The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (7 page)

They knew exactly what they wanted. They took the head of St Stephen, to go with the martyr’s feet already enshrined in the monastery of San Giorgio at home, and a multitude of lesser sacred relics, with the prodigious gold, silver and enamelled reliquaries which the Byzantine craftsmen had made for them: shared out among the Venetian churches, these would vastly increase the profitable allure of the city as a pilgrim port. They took a series of exquisite enamelled cameos from the Pantokrator Monastery, to make the Pala d’Oro even more magnificent, and a pair of great carved doors to make the entrance to the Basilica still more impressive. They took a pair of marble columns, floridly decorated, to enrich the Piazzetta. They took a quartet of little porphyry knights, probably Roman tetrarchs, to embellish a corner of St Mark’s. They took stones and panels from all over Constantinople, classical fragments, plinths of lost statues, streaked slabs of alabaster, to be shipped home as ballast and built into the texture of Venice.

Most deliberately of all, they snatched two supreme treasures of The City which would for ever afterwards be associated with their own power and providence. The first was the miraculous icon of the Nikopoeia, the Victory-worker: this they spirited away from the Church of the Virgin, where it made its weekly revelation, to be enshrined in a new chapel within the Basilica, and brought forth in glory or in supplication whenever a victory had been won, or a disaster was to be averted. The second was that grand quadriga of horses from the emperor’s box at the Hippodrome: from these they removed the harnesses, and they were to be associated always with the independence of Venice from Constantinople as from all other suzerains, never to be bridled again, but to stand side by side until the end of the Republic, surveying the Piazza from their platform on the façade of St Mark’s – whinnying sometimes in the dusk, imaginative visitors were always to think, and displaying in the very ripple of their muscles or the toss of their noble heads, the spirit of proud liberty.

Venice became, from that day to this, the chief repository of Byzantine art and craftsmanship. Constantinople was left stripped of its glories. ‘Oh city, city, eye of all cities,’ mourned Nicetas. ‘Thou hast drunk to the dregs the cup of the anger of the Lord.’

Even the bold Murzuphlus fled before these horrors, and this time the leaders of the Fourth Crusade decided to take the empire for themselves. Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned first Latin Emperor of Byzantium in Santa Sophia. Dandolo had declined the honour, but to balance the authority a Venetian of well-known family, Tommaso Morosini, was made Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, with the undertaking that all Patriarchs thereafter would be Venetians too (Morosini was only a sub-deacon at the time, but they made him a deacon at once, a priest two weeks later, a bishop next day and a patriarch as soon as he arrived in Constantinople).

In the end, of course, it was the Venetians who gained most from the fall of Byzantium. When it came to splitting up the Byzantine territories, they acquired an empire at a stroke. Dandolo did not want great mainland possessions for the Republic, and willingly agreed to the fragmentation of Greece among the various Frankish barons – all he demanded was free trade for Venice, and as little trade as possible for her competitors. It was along the trade routes that he built his dominion.

He took, for a start, the best part of Constantinople itself, the district around Santa Sophia, seat of the Patriarchate, running down to the Golden Horn. He then demanded a chain of islands, fortresses and coastal strips, from the Dardanelles all the way back to the Adriatic, which would provide permanent security and convenience for Venetian shipping. Only the Venetians, among the negotiating parties, knew these waters well, and they chose their acquisitions carefully. When all was sorted out they were to include most of the Aegean islands, strongpoints dotted around the coast of Greece, the Ionian Islands at the mouth of the Adriatic, and Crete, which commanded the approaches to the Levant. Most of the best harbours of the Byzantine Empire became Venetian.

The rest of the Byzantine dominions presently degenerated into a welter of feudal principalities and conflicting invaders. The Bulgars seized part of it, the exiled Greek emperors re-established themselves in another. The Frankish barons of the Crusade turned Greece into a patchwork of feudal states, the Principality of Achaia, the Duchy of Athens, Burgundians in one place, Normans in another – Italians too, later in history, and Greeks again, and Catalans from Spain, until at last the Turkish conquerors, in their slow advance through the Middle Ages, swept the petty dynasties aside and made it all a part of Islam.

The Venetians, unable with their small resources to handle all their new territories, left one or two claims in abeyance, and handed other acquisitions to individual Venetian nobles, to be governed as feudal fiefs: but the backbone of their new territories, the train of strongpoints leading back from the Levant to the lagoon, they took firmly into their own hands. The Republic became an imperial power, and the Doge added to his titles the most sonorous of them all: ‘Lord of a Quarter and a Half-Quarter of the Roman Empire’ – which was to say, in less stately mathematical terms, rather more than three-eighths of old Byzantium.

This was Dandolo’s moment of fulfilment. It was an astonishing thing that the ruler of Venice should actually be on the spot, in the field, for this seminal moment of Venetian history, and the terrible old man made the most of it. He assumed yet another title, that of Despot, and hobbled around the city, we are told, wearing the scarlet buskins of an emperor of himself. He was the true hero of the hour, the strategist of the expedition, the inspiration of the assault, the disposer of the spoils –
Blind old Dandolo!
as Byron was to apostrophize him.
Th’octogenarian chief, Byzantium’s conquering foe!

At this moment, in his nineties by now and in the plenitude of his triumph, in 1205 he died. He had never gone home to Venice again, but of all the Doges of Venice, he remains the best-known to this day – a supreme champion to the Venetians, a supreme rogue to all philhellenes. They interred him, of course, in Santa Sophia, in a pillared sarcophagus on the south balcony. Nobody quite knows what happened to his bones when, two centuries later, Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks, and the
cathedral was turned into a mosque. Some say they were thrown to the dogs, others suggest that when in 1479 the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini was fulfilling a commission from the Sultan of Turkey in Constantinople, he was allowed to take the old warrior’s remains home to Venice, together with his sword and helmet.

Anyway, his tombstone remains in Santa Sophia still, a plain oblong slab carved crudely with his name. I mentioned once to a Byzantine specialist of my acquaintance that hardly anybody seemed to visit the stone these days, on their circuit of the great building. The scholar snorted. ‘I visit it,’ he said. ‘I go to spit on it.’

It is true that Dandolo and his Venetians, more absolutely than anyone else, had destroyed the Byzantine civilization. The Latin Empire did not last long. Though Murzuphlus returned to Constantinople only as a blinded prisoner, and was made to jump to his death from one of its columns (‘because it was felt that an act of justice so notable should be seen by the whole world’), other Greek emperors were restored to the throne within half a century, and presided over a late revival of the Byzantine genius. But the city and its empire were never the same again. The spirit had gone, the heritage was dispersed, and in the fifteenth century, when the Turks took it in their turn, they found it half-ruined still.

Greeks everywhere never forgave the Venetians, whom they regarded as the instigators of this tragedy. The Venetians themselves actually considered moving their capital to Constantinople – ‘truly our city’, is how an official document described it – but lost their share of sovereignty there, and their Patriarchate too, when the Greek emperors came back in 1261. They were not finished with the city, however. They maintained a trading colony there for two centuries more, and were to fight battles in its waters, against one enemy or another, on and off until the seventeenth century. But they left no monuments on the peninsula above the Golden Horn. The Venetian quarter that Dandolo acquired left no trace. The covered bazaar now called the Egyptian Market, or the Spice Bazaar, is on the site of the
Venetian market, but not a sprocket is left, not a machicolation, to show that they were even there.

Sometimes though, by some trick of climate or association, some alchemy of setting, in Istanbul to this day I feel a hint of Venice in the air. In the early morning especially, when a thin mist still hangs over the Golden Horn and the ships feel their way through a sea-haze towards the Bosphorus, when the clamour of caiques and ferry-boats is just beginning to stir the waters, and the bazaars are coming to life with coffee-smells and truck-rumbles – sometimes then, as the sun catches the tips of the minarets on the high ridge of Stamboul, I see in the eye of fancy that other city far away, where the golden horses of the Hippodrome are stabled now, and the little light burns, within the recesses of the Basilica, night and day before the Victory-worker.

H
umped
and
speckled
, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea. You are never out of sight of them, and as one by one they slide past your ship’s prow, blue or grey or golden in the evening – as Patmos fades into the haze astern, Amorgos looms over the horizon ahead, so one myth follows another too, and the distant rocks are peopled in your mind with the gods, nymphs, heroes and sea-kings of the Aegean legend.

The Venetians called them generically ‘The Archipelago’, and cared little for their pagan echoes. Their importance to the Republic was strictly military, as potential strongpoints or havens along the shipping routes. Venetian merchantmen had been sailing these waters for centuries, generally just passing through, sometimes stopping to pick up fruit, salt or sweet wine from the islands. Their navigations, though, had always been hazardous. In times of war every island was potentially a hostile base, and even in peacetime passage among them was risky. The Aegean was a corsair’s paradise. From the landlocked bays of Lesbos; from the fine wide anchorage of Cos; from hidden havens in uninhabited islets; from a thousand unflushable lairs the pirates sprang, sometimes in hazy causes of national or religious purposes, more often for private gain.

Byzantium had been the suzerain of these waters, and to a sea-people like the Venetians, whose welfare depended so largely
upon the trade routes to the Dardanelles, complete mastery of the Aegean might have been one of the greatest prizes to be snatched from the fall of Constantinople. They never achieved it, though. Their rivals the Genoese got Chios, off the Turkish coast, which they made into a great trading mart and naval base. The Knights of St John got Rhodes. Other islands were tossed down the years from proprietor to proprietor, from Frankish lord to Greek freebooter, from transient pirate to passing admiral. The Greek islanders generally detested the Venetians for their part in the Crusade, and often encouraged their enemies. The Turks, from bases in Asia Minor, made their positions in the islands progressively more precarious.

In one way and another, however, the Venetians did achieve a lasting overlordship in Euboea, the biggest of the off-shore islands on the Greek side of the sea, and in the scattered islands of the Cyclades. They earned few revenues from their possession of these places, and they spent fortunes in preserving them; but with the support of their naval bases in Crete and on the Greek mainland, for the next five centuries they maintained a presence there, until the banner of St Mark was lowered from the last island fortress, the hilltop city of Exombourgo on Tinos, in 1715.

The division of the Byzantine Empire by the Crusaders was, of course, a paper division – in many of the imperial possessions Byzantine officials were still in control. In 1205 the new Doge Pietro Ziani, considering how best to handle Venice’s own share of the spoils, decided to offer the Cyclades to free enterprise. Any Venetian citizens with enough ships, men and temerity might take the islands for themselves as feudal chiefs, on the assumption that they would remain in some sense clients of the Republic. It was no chance, perhaps, that the first to accept the challenge was a nephew of Enrico Dandolo, Marin Sanudo, who had followed his uncle to Constantinople. He was serving as a judge in the Venetian courts there, but he resigned his office at once, mustered a scratch force of adventurers, equipped eight fighting galleys, and sailing south through the Dardanelles into the enchanted seas, seized the Cyclades and declared himself their duke.

In theory his duchy became a fief of the Latin empire in
Constantinople, but the Venetianness of it was never in doubt, and over the years it provided many imperial agents and governors in the east. The dukes, officially regarded by the Venetians as the premier dukes of Christendom, remained Venetian citizens. Venetian law obtained and the Venetian dialect of Italian was the official language. Sanudo handed over some of his two hundred islands as sub-fiefs to his comrades, and so some of the most celebrated Venetian clans became associated with the Cyclades. If one nephew of Enrico Dandolo was the duke himself, another was master of Andros. A Foscolo took Anafi, a Barozzi took Thira, Stampalia went to one of the Querinis, the Ghisi brothers took Tinos and Mykonos, a Giustinian helped to rule Kea. These were names destined to figure again and again in the annals of the Republic: and the distant island of Kithira, to the south of the Peloponnese, went to Marco Venier specifically
because
of his name – it was the birthplace of Venus, and the Veniers had always claimed that, as their patronymic demonstrated, they were direct descendants of that goddess.