The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (4 page)

Nor did this formidable old man think of his splendid republic as any kind of vassal. He thought of it as a Great Power in its own right –
La Dominante
, as the Venetians later learned to call it.

Venice, in short, was almost ready for empire. She was impelled by a fierce patriotism – perhaps the first proper national pride in Europe – and was a sort of overseas power already. The Byzantines themselves recognized her overlordship of the Adriatic, and had dubbed the Doge Duke of Dalmatia too: on the maps of the cartographer Abu Abdullah Mohammed ibn al-Idrisi, the finest
of the day, the northern Adriatic was called the Gulf of Venice. Every Ascension Day the Doge sailed out to the open sea in his marvellous state barge, the gilded
bucintoro
, and with elaborate ceremonial threw a ring into the sea: it was supposed to symbolize this Venetian mastery of the Adriatic, but it had come to represent a marriage with the sea as a whole, and so aspirations to maritime supremacy everywhere.

Certainly Venice was already important throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Her agents all over the Near East gave her an incomparable intelligence service. Her merchants were immensely experienced in the affairs of the Levant. Her knowledge of the eastern trade routes, of Byzantium, of Islam, meant that already, when people in western Europe wished to learn about, travel to, plot against or do business with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, it was Venice that they were likely to consult. Many of her leading citizens had served their country in the east, as diplomats, sailors or soldiers, and many more had money bound up in eastern ventures. This was a merchant city, a city in which the ruling aristocracy was itself a commercial class: trade was its power, and trade, in Venice’s particular geopolitical situation, meant a knowledge of the east.

This is how that knowledge was transmuted into imperialism. In 1197 the chivalry of France, encouraged by the Pope, Innocent III, determined to mount a new Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Islam. They turned to Venice for help. The Venetians had the knowledge and the resources to convey a big army from Europe to the east, and they were particularly well-acquainted with Egypt, an old trading partner, which the Crusaders had chosen as their immediate target. It was true that the Venetians were by the nature of things reluctant Crusaders – they did not like antagonizing Muslim commercial colleagues, and they resented footholds gained in the Levant by rival European powers in the course of their pious campaigns. Moreover they were, it is believed, at that very moment negotiating with the Egyptians for even more profitable trading arrangements.

But they accepted the Crusaders’ commission anyway, and undertook to supply a fleet to carry 20,000 men from Venice to Egypt. It was a mammoth undertaking for a state of 80,000 souls,
but as they probably reasoned from the start, there was sure to be profit in it somewhere. Directly or indirectly the whole city was geared to the project. Even the conclusion of the agreement with the Crusaders was a civic function, for the six envoys of the Franks were invited to make their request to the people themselves, assembled in St Mark’s. They were great men in their own countries, but they knelt humbly before the congregation, weeping tears for the Holy Land, and begging the help of Venice in the name of Christ: and when they had finished the Venetians raised their hands and cried as one man (so the chroniclers assure us), ‘We consent! We consent!’ – ‘and there was so great a noise and tumult that it seemed as though the earth itself were falling to pieces’.

Later the Doge himself, in another tearful ceremony in the Basilica, announced that he himself would take the cross. ‘I am a man old and feeble… but I see that no one could command and lead you like myself, who am your lord.’ He knelt before the high altar there and then, and they sewed the cross on to a great cotton hat, and placed it on his head: and from that moment the destiny of the expedition was settled.

For old he was, but rascally. Enrico Dandolo’s part in the Fourth Crusade has been debated ever since, but we may assume that, however moved his people were by the cause, he himself did nothing out of pure religious impulse. It is very unlikely that he ever intended to lead his ships to an assault on Egypt, as the Crusaders thought. Venetian trade with Egypt was extremely valuable to Venice, and some scholars suggest indeed that Dandolo told the Sultan of Egypt all about the Crusaders’ plans.

The chances are that even as that great white hat was placed upon his head, Dandolo was planning to lead the Crusade to a very different destination: not an Islamic objective at all, but the greatest city of Christendom itself, Constantinople. The time had come to humble the arrogant emperors, and ensure once and for all Venetian commercial primacy in the east. In the meantime the Doge struck a properly Venetian bargain. In return for providing the fleet, and sailing it, Venice would be paid the enormous sum of 80,000 francs, and would be entitled to a share of any territory the Crusaders captured.

Everything then played into Dandolo’s hands. The Crusaders began to arrive in Venice in the winter of 1201. They were mostly French, with some Germans, Belgians and Italians, and they were quartered on the island of Lido, well away from the city centre – for if there were, as the old historians were fond of saying, many good, worthy and holy men among them, there were many adventurers and vagabonds too. From the beginning they had difficulty in raising the necessary cash. To make a first deposit, enabling the Arsenal to start work upon new ships, their leaders borrowed 5,000 francs from the Venetian Jews. Then, when the army was already assembling, and the fleet was half-built, they were reduced to payment in kind – huge piles of precious objects were to be seen disappearing into the Doge’s Palace, whence many of them would later reappear in the guise of another great Venetian coin, the silver grosso.

Almost at the same time there arrived in the west a plausible pretender to the imperial throne of Constantinople: Alexius, son of the blinded and imprisoned Isaac Angelus, and known as Young Alexius to distinguish him from his usurper uncle, the present emperor. He let it be known that if he ever gained the throne of Byzantium, he would not only be a munificent patron of Crusades, but would actually undertake to bring the Orthodox Church back within the fold of Rome.

Nothing could be handier for Dandolo than this combination of circumstances. When it became obvious that the Crusaders would never be able to pay their debt to Venice, he proposed that they commute it by stopping on their way to the east to subdue in the name of Venice a troublesome city on the Dalmatian shore, Zadar – Zara in those days – thus consolidating Venetian supremacy in the Adriatic. And when it was hinted that Young Alexius might be forcibly installed upon the throne of Constantinople, to end the Great Schism at last, why, Dandolo was doubtless the first to suggest that the Fourth Crusade, in its Venetian ships, might conveniently take him there.

So the Doge Dandolo manipulated the course of history, and laid the foundations of the Venetian Empire. He acted in collusion, no doubt, with some of the less scrupulous seigneurs of the Crusade,
but the lesser knights, and the ordinary soldiers, were left in ignorance of these machinations, and thought they were still preparing for an assault on Alexandria. By the autumn of 1202 all was ready. The army had embarked from the Lido, the fleet was assembled on the lagoon. Then the belvedere of the Piazzetta saw its greatest spectacle of all, for nearly 500 ships were lying there. They filled that great water-stage, from the Basin itself to the distant shore of the Lido. ‘Never did finer fleet,’ wrote Geoffrey de Villehardouin, one of the principal Crusaders, ‘sail from any port… Our armament could undertake the conquest of the world!’ There were the fifty war-galleys of the naval escort, dominated by
Paradiso, Aquila
and
Pellegrina
, probably the most powerful vessels afloat: snake-like craft, very low in the water, with their long banks of oars like insects’ legs, their lateen yard-arms drooping, at their sterns high canopied castles where their lordly captains, all in armour, strutted and postured as captains do. There were the 240 troopships, heavier and fatter in the water and square-sailed. There were seventy supply ships and 120 flat-bottomed cavalry transports, specially designed for amphibious war, with wide ports for the horses. And all around the hulls of these vessels, emblazoning the lagoon itself, were the crested shields of the knights-at-arms – Boniface of Montferrat and Baldwin of Flanders, Richard of Dampierre and Guy of Conflans, Count Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, the Castellan of Bruges and the Seneschal of Champagne.

Then there were all the hundreds of lesser craft that milled about the fleet, the pinnaces of the admirals and the generals, scudding from ship to ship, ship to shore – all the sightseeing craft too, no doubt, in which the citizens of Venice, as always, pottered inquisitively here and there, and fishing boats of the lagoon, still stoically at their work in clusters around the mudbanks, and gondolas, and market skiffs, and perhaps an astonished merchant ship or two, working their way through the Lido sea-gate to find that stunning armada crowding the roadsteads inside.

Trumpets blared; cymbals clashed; attended by senators and captains of Venice, counts and commanders of the Frankish chivalry, chaplains and aides and physicians, the blind Doge emerged from his palace and was led between the twin columns of
the Piazzetta to his galley at the quay. The drums of the fleet struck up their rhythm. The bugles called from admiral to admiral. Hymns sounded from the waterfront. Vessel by vessel the great fleet followed the Doge’s flagship out of the Basin, and gathering speed as the day wore on, disappeared past the eastern point of the city, and headed for the open sea.

By nightfall the Fourth Crusade was in mid-Adriatic, on its way (though so few of its soldiers knew it) to Constantinople: and there, squeamishly avoiding the assault on Zadar, a very blood-thirsty affair, and drawing a veil over the dissensions that arose when the rank-and-file Crusaders discovered that they were not, after all, going to rescue the Holy Places from the infidel – there, to the City of Cities, by the turn of a page we shall follow them.

‘O
city
,
city
,
the
eye of all cities!’ So passionately exclaimed Nicetas Chroniates, a contemporary Greek chronicler, writing of the Fourth Crusade’s expedition to Byzantium, and the cry may echo in our minds now when, sailing out of the Sea of Marmara in the wake of Dandolo’s great fleet, we approach Constantinople as the Crusaders approached it long ago.

O city, city! Nowhere on earth is more magnificently sited, or greets the sea voyager with such a mighty sense of consequence – not even Manhattan, when its tight-packed silhouette greets you through the Narrows, or London when you first see the towers of Westminster grave and heavy beyond its bridges. Constantinople was built on a high narrow peninsula, the Marmara on one side, the deeper-water inlet called the Golden Horn on the other, commanding the narrow strait of the Bosphorus as it runs away between hills towards the Black Sea. It is so tremendous a site, on the very frontier between Europe and Asia, where the warm seas meet the cold, that the ancient settlement of Chalcedon, on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, was said to have been called the City of the Blind because its founders
must
have been myopic to have settled so crassly in the wrong place.

Constantinople is called Istanbul now, and one’s first distant sight of it is misleading. It looks like simply another fold in the hills, unimpressive beside the white-capped mountains of Anatolia over the water to the east. But as the ship draws closer an indefinable sense of excitement grows. The passing water-traffic
thickens, the pace quickens, and all of a sudden the peninsula is clarified, and you realize that it is not simply a protrusion of the landscape, but a solid mass of city. Nowadays its skyline is dominated by the domes and pinnacles of its mosques, one after the other along the ridge – a stupendous encrustation up there, huge hulks of buildings, dish-domed and buttressed all around, and transmitting like so many beams into the sky their fragile minarets. Below them the city spills away down the hillsides in a messy confusion, patternless, greyish, until at the water’s edge it is bounded by the crumbled remains of a city wall, battlemented still. At the tip of the peninsula are the towers and gardens of a great palace: and as your ship steers beneath its walls, past the little castle which, standing on its island off-shore, looks like a toll-house for the passing vessels, abruptly to your left the Golden Horn runs away on the other side of the promontory, seven miles long, cast in shadow, spanned by two busy bridges and full of ships.

Everywhere
is full of ships. ‘You are accustomed to the Gondolas that slide among the palaces of St Mark,’ wrote Alexander Kinglake in the 1840s, ‘but here at Stamboul it is a hundred and twenty-gun ship that meets you in the street… the stormy bride of the Doge is the bowing slave of the Sultan.’ It is true still. Ferry-boats push and manoeuvre crazily all about you, blowing their sirens, threshing their propellers, perilously keeling to their moorings as their passengers rush to the quayside rail. Caiques come chugging down the Horn, their masts laid flat for the passage of the bridges. A string of big liners is always moored along the waterfront, and perpetually off the city, never absent, never stopped, the deep-sea freighters pass up and down the Bosphorus. A constant rumble hangs on the air, as your own ship ties up, and wherever you look around you, pouring over the bridges and fly-overs, thronging the docksides, clambering up the steep sides of the peninsula, flooding down the cobbled streets on the other side of the Golden Horn – wherever you look the Turks are on the move, tireless, numberless and grey.