City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

people’, spluttered another Byzantine writer. A bishop of Salonica called them ‘marsh frogs’. The Venetians were becoming increasingly unpopular in the Byzantine Empire and they seemed to be everywhere.
    In the larger geopolitics of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Byzantines and their errant subjects was marked by ever more violent oscillations between the poles of love and hate: the Venetians were insufferable but indispensable. The Byzantines, who complacently still saw themselves as the centre of the world, and for whom land ownership was more glorious than vulgar commerce, had given away their trade to the lagoon dwellers and allowed their navy to decline; they became increasingly dependent on Venice for maritime defence.
    The imperial policy towards the pushy foreigners veered erratically. The emperor’s one throttle on them was control of trading rights. Repeated attempts were made over a century to loosen Venice’s hold on the Byzantine economy by playing the Republic off against its commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa. In 1111 the Pisans were also granted trading rights in Constantinople; forty-five years later the Genoese were similarly admitted. Each was awarded tax breaks, a commercial quarter and landing stages in Constantinople. The city was a crucible for fierce rivalry between the Italian republics that would, in time, flare into full-scale trade wars. When the Spanish Jew Benjamin Tudela came to the city in 1176 he found ‘a tumultuous city; men come to trade there from all countries by land and by sea’. The city became a claustrophobic arena for competition. Ugly brawls broke out between competing nationalities, hemmed into adjacent enclaves along the banks of the Golden Horn. The Venetians were jealous of their monopolies which they felt had been earned in the Norman wars of the last century; they deeply resented the manner in which successive emperors rescinded them or favoured their rivals. The Italians had become, in the eyes of the ruling Greeks, an uncontrollable nuisance: ‘a race characterised by a lack of breeding which is totally at variance with our noble sense of order’, they pronouncedwith aristocratic hauteur. In 1171, the emperor Manuel I took the whole Venetian population in his empire hostage and detained it for years. The crisis took two decades to resolve and left a bitter legacy of mutual mistrust. By the time Venetian merchants were readmitted to Constantinople in the 1190s any special relationship was dead.
    It was against this background that the pope called for a new crusade in the summer of 1198.

The Blind Doge
     

     
     
1198–1201
     
    The Fourth Crusade opened with a furious blast:
After the miserable destruction of the territory of Jerusalem, after the mournful massacre of the Christian people, after the deplorable invasion of the land on which had stood the feet of Christ and where God, our Father, had seen fit before recorded time to work out salvation in the middle of the earth … the apostolic seat [papacy], disquieted by the misfortune of such a great calamity, was sorely troubled … [it] cries out and raises its voice like a trumpet, desiring to arouse the Christian people to fight Christ’s fight and to avenge the outrage against Him who was crucified … Therefore, my sons, take up the spirit of fortitude, put on the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, trusting not in numbers nor in brute force, but rather in the power of God.
     
    The ringing call to militant Christendom, launched by Pope Innocent III in August 1198, came an ominous century after the successful capture of Jerusalem. In the interim the whole crusading project had slid towards collapse. The decisive blow fell in 1187, when Saladin shattered a crusader army at Hattin and retook the Holy City. Neither the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned in a Syrian river, nor the English king, Richard the Lionheart, had come close to regaining it. The crusaders