The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage Read Online Free PDF Page A

knelt humbly before the congregation, weeping tears for the Holy Land, and begging the help of Venice in the name of Christ: and when they had finished the Venetians raised their hands and cried as one man (so the chroniclers assure us), ‘We consent! We consent!’ – ‘and there was so great a noise and tumult that it seemed as though the earth itself were falling to pieces’.
    Later the Doge himself, in another tearful ceremony in the Basilica, announced that he himself would take the cross. ‘I am a man old and feeble… but I see that no one could command and lead you like myself, who am your lord.’ He knelt before the high altar there and then, and they sewed the cross on to a great cotton hat, and placed it on his head: and from that moment the destiny of the expedition was settled.
    For old he was, but rascally. Enrico Dandolo’s part in the Fourth Crusade has been debated ever since, but we may assume that, however moved his people were by the cause, he himself did nothing out of pure religious impulse. It is very unlikely that he ever intended to lead his ships to an assault on Egypt, as the Crusaders thought. Venetian trade with Egypt was extremely valuable to Venice, and some scholars suggest indeed that Dandolo told the Sultan of Egypt all about the Crusaders’ plans.
    The chances are that even as that great white hat was placed upon his head, Dandolo was planning to lead the Crusade to a very different destination: not an Islamic objective at all, but the greatest city of Christendom itself, Constantinople. The time had come to humble the arrogant emperors, and ensure once and for all Venetian commercial primacy in the east. In the meantime the Doge struck a properly Venetian bargain. In return for providing the fleet, and sailing it, Venice would be paid the enormous sum of 80,000 francs, and would be entitled to a share of any territory the Crusaders captured.
    Everything then played into Dandolo’s hands. The Crusaders began to arrive in Venice in the winter of 1201. They were mostly French, with some Germans, Belgians and Italians, and they were quartered on the island of Lido, well away from the city centre – for if there were, as the old historians were fond of saying, many good, worthy and holy men among them, there were many adventurers and vagabonds too. From the beginning they had difficulty in raising the necessary cash. To make a first deposit, enabling the Arsenal to start work upon new ships, their leaders borrowed 5,000 francs from the Venetian Jews. Then, when the army was already assembling, and the fleet was half-built, they were reduced to payment in kind – huge piles of precious objects were to be seen disappearing into the Doge’s Palace, whence many of them would later reappear in the guise of another great Venetian coin, the silver grosso.
    Almost at the same time there arrived in the west a plausible pretender to the imperial throne of Constantinople: Alexius, son of the blinded and imprisoned Isaac Angelus, and known as Young Alexius to distinguish him from his usurper uncle, the present emperor. He let it be known that if he ever gained the throne of Byzantium, he would not only be a munificent patron of Crusades, but would actually undertake to bring the Orthodox Church back within the fold of Rome.
    Nothing could be handier for Dandolo than this combination of circumstances. When it became obvious that the Crusaders would never be able to pay their debt to Venice, he proposed that they commute it by stopping on their way to the east to subdue in the name of Venice a troublesome city on the Dalmatian shore, Zadar – Zara in those days – thus consolidating Venetian supremacy in the Adriatic. And when it was hinted that Young Alexius might be forcibly installed upon the throne of Constantinople, to end the Great Schism at last, why, Dandolo was doubtless the first to suggest that the Fourth Crusade, in its Venetian ships, might conveniently take him there.
    So the Doge