Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (30 page)

Did his loss of sight date from this time? According to his later namesake, the historian Andrea Dandolo, his arrogance and stubbornness antagonized Manuel to such a point that he actually had him arrested and partially blinded; on the other hand a contemporary and so possibly more reliable source - an appendix to the
Al
tino Chronicle -
reports that the next Venetian embassy to Constantinople was sent only after the three previous ambassadors had returned safe and sound. This, combined with what we know of Manuel's character and the absence of any other references to what must have created a major outcry in Venice had it in fact occurred, suggests that imperial displeasure cannot be blamed on this occasion. Another theory
1
holds that while in Constantinople Dan-dolo had been involved in a brawl, in the course of which his eyes had been injured. This too seems improbable in view of
the Al
tino
testimony; besides, he was not even then in his first youth, but a mature diplomatist of fifty or so. Thirty years later, at any rate, the facts are no longer in doubt. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who knew him well, assures us that 'although his eyes appeared normal, he could not see a hand in front of his face, having lost his sight after a head wound'.

Fortunately for posterity, Geoffrey has left a full record not only of the Crusade itself but also of these preliminary negotiations. No one was better placed to do so, and few men of his time could have done it better. His style has clarity and pace, and in his opening pages he gives us a vivid account of Venetian democracy in action. The Doge, he writes,

assembled at least ten thousand men in the church of St Mark, the most beautiful that there is, to hear the Mass and to pray God for His guidance. And after the Mass he summoned the envoys and besought them, that they themselves should ask of the people the services they required. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, spoke by consent for the others . . . Then the Doge and people raised their hands and cried aloud with a single voice, 'We grant it! We grant it!' And so great was the noise and tumult that the very earth seemed to tremble underfoot.

On the following day the contracts were concluded. Geoffrey notes in passing that the agreement did not mention Egypt as the immediate objective. He gives no explanation; but he and his colleagues were almost certainly afraid — and with good reason as it turned out - that the news would be unpopular with the rank and file, for whom Jerusalem was the only legitimate goal for a Crusade and who would see no reason to waste time anywhere else. Moreover an Egyptian expedition would necessitate a dangerous landing on a hostile shore, as opposed to a quiet

1
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades,
Vol. Ill, p. 114.

anchorage at Christian Acre and an opportunity to recover from the journey before going into battle. The Venetians for their part would have been only too happy to cooperate in the deception, for they too had a secret. At that very moment their own ambassadors were in Cairo, discussing a highly profitable trade agreement; and in the course of these discussions they are believed to have given a categorical undertaking not to be party to any attack on Egyptian territory.

Such considerations, however, could not be allowed to affect plans for the Crusade, by which still greater prizes might be won; and it was agreed that the Crusaders should all forgather in Venice on the feast of St John,
24
June
1202,
when the fleet would be ready for them.

Just how Enrico Dandolo proposed to deflect the Frankish Crusaders from Egypt we shall never know. He and his agents may have been partly responsible for leaking the Egyptian plans through the countries of the West; certainly these became public knowledge in a remarkably short time. But if he hoped that the popular reaction to this news would induce the leaders to change their minds, he was mistaken. It was the followers who changed theirs. Many, on hearing of their proposed destination, renounced the Crusade altogether; many more decided to head for Palestine regardless, arranging their own transport from Marseille to one of the Apulian ports. On the day appointed for the rendezvous in Venice, the army that gathered on the Lido numbered less than one-third of what had been expected.

For those who had arrived as planned, the situation was embarrassing in the extreme. Venice had performed her share of the bargain: there lay the fleet, war galleys as well as transports - no Christian man, writes Geoffrey, had ever seen richer or finer - but sufficient for an army three times the size of that assembled. With their numbers so dramatically reduced, the Crusaders could not hope to pay the Venetians the money they had promised. When their leader, the Marquis Boniface of Montfer-rat - Tibald of Champagne having died shortly after Villehardouin's return the previous year - arrived in Venice rather late, he found the whole expedition in jeopardy. Not only were the Venetians refusing point-blank to allow a single ship to leave port till the money was forthcoming; they were even talking of cutting off provisions to the waiting army - a threat made more serious in that the bulk of that army was confined to the Lido and strictly forbidden to set foot in the city itself. This last measure was not intended to be deliberately offensive; it was a normal precaution on such occasio
ns, designed to prevent distur
bances of the peace or the spread of infection. But it scarcely improved the atmosphere. Boniface emptied his own coffers, many of the other knights and barons did likewise, and every man in the army was pressed to give all he could; but the total raised, including quantities of gold and silver plate, still fell short by
34,000
marks of what was owing.

For as long as the contributions continued to come in, old Dandolo kept the Crusaders in suspense. Then, as soon as he was sure that there was no more to be got, he came forward with an offer. The Venetian city of Zara,' he pointed out, had recently fallen into the hands of the King of Hungary. If, before embarking on the Crusade proper, the Franks would agree to assist Venice in its recapture, settlement of their debt might perhaps be postponed. It was a typically cynical proposal, and as soon as he heard of it Pope Innocent sent an urgent message forbidding its acceptance. But the Crusaders, as he later came to understand, had no choice.

There followed another of those ceremonies in St Mark's that Enrico Dandolo, despite his years, handled so beautifully. Before a congregation that included all the leading Franks, he addressed his subjects. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who was there, reports his speech as follows:

'Signors, you are joined with the worthiest people in the world, for the highest enterprise ever undertaken. I myself am old and feeble; I need rest: my body is infirm. But I know that no man can lead you and govern you as I, your Lord, can do. If therefore you will allow me to direct and defend you by taking the Cross while my son remains in my place to guard the Republic, I am ready to live and to die with you and the pilgrims.'

And when they heard him, they cried with one voice, 'We pray God that you will do this thing, and come with us!'

So he came down from the pulpit and moved up to the altar, and knelt there, weeping; and he had the cross sewn on to his great cotton hat, so determined was he that all men should see it.

Thus it was that on
8
November
1202
the army of the Fourth Crusade set sail from Venice. Its
480
ships, led by the galley of the Doge himself, 'painted vermilion, with a silken vermilion awning spread above, cymbals clashing and four trumpeters sounding from the bows', were however bound neither for Egypt nor for Palestine. Just a week later, Zara was taken and sacked. The fighting that broke out almost immediately afterwards between the Franks and the Venetians over the division of the spoils scarcely augured well for the future, but peace was eventually

1 Now Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast.

restored and the two groups settled themselves in different parts of the city for the winter. Meanwhile the news of what had happened had reached the Pope. Outraged, he at once excommunicated the entire expedition. Though he was later to limit his ban to the Venetians alone, the Crusade could hardly be said to have got off to a good start.

But worse was to follow. Early in the new year a messenger arrived with a letter for Boniface from Philip of Swabia - not only Barbarossa's son and the brother of Emperor Henry VI, whose death five years before had left empty the imperial throne of the West, but also the son-in-law of the deposed and blinded
basileus
Isaac Angelus. Now it happened that in the previous year Isaac's young son, another Alexius, had escaped from the prison in which he and his father were being held; and Philip's court had been his obvious place of refuge. There he had met Boniface shortly before the latter's departure for Venice, and there the three of them may have roughed out the plan which Philip now formally proposed in his letter. If the Crusade would escort the young Alexius to Constantinople and enthrone him there in place of his usurper uncle, Alexius for his part would finance its subsequent conquest of Egypt, supplying in addition ten thousand soldiers of his own and afterwards maintaining five hundred knights in the Holy Land at his own expense. He would also submit the Church of Constantinople to the authority of Rome.

To Boniface the scheme had much to recommend it. Apart from what appeared to be the long-term advantages to the Crusade itself and the opportunity to pay off the still outstanding debt to Venice, he also smelt the possibility of considerable personal gain. When he put the idea to Dandolo - to whom, also, it probably came as a less than total surprise -the old Doge accepted it with enthusiasm. He had been in no way chastened by his excommunication; this was not the first time that Venice had defied papal wishes, and it would not be the last. His earlier military and diplomatic experiences had left him with little love for Byzantium; besides, the present Emperor had on his accession made intolerable difficulties over renewing the trading concessions granted by his predecessor. Genoese and Pisan competition was becoming ever more fierce; if Venice were to retain her former hold on the Eastern markets, decisive action would be required. Such action, finally, would involve a welcome postponement of the Egyptian expedition.

The Crusading army proved readier to accept the change of plan than might have been expected. A few of its members refused outright and set off for Palestine on their own; the m
ajority, however, were only too
happy to lend themselves to a scheme which promised to strengthen and enrich the Crusade while also restoring the unity of Christendom. Ever since the great schism - and even before - the Byzantines had been unpopular in the West. They had contributed little or nothing to previous Crusades, during which they were generally believed to have betrayed the Christian cause on several occasions. Young Alexius's offer of active assistance was a welcome change and not to be despised. Finally, there must have been many among the more materialistically inclined who shared their leader's hope of personal reward. The average Frank knew practically nothing about Byzantium, but all had been brought up on stories of its immense wealth. And to any medieval army, whether or not it bore the Cross of Christ on its standard, a fabulously rich city meant one thing only: loot.

Young Alexius himself arrived in Zara towards the end of April; and a few days later the fleet set sail, stopping at Durazzo and Corfu, in both of which he was acclaimed as the rightful Emperor of the East. On
24
June
1203,
a year to the day after the rendezvous in Venice, it dropped anchor off Constantinople. The Crusaders were astounded. Geoffrey reports:

You may imagine how they gazed, all those who had never before seen Constantinople. For when they saw those high ramparts and the strong towers with which it was completely encircled, and the splendid palaces and soaring churches - so many that but for the evidence of their own eyes they would never have believed it — and the length and the breadth of that city which of all others is sovereign, they never thought that there could be so rich and powerful a place on earth. And mark you that there was not a man so bold that he did not tremble at the sight; nor was this any wonder, for never since the creation of the world was there so great an enterprise.

Alexius III had had plenty of warning of the arrival of the expedition, but had characteristically made no preparations for the city's defence; the dockyards had lain idle ever since his idiotic brother had entrusted the whole Byzantine shipbuilding programme to Venice sixteen years before; and according to Nicetas Choniates - who as a former imperial secretary was well placed to know what was going on - he had allowed his principal admiral (who was also his brother-in-law) to sell off the anchors, sails and rigging of his few remaining vessels, now reduced to useless hulks and rotting in the inner harbour. He and his subjects watched, half-stunned, from the walls as the massive war fleet passed beneath them, beating its way up to the mouth of the Bosphorus.

Being in no particular hurry to begin the siege, the invaders first landed on the Asiatic shore of the straits, near the imperial summer palace of Chalcedon, to replenish their stores. 'The surrounding land was fair and fertile,' writes Villehardouin; 'sheaves of new-reaped corn stood in the fields, so that any man might take of it as much as he needed.' There they easily repulsed a half-hearted attack by a small detachment of Greek cavalry - it fled at the first charge, but its purpose was probably only reconnaissance - and later, with similar lack of ceremony, dismissed an emissary from the Emperor. If, they told him, his master was willing to surrender the throne forthwith to his nephew, they would pray the latter to pardon him and make him a generous settlement. If not, let him send them no more messengers, but look to his defence.