III, blamed the failures on the loss of God’s favor and fixated on the looting of churches as the cause of this loss. Meanwhile, sacred plunder began arriving in the West, and the medieval traditions of translatio required beneficiaries of relics to craft valorizing counternarratives that placed these objects within local sacred geographies. In most cases, these beneficiaries, or the mostly anonymous hagiographers they commissioned, labored to memorialize their newly acquired relics so as to exempt them from broader scrutiny or criticism. In other cases, particularly within Venice and its expanding empire, the translatio narratives served broader cultural purposes. These relic-focused counternarratives and the interpretative modes they revealed played a key role in reshaping Venetian cultural development over the thirteenth century and beyond.
Going to Constantinople, let alone conquering it, was never part of the original plan for the crusade. In fact, the leaders of the crusade had commissioned a massive fleet from Venice in order to launch an amphibious assault upon Egypt. The crusaders and their sponsors hoped that the wealth of Egypt would sustain a campaign in the Holy Land and provide the means for regular resupply and reinforcement. But controversy and unanticipated challenges had dogged the enterprise since nearly the beginning. Despite innovative attempts to organize leadership, transportation, and financing so as to avoid problems of past crusades, the crusaders found themselves in debt, stuck in Venice, and commanded by a sometimes disorderly committee. Constantinople’s wealth eventually lured the crusaders into a Byzantine dynastic struggle that left them in little better financial condition, far from their original destination, and excommunicated by the pope. As emperor after emperor fell to internal pressures and Greek and Latin antipathy intensified, the crusaders decided to launch a last-ditch assault on the city. Much to everyone’s surprise, it succeeded.
Initially, the Latins who conquered Constantinople, supporters back home, and even some critics of the crusaders were extremely optimistic in the wake of the conquest. This feeling did not last. Although Rome tried, Constantinople’s Greek citizens did not convert to the Latin rite in large numbers. The empire was immediately beset by various Greek pretenders to the throne as well as outside invaders. The first Latin emperor soon died in battle. Moreover, despite carefully laid plans concerning the division of plunder that were meant to forestall conflict, the victors argued among themselves over the spoils and then argued collectively with papal legates who came to assert authority over the churches of Constantinople and their vast possessions.
Meanwhile, narratives about the conquest proliferated in diverse genres, with varying degrees of relationship to the events themselves and largely in isolation from one another. And yet, in an act of surprising unanimity, both those most critical of the crusade and those who directly benefitted from it fixated on the looting of the city and its churches. For critics, faced with the inarguable signs of divine favor in the successful assault, blasphemous looting provided a new set of sinful acts to explain why God had subsequently turned his face from the new
