The Venetians’ decision to supply and bankroll the Fourth Crusade was not exclusively inspired by piety, and they demanded a say in the strategy in return. The existing plan to reach the Holy Land by first attacking the Muslims in Egypt did not really benefit the city. Dandolo was more interested in picking off trade competitors than in attacking trade partners in Alexandria, even if those partners were infidels. The Venetians observed that the passage to Egypt would be dangerous with winter approaching, and they recommended spending the cold months at Zara, a city on the Dalmatian coast that was once a client of Venice but had recently rebelled. Dandolo personally led the charge against Zara in a scarlet galley with gorgeous silk hangings, and with attendants who signaled his instructions to the other vessels on trumpets of solid silver. When they captured Zara in November 1202, it marked the first time that Catholic crusaders attacked people of their own faith, and it earned them excommunication by Pope Innocent III.
The company may not have been aware of this action by the pope when they sailed on to Constantinople. In any case, relations between Venice and the Byzantine Empire had been deteriorating since the Great Schism of 1054 formally divided the Eastern and Western churches, though the reasons were not all theological. Venetians continued to trade with Constantinople and resented incursions into their trade monopoly by rivals (particularly Genoa and Pisa). But they also resented the high-handed treatment of their merchants by the Byzantines, who viewed foreigners as greedy upstarts.
Doge Dandolo had not forgotten the unpleasantness of his diplomatic mission to Constantinople three decades earlier, nor the death of his father there on another failed mission two years afterward. He was therefore receptive to a scheme proposed by Alexius Angelus, the exiled son of the emperor Isaac II Angelus. Isaac had been deposed and blinded by his own brother, also named Alexius. The younger Alexius claimed that he should be emperor by hereditary right, and he promised to pay the crusaders generously if they threw out his uncle, Alexius III, and installed him on the throne. And so the crusaders sailed not for Jerusalem but for the capital of the Byzantine Empire, arriving at its gates in June 1203.
Constantinople: April 12, 1204
“The Queen of Cities” made an awesome sight. It was ten times the size of Venice, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants at the time, while Constantinople had half a million. Its triangular site was bounded on two sides by water, while the third was guarded by some three and a half miles of fortified masonry walls dating back to the fifth century. The city boasted hundreds of churches, huge palaces, libraries, bath complexes, race tracks and amphitheaters that had survived for hundreds of years in proud testimony to the fact that no invader had ever breached its defenses. In Rome, such things had been reduced to rubble.
The crusaders had been in the vicinity of the imperial city for nearly a year, and their patience was wearing thin. At first, things had gone according to plan because the lazy and ineffective emperor Alexius III had not adequately prepared for their arrival. Doge Dandolo led the initial charge, roaring orders from the prow of his galley and ramming the vessel aground in front of the walls, with the banner of Saint Mark streaming over him.1515
Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice, 161.
Dandolo had hoped the Byzantines would rise up in support of the younger Alexius and the deed would be done with little fighting. Alexius III fled in due order, but his nephew, now Alexius IV, was greeted with apathy, and the city showed no signs of producing the hefty payment that had been promised to the crusaders. As negotiations dragged on, the Venetians grew suspicious that they had been dupes in yet another Byzantine plot.
Outside the city, skirmishes began between the Byzantines and the crusaders, or Latins as they were called. Alexius IV was deposed by one of his own nobles and thrown into prison, where he was eventually strangled. The fighting escalated until Constantinople was under siege, and finally the walls were breached.
Thousands of enraged (and starving) crusaders rampaged through the city, which was quickly engulfed in flames thanks to the ceramic vessels of “Greek fire” that were delivered from the Venetian ships by catapult. This highly incendiary substance had once been a Byzantine secret, but now it was turned against the empire. The Byzantines who were not cut down started to flee in large numbers as the Latins divided their time between rape, plunder and devastation. At Hagia Sophia, a prostitute was seated in the high chair of the Orthodox patriarch, where she sang a dirty song and drank wine out of a communion goblet. Anything of value disappeared into the flames, the official inventory of plunder, or the pockets of individual crusaders.
Tintoretto, The Conquest of Constantinople in 1204, 1584.
After three days, some semblance of order returned, although the city was almost unrecognizable – a burned-out shell with a shadow of its former population. The leaders of the crusade began divvying up the spoils, with Venice receiving three-quarters of the booty by prior agreement. This massive haul justified Dandolo’s support for the expedition from the Venetian perspective, even as the rest of the Latin West was shocked at the ravaging of Constantinople by fellow Christians.
Within weeks, the crusaders had chosen one of their own, Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders and Hainaut, to become Emperor Baldwin I.1616 It was rumored that Dandolo turned down the crown, and he seemed less concerned with ceremony than with governmental affairs and selecting objects to send back to Venice, particularly the four bronze horses. The doge died in May 1205 of a septic hernia sustained during a three-day ride visiting his troops outside the city, and was buried in Hagia Sophia – the only man to be so honored.
The “Latin Empire” in the East would last only until 1261, when the Byzantines once again gained control of Constantinople.
St. Mark’s Basilica: February 1438
The Byzantine courtiers could not help but be impressed. They had traveled west seeking aid, and Venice was putting on a fine display of its wealth. More than two centuries had passed since the crusader sack of Constantinople, which still bore physical scars from the attack, but an even more brutal enemy was now at the gates. The Ottoman Turks had already whittled the empire down to little more than the capital city itself, and the emperor could not pick and choose his friends. John VIII Palaeologus had come personally to seek reconciliation with the West, hoping it would bring material assistance from Christian allies to keep Constantinople out of Ottoman hands. Along with the leaders of the Orthodox Church, he would be attending an ecumenical council in Ferrara (later transferred to Florence).
Pisanello, medal of John VIII on his visit to Italy, c. 1440.
The Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, had expressed a special interest in visiting St. Mark’s Basilica. He arrived in state at the quay beside the Doge’s Palace, and the long retinue of courtiers paraded down the Piazzetta toward the basilica, pausing frequently to examine objects of interest. While relatively small in comparison with the colossal churches of the imperial city, St. Mark’s made up for it in opulence. The mosaics were largely complete by this point, and the spoils from the Fourth Crusade had been carefully installed throughout the complex. Sophisticated visitors like the Byzantines would have understood the messages conveyed by the sumptuous decoration.
For example, there was the statue of the Tetrarchs at the corner where the church met the passage to the Doge’s Palace. The Tetrarchs had been created to represent the four rulers of the Roman Empire when it was administratively divided for a time before Constantine gained sole control. Made of the dense purple stone called porphyry, which in Roman antiquity was exclusive to the emperor, the statue had stood for more than eight hundred years at the Philadelphion, the great council hall of Constantinople, as a symbol of unity and good governance. Now the figures were embedded into the juncture of church