have conflated the activities of marauding soldiers with those of confiscatory bishops or princes. In a brief summary, Donald Queller and Thomas Madden use the words “stole” and “seized” to describe the deeds of Bishops Nivelon and Conrad, linking them to the “hundreds of relics pilfered by the crusaders.”46 I suggest here that the looting of soldiers and the secretive thieves discussed below varies significantly from confiscations by commanding bishops, especially in terms of how such deeds are memorialized. The elites could authorize their own activity; the common crusaders could not. Surely Nivelon was not the only Latin cleric to extract a few sacred fragments from a newly possessed church’s inventory.
Abbot Martin of Pairis
In the initial chaos, many crusaders no doubt plundered Constantinople’s churches, but the record of their misdeeds emerges only in sources distancing themselves from such behavior. Bishop Garnier of Troyes seems to have tried to put a stop to the sacrilege; one source from a site that received a relic from Garnier labeled him procurator sanctorum reliquarum (manager of holy relics), but this is an uncertain attribution at best and is probably untrue, as will be argued below.47 He certainly failed to contain the actions of Abbot Martin of Pairis, his ecclesiastical peer.
Abbot Martin’s actions lie somewhere between the authorized, careful deeds of the bishops and the indiscriminate and largely untraceable looting that was not memorialized. Martin had left the main force of the crusade to protest the diversion to Constantinople, but he returned before the final conquest and entered the city after it was taken. According to the Historia Constantinopolitana, a text Martin commissioned from Gunther of Pairis once he returned home, he witnessed bands of soldiers ripping through the abbey church of the Pantocrator and decided to seek relics in a remote section of the monastic complex. These scenes may well accurately recount events that Martin actually witnessed, but as with all translatio narratives, one must be cautious. The neat positioning of Martin’s pious looting against the impious looting of secular crusaders, for all its plausibility, may well function as a rhetorical device rather than correlate to fact.
By implication, Martin worried that he might lose his sacred plunder to the secular throng. Within the complex, he found a Greek priest hiding and threatened him with death if he did not yield the most powerful relics up to him. The priest, “thinking it more tolerable that a man of religion violate the holy relics in awe and reverence, rather than that worldly men should pollute them, possibly, with bloodstained hands,”48 eventually submitted to Martin’s demands. Martin took the best relics and hid them, then offered his protection to the priest and found him safe lodgings in the city.49
St. Simon and the Seven Thieves
The Historia Constantinopolitana suggests that Martin was concealing the relics from common pillagers, but he was likely also hiding his haul from other elites. As an abbot, perhaps he could have protected his plunder; other relic thieves were less fortunate. This conclusion may be drawn from the account of a successful theft carried out by seven crusading sailors from the parish of St. Simon the Prophet in Venice. Within days of the conquest, the sailors decided to steal the body of their parish’s patron saint from the church of St. Mary Chalkoprateia.50 According to the “Translatio Symonensis,” which survives only in a fourteenth-century manuscript, they laid their plans, reconnoitered the site, and then stole the relic on Palm Sunday (April 18, 1204). They selected the holy day in order to avoid notice, as the citizens and other crusaders would be busy celebrating.51
The heist went off relatively smoothly, although some of the Venetians got lost on their way to the church. Having stolen the body, the remaining thieves found that they could not leave the city because Doge Enrico Dandolo would not let any ships depart. This had nothing to do with the theft of St. Simon; rather, it was an attempt by the leaders of the new empire to keep the army intact. According to the translatio, the doge then heard of the relic’s theft and announced a reward for its recovery. After hiding St. Simon in an abandoned palace on the banks of the Bosphorus, the sailors waited for six months. Eventually, one of them received permission to leave Constantinople (by lottery) and took the body to his home parish.52
One can deduce many things about the looting of relics based on this rare narrative. First, these men clearly stole a relic as part of a heist. They did not simply authorize themselves to take possession of relics in their new church treasuries. Whereas Abbot Martin demanded to be taken to the most powerful relics and the looters he was avoiding grabbed whatever they came across, the Venetians were more discriminating. Theirs was a carefully planned and executed heist with a target chosen solely because of its particular value to the parishioners of St. Simon. Indeed, they even ignored the relics of St. Zachary, the patron of an important Venetian church, taking only the body of their own patron saint.53 If Dandolo’s attempt to obtain the stolen relic by offering a bounty is credible, as it may well be, another fact comes into focus. Had someone betrayed the fellowship of thieves and given the relic to the doge, the “Translatio Symonensis” would never have been written. We would not know about the band from the parish of St. Simon, although Dandolo might still have sent the relics to Venice in the end. Thus, we can conclude that there may have been other cases in which a member of the leadership, secular or clerical, confiscated a relic from a lower-status thief, condemning his story to oblivion, yet providing clues as to how bishops and counts acquired their relics.
The great majority of actions taken inside the churches of Constantinople remain invisible, and our few reliable examples cannot support a fully developed narrative. Yet our sources do suggest a range of possibilities. Bishop Nivelon and likely other leading clerics acquired relics by taking them out of churches under their control, confiscating them from errant pillagers, and receiving them as gifts. The deeds of the parishioners of St. Simon provide a counterexample, in which crusaders executed both a targeted and unauthorized theft. For Abbot Martin, the pursuit of saintly power, carried out surreptitiously, trumped other concerns about which specific relics he might acquire. The complaints from outsiders suggest that the stories of Martin and the Venetian parishioners may reflect a much larger, and now forgotten, pattern of theft and pillaging. If Dandolo and his cadre were ready to seize relics from lesser crusaders, no wonder most chose to remain silent.
The Second Phase: The Crusaders Go Home
Enrico Dandolo
Enrico Dandolo tried to recover the body of St. Simon at some point during the first six months after its initial theft. This attempted confiscation actually belongs to the second phase in the movement of the relics of the Fourth Crusade. In the weeks and months after the sack, the crusaders organized and disbursed their loot. They elected Baldwin of Flanders as emperor. The Venetians, as prescribed by the March Pact, took control of Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate. The crusade leadership divided up other properties and Greek territories, many still unconquered, in a process that led to great riches for some, conflicts among the Latin forces and other powers in the region, sales and exchanges, the settlement of Franks in Greece and Venetians in Crete, and many other changes. Boniface of Montferrat began his military operations in Thessalonica. The disastrous campaign against the Vlachs led to the death of the first Latin emperor of Constantinople and other leading nobles. Seeking to undermine the Venetian advantage, Genoa sent out privateers to plunder ships returning to the West. The pope attempted to reassert control. Peter Capuano lifted the crusade vows, and eventually the army dispersed.54 As the crusaders returned home, relics returned with them; some were sent ahead as gifts to reward friends or to grease the wheels of diplomacy, as detailed below. In this phase, Dandolo, Baldwin, and Capuano all emerged as particularly important players in the authorized acquisition and translation of relics. Unauthorized actions continued as well, though as always they are harder to locate in the record.
In the most important Venetian chronicle from the fourteenth century, the Chronica per extensum descripta of Andrea Dandolo, who was the doge of Venice from 1343 to 1354 and a member of the same family as Enrico, one finds a description of Venice’s share of the sacred plunder from Constantinople.
