The Taste of Conquest (10 page)

Despite the fact that you could now finally get a decent meal in northern Italy, Flamma’s Milan was by no means the fashion center it is today. At this point, Italians—or at least, the ones in the up-and-coming merchant republics of Florence, Genoa, and Venice—were more interested in making money than spending it. In early medieval Europe, the fashion makers were to be found at the courts of rich and powerful princes, not in places run by bankers and businessmen. It was the feudal magnates who had to secure their position by spending fortunes to impress potential rivals and awe their underlings. And mostly, these aristocrats spoke French—or at least, some variant of it. In the thirteenth century, the rulers of England, France, the Low Countries, Naples, and Sicily as well as the Crusader kings of the Holy Land were all part of the French sphere of influence. Even in the city-states of northern Italy, the Provençal dialect of French was the trendy vernacular in the twelve hundreds. The account of Marco Polo’s travels (1298) was originally distributed in French, and some have suggested that Dante almost wrote the
Divine Comedy
(circa 1308–21) in Provençal rather than in the Tuscan dialect that he would eventually choose. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the first “Italian” cookbook that we’re aware of,
Liber de coquina,
came out of the royal court in Naples, ruled by members of the French house of Anjou.

In fact, the culinary fashion had much in common wherever French was spoken. This was the cuisine partially adapted from the Arabs, with a similar penchant for sweet and sour complemented by a robust addition of spice mixtures. Specific spices went in and out of vogue, but remarkably, this approach to seasoning, even while it became more artful and incorporated new ingredients, did not go out of style until the seventeenth century. Accordingly, no self-respecting nobleman could make do without a steady supply of spice. This “need” for imported luxuries (not only spices but silks, pearls, and gemstones) meant that every prince and aspiring aristocrat could be counted on as a cash cow for the Italian city-states.

The Florentines, Genoans, and Pisans were all well located to be the middlemen in the growing luxury trade precisely because they were in the middle, between Byzantium and the Arabs, and the Catholic kingdoms to the north. Typically, Genoa and Pisa supplied France and the Low Countries, while Venice provisioned central Europe. But there were other players in the spice trade, too. Both Marseilles and Barcelona gave the western Italian towns a run for their money. Venice, on the other hand, not only had no competition across the Alps, she was also the closest of the major spice-trading powers to the Oriental ports as well as the silver mines of Germany and Bohemia. As the Germans sent silver down the Brenner Pass, the merchants of Venice sent pepper-laden mules back. Though Venice wouldn’t be able to monopolize the spice trade until the early fourteen hundreds, in the interim, she was clearly the leader, and she meant to keep it that way.

As the Asian aromatics became increasingly important to the city’s dynamic economy, the government paid more and more attention to securing the pepper galleys. The armed convoy system of the
muda
solved the problem of piracy, but even before this was in place, the Republic was confronted with a more pressing issue. In Byzantium, the people were increasingly getting fed up with the aggressive tactics of the Adriatic upstart. As a result, Venetian residents were targeted for violence, but what was even worse, the emperor had begun to cozy up to the Genoans. Back at the doge’s palace, the decision was made that Venice’s “national interest”—mainly, the route to the Eastern spice emporia that ran straight through the heart of the empire—was at risk. The leadership’s solution to the problem was to mount a military assault in the guise of a crusade, an action that would culminate in one of the most egregious incidents of “collateral damage” in the whole history of the spice trade.

T
HE
C
RUSADER
D
OGE

I am always reminded of the shrunken assemblages of New York and Paris they’ve built on the Vegas strip when I see the Basilica of San Marco. It, too, is a pastiche, though this one of Constantinople. There is, however, at least one significant difference between the design of the gaudy church and the garish casino hotels in the desert. Here, the fragments of the Eastern imperial capital are real, not simulated. The great, glittering chapel is encrusted with genuine Byzantine loot both inside and out: the undulating corkscrew columns planted into the façade; the famous bronze racehorses cavorting—incongruously for a city devoid of horses—above the basilica’s entry; the very altar, the gorgeously bejeweled
Pala d’Oro,
many of its two thousand plus emeralds, rubies, amethysts, pearls, and 255 icons ripped out of Byzantine churches and monasteries. And these are just the most obvious. At one time, there used to be an ampoule with the blood of Christ, the arm of Saint George, and a segment of the head of Saint John the Baptist brought back to the basilica to keep Saint Mark’s body parts company. The resulting edifice also sent a different sort of message than the playful desert casinos. This was dead serious. It was Venice’s signal to the world that she now owned and ruled the remains of the old Eastern Empire, that the Queen of the Adriatic had donned the mantle of ancient Rome.

The motives for the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent looting of Constantinople by Franks and Venetians were an unfortunate, if all too common, collusion among religion, greed, and realpolitik. As such, it foreshadowed the later actions of Portuguese conquistadores in Africa and the Indies. These Crusaders, though, weren’t going after Muslims (like the earlier Franks and later Iberians); their target was a city of fellow Christians. Of very wealthy Christians, it’s worth adding. When I read contemporary descriptions of the Fourth Crusade, I keep thinking of American dollar bills with their motto “In God we trust.” To the Crusaders, their faith and their greed were simply the opposite sides of the same coin. The accounts of the day point out how especially adept the Venetians were at manipulating a holy war to serve their financial goals. Which is not to say they weren’t all practicing, devout Catholics, I’m sure.

The Venetians had long maintained a sizable colony in the Byzantine capital, and though they were nominally subject to imperial law, they largely acted as they pleased. A Greek eyewitness (admittedly not the most impartial judge) describes the resident merchants as morally dissolute, vulgar, and untrustworthy, “with all the gross characteristics of seafaring people.” Their insolence apparently knew no bounds, so that they even abused and assaulted the local Greek nobility. It didn’t help matters that they paid no taxes while the locals got squeezed. In 1172, the emperor, who was increasingly concerned by the Adriatic city’s sway, decided to trade in the Venetians for the Genoese, but just to make sure the Republic didn’t cause trouble, he seized ten thousand of her citizens as hostages. Eventually, most of the people were recovered, but the spice trade was in shambles, and it became all too evident that the Venetians needed a longer-term solution to the Byzantine problem. Then, conveniently, in 1198, Pope Innocent III called for yet another crusade to retake Jerusalem.

As usual, the (mostly) French knights needed transport and turned to the only city capable of mass-producing a navy, Venice, for “there they might expect to find a greater number of vessels than in any other port,” to quote Geoffroi de Villehardouin, one of the French noblemen who led the expedition. The Venetian doge cut a deal with the Crusaders to provide food and transport for their men and horses in exchange for eighty-five thousand marks as well as half the booty derived from the operation.
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Supposedly quite taken with the whole enterprise, the nearly blind ninety-year-old Doge Enrico Dandolo declared that he, too, would take on the cross and join the Crusaders. This was an unusual move for the Venetian executive, though how close to Jerusalem he intended to take his pilgrimage is less than clear. Dandolo came from a long line of Venetian merchants and politicians. Like most of Venice’s wealthy elite, the family’s business interests spread across the eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria and its spice markets to the imperial capital on the Bosporus. While we have little information on the doge before he was elected to the leadership in 1192 (at the age of eighty!), it is a safe assumption that he spent a good portion of his youth traveling on business—this was the pattern in almost every Venetian family of note. We do know that in his later years, he served as a sort of ambassador in the Middle East. He also seems to have taken part in a disastrous rescue operation meant to free the emperor’s Venetian hostages in 1172, which must have given him firsthand incentive to remove the Byzantine obstructionists once and for all.

When the flotilla was ready in 1202, only a fraction of the expected Crusaders showed up. The ships were ready, but there weren’t enough men to cover the costs for the trip. At first, the Republic threatened to deny the foreign army food and drink until they paid up, but then Dandolo wrangled a new deal in which the Venetians would get their share of the Crusaders’ booty before anyone else got theirs.

In the meanwhile, Constantinople was in the midst of a dynastic squabble that involved fraternal eye-gouging and other unsavory acts. The emperor was deposed, and in the aftermath, his young son Alexius showed up in Venice, hat in hand. This gave Dandolo and the Crusaders what they had been waiting for all along—a rationale for a profitable detour.

From a purely mercenary standpoint, gold-filled Constantinople was a much plumper fruit to pick than the war-ravaged cities of Palestine, and her defenders an easy target when compared to the formidable Muslim battalions in the Holy Land. Venice could regain her strategic commercial base in the Byzantine capital and secure the spice route; the knights could come home rich. To their credit, some of the pilgrims—most notably, Cistercian monks—refused to take part in this sham crusade, and the pope expressly forbade it. But even as the dissenters went home and the pope’s missives went mysteriously missing, the majority of the Latin army sailed for Constantine’s city, and on April 12, 1204, after a long siege, Venetian and Frankish soldiers breached the walls. The ensuing rampage was heartrending.

“How shall I begin to tell of the deeds wrought by these nefarious men!” writes a Byzantine survivor. “Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden under foot! Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places!” Our reporter, Nicetas Choniates, describes the altar of Hagia Sophia torn into pieces; mules and horses brought into churches, where they were laden down with booty; the doors of monasteries ripped down and the nuns raped. “In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.”

What distinguished the sack of Constantinople from the conquest of other medieval cities was hardly the brutality and greed shown by the attackers. The viciousness experienced in the sieges of Jerusalem, by Christians and Muslims alike, was, if anything, worse, and we can point to all too many equally reprehensible war crimes committed in our own time. But what made the sack so remarkable was its sheer scale and the coldhearted calculation that went into it. While it is unlikely that Constantinople held two-thirds of the world’s riches, as one of the veterans of the attack claimed, the gold and jewels in its churches and palaces exceeded those of any other Christian city by several orders of magnitude.

For Doge Enrico Dandolo’s merchant republic, the Fourth Crusade turned out to be one of the best mergers and acquisitions in history. Not only did the city earn a handsome profit in transport fees and a huge windfall in the form of gold, silver, and precious jewels, but the adventure amounted to a vast real estate coup, giving Venice three-eighths of the empire. Henceforth, each doge would be known as “Lord of One Quarter and One Half [of a quarter] of the Empire of Romania,” or three-eighths of the Roman Empire. The spice route was secure.
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When young Alexius refused to cooperate with the conquerors, Doge Enrico dismissed him. “We have raised you off the dunghill, and on the dunghill will we cast you back again” was his send-off to the man who would be emperor. He was duly thrown into prison and strangled. Thereupon a French nobleman grabbed the imperial throne. And although the Greeks did eventually get the seat back after sixty years of Latin rule, the emperor’s palace would be a gloomy place from now on. In 1453, its light was extinguished once and for all by Mehmed the Conqueror when his Turkish troops bombarded the city into subjection. However, the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium wasn’t a loss merely for the Greeks. The inevitable result of the Muslim invasion was that Venice’s entire strategic plan for the eastern Mediterranean began to crumble. Her fate had always been tied to Constantinople, whether as satrap or as conqueror, so once the Islamic crescent rose above Hagia Sophia’s great dome, it was only a matter of time before Venice’s star would set. Still, in the intervening 250 years, the Queen of the Adriatic would become the undisputed ruler of Europe’s spice trade.

P
EPPER ON THE
R
IALTO

In Enrico Dandolo’s day, the church of San Marco was by far Venice’s flashiest structure, towering over a town much homelier than today’s panorama of churches and palazzi glittering in the reflected sunlight. A map from about 1150 shows a watery village of modest dimensions. The great basilica looks across a canal at the stocky walls of the doge’s fortress. The famous Piazza San Marco is a muddy meadow. Much as it is today, the city depicted on the map is a jigsaw puzzle of islands fitted around the double arc of the Grand Canal, but instead of the cheek-by-jowl stone façades and paved squares that surround you today, you would have seen wooden houses, vineyards, and plots of vegetables. The walk from San Marco to the Rialto commercial district took you through the most densely built-up part of town. Here, pedestrians had to dodge garbage flung out of windows, tiptoe past pig feces in the alleys, and make sure they didn’t sink too deep into muck during the rainy weather or high tide. (Mud was so ubiquitous that Venetians invented platform shoes a foot or more high to keep themselves above the filth.) Pigs were encouraged in the alleys so that they would consume the accumulating garbage, while along the banks of the Grand Canal, cows grazed, as best they could. But then, just as you approached the wooden Rialto Bridge, which was freshly built in the Crusader doge’s old age to let people cross over the cattle-lined canal, you would be enveloped by a perfumed haze.