their decisions about secular wealth and offices shaped the fate of the relics and the later contest about the meaning of the fall of Constantinople in the Latin world.
The combination of the prohibitive costs of campaigning coupled with the potential bounty of a conquered Constantinople drove much of the crusade’s action. By March 1204, the crusaders still owed another year’s worth of fees to the Venetians. As the Latins drew up their pact, they hoped that the city of Constantinople would pay the now-deceased emperor’s (Alexius IV Angelos’s) debts to the crusaders and the crusaders’ debts to the Venetians.11 The realists among the army must have known that full conquest was highly unlikely, but they still needed a system for handling plunder, lest greed undermine a victory. Previous assaults on Constantinople indicated that they might be able to take, hold, loot, and retreat from a section of the city, even if a full conquest failed. The plan was to mandate, on pain of death, the collection of all valuable goods and coin in centrally guarded sites.12 Anxious to avoid any conflict over the imperial throne, the crusade’s leadership developed an electoral system that would go into effect as needed. The system would eventually work, but out of necessity the pact ensured that the leadership had not preselected an emperor at the moment that the crusaders entered Constantinople. Hence, as the crusaders began pillaging, no one could claim to be fully in charge.13
Toward the end of the March Pact, having dispensed with the apportioning of coin, food, and the throne, its authors turned to other forms of wealth. One paragraph of the pact ultimately not only shaped the division of the property and the offices of the Greek church but also set the stage for the next (postconquest) conflict between the Venetians and the papacy. Both subjects—church property and Venetian-papal dispute—pertain to the fate of the relics. The pact reads,
Let it also be understood that the clergy who are from that party from which the emperor was not chosen will have authority to organize the church of Sancta Sophia and to elect the patriarch for the honor of God. . . . Certainly, the clerics of each party ought to organize those churches that have come into the possession of their party. To be sure, sufficient quantities of the possessions of the churches ought to be provided to the clerics and the churches so that they might live and be sustained in an honorable fashion. The remaining possessions of the churches, indeed, should be divided and distributed in accordance with the aforesaid agreement.14
The first part of this passage eventually gave control over Hagia Sophia to the Venetians. The subsequent text suggests that all sides would be claiming territory in the city as their own and that whoever took an area might also lay claim to the churches there. Any group of crusaders could seize an area and its churches, but it would not also receive all of the property and rents traditionally owned by a given church. Instead, such property (beyond “sufficient quantities”) went into the general pool of plunder, was split according to the aforementioned guidelines, and was then apportioned by a given faction’s leaders. The framers of the pact might have had relics in mind when they wrote about the “remaining possessions of the churches,” but if so, their plans did not come to fruition. In the end, a central committee handled the issue of control over the churches and their properties, though arguments on this matter continued for decades.15 Relics never received the same degree of citywide oversight as the churches themselves.
Evidence suggests that the leaders of the crusade made a strong attempt to keep to the terms of their pact, a finding that contrasts with the general tenor of external accounts of the days after the fall of the city. Some common soldiers, of course, had other ideas. Villehardouin, for example, laments that many soldiers did not deposit all of their plunder at one of the three central churches that the crusaders had set up as repositories, despite threats of execution for holding back loot.16 Clari angrily accuses the treasure’s guards of letting elite knights take whatever they wanted, leaving only the silver for the common soldiers.17 The anonymous author of the Devastatio Constantinopolitana scornfully characterizes the common shares of the spoil as “almost like certain down-payments.”18 Scholars argue about how to tally the total wealth collected. They also argue over why the shares were so low, whether the shares were actually as low as stated, how many people and what class of people were hanged for keeping back loot, the fate of jewels and other precious objects not easily divided, and other related issues.19 If Clari and the author of the Devastatio Constantinopolitana were correct, then the collection system more or less worked (as evidenced by how unhappy they were with the official distribution). If Villehardouin is correct, then common soldiers concealed much of the loot for their personal benefit. Niketas and Innocent ranted about the wild looting, but neither was in as good a position to know the truth as the soldiers present in Constantinople. On the other hand, soldiers were unlikely to confess to sacrilegious outbursts of violence and destruction in internally produced sources. The totality of the evidence suggests that the initial days of the looting were indeed quite chaotic, as described to various degrees by eyewitness sources. Eventually, however, Villehardouin and his fellow elites took control of the city and its wealth and then made an honest effort to collect the treasure centrally. After all, the debt still loomed unpaid.
Thus, we understand the Latin army’s approach to the secular wealth of Constantinople. The leadership tried to assert authority, the better to distribute loot and property in an organized and self-benefitting manner. The rank and file, risking serious punishment but aware of the great wealth available in the city and the difficulty that their leaders would have in enforcing their edict, helped themselves as they could. When able, the leaders punished those they caught, making an example out of the miscreants. Despite the many violent incidents that no doubt took place, no matter how much plunder the rank and file seized in bloody pillaging, the bulk of Constantinople’s vast wealth passed into the hands of the great men of the crusade by the simpler process of occupation, appropriation, and negotiation with one another. The same holds true for the relics.
Phase One: Relics and Looting Immediately Following the Conquest
The crusaders took the walls, frightened off the Greek army, opened the gates, and stormed the city. Many citizens, expecting a more-or-less orderly triumph, lined the streets to welcome the new emperor; alas, for them, no emperor had yet been named and no single leader of the crusade could claim control over the whole city.20 Instead, the various military commanders staked out their own territories. As was typical of the initial days following a conquest, chaos reigned, magnified more by scale than by ferocity. We will never know exactly what happened in the churches of Constantinople in these first hours and days, but out of the confusion and the scant textual evidence, a few faces and deeds emerge. We can begin to tease out a narrative based on scarce data points. An abbot sees soldiers looting the great monastic complex of the Pantocrator and uses that sacrilege to justify a more pious sacrilege of his own. He creeps into a remote part of the complex and bullies a Greek monk into revealing the location of relics, which he then takes into protective custody. A French bishop follows his friend, Boniface of Montferrat, into the Bucoleon Palace and takes command of one of the greatest collections of relics in the world. When the bishop leaves a month later, the collection is missing some pieces. Some Venetian crusaders take advantage of the confusion to scout out the crypt that holds the relics of their patron saint; a week later, while their comrades-in-arms are celebrating Palm Sunday, they steal them. A bishop from Troyes confiscates relics looted by soldiers and carefully apportions them to European and local churches. When he dies, the papal legate takes the bishop’s collection and does the same.
None of the standard reports of the conquest reveal much reliable information about its chaotic first few hours. The incendiary rhetoric of Niketas quoted above represents just the barest fragment of his detailed and horrific description of the sack of Constantinople, for which he mourns. In lurid, tragic tones, the chronicler describes the breaking of the altar, the destruction of priceless works of art, and the stabling of mules in the sanctuary. In an ultimate act of impiety, a prostitute was placed on the throne of the patriarch. After describing the outrages committed against women and the old, Niketas concludes by attacking the crusaders for violating their crusading oath. They had promised not to deviate from their planned course until
