These three cities represented the most developed commercial powers in western Europe and their merchant fleets sailed extensively across the Mediterranean basin, even to trade with Muslim North Africa and Spain. All of these cities had taken part in crusades to the Holy Land and against the Muslims in the Balearics and the Iberian peninsula. The intense sense of religious devotion that permeated western Europe did not, of course, stop at the gates of the great trading centres, and the Italians possessed a potent mix of religious zeal and driving commercial ambition.
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Each of these commercial centres was deeply imbued with a sense of Christian duty and was drawn to take part in the holy wars for spiritual reward; crusaders from all of the cities were as determined and delighted to secure the Holy Land for the faithful as their fellow-Catholics elsewhere in Europe. They were also keen to bring back relics from the East to venerate in their churches: the treasury of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa still houses a piece of the True Cross, a plate believed to have carried the head of John the Baptist, and a beautiful emerald-green bowl from Caesarea, once thought to be the Holy Grail itself. The Venetians acquired the body of St Nicholas on the First Crusade and in the 1123-4 crusade to Tyre they brought back a block of stone from which Christ was said to have preached.
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Irrevocably entwined with this religious zeal and acute business sense was a growing feeling of pride in the achievements of their respective cities. The Italians did not view spiritual advance, commercial enterprise and civic prestige as the unhappy combination that it may seem today. A Genoese chronicler described the taking of the important southern Spanish trading port of Almeria in 1147 thus: ‘they captured the city for the honour of God and all of Christendom and determined to remain in control of it out of necessity of all Christians and the honour of Genoa’.
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Devout Christians the Italians undoubtedly were, but their support for the crusading movement had always come at a substantial price. In the early years of the Frankish conquest of the Holy Land there was a need to capture many of the coastal towns and cities of the Levant. The crusaders could not provide the ships to transport westerners to take part in these campaigns, nor the naval skills necessary to mount seaborne attacks on places such as Caesarea, Beirut, Acre and Sidon. In return for their expertise, the Italians gained streets and houses in these cities and secured highly profitable rights to use the harbours and trading points within each port. They also had their own churches, dedicated to the patron saint of their home city. Thus we find a church of St Lawrence in the Genoese quarter of Acre, and a church of St Mark’s in the Venetian district. They were also given the right to administer their own justice to their own people - a notable prerogative in that it cut across the authority of the local lord or monarch. In essence, little Pisan, Genoese or Venetian colonies grew up in the Crusader States, manned by personnel sent out from each mother city. Traders and administrators would probably serve for a two- or three-year term before returning home.
The Italians provided the Frankish settlers with an essential lifeline to the West. Twice a year, in March and September (for Easter and Christmas), great fleets set out from Italy to transport pilgrims, new crusaders and new settlers to the Levant. They would also carry items such as cloth, wood and metal, and would trade these for spices, silks, oils and sugar to bring back to their homelands. The most important port of the eastern Mediterranean was, however, the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The fact that it was a Muslim-held city did not prevent the Italians from having outposts there and from engaging in normal trading relations. Obviously at times of crisis the position of those in Alexandria was perilous and they might be expelled by the rulers or, on one rare occasion (1174) killed. Yet the requirements of the commercial world were not delineated by faith. Saladin himself had to justify the Italians’ presence in Egypt to his spiritual overlord, the caliph of Baghdad, and he explained that the trade in metals and military equipment was essential to his cause. In parallel, Muslim traders moved freely through the Crusader States, bringing their goods from Damascus and Aleppo to ports such as Acre and Beirut. They had to pay heavy taxes, but equally Frankish traders who ventured inland into their territories were required to pay dues as well. Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Muslim who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1184, was amazed by this state of affairs and wrote:
One of the astonishing things is that although the fires of discord burn between the two parties ... yet Muslim and Christian travellers will come and go between them without interference. The sultan [Saladin] invested [the castle of Kerak, in Transjordan], but still the caravans passed successively from Egypt to Damascus, going through the lands without impediment from them. In the same way the Muslims continuously journeyed from Damascus to Acre and likewise not one of the Christian merchants was stopped or hindered in Muslim territories ... Security never leaves them [the merchants] in any circumstance, neither in peace nor war.
The lengthy siege of Acre (1189-91) brought trade to a halt for a time, but once relative calm returned, so too did the commercial traffic as the world of business crossed and recrossed the lines drawn by the conflict between Christianity and Islam.
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The three Italian cities were bitter competitors and on many occasions their rivalry spilled over into outright conflict; indeed, at the time of the Fourth Crusade, Genoa and Pisa were engaged in a period of intense feuding. In spite of papal attempts to mediate, their continuing struggle made it difficult for them to contemplate transporting a large army to the Holy Land.
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Furthermore, disputes concerning the Genoese transportation of King Philip’s army during the Third Crusade meant that the French were less willing to engage the Genoese again on an exclusive basis.
It was, therefore, to Venice that the envoys turned. In his crusade bull of August 1198 Innocent had explicitly mentioned the dispatch of his legate Soffredo to Venice ‘in search of aid for the Holy Land’, and, with Pisa and Genoa at odds, he had little or no alternative anyway.
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Villehardouin reported that when the crusade leaders assembled in council at Compiègne they decided to appoint six envoys to negotiate a sea passage on behalf of the crusading army. They were given charters; documents sealed by all the principal nobles who promised to abide by whatever arrangements were settled upon by their representatives. This was obviously an enormous responsibility and the six men were chosen with great care: two each from the contingents of Thibaut, Louis and Baldwin. Amongst these was Geoffrey of Villehardouin, whose presence here gives his chronicle a unique insight into the decision-making process.
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The terms that these men negotiated were amongst the most important influences on the outcome of the crusade. The circumstances fostered by their deal shaped and directed the armies’ actions in ways no one foresaw and did much to draw the crusade towards its terrible conclusion. Villehardouin and his colleagues, of course, could not have anticipated the outcome of the campaign and set out in complete good faith to secure passage for the army of Christ to regain His patrimony. In the early months of 1201 they passed across the Alps and into northern Italy, probably though Piacenza, and thence to Venice itself, reaching the city in the first week of Lent, March 1201.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Our lords entreat you, in God’s name to take pity
on the land overseas’
The Treaty of Venice, April 1201
S
ET UPON A clutch of islands in the lagoon at the head of the Adriatic, the city of Venice was a powerful and independent force in the medieval world and boasted a proud and distinctive history.
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The islands had been inhabited by fishermen since Roman times when the region was part of the great empire. In those days the lagoons were far more extensive, both inland and stretching to the north and south of the area that would later become Venice. With the decline of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries most of Italy came under the rule of Germanic tribes. One exception was the territory known as Venetia. This remained under the control of officials sent out from Constantinople, which, since 331 as the emperors sought a safer base further east, had been the ‘new Rome’. This link with Byzantium was fundamental in shaping the development of Venice over the next few centuries.
The Lombard invasion of Italy in 580 forced many refugees from the mainland to seek safety on the islands deep amongst the lagoons. Several settlements grew up and in 697 the Byzantine officials appointed the first dux (or doge) to rule the area. In 810, Charlemagne’s son, Pepin, attempted to conquer the region on behalf of the Frankish Empire, but was unable to cross to the Rialto island that already formed the hub of the settlement.
A subsequent peace treaty made plain that Venice was part of the Byzantine Empire, although the islanders soon began to assert their independence. This was vividly symbolised in 829 with the theft of the relics of St Mark from Alexandria and the adoption of the apostle in place of Theodore, a Greek warrior saint, as the patron saint of the city. However, a loosening of political ties did not mean a complete break from Constantinople, and trading links remained strong, as did Greek influence on cultural matters, such as architecture.
Around this time the Venetians concentrated their sailing skills on the myriad river valleys that ran into the broad natural basin that lay below the Dolomites in northern Italy. Their bargemen became great traders, selling salt and fish from their own region, as well as products brought up from the Mediterranean by Byzantine merchants (spices, silk and incense) in return for staple foodstuffs including grain, which they were unable to grow on their own small, sandy islands.
Neighbouring regions such as the Po river valley became increasingly peaceful during the ninth and tenth centuries, the economy prospered and the Venetians started to travel further afield to satisfy a rising demand for luxury products. Their ships sailed into the Mediterranean with ever-greater frequency, trading with Muslim North Africa as well as Asia Minor and the Levant. Slaves from the Slavic lands and timber from the plains and mountains to the north of Venice became important exports. The slaves and wood were sold to North Africa in return for gold and this, in turn, was spent in Constantinople to obtain luxury goods to sell in the West. This growth in trade, combined with the ready availability of timber, meant that the Venetian shipbuilding industry emerged to help sustain the city’s commercial ascendancy.
In 1082 Emperor Alexius I of Byzantium favoured the Venetians by granting them complete exemption from tariffs across the Byzantine Empire - another substantial boost to the islanders’ economy.
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By the eleventh century Venice was a strong, wealthy and vigorous political and economic force. Unlike its rivals Pisa and Genoa, it had managed to remain independent from the German emperor who ruled over much of northern Italy. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, the city had grown to be one of the largest urban centres in Europe with a population estimated at about 60,000 people based on the islands centred around the Rialto.
In early 1202 the envoys halted their horses at the eastern edge of the Veneto plain and transferred to small barges for the last leg of their journey. Their boats passed through the lush vegetation of the lagoons and on to stretches of green, open water where they caught their first sight of Venice. They saw a skyline unlike that of any other city in northern Italy. Centuries of rivalry meant that places such as Siena, Genoa, Bologna and Perugia were marked by a forest of tall stone towers. These structures were built by families and kin groups as statements of wealth and power and as defence against aggressive neighbours both inside and outside the city. Venice had no such high towers, in part because it had suffered few political upheavals - the non-hereditary system of election for the doges worked well - and, more practically, because the sand upon which it was built could not support buildings of this sort. The clay lagoon floor (beneath the sand), combined with wooden piles, offered some sort of foundation, but this underlying weakness and a lack of local stone meant that it was hard to construct tall buildings.Today the Venetian skyline remains remarkably low, broken principally by the
campanile
(bell-tower) of St Mark’s Square. First constructed in 1173, the present structure originates from the sixteenth century, although a collapse in 1902 led to it being rebuilt.
Soon after the envoys’ arrival, the ruler of Venice, Doge Enrico Dandolo, came to welcome the Frenchmen. This remarkable individual was to be one of the central players in the Fourth Crusade.
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By this time he was already a most venerable man, probably aged over 90 years old; he was also blind. To survive to such an advanced age indicated a hardy constitution and was a comparative rarity in the medieval period, although genetics seems to have favoured the Dandolo family because several other members of the clan lived into their eighties and beyond.
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Enrico had been blind since the 1170s and he told Villehardouin personally that he had suffered the disability as the result of a severe blow to the head. Later rumours suggested that the wound had been inflicted by Emperor Manuel Comnenus during an embassy to Constantinople in 1172. Manuel had realised that Dandolo was a dangerous opponent and had had him bound and then blinded by using glass to reflect the sun’s rays into his eyes. Thus, the story went, Dandolo swore to be avenged on the Greeks; hence the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople. Sadly, this neat reasoning does not tally with the evidence because, as well as his account to Villehardouin, we know that the doge could still see in 1176. Thus, however attractive it is, the idea of a long-standing personal grudge against the Greeks based upon Dandolo being blinded by Manuel Comnenus cannot be sustained.
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