City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (11 page)

The crusade had survived by the skin of its teeth.

And yet for those who could see, the Corfu stay should have given further pause for thought. Alexius had promised that the Byzantines would recognise the justice of his claim, that the gates of Constantinople would be flung wide to welcome him and then the Orthodox Church would bow to the supremacy of Rome. Nothing at Corfu presaged such an outcome. The citizens remained loyal to the ruling emperor, kept their gates shut and bombarded the Venetian fleet in the harbour, forcing it to withdraw. As for the religious schism, when the Orthodox archbishop of Corfu invited some of his Catholic brethren to lunch, he remarked that he could see no basis for Rome’s primacy over his church, other than the fact that it had been Roman soldiers who had crucified Christ.

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Back in Rome, Innocent’s worst fears had been confirmed. He had now learned that, after sacking Zara, the crusaders were sailing for Constantinople. On 20 June he penned another blast: ‘Under threat of excommunication we have forbidden you to attempt to invade or violate the lands of Christians … and we warn you not to contravene this prohibition lightly.’ Expressing his utter revulsion at the possibility of redoubled sin, he summoned up the most distasteful metaphor at his command: ‘A penitent returning to his sin is regarded as a dog returning to its vomit.’ The letter makes quite clear whom Innocent held responsible for this state of affairs. Dandolo is likened to Pharaoh in Exodus, who ‘under a certain semblance of necessity and the veil of piety’ kept the
crusaders, as the children of Israel, in bondage. He is ‘a person hostile to our harvest’, a trifle of leaven ‘corrupting the whole mass’. Innocent commanded the crusader leaders to present the letter of excommunication to the Venetians, ‘so that they cannot find an excuse for their very sins’. At the same time he was wrestling with the tricky theological problem as to how the crusaders might consort with the excommunicated Venetians on the ships. His elliptically worded solution was startling: they might travel with them to the Holy Land, ‘where, seizing the opportunity, you might suppress their malice, insofar as it is expedient’. Decoded, it suggested that the unrepentant Venetians might justifiably be destroyed.

But everyone in the fleet, willingly or otherwise, was in this together, and it was far too late. With a fair wind, the fleet was making steady progress towards the Dardanelles even as Innocent set pen to paper. Four days later, on 24 June 1203, the crusaders were in the Bosphorus, looking up, astonished, at the impregnable walls of Constantinople. Events had drifted well beyond Innocent’s control. The following month he sorrowfully acknowledged as much: ‘For here the world ebbs and flows like the sea, and it is not easy for someone to avoid being driven hither and thither in the ebb and flow, or for him, who does not stay in the same place, to remain unmoved in it.’ The maritime image was telling.

At the Walls

JUNE–AUGUST 1203

Some time on 23 June 1203, the people of Constantinople gazed out from the sea walls to behold an extraordinary sight: an enormous Venetian fleet tacking up the Bosphorus from the west, carrying ten thousand Christian crusaders intent on replacing their emperor. Many were puzzled and stunned; almost all were unprepared. Among the audience of this maritime spectacle was an aristocratic chronicler of the Byzantine court, Niketas Choniates. As he prepared to recall the events about to unfold, Choniates was overcome by emotion. ‘Up to now, the course of my history has been smooth and it went along easily,’ he wrote of his narrative. ‘Now, to tell the truth, I hardly know how to describe what happened next.’

Choniates was scathing about the present emperor, Alexius III, who had deposed and blinded his own brother Isaac, and whose nephew was now coming to demand the throne. ‘A man who could not even lead sheep’ was perhaps his kindest verdict. The emperor was lazy, pleasure-seeking, complacent and intrinsically unwarlike – though he may also have been lulled by Innocent’s letters assuring him that aggressive action from the west was forbidden and would not happen. At any rate, preparations for such an eventuality were minimal. When urged to take precautions against the impending storm, ‘it was as though his advisors were talking to a corpse’. The Byzantine navy was almost non-existent – its admiral had sold off the anchors, sails and rigging. Reluctantly the emperor ‘began to repair the rotting and worm-eaten small vessels, barely twenty in number’. He preferred to put his
faith in the defensive strength of the city’s walls and his army. Constantinople occupied the best-fortified position in the medieval world; its thirteen-mile triangular site was guarded by sea on two fronts, the third by a formidable triple wall, which had remained unbreached in eight hundred years. As for forces, he commanded some thirty thousand men – three times the size of the crusader army – backed by the civilian resources of a substantial population.

Many of the Venetians were familiar with the silhouette of Constantinople looming on their port bow; to the landlubber crusaders seeing its walls for the first time, the prospect was extraordinary. It took their breath away. Constantinople was on a scale quite beyond their experience. It was the largest metropolis in the Christian world; the capital of an empire which, although shrunken, controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean, from Corfu to Rhodes, Crete to the shores of the Black Sea, much of Asia Minor and continental Greece. The city’s population numbered four or five hundred thousand; Venice’s was perhaps sixty thousand, Paris the same. From the water they could see, behind the encircling sea walls, a city dense with impressive buildings, all dominated by the mother church of Hagia Sophia, whose imposing dome looked, as one Greek writer put it, as if it were suspended from heaven.

The European chroniclers struggled to find analogies to convey the scale of the place: ‘it has more inhabitants than those who live in the area from the city of York all the way to the River Thames’, the parochial English chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall assured his readers. A sense of wonder, awe – and growing trepidation – informs the eyewitness accounts. ‘They looked on Constantinople for a long time because they could scarcely believe there could be such an enormous city in all the world,’ declared Villehardouin.

They saw its high walls and magnificent towers by which it was enclosed for all its circumference, and the fine palaces and tall churches, of which there were so many that none would believe it if he hadn’t seen this with his own eyes, as well as the great dimensions of the city, which is the sovereign of all others. Know that there was no one so brave that his flesh did not tremble.

Constantinople from the sea

What they could not yet fully grasp was what Constantinople contained: the marble, the broad streets, the mosaics, the icons, the sacred gold, the treasure houses, the ancient statues looted from the classical world, the holy relics and irreplaceable libraries; nor could they fathom the scale of its dark underside: the huddled slum streets of wooden houses on the hills down to the Golden Horn where a downtrodden urban proletariat eked out lives of poverty and riot. Medieval Constantinople was a mirror image of
ancient Rome, a place where explosive popular and partisan tensions exposed the melting-pot city to superstition, chronic instability and dynastic upheaval. Above all its people were fiercely loyal to their Orthodox faith and deeply hostile to the rival claims of Rome. A city whose population was given to contemptuously naming their dogs ‘Rum Papa’ – the Roman pope – was unlikely to respond well to Angelus’s confident promise that it would easily submit to its detested rival.

The Venetians had a better understanding of the situation; there were perhaps as many as ten thousand of their compatriots trading within the city, and they did not underestimate the task. Dandolo was a sage adviser and he gave the crusader lords the benefit of his knowledge. ‘My lords, I know the situation in this land better than you do, because I have been there before. You have undertaken the most arduous and perilous mission undertaken by any men. For this reason it is critical that you proceed with care.’ On 24 June, the day after they first sighted Constantinople, the whole fleet passed close under the city walls. It was John the Baptist’s feast day and the fleet made a magnificent array as it sailed by, with banners and pennons streaming in the wind and shields hung from the ships’ sides. On the deck the soldiers nervously sharpened their weapons. They passed so close they could see a throng of people watching from the walls, and they loosed arrows at the Greek ships as they went.

As they set up camp on the Asian shore across the water from the city and foraged for food, they waited in confidence for Angelus’s supporters to welcome them in as liberators. None came. Instead an ambassador from the emperor arrived to declare he was ‘deeply puzzled why and for what purpose you have come to his kingdom … because he is a Christian and you are also Christians, and he is well aware that you have set out to recover the Holy Land overseas’. The ambassador, an Italian, offered them food and money to speed them on their way, backed by a threat from the emperor: ‘If he wanted to do you harm, you would be destroyed.’

A growing uncertainty gripped the crusader command as to
how exactly to proceed. The lack of welcome was unnerving. It was Dandolo again who proposed a way forward; by this time he probably had a good idea of the true state of affairs via Venetian merchants within the city. To break the deadlock he suggested that they should sail up to the city walls, display Angelus to the population and explain that he had come to free them from the tyrant. Ten galleys set out under flag of truce; the young prince was placed in the lead galley with Dandolo and Boniface. As they rowed up and down very close to the walls, the young prince was shown to those watching intently from the battlements above: ‘Behold your true lord,’ the herald called across the water in Greek. ‘Know that we do not come to do you harm, but to protect and defend you.’ There was silence; then shouts: ‘We do not recognise him as our lord; we do not even know who he is.’ On being told that he was the son of Isaac, the former emperor, there was a further riposte: they knew nothing about him. It was probably followed by a sharp volley of arrows for added emphasis. Not a single person had expressed support for the crusaders’ champion. ‘We were stunned,’ recorded Hugh of Saint-Pol. The crusaders had believed utterly in the scenario of instant success that Angelus had painted for them at the outset. They would have been less surprised if they had taken heed of the reaction he had received on Corfu. The Greeks wanted nothing to do with this western puppet who had promised submission to Rome. It did not help that Angelus was visibly under the wing of the unpopular Venetians. ‘And so they sailed back to camp and went each to his own quarters.’ It was a gloomy moment. The crusaders knew now that they would have to fight their way in if they wanted money and men to win back the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem must have suddenly looked a long way off. They prepared for war. And for the first time the crusaders began to look sideways at the young man who had promised them so much – ‘a child in mind rather than age’, was the disgusted judgement of Choniates.

The day after this failed approach, Sunday 4 July, the crusader barons attended a solemn mass and gathered to formulate their
plans. Dandolo, with his detailed knowledge of the city, was probably again instrumental in their choice of tactics. The city’s harbour was in the sheltered Golden Horn, a long creek on its eastern flank. It was down by this shoreline that the Venetians had their settlement; the city walls were at their weakest along this stretch. To protect the harbour the Byzantines had a chain of iron links strung across its mouth, from the walls of the city to the tower of Galata, fringed by the settlement of the Jewish community, on the headland opposite. It was decided that the first step must be to land near the suburb of Galata, storm the tower and break the chain, allowing the fleet to sail into the Horn. Time was pressing hard on the crusaders; they were already short of supplies. That evening men confessed their sins and drew up wills, ‘since they did not know when God would impose his will on them’. There was much apprehension about undertaking an amphibious landing on a contested shore; ‘there was real doubt that they would be able to land at Constantinople’, remembered Robert of Clari. They ‘were to embark upon their ships and go forward to take the land by force and either live or die’.