City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (17 page)

Down by the Horn, the crusaders started a perplexing day. They nervously prepared for the hard street fighting ahead. Instead they encountered a religious procession coming down the hill from 
Hagia Sophia to their camp. The clergy advanced with their icons and sacred relics, accompanied by some of the Varangian Guard, ‘as was the custom in rituals and religious processions’, and a host of people. In a city undergoing a period of repeated civil wars this was practised procedure: to welcome in a new emperor deposing the old. They explained that Murtzuphlus had fled. They had come to acclaim Boniface as the new emperor – to honour him and lead him to Hagia Sophia for his coronation.

It was a moment of tragic misunderstanding. To the Byzantines this was customary regime change. To the Franks it was abject surrender. And there was no emperor – according to the March Pact that had still to be decided – only an ugly, angry, desperate army to whom the idea had been preached, not two days before, that the Greeks were treacherous people, worse than the Jews who had killed Christ, worse than dogs.

They started to advance into the heart of the city. It was true: there was no opposition; no trumpets or defiant martial clamour. They quickly found that ‘the way was open before them and everything there for the taking. The narrow streets were clear and the crossroads unobstructed, safe from attack.’ Stupefied, ‘they found no one to resist them’. The streets were apparently lined with people who had turned out ‘to meet them with crosses and holy icons of Christ’. This pacific, abject, trusting, desperate ritual was horribly misjudged. The crusaders were utterly unmoved: ‘At this sight their demeanour remained unchanged, nor did the slightest smile cross their faces, nor were their grim and furious expressions softened by this unexpected spectacle.’ They just robbed the bystanders, beginning with their carts. Then they started a wholesale sack.

At this point the chronicle of Niketas Choniates breaks out into an anguished cry of pain: ‘O City, City, eye of all cities … have you drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury?’ Over the space of three days Choniates watched the devastation of the most beautiful city of the world, the destruction of a thousand years of Christian history, the plunder, rape and murder of its 
citizens. His account, frequently descending into a threnody of semi-articulate pain, unfolds in a series of vivid snapshots as an eyewitness to profound tragedy. He barely knew where to start: ‘Which actions of these murderous men should I relate first, and which should I end with?’

To the Byzantines, Constantinople was the sacred image of heaven on earth, a vision of the divine made manifest to man, a vast sacramental icon. To the crusaders it was a treasure house waiting to be stripped. The previous autumn they had visited Constantinople as tourists and seen the extraordinary wealth of the place. Robert of Clari was one of many open-mouthed at the glimpse of riches afforded to the warrior class of underdeveloped western Europe: ‘For if anyone should relate to you even a hundredth of the richness, beauty and magnificence that was there in the convents, monasteries, abbeys and palaces of the city, he would be taken for a liar and you would not believe him.’ Now it all lay at their mercy.

The two crusader leaders, Boniface and Baldwin, hurried to secure the richest prizes – the sumptuous imperial palaces, the Bucoleon and the Blachernae, ‘so rich and so magnificent that no one could describe it to you’, where the crusader deputations had been repeatedly overawed by the wealth of the Byzantine court. Elsewhere there was indiscriminate plunder. All the vows made before the attack were forgotten. The crusaders targeted both churches and the mansions of the rich. The Greek accounts are vivid with rhetorical anguish:

Then the streets, squares, two-storeyed and three-storeyed houses, holy places, convents, houses of monks, and nuns, holy churches (even God’s Great Church), the imperial palace, were filled with the enemy, all warmaddened swordsmen, breathing murder, iron-clad and spear-bearing, sword-bearers and lance-bearers, bowmen [and] horsemen.

They battered their way into Hagia Sophia and started to strip the place. The high altar, fourteen foot long, ‘so rich that no one could estimate its value’, whose surface was ‘made of gold and precious stones broken and ground up all together’, ‘blazing with every sort of precious material and wrought into an object of extraordinary beauty, astonishing to everyone’ – this was hacked to pieces. The overarching canopy, supported on slim columns, all of solid silver, was dragged down and broken up; the hundred silver chandeliers suspended each by a great chain ‘as thick as a man’s arm’, the columns studded with ‘jasper or porphyry or some other precious stone’, the silver altar rails, the golden censers and sacrificial vessels – ‘and the pulpit, a wonderful work of art, and the gates … completely faced with gold’, all were chopped into transportable lots. Axes, crowbars and swords hacked, wrenched and prised out. Every corner of the church was probed for the valuables it might contain, the monks tortured for hidden treasures, casually despatched for trying to protect a venerated icon or particular relic; women were raped there, men were killed.

To the Greeks it was if these crusaders who had come in the name of God were filled with a kind of terrible madness,

baying like Cerberus and breathing like Charon, pillaging the holy places, trampling on divine things, running riot over holy things, casting down to the floor the holy images of Christ and His holy Mother and of the holy men who from eternity have been pleasing to the Lord God, uttering calumnies and profanities, and in addition tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men.

Mules and asses were led into Hagia Sophia to carry away the loot but were unable to keep their footing on the polished floors of ancient polychromatic marble and slipped and fell; somehow maddened by this difficulty, the looters slashed the terrified animals open with their knives. The floor became slippery with blood and the muck of excrement from their punctured bowels. A prostitute, evidently not expelled from the camp, was set on the patriarch’s throne ‘and started to sing a wretched song and danced about, spinning and turning’.

Some of this ecclesiastical looting was nominally in a religious cause. Abbot Martin of Pairis learned that the Church of the Pantocrator Monastery housed an extraordinary collection of relics. Hurrying there with his chaplain, he entered the sacristy – the depository of the most sacred objects – where he encountered a man with a long white beard. ‘Come faithless old man,’ bawled the prelate, ‘show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.’ The trembling monk showed him an iron chest, containing a trove of treasures, ‘more pleasing and more desirable to him than all the riches of Greece’. ‘The abbot greedily and hurriedly thrust in both hands, and as he was girded for action, both he and the chaplain filled the folds of their habits with sacred sacrilege.’ With their robes stuffed with religious treasure, the two men waddled back to their ship, with the old monk in tow. ‘We have done well … thanks be to God,’ was the abbot’s laconic reply to passers-by.

An extraordinary list of the religious treasures of the Orthodox world made it back to the monasteries of Italy and France: the Holy Shroud, hair of the Virgin Mary, the shinbone of St Paul, fragments of the crown of thorns, the head of St James – the venerated objects were carefully itemised in the chroniclers’ accounts. Dandolo obtained for Venice a piece of the True Cross, some of Christ’s blood, the arm of St George and part of St John’s head. Many of the great icons and valued religious talismans of the Byzantine Church were just lost in the rampage – probably smashed to pieces by men intent only on precious metal. By the Church of the Holy Apostles, where Constantine himself and all the emperors were buried, they plundered all night, ‘taking whatever gold ornaments, or round pearls, or radiant, precious and incorruptible gems were still preserved within’; crowbarring open the tombs, they gazed on the face of the great Justinian, builder of Hagia Sophia, dead for seven hundred years. His corpse was not decomposed in the airtight tomb. They looked upon this sight as if it were a miracle – then looted the body for its valuables. And everywhere there were acts of terrible molestation:

They slaughtered the new-born, killed prudent matrons, stripped elder women, and outraged old ladies; they tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. Mortal blood was spilled on holy altars, and in place of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of the universe, many were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs the wretches slew the innocent. Such was the reverence for holy things of those who bore the Lord’s Cross on their shoulders.

The murders and rapes appalled:

There was no one spared grief – in the wide streets and the narrow lanes; there was wailing in the temples, tears, lamentations, pleas for mercy, the terrible groaning of men, the screams of women, the tearing to pieces, the obscene acts, enslaving, families torn apart, nobles treated shamefully and venerable old men, people weeping, the rich stripped of their goods.

‘Thus it went on,’ continued Choniates, thunderous with rage, ‘in the squares, in corners, in temples, in cellars – everywhere terrible deeds.’ ‘The whole head’, he said, ‘was in pain.’ In a final taunting gibe, he contrasted the generous treatment by Saladin at the recapture of Jerusalem seventeen years earlier. ‘They allowed everyone to go free and left them everything they possessed, content with just a few gold coins’ ransom on each head … thus the enemies of Christ dealt magnanimously with the Latin infidels.’

There were just a few brief moments of human sympathy. The crusaders looting the Church of St George of Mangana were stopped dead in their tracks by the spiritual presence of the saintly figure of John Mesarites, a bearded ascetic, who told the intruders that his purse was so empty that he feared no thieves. They stood before him in silence. Led to the baron in charge, he sat on the floor. The baron placed him in the seat of honour and knelt at his feet. His unearthly sanctity impressed the Norman warriors. He was fed, according to his brother’s sardonic account, ‘like some ancient saint by thievish, man-eating magpies’.

Choniates, who himself showed considerable personal courage, was also the recipient of acts of extraordinary humanity. His 
palace had been destroyed in the devastating fire of the previous year. At the moment of the sack he was living quite humbly. ‘My house, with its low portico, was difficult to approach because of its cramped location’, hidden away near Hagia Sophia. Despite his detestation of the Venetian invaders, this polished aristocrat obviously had sympathetic personal relations with some resident foreigners. Most had fled before the final attack, but he had taken into his household a Venetian merchant and his wife and protected them. When the looters finally reached the house, Domenico the merchant acted with considerable presence of mind. Donning armour so that he looked like one of the invading Italians, he resisted all attempts to sack the house, claiming that he had already gained possession of it for himself. The intruders gradually became more insistent, particularly the French, ‘who were not like the others in either character or physique’. Realising that he could not hold out indefinitely, and fearing the rape of the women, Domenico moved them all to the house of another Venetian. The net closed on this house too. Domenico moved them again. The servants fled.

The proud Byzantine nobles found themselves reduced to the status of common refugees. Abandoned by their servants, ‘We had to carry the children who could not walk on our shoulders and a baby boy, still a suckling, in our arms; thus we were compelled to make our way through the streets.’ Domenico ingeniously dragged them along as if they were his captives. Choniates realised that it was essential to leave. On 17 April, five days after the siege, a small group of nobles started the dangerous walk up the main thoroughfare towards the Golden Gate – a distance of three miles. They wore ragged clothes to conceal their origins; the patriarch, with no sign of his rank as archbishop, took the lead. It was a wet and windy day. Choniates’s wife was heavily pregnant and some of the young women in the group were temptingly beautiful to the French soldiers lounging about; the men cordoned the girls in the middle of the party, ‘as if in a sheep pen’, and instructed them to rub mud into their faces to disguise
their looks. ‘We passed through the streets like a line of ants,’ said Choniates. All went well until they passed a church. Suddenly ‘a lecherous and wicked barbarian’ thrust himself into the band of refugees and snatched a girl, the young daughter of a judge, and dragged her away. The judge, who was ageing and ill, tried to run after him but stumbled and fell in the mud. Lying there he called on Choniates to free the girl.

Choniates took his life in his hands. ‘Immediately I turned on my heels in pursuit of the abductor.’ In tears, he called out to passing soldiers to take pity and help, and even grabbed some by the hand and persuaded them to follow. The whole party and a group of soldiers followed the abductor back to his lodging where he had secured the girl and barred the door. He now defied the crowd to do their worst. And there Choniates made an impassioned speech, wagging his finger at the potential rapist, shaming the crusaders he had gathered with a ringing address, reminding them of their vows before God, appealing to them to remember their families and the precepts of Christ. Somehow it worked. Enough was transmitted across the barrier of language. He incited their anger and won them round. The crowd threatened to hang the villain on the spot. Sulkily he surrendered the girl to her father, who was weeping with joy.

And so they made it out of the Golden Gate. From there they could look back along the rippling line of defensive land walls, intact for eight hundred years, now powerless to prevent this disaster. For Choniates the moment was too much. ‘I threw myself headlong on the ground face down and cursed the walls, because they were completely untouched by the disaster, neither did they weep, nor had they collapsed in a heap, but were still standing, insensible.’