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

of service to the Republic. They had been involved in reforming the city’s church and state institutions in the middle years of the twelfth century and participated in Venice’s crusading ventures. By all accounts the male Dandolos were a clan of immense wisdom, energy – and longevity. In 1201 Enrico was over ninety. He was also completely blind.
    No one knows what Enrico looked like; his physical image has been shaped by numerous anachronistic portrayals, so it is easy now to imagine a tall, thin, wiry man with a white beard and piercing but sightless eyes, steely in his resolve for the Venetian state,sagacious with experience of many decades at the heart of Venice’s life during a century of rising prosperity – an impression for which there is no material substance. Of his personality, contemporary impressions and subsequent judgements have been sharply divided. They would match the divergent views of Venice itself. To his friends Dandolo would become the epitome of the Republic’s shrewdness and good government. To the French knight Robert of Clari he was a ‘most worthy man and wise’; to Abbot Martin of Pairis, a man who ‘compensated for physical blindness with a lively intellect’; the French baron Hugh of Saint-Pol called him ‘prudent in character, discreet and wise in making difficult decisions’. Villehardouin, who came to know him well, declared him to be ‘very wise, brave and vigorous’. To the Greek chronicler Niketas Choniates, who did not, he was destined to a counter-judgement which has also passed into the bloodstream of history: ‘a man most treacherous and hostile to the [Byzantines], both cunning and arrogant; he called himself the wisest of the wise and in his lust for glory surpassed everyone’. Around Dandolo would gather accretions of myth that would define less the man than the way that Venice would be seen both by itself and its enemies.
    Dandolo had always been destined for high office, but some time in the mid-1170s he started to lose his sight. Documents that he signed in 1174 show a firm, legible signature well aligned along the page. Another in 1176 bears the tell-tale signs of visual impairment. The words of the Latin formula (‘I, Henry Dandolo, judge, have signed underneath in my hand’) slope away downhill to the right, as the writer’s grasp of spatial relationship falters across the page, each successive letter taking its stumbling position from an increasingly uncertain guess as to the orientation of its predecessor. It appears that Dandolo’s eyesight was slowly fading and in time utterly extinguished. Eventually, according to Venetian statute, Dandolo was no longer permitted to sign documents, only to have his mark attested by an approved witness.
    The nature, the degree and the cause of Dandolo’s loss of sight were destined to become subjects of much speculation and to beheld as a key explanation for the events of the Fourth Crusade. It was rumoured that during the Byzantine hostage crisis of 1172, when Dandolo was in Constantinople, the emperor Manuel ‘ordered his eyes to be blinded with glass; and his eyes were uninjured, but he saw nothing’. This was held to be the reason why the doge harboured a profound grudge against the Byzantines. In another version he lost his sight in a street brawl in Constantinople. Variants of this tale perplexed the medieval world in all subsequent considerations of Dandolo’s career. Some held that his blindness was feigned, or not total, for his eyes were attested to be indeed still bright and clear, and how otherwise was Dandolo able to lead the Venetian people in peace and war? Conversely it was said that he was adept at covering up his blindness, and that this was a proof of the treacherous cunning of the man. It is certain, however, that Dandolo was not blinded in 1172 – his signature was still good two years later – nor did he himself ever apportion blame for it. The only explanation that he subsequently gave was