The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage Read Online Free PDF

Dandolo manipulated the course of history, and laid the foundations of the Venetian Empire. He acted in collusion, no doubt, with some of the less scrupulous seigneurs of the Crusade,but the lesser knights, and the ordinary soldiers, were left in ignorance of these machinations, and thought they were still preparing for an assault on Alexandria. By the autumn of 1202 all was ready. The army had embarked from the Lido, the fleet was assembled on the lagoon. Then the belvedere of the Piazzetta saw its greatest spectacle of all, for nearly 500 ships were lying there. They filled that great water-stage, from the Basin itself to the distant shore of the Lido. ‘Never did finer fleet,’ wrote Geoffrey de Villehardouin, one of the principal Crusaders, ‘sail from any port… Our armament could undertake the conquest of the world!’ There were the fifty war-galleys of the naval escort, dominated by Paradiso, Aquila and Pellegrina , probably the most powerful vessels afloat: snake-like craft, very low in the water, with their long banks of oars like insects’ legs, their lateen yard-arms drooping, at their sterns high canopied castles where their lordly captains, all in armour, strutted and postured as captains do. There were the 240 troopships, heavier and fatter in the water and square-sailed. There were seventy supply ships and 120 flat-bottomed cavalry transports, specially designed for amphibious war, with wide ports for the horses. And all around the hulls of these vessels, emblazoning the lagoon itself, were the crested shields of the knights-at-arms – Boniface of Montferrat and Baldwin of Flanders, Richard of Dampierre and Guy of Conflans, Count Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, the Castellan of Bruges and the Seneschal of Champagne.
    Then there were all the hundreds of lesser craft that milled about the fleet, the pinnaces of the admirals and the generals, scudding from ship to ship, ship to shore – all the sightseeing craft too, no doubt, in which the citizens of Venice, as always, pottered inquisitively here and there, and fishing boats of the lagoon, still stoically at their work in clusters around the mudbanks, and gondolas, and market skiffs, and perhaps an astonished merchant ship or two, working their way through the Lido sea-gate to find that stunning armada crowding the roadsteads inside.
    Trumpets blared; cymbals clashed; attended by senators and captains of Venice, counts and commanders of the Frankish chivalry, chaplains and aides and physicians, the blind Doge emerged from his palace and was led between the twin columns ofthe Piazzetta to his galley at the quay. The drums of the fleet struck up their rhythm. The bugles called from admiral to admiral. Hymns sounded from the waterfront. Vessel by vessel the great fleet followed the Doge’s flagship out of the Basin, and gathering speed as the day wore on, disappeared past the eastern point of the city, and headed for the open sea.
    By nightfall the Fourth Crusade was in mid-Adriatic, on its way (though so few of its soldiers knew it) to Constantinople: and there, squeamishly avoiding the assault on Zadar, a very blood-thirsty affair, and drawing a veil over the dissensions that arose when the rank-and-file Crusaders discovered that they were not, after all, going to rescue the Holy Places from the infidel – there, to the City of Cities, by the turn of a page we shall follow them.

O City, City!
     
    A great presence – the Crusade sails in – the
assault – the City – ‘anger of the Lord’ –
empire at a stroke – a hint of Venice
     
    ‘O city , city , the eye of all cities!’ So passionately exclaimed Nicetas Chroniates, a contemporary Greek chronicler, writing of the Fourth Crusade’s expedition to Byzantium, and the cry may echo in our minds now when, sailing out of the Sea of Marmara in the wake of Dandolo’s great fleet, we approach Constantinople as the Crusaders approached it long ago.
    O city, city! Nowhere on earth is more