carry old meanings along with the objects themselves.11 Rather, movement created the possibility for innovation and the establishment of new patterns of imaginative memory, sometimes in direct opposition to previous meanings.12 The hagiographies of the Fourth Crusade reveal how a set of thirteenth-century voices responded to such a moment of narrative possibility through distinct commemorative acts.
Memory, as a concept, stretches along a continuum from event into perpetuity, guided by conscious and unconscious choices of communities and those who shape communal memory. Mary Carruthers was among the first to introduce memory as a field of study for medieval scholars. In her work on mnemonic systems and the ways in which medieval people engaged with and interpreted the past, Carruthers emphasized diverse interpretive modes of recollection.13 James Fentress and Chris Wickham focused on the relationship of “the social function of the past to its narrative structures” in their chapter on historians who wrote during the Middle Ages.14 These pioneering works and the many that followed have generally examined the shaping of historical memories over time as we expand our understanding of medieval people and their perceptions of the past.15 Some engage retrospectively, starting with memorializing acts produced at some chronological remove from the time that they consider.16 Others, such as the essay “The Venetian Version of the Fourth Crusade” by Thomas Madden, work forward, starting at the event in question and tracing the development of ideas about it over time. My book, on the other hand, focuses on commemorative translatio narratives produced while the objects concerned were still trapped within a kind of cultural gravitational well formed by the conquest of Constantinople.17 These texts represent early reactions in a contentious environment, yet the mostly anonymous hagiographers had to think about posterity in order to craft a usable narrative that could accompany the relic into the treasury or below the altar, as well as into liturgical traditions and depictions in sacred art.
As for the crusade itself, the publication of The Fourth Crusade by Donald Queller, later revised with the help of Thomas Madden, has shifted scholarly debate away from an endless argument about blame and diversion. There is wide scholarly agreement about the basic facts of the crusade. Neither papal, military, nor Venetian leaders intended the crusaders to become badly indebted or to be diverted to Constantinople, but rather designed what seemed to be a reasonable plan to fund an amphibious assault on Egypt. Plans went awry and various actors took advantage of the situation. When the crusaders turned toward Constantinople, they still expected to set sail for Egypt in the near future. No one expected Constantinople to fall to the Latin forces—not even the Latins.
But outside the narrow constraints of crusade and Mediterranean scholarship, the memory and meaning of the Fourth Crusade remain contested ground to this day, a contest that can still fixate on relics and narrative. On November 27, 2004—950 years since mutual excommunications officially began the great schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and 800 years after the Fourth Crusade—Pope John Paul II presented two relics to the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew I of Istanbul in Rome. The relics were the bones of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nazianzus, both fourth-century prelates who played pivotal roles in the formation of normative Christianity. The plan was that these relics would be placed in new reliquaries of crystal, given to the patriarch on the twenty-seventh, and reinstalled in Istanbul on November 30, the feast of St. Andrew, patron saint of Istanbul.
A week before the handover, disputes between the patriarchal staff in Istanbul and the curia had soured the mood of reconciliation. On Sunday, November 20, the patriarch gave a sermon in which he praised the pope for his apologetic gesture. Bartholomew said, “For 800 years these relics have been in exile, although in a Christian country, not of their own will, but as a result of the infamous Fourth Crusade, which sacked this city in the year of our Lord 1204. . . . This gesture differentiates them [John Paul and his curia] from the deeds of their predecessors eight centuries ago, who accepted the spiritual and material treasures that had been taken from our city and our Church.”18 The patriarch concluded that the return of the relics was a “warning to all those who arbitrarily possess and retain treasures of the faith, piety, civilisation of others.”19 Note how Bartholomew invoked the concepts of the living saints, held imprisoned against their will in a wicked Rome. Such language would not have been out of place in an anti-Latin tract from medieval Byzantium.
A Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, retorted that although “‘certain media’ had portrayed the pontiff’s gesture as a reparation and a means for the Pope to ‘beg pardon’. . . this interpretation . . . was ‘historically inexact.’ The handover was a ‘return, not a restitution.’” Furthermore, although the patriarchate maintained that both relics had come to Rome through looting after 1204, the Vatican was not so sure. Navarro-Valls claimed that Greek nuns had translated St. Gregory’s bones to Rome in the eighth century in order to protect them from Greek iconoclasts. Thus, instead of being a piece of war booty, these relics went to Rome in search of protection, brought by those least warlike of beings—nuns. The Vatican gave little ground on the relics of St. John as well, admitting only that the translation had probably occurred “at the time of the Latin empire of Constantinople.”20 Rome’s rhetoric tried to shape the exchange as a translatio, not a reparation after an act of relic theft. Although John Paul apologized for the Fourth Crusade (and other wars between Latins and Greeks) in 2001, he was not apologizing for having received the relics. How could the Church apologize for the translation of relics, an act only possible if the saint wanted to be moved? The relics were translated, and now they were being translated back—God wills it.
The exchange still took place, as planned, on November 27, but the episode shows that in 2004, as in 1204, mere possession of a relic was not enough. In order to control the meaning of possession, one also had to write a compelling narrative explaining why, and how, the saint wanted a new home. It takes a story to situate the translation of any relic in both its immediate and historical context.
A study of the hagiographers and their texts will not soothe modern conflicts between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, nor reveal mysteries about what really happened to all the relics. Instead, this study examines the shaping choices of the creators and manipulators of institutional and civic memory, the challenges of contested meaning, and the transformative potentiality of relics and their stories.
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Constantinople’s Relics, 1204–1261
In March 1204, the secular leaders of the crusading army optimistically drew up an agreement about what to do with Constantinople if they were lucky enough to seize it. All parties swore sacred oaths to adhere to the terms of the treaty, which became known as the “March Pact.” The pact governed nearly every aspect of the division of Constantinople’s wealth. It mandated that all plunder be brought to one of three central locations so that it could be doled out appropriately. It stated that the Franks would pay off their debt to the Venetians before all parties split the rest of the plunder. It contained a mechanism for electing a new emperor and another for dividing up the property of the Greek church. Still other passages governed the division of the lands of the empire outside the city and protected Venetian trading hegemony. Both contemporary sources and modern scholarship have used the pact as a template for talking about the division of spoils and have argued about the extent to which the crusaders followed their own plan.1
The March Pact does not
