Authors: Jonathan Phillips
In the spring of 1200 they gathered at Soissons and started to plan their
campaign. Here they made a decision that, unforeseen by them, was to have the most profound consequences for the direction of their expedition and, ultimately, for the history of Christendom itself. The crusaders resolved to sail to the Levant and, given that Pisa and Genoa were at war, they approached the other maritime experts of the day, the Venetians. Pope Innocent had already sent a legate to the city to petition their involvement so this linkup dovetailed with papal thinking anyway.
In March 1201 a specially deputed group of crusaders arrived in Venice to arrange the terms of passage. There they encountered one of the most amazing figures in medieval history: Doge Enrico Dandolo, a man already over ninety years of age and who, for at least the previous two decades, had been blind.
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In spite of his handicap Dandolo was an individual of enormous energy and drive whose behavior on the campaign would attract strong praise and sharp criticism alike. Bishop Gunther of Pairis (a Cistercian monastery in Alsace) described him thus: “He was, to be sure, sightless of eye, but most perceptive of mind and compensated for physical blindness with a lively intellect and, best of all, foresight. In the case of matters that were unclear, the others always took every care to seek his advice and they usually followed his lead in public affairs.”
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To Pope Innocent, however, he behaved in an outrageous fashion that did nothing but cause the crusaders to fight Christians rather than Muslims. Dandolo had governed Venice since 1192 and was clearly a hugely experienced and able politician. After a few days’ consideration the Venetians made their response to the crusaders’ request:
We will build horse transports to carry 4,500 horses and 9,000 squires with 4,500 knights and 20,000 foot sergeants travelling in ships. And we will agree to provide food for all these horses and people for nine months. This is the minimum we will provide in return for a payment of four marks per horse and two marks per man. All the terms we are offering you would be valid for one year from the day of our departure from the port of Venice, to do service to God and Christendom, wherever that might take us. The total cost of what has just been outlined would amount to 85,000 marks.
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And what’s more, we will provide, for the love of God, fifty armed galleys, on condition that for as long as our association lasts we will have one half of everything we capture on land or at sea, and you will
have the other. Now you should consider whether you have the will and the means to go ahead.
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The envoys duly agreed to these terms, but the doge still needed the approval of the people of Venice. Such was the scale of this undertaking that it would require the city to suspend its entire commercial operations for a year to fulfill the treaty—a breathtaking and unprecedented commitment. At a meeting held in the mosaic-covered splendor of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Villehardouin himself addressed the congregation.
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He implored the Venetians, as the greatest seafaring power of the time, to act to help recover Christ’s land. He sought to harness their civic pride and their commercial aspirations to the intrinsic religiosity of the age. Of all the Italian communities, the Venetians are frequently imagined as money-grabbing mercenaries, devoid of the spirituality of many of the other crusaders.
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In large part, the outcome of the Fourth Crusade is to blame for this, but as we will see, their behavior does not entirely merit such opprobrium. They had already taken part in the First Crusade and the 1124 crusade that captured Tyre; on both occasions they eagerly sought relics, just as the other crusaders had. The numerous churches in Venice bear obvious testimony to their conventional, and deep-seated, spiritual values. As Villehardouin reached the climax of his speech, he fell to his knees and cried out to the congregation for help. The doge and crowd responded with cries of “We agree! We agree!” and with “this great outpouring of piety,” as Villehardouin described it, the pact was sealed and the Venetians had joined the crusade.
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The execution of these terms came to exert an unyielding and pervasive influence on the outcome of the Fourth Crusade, far beyond anything that could have been calculated or forecast. The costs per individual were broadly in line with what the Genoese had charged King Philip during the Third Crusade, but it was the sheer scale of the project that proved the devastating structural flaw which drew the expedition to its terrible conclusion. The numbers promised were massive, particularly given the absence of a major monarch to pull troops along with him. By way of comparison, Frederick Barbarossa had led twelve thousand to fifteen thousand men on the Third Crusade, while the money required to pay the Venetians amounted to twice the annual income of the English or French crowns.
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Yet Villehardouin and his colleagues were highly experienced nobles, many of
whom had taken part in the Third Crusade; how could they have been so mistaken? Either they must have been confident in promises from people in northern France who planned to take part in the crusade, or else they were breathtakingly—and criminally—optimistic.
One further dimension to the campaign was a secret agreement between the leadership and the doge to begin the crusade with an assault on Egypt, rather than the Holy Land; the intention was to use the former as a staging post en route to Jerusalem.
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Sound strategy and considerable financial advantages lay behind such a plan. As we saw earlier, King Amalric of Jerusalem had made several attempts to conquer Egypt, the Sicilians attacked Alexandria in 1174, and Richard the Lionheart had favored an invasion of the Nile as a prelude to an approach on Jerusalem in 1191. The immense resources of Egypt offered unparalleled opportunities to the Christian military, while control of the coastline would all but guarantee Frankish security at sea. If Egypt came under Frankish power, then the Muslim world—which, since Saladin’s death in 1193, was in a highly fragmented condition anyway—would certainly struggle to recover. The existence of an ongoing truce between the kingdom of Jerusalem and Muslim Syria was a further reason to begin the campaign on the Nile because this arrangement excluded Egypt.
For the Venetians, the chance to become the preeminent trading city in Alexandria was impossible to resist. The city was by far the greatest commercial center in the Mediterranean, yet by the year 1200 Dandolo’s people conducted only 10 percent of their trade there: by contrast, the Pisans and the Genoese held a much stronger position. The pope frowned upon dealings with the Muslims, especially in materials of war such as iron and timber, but in the run-up to the crusade Innocent was flexible enough not to alienate the Venetians and he condoned trade in nonmilitary goods. Dandolo himself had visited Egypt in the 1170s so he was well aware of this tremendous opportunity. If the crusade succeeded, then it would bring the most phenomenal wealth to Venice and, of course, be the crowning achievement of Dandolo’s time as doge. The fact that it might then lead to the recovery of Jerusalem itself would only add further luster to his triumph.
It must be said that this was a hugely ambitious scheme—previous campaigns had seen pretty limited Christian progress in Egypt, although the plan to deliver a large force by sea marked an advance on previous strategy. The decision to take 4,500 horses required the construction of dozens of
special galleys, each equipped with slings to carry the beasts, as well as low-level doors that, on landing, could be opened to allow mounted knights to pour straight out of the ship and into battle. In other words, these vessels were a form of medieval landing craft and disgorged, in the form of a charging crusader, the equivalent of an armored car. The Venetians had fifty of their own battle galleys, headed by the vermilion-painted ship of the doge, along with around sixty to seventy large sailing boats that each carried up to six hundred passengers and a hundred crew. In total it would need about thirty thousand Venetians to man the whole fleet—possibly half the adult population and another indication of the scale of the city’s commitment.
The envoys made a down payment of 5,000 silver marks so the work could start immediately and then headed back to France, eager to announce the agreement. By the time they arrived home, however, the crusade had been dealt a heavy blow because the charismatic young Thibaut of Champagne had fallen ill and died on May 24, 1201. The death of this immensely popular figure provoked genuine distress in the region: “no man of his era was loved more by his vassals and by others,” as Villehardouin wrote.
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He could have been an inspirational and unifying figure to the crusaders and his presence might well have drawn many more to take the cross. The epitaph on his richly decorated tomb in Troyes (sadly, no longer extant) revealed his loss as a potential crusader, as well as showing a belief that he would attain the heavenly Jerusalem:
Intent upon making amends for the injuries of the Cross and the land of the Crucified
He arranged the way with expenses, an army, a navy.
Seeking the terrestrial city, he finds the celestial one;
While he is obtaining his goal far distant, he finds it at home.
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Thibaut’s passing meant that the crusade needed a new leader, a man of comparable authority and connections. The nobles decided to contact someone from outside France—perhaps a move designed to broaden the crusade’s appeal—and approached Boniface, marquis of Montferrat. We have already met his brothers, namely William Longsword, briefly the husband of Sibylla of Jerusalem and father of Baldwin V; and Conrad, the man chosen to rule Jerusalem but murdered (probably) by the Assassins in 1192. Boniface could boast, therefore, a formidable crusading ancestry. The
Montferrat clan also had a history of involvement with Byzantium because another brother, Renier, had married into the imperial family in 1179, although three years later he was poisoned by the usurping Angeloi dynasty. Conrad himself had served as the commander of the imperial army later in the decade before political intrigue forced him to flee for his life in the summer of 1187. Given this history, plus family ties to the ruling houses of France and Germany, coupled with his long experience of war and diplomacy (he was in his mid-forties), Boniface was a genuinely astute choice. The marquis traveled up to Soissons and there, in late August, he formally took the cross.
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For the remainder of 1201 and into early 1202 preaching and preparations for the crusade gathered pace. The most intriguing—and potentially sinister—development took place at Christmas 1201 at the court of Philip of Swabia, king of Germany, in Hagenau. Boniface was visiting his relative when the king’s brother-in-law, Prince Alexius of Byzantium, arrived to seek help. This meeting has aroused considerable suspicion over the years: some have seen it as the foundation stone of an alleged agreement with Boniface that eventually led to the sack of Constantinople. A few years earlier, the prince’s father, Isaac Angelos, had been the victim of a coup led by his brother who now ruled Byzantium as Alexius III. Isaac was blinded and, along with his son, Prince Alexius, cast into prison. The young prince managed to escape and now he haunted the courts of Europe trying to persuade relatives to restore him and his father to their rightful position. While his pleas had some emotional leverage, the fact that the Angeloi family themselves had brutally removed the previous dynasty and that Isaac had allied with Saladin counted against his cause. In any case, the way events on the crusade developed was so unexpected and, in several cases, so far outside of the prince’s control that the idea of a plot hatched at Hagenau is not sustainable. Prince Alexius also visited Innocent, but the pope showed little interest in the case.
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During the late spring of 1202 the northern French crusaders set out on their great campaign. As they headed southward many traveled via the mighty waterways of the Seine and Saône, before they crossed the Alps and
moved into northern Italy to assemble at Venice. Here, during the long, hot summer, the catastrophic miscalculation of the previous year’s treaty became apparent. Contingents of crusaders arrived in small groups: every so often the appearance of a senior noble would boost morale, but in essence only a fraction of the huge numbers of men promised actually gathered. Those waiting were stuck out on the Lido, an island seven miles from the main city, prudently housed there by the Venetians to ensure they could not cause any trouble. By August, only about twelve thousand of the stipulated 33,500 men had turned up. Dandolo began to fear the whole plan would collapse and all the sacrifices that he had induced the Venetians to make would be in vain. He appealed to the crusaders: “Lords, you have used us ill, for as soon as your messengers made the bargain with me I commanded through all my land that no trader should go trading, but that all should help prepare this navy. So they have waited ever since and have not made any money for a year and a half past. Instead, they have lost a great deal, and therefore . . . you should pay us the money you owe us. And if you do not do so, then know that you shall not depart from this island before we are paid, nor shall you find anyone to bring you anything to eat or to drink.”
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In desperation the leadership pooled their resources but still fell 34,000 marks short of the 85,000 owed to their hosts. Both parties here faced a deeply uncomfortable dilemma: the crusaders were aware they had made a contractual obligation and that any failure to fulfill it would entail a substantial loss of face. They might have to return home, ridiculed as the men who had reneged on their vows—in such a status-conscious society this was practically unthinkable. On Dandolo’s part, he had persuaded his people to make this huge effort and now it seemed as if it had been a terrible mistake. Not only would this ruin his own standing as doge but it would catastrophically compromise Venice’s finances. It would be an error, however, to view Dandolo as nothing other than a ruthless commercial operator. While the well-being of Venice was—rightly, given his role as doge—central to his actions, he had also chosen to become a crusader. His own father, grandfather, and uncle had taken part in the crusade of 1122–24: in the same way that the French were proud of their crusading ancestry, so was the Venetian.
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His age and blindness were, of course, immense barriers to his participation; at a ceremony in Saint Mark’s he cried out: “I am an old man, weak and in need of rest, and my health is failing,” yet he pleaded to be allowed to take the cross and “protect and guide” his people; the congregation bellowed
their support: “We beg you in God’s name to take the cross,” and thus Dandolo bound himself even closer to the cause of the crusade.
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