God's War: A New History of the Crusades (85 page)

In August 1201 Boniface was installed as leader of the crusade, seemingly with more powers than had been accorded Theobald. The other leaders probably swore oaths of fealty to Boniface to establish some hierarchical order in what at the best of times remained a quarrelsome and fissiparous command structure. Importantly, Boniface added his
own sworn ratification to the Treaty of Venice.
⁴⁹
He then left the other commanders to settle his affairs and visit Germany. There, at Philip of Swabia’s Christmas court at Hagenau, he met the exiled Byzantine pretender and Philip’s brother-in-law Alexius Angelus, whose appeals for help added a new dimension to the crusade’s strategic possibilities. Boniface’s tour may have encouraged further German recruitment, not least among supporters of Philip of Swabia, such as Bishop Conrad of Halberstadt.

These German contingents were among the last to reach Venice in the late summer of 1202.
⁵⁰
Before them, from Easter 1202 onwards, thousands of
crucesignati
and hired troops, who may or may not have taken the cross, had converged on the Venetian lagoon. Their travel experiences evidently differed. Abbot Martin of Pairis with his Basel company received enthusiastic hospitality at Verona, where they stayed for some weeks in May or June, even though the city was already crammed with crusaders heading eastwards. Another visitor at Verona at the time was Alexius Angelus, trying to drum up support for his cause. Others encountered a different sort of Lombard welcome, with crusaders denied markets and hurried on, not being allowed to stay anywhere for more than one night, an indication that local resources and charity were equally finite.
⁵¹
Lombardy was particularly affected, with the German and most of the French contingents passing through, even if some of them decided to sail from the ports of southern Italy rather than Venice. This soon became a serious problem. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the first important lords to reach Venice, was sufficiently worried about the commitment even of Louis of Blois to send Villehardouin and Hugh of St Pol to meet him at Pavia to stiffen his resolve. Even this failed to persuade many travelling with or at the same time as Count Louis not to seek transport elsewhere. Reaching Piacenza, some well-connected Frenchmen from the Ile de France, Champagne and Flanders turned south to Apulia, probably to Brindisi.
⁵²
Even those who did proceed to Venice arrived well after the supposed deadline of late June.

This haemorrhaging of troops exposed two central flaws in the planning. The lack of generally accepted authority, not uncommon on crusade, was compounded by the leadership’s decision to keep their strategy a secret, at least from many recruits outside the orbit of the inner circle. If the expedition had been bound for Acre, the Fourth Crusade could have followed the Third and anticipated the Fifth in seeing waves of
autonomous armies reaching the Holy Land over a number of sailing seasons or passages. However, many crusaders not only felt no obligation to honour the Venice treaty but, perhaps like the Flemish fleet that embarked in the summer of 1202, had little idea that the target was Egypt, still less what the timing and tactics were to be. They followed precedent and expectation in heading for Palestine. Despite Villehardouin’s blaming them for the subsequent problems encountered by the main crusade army, it is hard to see they were in any way at fault. Responsibility for the prospect of the terms of the Treaty of Venice coming unstuck, and with it the whole elaborate and possibly over-prescriptive crusade plan, lay squarely with those who had agreed to it in the first place. They now had to cope with the consequences.

16. Europe and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

17

The Fourth Crusade: Diversion

In the early summer of 1205 the papal legate Peter Capuano arrived in Constantinople from the Holy Land. A year earlier, the Byzantine capital had been captured by the army of westerners and much of southern Greece occupied in a campaign portrayed at the time as preliminary to the long-anticipated attack on Egypt. The diversion of the crusade in the autumn of 1202 to the Christian city of Zara in Dalmatia then, the following spring, to Constantinople had flouted papal prohibitions and aroused loud dissent within the crusaders’ own ranks. Many deserted. Only a rump of the great crusade host that had left western Europe in 1202 achieved the remarkable feat of storming the walls of Constantinople and taking the city in April 1204. Those who promoted these attacks consistently argued that they were necessary to keep the crusade intact and ensure the ultimate goal of the recovery of Jerusalem. Their success provided its own justification. However, a year on, the task of preserving the Greek conquests continued to absorb all the effort and attention of the crusaders. The legate had a history of doing what the crusade’s leaders wanted. Ostensibly on his own initiative and with his legatine authority he absolved the
crucesignati
in Greece from their vows to complete their journey to Jerusalem, thus ending the Fourth Crusade. The objective of Egypt and the recovery of the Holy Places remained as remote as on the day Innocent III launched the enterprise in August 1198. The pope, furious at his legate’s presumption and humiliated that the compromises of the previous three years had been for nothing, voiced a common view that the crusaders had ‘pursued temporal wages’ not the way of Christ.
¹
Instead of preparing the road to Jerusalem, the campaigns of 1202–4 had, in retrospect, not been diversions at all, but the sum of the crusade’s ambition. How this had happened, whether through malign conspiracy, organized hypocrisy or accidental concatenations
of events, became and remains a subject of fierce debate, not least because the outcome was, on any standard, remarkable.

VENICE

As the crusaders gathered at Venice in the summer of 1202 they were quartered on the island of the Lido on the eastern edge of the lagoon.
²
The growing anxiety over fulfilling the terms of the 1201 treaty soon turned to alarm. Despite the large numbers gathering in Venice during the summer of 1202, it became clear that they would fall far short of the estimated complement. Villehardouin implied only a third of the 33,500 arrived; Robert of Clari thought only a quarter of the knights and half of the infantry.
³
An army of perhaps 12,000 represented a huge logistic and human undertaking, especially when the Venetian crews and galley companies are added. But, as the rows of empty ships, galleys and horse transports in the lagoon mutely demonstrated, it fell far short of what was required to fulfil the contract, exposing a measure of confusion as to who would pay what proportion of the costs. Was each man to find his own costs or to contribute to the central fund that would be subsidized by the leaders? If each were to pay his own costs, why should he be obliged to follow the formula agreed in 1201 of two marks per person and four per horse? The calculations were complicated by the networks of support provided by lords for their followers and by the probable attendance of larger numbers of hired troops. The papal legate, Peter Capuano, who arrived on 22 July, compounded the funding crisis when he absolved the destitute, sick, women and non-combatants from their vows, enhancing military efficiency while reducing the numbers available to pay. One Rhineland witness, perhaps talking of those he consorted with, remembered that ‘a minority remained in Venice’.
⁴

The delay caused by the lack of money was matched by the slowness of the muster. Although Baldwin of Flanders had been in Venice since early summer, Boniface of Montferrat only arrived in mid-August. The conditions in the crowded crusader camp on the Lido varied from the comfortable to the desperate, depending on status, wealth and association with the entourages of the great. The Venetian control of access to the island, to the city and to markets could be used to put pressure
on the crusaders to honour their contract. The political cohesion of the expedition proved stubbornly elusive. The high command’s attempts to negotiate with the Venetians were always subject to the approval not just of the other baronial chiefs but the wider body of
crucesignati
, a three-tiered structure reminiscent of both the First Crusade and the Third in Palestine. As the doge began to press for payment, the responses of these different groups became crucial to the survival of the expedition.

The first expedient was to insist that every crusader paid his own passage. According to Robert of Clari, unlike the treaty of 1201, where payment had been calculated per capita, the leaders fixed rates according to function and perhaps ability to pay: a knight paid four marks, mounted sergeants two and infantry one, with horses, as before, costing another four marks each. As even this proved too much for many, ‘each man paid what he could’.
⁵
The burden of collecting what amounted to a tax on movables fell on the barons, who were nonetheless faced with the problem that the sums raised were less than half the agreed price. A proposed further discretionary levy on those still with cash was refused by many, who not unreasonably objected that they had already paid for their passages; if the Venetians would not take them then they would go elsewhere or abandon the enterprise altogether. Embarrassed but determined not to allow the disintegration of the expedition, the high command was forced to hand over great quantities of their own gold plate and silverware. Baldwin of Flanders and perhaps others supplemented their contributions with borrowed money, adding to the debt. Many crusaders were left unmoved by such commitment. Some regarded the Venetians as simply rapacious.
⁶
Only a minority seemed to have shared Villehardouin’s sense of impugned honour at the prospect of breaking the oath he had sworn to the 1201 contract. More than any previous large-scale crusade to the east, the Fourth Crusade had become the victim of confused and contradictory expectations.

After all efforts, the crusaders remained 34,000 marks – 40 per cent – short.
⁷
Many crusaders on the Lido had barely enough left to survive as winter approached. However, what appeared a disaster for the crusaders also placed the Venetians, especially Dandolo, in a very awkward position. The doge had invested much political as well as financial, industrial and commercial capital in the project, his own and the city’s. By presenting the plan as a corporate enterprise, he had pinned Venice’s civic pride to the expedition. The option of keeping the money and
allowing the crusaders to go home, while possibly legally sustainable, would incur a great loss in prestige as well as finance. If Dandolo wanted a return on the venture, it was in his interest to devise a way to keep the contract alive and acceptable to the crusaders and to his citizens. In any scheme to rearrange the crusaders’ debt, Dandolo knew how eager the high command – if no one else – was to save face and advance the objectives of the crusade. The ingredients of any solution were the existence of a huge bespoke armada; the crusaders’ guilt, debt and physical vulnerability; the presence of one of the largest and potentially most effective fighting forces seen in the Adriatic since classical times; the sustained commitment of Venice to the ultimate goal of the crusade; and immediate Venetian political interests. Dandolo’s scheme to break the deadlock relied on all of these.

Some time in September 1202, the doge proposed a temporary moratorium on the crusaders’ debt, which would now be held on account to be paid off by the proceeds of future conquests. In return, the crusaders were to embark in the already prepared fleet to assist the Venetians capture the Dalmatian port of Zara, with their share of any booty, it was hoped, satisfying the debt. This move was portrayed as the first step towards Egypt which, given the time of year, was out of reach until the spring. To sweeten the pill, and allay doubts as to Venetian sincerity, in a carefully theatrical performance, the aged Dandolo himself took the cross and promised to accompany the expedition.
⁸
Despite the agreement of the crusade high command, who presumably saw little alternative, the plan to attack Zara was highly controversial. Zara was a semi-independent Christian maritime city that had spent much of the twelfth century under the control of Venice. However, from the 1180s, despite numerous Venetian attacks, Zara enjoyed the protection of the king of Hungary, and in 1202 King Emeric was a crusader. Any campaign against Zara would attract the condemnation of the pope on the grounds that Zara was Christian and its overlord, as a crusader, entitled to the protection of the church. The leaders of the crusade who struck the deal were well aware of its sensitivity. Although they were told the good news of the freezing of the debt, according to Robert of Clari, who was there, ‘the host as a whole did not know anything of this plan, save only the highest men’.
⁹
The leadership clung to the line that the end justified the means, a dominant theme of Villehardouin’s account: anything rather than ‘the army broken up and our enterprise a failure’. When
challenged by the bishop of Halberstadt, Peter Capuano, the papal legate, acknowledged the problem, insisting that the pope ‘would prefer to overlook whatever was unbefitting of them rather than have this pilgrimage campaign disintegrate’. The legate was entirely wrong. As soon as he heard of it Innocent III sent letters prohibiting the attack and threatening all those involved with excommunication.
¹⁰