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

were now confined to a few settlements along the coast such as the ports of Tyre and Acre. It fell to the pope to breathe life back into the project.
    Innocent was thirty-seven years old – young, brilliant, determined, pragmatic, a master of religious rhetoric and a skilled jurist. His call to arms was both a military venture, a campaign of moralrearmament in a secularising world, and an initiative to reassert papal authority. From the start he made it clear that he intended not only to raise the crusade but to direct it himself, through the offices of his papal legates. While one went to stir up the warrior lords of northern France, the other, Cardinal Soffredo, came to Venice to ask about ships. A century of crusading had taught military planners that the land route to Syria was an arduous trudge and that the Byzantines were hostile to large numbers of armed men tramping across their terrain. With the other maritime republics, Pisa and Genoa, at war, only Venice had the skill, the resources and the technology to transport a whole army to the east.
    The immediate Venetian response was startling. They sent their own legates back to Rome to request, as a preliminary, the lifting of the papal ban on trading with the Islamic world, specifically Egypt. The Republic’s case framed at the outset the collision of faith and secular necessity that was to haunt the Fourth Crusade. It rested on the prototype definition of Venetian identity. The legates argued the city’s unique situation. It had no agriculture; it depended entirely on trade for its survival and was being badly hurt by the embargo, which it faithfully observed. The legates might also have muttered under their breath that Pisa and Genoa had meanwhile continued their trade in defiance of the papacy, but Innocent was not impressed. The city had long existed at an oblique angle to pious Christian projects. Eventually he gave the Venetians a carefully worded permission, framed to exclude transaction in any war materials, which he proceeded to enumerate: ‘[we] prohibit you, under strict threat of anathema, to supply the Saracens by selling, giving or bartering, iron, hemp, sharp implements, inflammable materials, arms, galleys, sailing ships, or timbers’, adding with a lawyer’s eye, to snuff out any legal loopholes the devious Venetians might seek to exploit, ‘whether finished or unfinished …’
… hoping that because of this concession you will be strongly moved to provide help to the province of Jerusalem, and making sure that you do not try any fraud against the apostolic decree. Because there can not be the slightest doubt that he who tries fraudulently, against his own conscience, to cheat this order, will be bound tight by divine sentence.
     
    This was not a good start. The threat of excommunication was heavy and Innocent did not trust Venice at all, but practically he had no choice but to bend a little: only the Republic could supply the ships.
    So it was that when six French knights arrived at Venice in the first week of Lent 1201, the doge probably had a good idea of their mission. They came as envoys of the great crusading counts of France and the Low Countries – from Champagne and Brie, Flanders, Hainaut and Blois – with sealed charters that gave them full authority to make whatever agreements they saw fit for maritime transport. One of these men was Geoffroi de Villehardouin of Champagne, a veteran of the Third Crusade and a man with experience of assembling crusader armies. It was Villehardouin’s account that would form a principal, but highly partial, source for all that followed.
    Venice had a long tradition of equating age with experience when it came to appointing doges, but the man the counts had come to see was remarkable by any measure. Enrico Dandolo was the scion of a prominent family of lawyers, merchants and churchmen. They had been intertwined in nearly all the great events of the past century and had built up an impressive record