The
Devastatio Constantinopolitana,
an anonymous eye-witness account of the expedition written by a Rhineland crusader, paints a grim picture of conditions on the barren Lido: trapped, for day after day on the dull, flat sandbar; bored, hungry and condemned to wait on the decisions of their commanders. The author emphasised the suffering of the poor and their sense of being exploited by the crusade leadership—regardless of whether they were French or Venetian.
13
He wrote of hugely inflated food prices, and grumbled that ‘as often as it pleased the Venetians, they decreed that no one release any of the pilgrims ... consequently the pilgrims, almost like captives, were dominated by them in all respects’. These feelings of tedium and powerlessness, as well as the difficulties of survival, are representative of the lot of the average crusader and reveal how arduous such expeditions were. The
Devastatio
also mentions that many crusaders deserted and either travelled home or went south to Apulia. Of those who remained, ‘an unusual mortality rate arose. The result was that the dead could barely be buried by the living.’
14
Although this latter claim might be tenuous, the outbreak of some form of disease on the Lido during the hot summer months seems more than likely. For these disaffected individuals, a resentment of the Venetians’ apparently hostile behaviour nurtured ill-feeling that would boil over into open conflict after the siege of Zara a few weeks later. Other writers record that some crusaders managed to make the short journey over to Venice and acquire food; and Robert of Clari maintained that the doge continued to provide food and drink because he was such a worthy man.
15
The variety of viewpoints reflects the different experiences of the eye-witnesses and makes plain that members of the nobility were better able to secure supplies than the impoverished foot-soldiers.
Dandolo’s request for payment can hardly have been a surprise. The crusade leaders’ first response was to ask everyone to contribute the cost of their passage. However—and as an illustration of the difficulties in raising money for such expeditions—many were unable to do so. Perhaps they had hoped that a wealthy lord would take them under his patronage (as quite often happened on crusade), or else they believed that the general fund, including the sums raised by the papal taxes, would contribute towards their expenses.
For some men, the initial attraction of the crusade had paled and the enthusiasm to recover the Holy Land was becoming an increasingly distant and ephemeral dream when set against the day-to-day needs of survival. Cardinal Peter Capuano tried, unsuccessfully, to intervene with the Venetians and to persuade them to be patient with the crusaders. He also attempted to streamline the expedition. Prudently, he granted letters releasing the sick, the destitute, women and ‘all feeble persons’ from their vows, which allowed them to return home without the penalty of excommunication.
16
From those who remained, the nobles collected all that they could but, even so, more than half the overall fee was still missing. Further discussion was clearly needed.
The French acknowledged that the Venetians had fulfilled their side of the bargain in good faith, and that the problem lay with the crusaders. Once again Villehardouin blamed the breach of the contract on those who had failed to come to Venice: ‘This is the fault of those who have gone to the other ports.’
17
He made no mention of the gross overestimation of the crusaders’ numbers and the fact that there was a free choice as to which port the crusaders could embark from. Again, Villehardouin was refusing to acknowledge his own responsibility in the original estimate of the numbers and was trying to deflect blame for this increasingly grotesque mistake.
With insufficient money to pay the Venetians, the nobles faced the grim prospect of the expedition collapsing before it had even begun. They fretted over the injury to their honour and lamented the continuing danger to the Holy Land. Some men were ready to abandon the arrangement with Venice entirely and argued that they, as individuals, had paid the agreed sum for their passage and, if the Venetians were unwilling to take them to the Levant, then they would sail from elsewhere or, as Villehardouin suspected, simply return home. The more determined majority resolved to persist: ‘We’d much rather give up all we have and go as poor men with the army than see it broken up and our enterprise a failure. For God will doubtless repay us in His own good time.’
18
The ominous tone underlying this last remark again betrays the knowledge of the outcome of the crusade in Villehardouin’s account. As he saw it, the sack of Constantinople was God’s way of recognising the willingness of his men to sacrifice all their worldly goods in His cause and to hold firm to their crusade vows.
The leadership dug deep into their personal resources to try to bridge the gap between the sum raised and that owed to the doge. Gold and silver vessels, jugs, plates and cutlery were all handed over and transported to Dandolo’s palace to help pay the debt. In spite of some nobles borrowing money, the crusaders were still, according to Villehardouin, 34,000 (or 36,000 by Robert of Clari’s reckoning) marks short of the 85,000 required—and there appeared no way out of this impasse.
19
The crusaders had not, however, counted on Doge Dandolo’s ingenuity. He had, as Robert of Clari reported, already spent much of the anticipated payment in the construction and equipping of the fleet and he had also required the Venetians to cease trading for more than a year —with obvious financial consequences. As the man who had led his people in the original negotiations, Dandolo had a duty to ensure that Venice did not lose out. He was clearly under enormous pressure to keep the city’s finances in proper order and to realise the huge investment made in the crusader fleet. Furthermore, the doge was a proud man and by leaving a legacy of bankruptcy to his mother city his reputation would be fatally compromised. He was also a canny politician with an appreciation of the wider diplomatic picture. Dandolo argued that if, as they were legally entitled, the Venetians kept what had been paid, but did not take the crusade to the Holy Land because of the overall shortfall, they would provoke widespread ill-feeling across the Christian West. More pertinently, he would enrage the crusading army on his doorstep. As these were equally unacceptable options, the crusade had to go on and he had to find a way for the crusaders to relieve the debt in full. The doge made an offer: a pragmatic proposal and one that was certainly of advantage to Venice, yet it was an idea that would strike at the very core of the crusaders’ motivation and provoke deep unease amongst many of those committed to the cause of Christ. Dandolo suggested that the crisis could be alleviated by the Venetians and the crusaders attacking the city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast, around 165 miles south-east of Venice.
Control of Zara had long been an aim of the Venetians and here was an excellent opportunity for them to assert their authority. The doge decided that payment of the debt should be suspended and subsequently, God permitting, the crusaders would be able to win the money they owed by right of conquest.
20
In any case, it was now September, almost too late to journey to Egypt in safety. A diversion to Zara would at least start the campaign and move the men away from the environs of Venice itself.
Although Dandolo’s proposal seemed, in some respects, simple enough, there was a sinister catch: Zara was a Christian city and at the same time it was under the jurisdiction of King Emico of Hungary (1196—1204). Even worse, Emico was marked with the cross and nominally committed to the same cause as themselves. Dandolo was, therefore, asking the crusaders to direct their energies against a Christian city and, crucially, against a man whose lands—as a crusader—were under papal protection. Was this Venetian empire-building or just an ingenious way to keep the crusade going? The answer is probably both, yet as the campaign unfolded, it was a combination that increasing numbers of crusaders found themselves unable to stomach.
The crusade leaders discussed the offer and, according to Robert of Clari, chose not to reveal the plan to go to Zara to the rank and file of the army for fear of an adverse reaction. They simply announced that payment of the debt to the Venetians was to be deferred, to be paid ‘out of the first gains you shall make for yourselves’, and that the expedition was finally to set out.
21
The masses were delighted and they celebrated by lighting great torches and carrying them around the camp on the tips of their lances, parading their happiness to all.
As Villehardouin relates the decision to go to Zara, there was some initial dissent from those amongst the leadership who wanted the army to disband anyway, but this was soon overcome and the agreement to besiege the city was quickly concluded.
22
In fact, as the plan to invest Zara leaked out, it would begin to open up a serious rift amongst the crusaders and to provoke open disobedience to the papacy.
The city of Zara was a wealthy, independent mercantile power compelled to live under the economic shadow of the Venetians. The contemporary author of the
Deeds of the Bisbop of Halberstadt
described it thus: ‘Zara is surely an exceedingly rich city ... it is situated on the sea. It is properly fortified with a first-class wall and extremely high towers.’
23
On many occasions during the twelfth century it had tried to break free from the supervision of its powerful northern neighbour. At the times when they operated under Venetian overlordship, Zaran merchants were given the same privileges in Venice as the native merchants themselves. Patrolling galleys ensured that the Zarans directed their goods through Venice, rather than trading freely to other ports, so that all the taxes flowed into the doge’s treasury. Zara was also important in providing much of the wood so essential in the construction of the Venetian fleet; the forests of Dalmatia supplied excellent oak—in contrast to the paucity of such material in the Veneto by this time. In 1181, however, the Zarans had thrown off Venetian authority and six years later they forged a deal with King Bela III of Hungary (1173-96) to move under his protection. Three Venetian attacks on the city failed, but in 1202 the opportunity for the doge to crush his rebellious neighbour and to quell a possible source of disorder during his absence on the crusade was extremely tempting.
Around the same time as he advanced this proposal, the doge bound himself ever closer to the crusading cause—ironically, of course, just as he was about to attack a Christian city. He called together the most important citizens of Venice, along with the leading crusaders, to the church of St Mark’s. There, before mass began, he climbed the steps of the lectern and, with the great central dome arching above him, addressed the congregation. Up to this point Dandolo had simply been a commercial contractor, arranging for the transportation of the crusade and acting solely in a business capacity. But in terms of status and spiritual standing he desired to move forward. Dandolo’s father, grandfather and uncle had taken part in the crusade of 1122-4 and now he, like the French nobles with crusading traditions, wished to join the line of holy warriors. He acknowledged his physical infirmities, barriers to almost everyone else of his age and condition —‘I am an old man, weak and in need of rest, and my health is failing’—but he pleaded to be allowed to take the cross and ‘protect and guide’ the Venetians.
24
The congregation cried out their approval: ‘We beg you in God’s name to take the cross: There was also a practical political angle here: Enrico ensured that the citizens approved the choice of his son, Renier, to act as his regent, effectively confirming the Dandolo dynasty in power for a second generation. After securing a continuity of government—and, of course, the position of his own family—the old man was led down from the lectern towards the high altar under the easternmost dome of the church. There he knelt sobbing, before handing over his cotton cap to the churchmen standing there. Perhaps in recognition of his status, they departed from convention and sewed a cross onto his headgear rather than his shoulder. Dandolo wanted everyone to see him as a crusader and this in turn inspired many of his citizens to come forward to take the cross. This spiritual commitment drew the Italians and the Frenchmen into a closer bond than before and helped to intensify a shared aim that would sustain the crusade over the next few years. Villehardouin noted that: ‘Our [men] watched the doge’s taking of the cross with joy and deep emotion, greatly moved by the courage and wisdom shown by this good old man.’
25
For those crusaders who had doubted the Venetian’s true intentions this was a persuasive public sign of a religious dimension to his endeavours. Some of the crusaders, meanwhile, had yet to come to terms with the prospect of a campaign at Zara and, the longer they considered it, the more unpopular an idea it became.
The notion of a crusade attacking Christian lands was not new. In 1107—8, Bohemond of Antioch had led an expedition against the Greeks with the endorsement of Pope Paschal II.
26
More recently (1191) Richard the Lionheart had seized Cyprus from Isaac Ducas Comnenus, a renegade member of the Byzantine family, and this had provoked little disquiet in the West. The basic differences between these cases and the Venetian plan was that Zara was a Catholic city. Besieging a city subject to the overlordship of a crusader (in this case, King Emico of Hungary) would mean conflicting with the papal promise to protect the property of all who took the cross. It would, therefore, open up the prospect of excommunication for the attackers. It seems that news of the target began to reach the ordinary troops and there were increasing murmurs of dissent. At this point, however, the level of ill-feeling simmered just below the surface and did not prevent the final preparations for setting sail. The crusaders’ horses were led into their stalls below decks and the doors caulked over. Villehardouin mentions that more than 300 siege machines were loaded aboard, including equipment and material for constructing towers and ladders—more evidence of how thoroughly the Venetians had prepared the fleet for the invasion of Egypt and an assault on Alexandria.