The Great Betrayal (22 page)

Only the Venetians amid the wild sack of the city seemed to have retained some sense of values. They hunted in organised bands through the churches and private houses for objects that might be used to grace their own city of the canals. Nearly all the thirty-two chalices now in the Treasury of St. Mark’s were taken from Constantinople. The magnificent cloisonné enamelled reliquary containing a relic of the True Cross—one of the principal prides of St. Mark’s—is yet another piece of loot from the sack.

Not content with ransacking and desecrating Santa Sophia, the Crusaders showed their contempt for eastern Christendom by enthroning a common whore in the Patriarchal chair. “Then, to show her contempt, she danced and sang lewd songs, dishonouring the name of God…”

Not for nearly six centuries, not indeed until 1793, when the French mob sacked their own churches, would Europe witness anything comparable to the desecration of Santa Sophia and the other churches of Constantinople: “Most of these persons were still drunk with the brandy they had swallowed out of chalices; eating mackerel on patenas! Mounted on asses, which were housed with priest’s cloaks, they reined them with priests’ stoles; they held clutched with the same hand communion-cup and sacred wafer. They stopped at the doors of Dramshops; held out ciboriums: and the landlord, stoop in hand, had to fill them thrice. Next came mules high-laden with crosses, chandeliers, censers, holy-water vessels, hyssops: recalling to mind the Priests of Cybele, whose panniers, filled with the instruments of their worship, served at once as storehouse, sacristy and temple. In such equipage did these profiteers advance…in an immense train, ranged in two rows; all masked like mummers in fantastic sacerdotal vestments; bearing on hand-barrows their heaped plunder, ciboriums, suns, candelabras, plates of gold and silver.”
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Never in history had there been anything to equal the loot that now fell into the hands of these soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. Robert de Clari’s description of the palaces and the chapels and houses of the city reads like a gasp of wonder: “In the palace of Boucoleon which the Marquis of Montferrat occupied, there were five hundred rooms, the one leading into the other, and all of them decorated with gold mosaic work. There were at least thirty chapels in the palace, some large and some small. Most outstanding of all was the Holy Chapel where even the door hinges and nails and things that are normally made of iron were all of silver. Not a column in it but was of jasper or porphyry or of precious stone! The chapel’s pavement was of white marble so polished and shining that one might have taken it for crystal. I cannot begin to tell you how beautiful and grand this whole building was! We found many rich relics here, among them two pieces of the True Cross, as thick as a man’s leg and about three feet long. Then there was the iron head of the lance which pierced Our Lord’s side, and the nails which were struck through His hands and feet, a phial containing some of His blood, and the tunic that He wore…”

All of these relics and hundreds more like them were soon to be dispersed throughout Europe, so that there was hardly a church or chapel of any importance in France or Italy which was not soon to be endowed with some miraculous and wonderworking object, bone or vestment. It was the Age of Faith (which later centuries might equate with the Age of Superstition), but, nevertheless, to these medieval Christians the tangible evidences of the saints and martyrs, and of the Holy Family itself, were the buttresses of that Faith. Constantinople, had become through the ages an immense repository of such relics, collected from all the Near East. The flow of them to the capital had steadily increased as the Moslems had invaded areas that were formerly Christian. The first thing that occurred to priests fleeing from towns and cities about to fall into Moslem hands was to save the evidences of their faith. From the fall of Alexandria to the Arabs in the seventh century, throughout the gradual loss of eastern Christendom, the stream of relics into Constantinople had increased to a flood—especially since the eleventh century as the Turks occupied Asia Minor and as so many old centres of Christian worship fell into their hands.

Although three-eighths of the relics in the city were officially allotted to the clergy, it was not only the Catholic priests who scavenged through the churches, monasteries and convents. The knights, men-at-arms and common soldiers were equally superstitious, and undoubtedly many of them felt that only by obtaining possession of some holy relic might their crime of having attacked the city be assuaged. The man who could return to his home town or parish with the shin-bone of a martyr, or some really important relic like the head of a saint, was certain of being freed from the terrors of excommunication and of being welcomed back in honour to his church. Such a one was Dalmatius de Sergy, who managed to steal the head of St. Clement from the church of St. Theodosia, and later presented it to the monks of Cluny. The Bishop of Soissons, for his part, managed to take back dozens of relics to his own See—among them the arm of John the Baptist, the head of St. Stephen, and the finger which doubting Thomas thrust into the side of Our Lord. Like works of art by famous old masters, relics proliferated suspiciously. There was to be argument for centuries to come about the authenticity of certain relics from the sack of Constantinople—particularly when it was discovered, for instance, that there was more than one head of John the Baptist in existence.

While France, Germany and Italy contrived to secure more relics than any other countries, loot from Constantinople even found its way to churches in remote England. Such sacred objects gave their possessors a unique position in those days when pilgrimages to shrines played an important part in religious life. In this way, Bromholm in Norfolk was to become prosperous from pilgrimages made to the ‘Sacred Rood of Bromholm’—a fragment of the True Cross carved into the shape of a cross, and stolen by an unknown soldier (presumably English) from Count Baldwin of Flanders in 1204.

It was Venice, above all, which benefited from the relics seized during the sack of the city. While it was the sacred relic inside its case or covering which gave the object its value in medieval Christian eyes, the reliquary containing the object was more often than not a marvellous work of art. The dispersion of so many almost miraculous objects of jewellery and enamel to Venice served to promote these crafts in the city, as her native craftsmen strove to emulate the Byzantines. In this way, throughout hundreds of cities in Europe, local artisans were prompted to try and rival the master-craftsmen and artists of Constantinople.

Although historians in the nineteenth century—and even subsequently—have claimed that the sack of Constantinople by the Turks in the fifteenth century unleashed a flood of works of art and of artists upon Europe—thus promoting the Renaissance—this simple assumption must be dismissed. It was the Latin conquest of the city in 1204 which first began the great dispersal not only of works of art but also of Byzantine artists and craftsmen throughout western Europe. It was from them that so many European jewellers, enamellers, gemsetters and modellers first learned what could be achieved with precious metals, ivories, gemstones and enamels.

Outstanding works of art like the cover of a reliquary for the preservation of a fragment of the True Cross (now to be seen at Limburg an der Lahn, Germany) reached a nunnery at Stuben shortly after the sack of the city. Set with half-pearls and with cabochon-cut gemstones, this masterpiece of gold and enamel was, like many others, to influence future generations of metalworkers and to give them an ideal towards which to aspire. As Professor Talbot Rice has remarked: “It was really as a result of the immense influx of Byzantine works of art brought after 1204 as loot accumulated by the Fourth Crusade that the imitation of Byzantine objects began on a really wide scale, and it was then that Venice became really active as a centre for the production of works in metal and enamel, and even stone, in a basically Byzantine style, so that it is sometimes hard to tell the Venetian copies from the Byzantine originals…”
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A curious fact which emerges from the looting of thousands of relics from Constantinople is that the Crusaders venerated them far more than did the Orthodox Greek Christians. A sceptical spirit has always been part of Greek nature, and although many of the faithful regarded these objects with awe and devotion, most Byzantines did not suffer from the same credulity as did the western Europeans of this date. With the instinctive Greek reverence for visual beauty they regarded the ikons and their bejewelled frames, the church furniture, the enamelled bindings of sacred books and the reliquaries themselves, with as much reverence as the objects they were said to contain.

But if a superstitious regard for relics blinded the Crusaders to the aesthetic value of their containers, the splendour of the ornaments and objects of everyday life in Constantinople excited their greed. Robert de Clari can find only one adjective to describe the treasure of Boucoleon Palace: “One found there a vast wealth of richness, for there were the rich crowns which had belonged to previous emperors, and rich jewels of gold, and rich garments of silk embroidered with gold, and rich imperial robes, and rich precious stones. Indeed there were so many rich things that one could hardly count the huge treasure of gold and silver to be found in the palace as well as in many other places in the city.”

15

DEATH OF A CITY

“Now among all the marvels of the city the most astounding were two columns. Each was at least the span of a man’s outstretched arms in width, and about three hundred feet high. On top of these were small dwellings where hermits used to live, and there were staircases inside the columns so that one could climb up to them. On the outside of the columns there were prophetic pictures and writings, showing all the events and all the conquests which have ever happened at Constantinople, or which are ever going to happen. Now no one could understand an event until it had happened, but afterwards people would go and look at the prophetic writings and pictures and then they would suddenly see and understand it. Even this present French conquest of the city was depicted and described on the columns —right down to the very ships in which they had made their attack on the city. The Greeks, however, had not been able to understand it beforehand. But now that they went and looked at the columns, they found letters inscribed on these ships, which said that a race would come out of the West, who would wear their hair long and carry iron swords, and that they would capture Constantinople!”

Robert de Clari’s account of the city in those last days has all the simple wonder of the eternal tourist. Villehardouin, on the other hand, while marvelling at ‘the sights’ was more preoccupied with policy. It is clear that in his old age he regretted the way in which the leaders of the army had lost their control over the troops. It is he who tells us that, for three whole days, Constantinople was given over to sack and massacre. It was not until the third day that even the Catholic bishops who had travelled with the Crusaders ventured to pronounce sentence of excommunication upon those who should plunder church, convent or monastery, or lay hands upon any of the priests, monks and nuns of the Orthodox Faith.

Although the loss to the world of so much unique Christian art—melted down, torn to pieces for its gems or burnt in the wanton firing of the city—is incalculable, it is the loss of the great works of art surviving from the pagan world that must appal the modern historian and art-lover. It was true that Constantinople was the city where the glorious monotheistic Nicene creed had been accepted since a.d. 326: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible: and in One Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father…” But the same people who embraced the Nicene creed were happy to tolerate, and indeed to love, the many evidences within their walls of the ancient world that had existed before ever the Crucified Saviour had died in an eastern province of the Roman Empire. Just as it abounded in Christian relics and reliquaries, the city was also the last treasure-trove of classical art in the world. Here the marbles and bronzes of great Greek and Roman sculptures formed a part of everyday life—an accepted background to the city.

One of these master-works was an immense bronze statue of Hercules, by the famous Greek sculptor Lysippus. Lysippus had been head of the school of Argos and Sicyon in the time of Alexander the Great. He worked only in bronze, became court sculptor to Alexander, and made many portrait statues of him. The Hercules, which had been brought to Constantinople from Tarentum in Italy, was accounted one of the finest bronzes surviving from the wreck of the ancient world. It was Lysippus who had modified the old conception of Hercules as no more than an arrogant ‘strong man’, and who had first depicted him as weary of the immense tasks he had undertaken, and scornful of their unworthy nature. His colossal bronze in Constantinople showed the hero seated, his lion-skin draped over his shoulders.

His left knee was bent and his head rested upon his left hand, the elbow on the knee, while his right leg and arm were stretched out to their full extent. The figure was august yet full of lassitude—it might have been taken as symbolic of the city itself, of its eternal struggle to clear up the Augean stables of the world. But the ignorant roaring mob who were now let loose upon the city had no interest in works of art—what concerned them was the bronze itself, so useful for turning into coin. The Hercules of Lysippus was dragged away, broken up and thrown into the melting-pots.