City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (7 page)

The answers lay in the Venetian character, its peculiar admixture
of the secular and religious, and in the treaty itself. Venice continuously looked back to the precedents of its history for received wisdom to steer the ship of state. Its rise over the previous century had been deeply entwined with the adventure of the crusades. The Venetians had participated in the First Crusade and again in 1123. From both they had profited in material terms; they had acquired a third of the city of Tyre in 1122, ruled directly from the lagoon on terms of tax-free trade, which marked the start of Venice’s overseas empire, as well as a foothold in a string of other harbours.

Beneath the pattern of intermittent holy wars, these Palestinian ports provided the Italian republics with new opportunities to acquire goods of the furthest Orient. They found themselves linked to a network of ancient trading routes that stretched all the way to China. Venice was also able to access a world of wealth and luxury within the Levant itself, where sophisticated manufacturing skills and agricultural expertise had been flourishing for hundreds of years. Tripoli was famous for the weaving of silk, Tyre for the vivid transparency of its glass, for its purple and red fabrics dyed in the vats of Jewish artisans, for sugar cane, lemons, oranges, figs, almonds, olives and sesame. Via the port of Acre, one could acquire medicinal rhubarb from the river Volga, Tibetan musk, cinnamon and pepper, nutmeg, cloves, aloe and camphor, ivory from India and Africa, and Arabian dates; in Beirut, indigo, incense, pearls and wood.

The brilliant Levantine light had exposed Europeans to a tumbling world of bright colours and vivid scents. New tastes in goods, clothes, foods and flavours permeated the crusader kingdoms and were carried back in the holds of merchant ships to an increasingly wealthy Europe. In return Venice, and its rivals, also provisioned the crusades; they brought the kingdom of Jerusalem (as well as its enemies in Egypt) the resources of war – arms, metal, wood and horses – and the necessary goods to sustain colonial life on a foreign shore, and ballasted their ships with pilgrims eager to witness the holy places. For Venetian merchants the crusades
had proved highly profitable. In the process they deepened their knowledge of how to trade across a cultural divide, which would make them, in time, the interpreters of worlds.

The expeditions to previous crusades had entered the national memory as triumphant episodes in the litany of Venetian glories. They reinforced the city’s sense of itself and its expectations. Venice had always looked east into the rising sun: for trade and booty, for material objects with which to embellish the city, for the stolen bones of Christian saints, for the possibility of wealth and military glory – and not least for the remission of sins. Venice’s attachment to the East was aesthetic, religious and commercial. The returning argosies set a pattern of expectation: that what would be unloaded at the Basin of St Mark would enrich, ennoble and sanctify the city. A hundred years earlier a doge had raised to the status of patriotic duty the demand that merchant ships returning from the East should bring back antiquities, marbles and carvings for the decoration of the newly rebuilt Church of St Mark. A successful expedition in 1123 had given the Republic lively expectations of the commercial benefits that might be derived from crusade. In the new treaty of Venice, the maritime contract alone would give a good profit, and half of all the spoils might yield unknown wealth.

As a youth, Dandolo had probably personally witnessed the religious fervour and national that had accompanied the departure of crusading fleets and heard the impassioned words of the doge of his childhood, extolling their spiritual and material glory:

Venetians, with what immortal glory and splendour will your name be covered from this expedition? What reward will you gain from God? You will win the admiration of Europe and Asia. The standard of St Mark will fly triumphantly in far-off lands. New profits, new sources of greatness will come to this most noble city … Roused by the holy zeal of religion, excited by the example of all Europe, hurry to arms, think of the honour and the prizes, think of your triumph – with the blessings of heaven!

Dandolo had other personal reasons. He came from a family of crusaders; probably a desire to emulate his forefathers struck a deep chord in him. And he was an old man: concern for his soul would also have weighed heavily. The promised absolution of sins was one of the most powerful incentives for crusades. He had impelling national, personal, spiritual and family motives for signing the treaty.

The blind but percipient doge had evidently glimpsed a moment of destiny – as if everything in Venetian history led up to this extraordinary opportunity. But there was something else, buried at the heart of the treaty, which would have lent it considerable appeal. What was kept from all but a handful of signatories and the crusading lords back in France and Lombardy was that the expedition, which had stirred the rank and file vaguely to ‘take pity on the Holy Land overseas’, had no intention initially of going there. It was bound for Egypt. As Villehardouin confessed in his chronicle, ‘It was secretly agreed in closed council that we would go to Egypt, because via Cairo one could more easily destroy the power of the Turks than by anywhere else, but publicly it was just announced that we were going overseas.’

There were sound strategic reasons for this. It had long been recognised by shrewder military tacticians that the wealth of Egypt was a reservoir of resource for the Muslim armies in Palestine and Syria. Saladin’s victories had been built on the riches of Cairo and Alexandria. As Richard the Lionheart had realised, ‘the keys to Jerusalem are to be found in Cairo’. The problem was that such an oblique approach to recapturing the Holy City was unlikely to stir the popular imagination. The ardently pious sought salvation by fighting for the ground on which Jesus had stood, not strangling Islam’s supply lines in the souks of the Nile Delta.

But to the Venetians this offered a further extension of commercial opportunity. Egypt was the wealthiest region in the Levant and another natural access point to the highly lucrative spice routes. It promised richer commercial prizes than the harbours of Tyre and Acre could ever provide. ‘Whatever this part
of the world lacks in the matter of pearls, spices, oriental treasures, and foreign wares is brought hither from the two Indies: Saba, Arabia, and both the Ethiopias, as well as from Persia and other lands nearby,’ wrote William of Tyre twenty years earlier. ‘People from East and West flock thither in great numbers, and Alexandria is a public market for both worlds.’ In fact Venice had a poor share of this market, despite the recent permission from Pope Innocent. Genoa and Pisa dominated the trade with Egypt. Dandolo had been to Alexandria; he knew at first hand both its wealth and its defensive frailties, and the city held a powerful emotional attraction for the Republic. It was here that St Mark had died and whence Venetian merchants had spirited away his bones. In essence, a victorious campaign in Egypt with half the proceeds as reward gave Venice a glimpse of riches that might far exceed all its previous commercial triumphs. It could, at a stroke, deliver a large part of the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean into its grasp, and permanently discomfit its maritime rivals. Tax-free monopoly trading was an irresistible lure. The potential returns were evidently worth the risk, and this was why the Venetians had thrown in fifty war galleys at their own expense. They were not designed to fight sea battles off the coast of Palestine, but to nose their way up the shallow reedy deltas of the Nile for a strike against Cairo.

This secret agenda was just one worrying co-ordinate of a treaty that was destined to exert a malign influence on the crusade. The others were time – the Venetians had committed themselves finally to a nine months’ finite maritime contract, from St John’s Day, 24 June 1202 – and crucially, money. It seems likely that the final agreed sum was knocked down to eighty-five thousand marks, still a staggering amount. Even if the per capita rate was reasonable, Villehardouin’s estimate of thirty-three thousand crusaders was exceptionally high. Villehardouin had experience of estimating crusader armies but his overnight acceptance of the doge’s terms would prove a colossal blunder. He had dramatically miscalculated the number of crusaders who could be assembled;
he had also failed to realise that those on whose behalf he had signed the treaty were not themselves bound to it: they were under no obligation to sail from Venice. The crusade was under financial pressure from the start: Innocent had attempted, and failed, to raise funds through taxation. The six delegates had to borrow the first down payment on the deal – two thousand marks – on the Rialto. Though no one knew it at the time, the Treaty of Venice contained the active ingredients for serious trouble, which would render the Fourth Crusade the most controversial event in medieval Christendom.

Villehardouin jingled his way back over the Alpine passes. The crusaders of France, Flanders and northern Italy – the Franks, as the Byzantines referred to them – made their vows and their wills, donned their surcoats and laboriously began the long-winded preparations for departure; in the lagoon, the Venetians set to work preparing the largest fleet in its history.

Thirty-four Thousand Marks

1201–1202

The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city’s previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial activities and to recall merchant vessels from overseas as the whole population threw itself into the preparations. They had thirteen months to complete the work.

The shipbuilding and refurbishment alone were a huge project, which required immense quantities of wood, pitch, hemp, ropes, sailcloth, and iron for nails, anchors and fixings. The Italian mainland was scoured for resources. Quantities of fir and larch were floated down the rivers that fed into the lagoon; oak and pine came from the Veneto and the Dalmatian coast. The state arsenal, established in 1104, was the industrial hub of the work, but much of it was carried on in private yards scattered across the islands of the lagoon. The air rang with the sound of hammering and sawing, the blows of axes and the rasping of adzes; cauldrons of pitch bubbled and steamed; forges glowed; rope makers paid out hundreds of yards of twisted hemp; oars, pulleys, masts, sails and anchors were shaped, hewed, sewn and forged. Ships started to grow from the keel up; others were refitted or adapted. In the arsenal war machines were under construction – stone-throwing catapults and siege towers in kit form which could be dismantled for the voyage.

Shipbuilding in Venice

The logistical requirements of the crusade demanded vessels of different types. The 4,500 knights and twenty thousand foot soldiers would be carried in round ships – high-sided sailing
vessels with fore and aft castles, of varying sizes from a handful of immense prestige ships, assigned to the nobility, to the standard crusader transports that crammed six hundred men below decks, then down to smaller craft. The 4,500 horses would be carried in 150 specially adapted oared galleys, fitted with hinged landing doors either in the side or the bows, up which the horses could be walked into the belly of the vessels, then secured in slings to counteract the rolling motion of the sea. The doors, which would be below the waterline, had to be caulked shut for the voyage, but could be swung open on a shelving beach to permit a fully armoured knight to ride out, terrifying any unsuspecting foe. In total, the Venetians probably had to provide 450 ships to carry the army and all its impedimenta. Then there were the fifty galleys which the Venetians themselves would provide and the recruitment of sailors and oarsmen to man the fleet. To row and sail thirty-three thousand men across the eastern Mediterranean required another thirty thousand maritime specialists – half the adult population of Venice, or replacements recruited from the sea-going cities of the Dalmatian coast. Many volunteered as
crusaders but the numbers still had to be made up. Men from each parish of the city were impressed by a lottery drawn using wax balls – those who drew a ball containing a scrap of paper were ordered to the Republic’s service.