postconquest sacrilege, but even the crusader-chroniclers Robert of Clari and Geoffrey of Villehardouin identified looting-related impropriety as having caused the loss of divine favor.
Writers within religious institutions newly enriched by sacred objects and saintly patrons from Constantinople faced a distinct set of issues. As sacred relics of all degrees and stature arrived in the West in a great holy diaspora, their presence created the potential for both fiscal enrichment and rise in stature for the Western churches and monasteries. Mere possession of a new relic, however, was not sufficient to transform potentiality into actuality. For that, a relic needed a story.
This book explores the widespread hagiographical memorialization of the Fourth Crusade that took place roughly in the decade following the conquest of Constantinople. Translatio narratives, a subgenre of hagiography that focuses on the movement, or “translation,” of relics, are a peculiar group of texts. Their erratic relationship to actual events in the East renders them unreliable as military or political sources. In number and content, they are unusual in the history of crusade memorialization as well. Relic discovery and translation occur throughout the history of the crusades to the Holy Land, but translatio narratives are rare at best. And yet, after 1204, diverse religious houses with no known points of contact with one another responded to their sacred plunder by generating new hagiographical narratives. The circumstances of the composition, content, and cultural impact of this unique intersection of hagiography and memory in the wake of 1204 make up the core of this book.
These texts exist as a body to be studied en masse thanks to the work of a nineteenth-century French historian named Count Paul Èdouard Didier Riant (Comte de Riant). On October 14, 1874, Riant first presented his work on the spoliation of relics from Constantinople in the thirteenth century to the Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France at the Louvre. His report, which took another six meetings to complete, was eventually published in the memoirs of the society as “Dépouilles religieuses à Constantinople au XIIIe siècle.”2 The next year, Riant founded the Société de l’Orient Latin in Paris. In 1877, he published the first volume of his extraordinary Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae and began the process of establishing the scale and extant source base for the translation of relics from the East to the West after 1204.3 Scholars have since located a few additional sources, and Alfred Andrea, in particular, produced superior editions of select texts, essays on the authors and important figures, and a number of extremely useful translations and commentaries. It was the Exuviae, however, that defined the hagiographical accounts of the aftermath of 1204 as a corpus.4 That said, my book benefits from over a century of new scholarship on the crusade itself and new approaches to the study of medieval texts and culture. Riant sought to understand the truth behind the narratives and locate both the origin of specific objects and their destinations in the West. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on single texts and figures, explicating each one as fully as possible. Yet, while no work on the relics of 1204 can occur without reference to Riant or reliance on the critical editions and detailed commentaries of Andrea, this book asks new questions about the intertwining of memory and narrative.
Part I, “Contexts,” establishes two different types of context for the hagiographies of 1204. Chapter 1 places each act of relic acquisition in a chronological moment and conceptual framework. Rather than conflating all types of acquisition as theft or looting, the framework distinguishes between authorized and unauthorized acts, as well as between early and late moments of acquisition. Chapter 2 explores the creation of normative Latin discourse on the crusade. Pope Innocent III fixated on the looting and disseminated his understanding of events throughout the Latin world; other voices followed his lead. The hagiographers, all beneficiaries of the stripping of Constantinople’s sacred resources, sought a way to situate their new possessions in their own locales without directly contradicting papal interpretation.
Part II, “Texts,” turns to the hagiographies themselves. Chapter 3 lays out the whole of the corpus (from complete texts to fragments), stories from later centuries, and evidence of perdita (lost texts). Chapter 4 turns from content to method. It compares the techniques that hagiographers used to create didactic spaces in the midst of their tales. For some, these didactic moments drew attention away from the relic theft and the troubles with the crusade, while others operated more fully in the medieval mode of pious thievery, a tradition dubbed furta sacra by Patrick Geary.5 For the latter, the logic of pious theft enabled a full-throated defense of the Fourth Crusade as providential, including the looting of churches.
Part III, “Outcomes,” turns to Venice. In ways distinct from other sites that received relics from Constantinople, the hagiographies of 1204 took root in Venice’s culture and flourished. Chapter 5 links these texts to themes and mythographic practices extant in Venice both before and after 1204. The Venetian translatio texts, perhaps written without knowledge of competing interpretations from Rome or France, embrace the principles of sacred thievery in order to make broader claims about Venetian destiny. Chapter 6 traces the cultural aftermath of the Venetian hagiographies of the Fourth Crusade from the 1230s to the last centuries of the Middle Ages. In the later stages, Venetian mythographers shifted from pinpointing recent temporal origins for Venetian greatness, such as the Fourth Crusade, to claiming an ancient grandeur for the city.
Four topics require a brief overview to contextualize the work that follows: the Fourth Crusade itself, the medieval practice of translatio and hagiographical memorialization, the concept of commemoration and memory as used within this book, and the relationship between translatio and the Crusades before 1204. The last is simple; there is almost none. The relative explosion of translatio narratives after 1204 stands out as a singular event of narrative innovation in part because of the absence of such textual creations during the twelfth century. True, the looting of Constantinople’s churches produced relics and the potential for forged relics on a scale unprecedented in Christian history. Relics had played a pivotal role, however, in the First Crusade, particularly during the saga of the Holy Lance and the use of the True Cross.6 The inventio of relics of various sorts shaped the Catholicization of the newly conquered territory during that period.7 Throughout the twelfth century, crusaders acquired Holy Land relics and installed them in their home churches in the West, but only one contemporary translatio narrative of the style employed in the thirteenth century is known to exist. This lone text relates the translation of the arm of St. George to Flanders, along with other relics, by Count Robert “of Jerusalem.”8 To this source, we might add Venetian translatio narratives that at least tangentially touch on the crusades, discussed in chapter 5. Otherwise, the post-1204 hagiographical writing stands on its own with little medieval precedent.
Nevertheless, narrative had long been central to the practice of relic veneration in Western Christendom. Mere possession offered little benefit without a story to promote the fact of possession. When the relic was already wrapped in stories from other sites or eras, narrative generation became paramount. Narrative controlled meaning. Cynthia Hahn, in her recent study of reliquaries, writes that “the real content of a treasury” is “the power and combination of narratives and ‘conversations’” among the sacred objects.9 For Hahn, the reliquaries themselves often speak. But when meaning becomes contested, more explicit forms of memorialization must support visual programs and speaking objects. Two hagiographical subgenres—inventio for “found” relics and translatio for transported relics—provided explicit narratives for placing a new relic in its locality.10
