The Blind Doge

 

1198–1201

The Fourth Crusade opened with a furious blast:

The ringing call to militant Christendom, launched by Pope Innocent III in August 1198, came an ominous century after the successful capture of Jerusalem. In the interim the whole crusading project had slid towards collapse. The decisive blow fell in 1187, when Saladin shattered a crusader army at Hattin and retook the Holy City. Neither the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned in a Syrian river, nor the English king, Richard the Lionheart, had come close to regaining it. The crusaders were now confined to a few settlements along the coast such as the ports of Tyre and Acre. It fell to the pope to breathe life back into the project.

Innocent was thirty-seven years old – young, brilliant, determined, pragmatic, a master of religious rhetoric and a skilled jurist. His call to arms was both a military venture, a campaign of moral rearmament in a secularising world, and an initiative to reassert papal authority. From the start he made it clear that he intended not only to raise the crusade but to direct it himself, through the offices of his papal legates. While one went to stir up the warrior lords of northern France, the other, Cardinal Soffredo, came to Venice to ask about ships. A century of crusading had taught military planners that the land route to Syria was an arduous trudge and that the Byzantines were hostile to large numbers of armed men tramping across their terrain. With the other maritime republics, Pisa and Genoa, at war, only Venice had the skill, the resources and the technology to transport a whole army to the east.

The immediate Venetian response was startling. They sent their own legates back to Rome to request, as a preliminary, the lifting of the papal ban on trading with the Islamic world, specifically Egypt. The Republic’s case framed at the outset the collision of faith and secular necessity that was to haunt the Fourth Crusade. It rested on the prototype definition of Venetian identity. The legates argued the city’s unique situation. It had no agriculture; it depended entirely on trade for its survival and was being badly hurt by the embargo, which it faithfully observed. The legates might also have muttered under their breath that Pisa and Genoa had meanwhile continued their trade in defiance of the papacy, but Innocent was not impressed. The city had long existed at an oblique angle to pious Christian projects. Eventually he gave the Venetians a carefully worded permission, framed to exclude transaction in any war materials, which he proceeded to enumerate: ‘[we] prohibit you, under strict threat of anathema, to supply the Saracens by selling, giving or bartering, iron, hemp, sharp implements, inflammable materials, arms, galleys, sailing ships, or timbers’, adding with a lawyer’s eye, to snuff out any legal loopholes the devious Venetians might seek to exploit, ‘whether finished or unfinished …’

This was not a good start. The threat of excommunication was heavy and Innocent did not trust Venice at all, but practically he had no choice but to bend a little: only the Republic could supply the ships.

So it was that when six French knights arrived at Venice in the first week of Lent 1201, the doge probably had a good idea of their mission. They came as envoys of the great crusading counts of France and the Low Countries – from Champagne and Brie, Flanders, Hainaut and Blois – with sealed charters that gave them full authority to make whatever agreements they saw fit for maritime transport. One of these men was Geoffroi de Villehardouin of Champagne, a veteran of the Third Crusade and a man with experience of assembling crusader armies. It was Villehardouin’s account that would form a principal, but highly partial, source for all that followed.

Venice had a long tradition of equating age with experience when it came to appointing doges, but the man the counts had come to see was remarkable by any measure. Enrico Dandolo was the scion of a prominent family of lawyers, merchants and churchmen. They had been intertwined in nearly all the great events of the past century and had built up an impressive record of service to the Republic. They had been involved in reforming the city’s church and state institutions in the middle years of the twelfth century and participated in Venice’s crusading ventures. By all accounts the male Dandolos were a clan of immense wisdom, energy – and longevity. In 1201 Enrico was over ninety. He was also completely blind.

No one knows what Enrico looked like; his physical image has been shaped by numerous anachronistic portrayals, so it is easy now to imagine a tall, thin, wiry man with a white beard and piercing but sightless eyes, steely in his resolve for the Venetian state, sagacious with experience of many decades at the heart of Venice’s life during a century of rising prosperity – an impression for which there is no material substance. Of his personality, contemporary impressions and subsequent judgements have been sharply divided. They would match the divergent views of Venice itself. To his friends Dandolo would become the epitome of the Republic’s shrewdness and good government. To the French knight Robert of Clari he was a ‘most worthy man and wise’; to Abbot Martin of Pairis, a man who ‘compensated for physical blindness with a lively intellect’; the French baron Hugh of Saint-Pol called him ‘prudent in character, discreet and wise in making difficult decisions’. Villehardouin, who came to know him well, declared him to be ‘very wise, brave and vigorous’. To the Greek chronicler Niketas Choniates, who did not, he was destined to a counter-judgement which has also passed into the bloodstream of history: ‘a man most treacherous and hostile to the [Byzantines], both cunning and arrogant; he called himself the wisest of the wise and in his lust for glory surpassed everyone’. Around Dandolo would gather accretions of myth that would define less the man than the way that Venice would be seen both by itself and its enemies.

Dandolo had always been destined for high office, but some time in the mid-1170s he started to lose his sight. Documents that he signed in 1174 show a firm, legible signature well aligned along the page. Another in 1176 bears the tell-tale signs of visual impairment. The words of the Latin formula (‘I, Henry Dandolo, judge, have signed underneath in my hand’) slope away downhill to the right, as the writer’s grasp of spatial relationship falters across the page, each successive letter taking its stumbling position from an increasingly uncertain guess as to the orientation of its predecessor. It appears that Dandolo’s eyesight was slowly fading and in time utterly extinguished. Eventually, according to Venetian statute, Dandolo was no longer permitted to sign documents, only to have his mark attested by an approved witness.

The nature, the degree and the cause of Dandolo’s loss of sight were destined to become subjects of much speculation and to be held as a key explanation for the events of the Fourth Crusade. It was rumoured that during the Byzantine hostage crisis of 1172, when Dandolo was in Constantinople, the emperor Manuel ‘ordered his eyes to be blinded with glass; and his eyes were uninjured, but he saw nothing’. This was held to be the reason why the doge harboured a profound grudge against the Byzantines. In another version he lost his sight in a street brawl in Constantinople. Variants of this tale perplexed the medieval world in all subsequent considerations of Dandolo’s career. Some held that his blindness was feigned, or not total, for his eyes were attested to be indeed still bright and clear, and how otherwise was Dandolo able to lead the Venetian people in peace and war? Conversely it was said that he was adept at covering up his blindness, and that this was a proof of the treacherous cunning of the man. It is certain, however, that Dandolo was not blinded in 1172 – his signature was still good two years later – nor did he himself ever apportion blame for it. The only explanation that he subsequently gave was that he had lost his sight through a blow to the head.

However it happened, it did nothing to dim the clarity of his judgement or his energy. In 1192 Dandolo was elected to the position of doge and swore the ducal oath of office to ‘work for the honour and profit of the Venetians in good faith and without fraud’. Despite the fact that Venice, always profoundly conservative in its mechanisms, was never given to a heady admiration of youth, the blind man who had to be led to the ducal throne remained an unusual choice; it is possible he was viewed as a stop-gap. Given his advanced years the electors could feel reasonably confident that his term of office would be short. None of them could have guessed that it had thirteen years to run, during which time he would transform the future of Venice – or that the arrival of the crusader knights would be the trigger.

Dandolo welcomed the knights warmly, examined their letters of credence carefully and, being satisfied with their authority, proceeded to the business. The matter was unfolded in a series of meetings. First to the doge and his council, ‘inside the doge’s palace, which was very fine and beautiful’, according to Villehardouin. The barons were highly impressed with the splendour of the setting and the dignity of the blind doge, ‘a very wise and venerable man’. They had come, they said, because they ‘could be confident of finding a greater supply of ships at Venice than at any other port’ and they outlined their request for transport – the number of men and horses, the provisions, the length of time for which they requested them. Dandolo was evidently taken aback by the scale of the operation that the envoys outlined, though it is unclear exactly how detailed their projections were. It was a week’s work for the Venetians to size up the task. They came back and named their terms. With the thoroughness of experienced workmen quoting on a job they stipulated exactly what they would supply for the money:

The per capita rate was not unreasonable. The Genoese had asked for similar from the French in 1190, but the aggregate sum of ninety-four thousand marks was staggering, equivalent to the annual income of France. From the Venetian point of view it was a huge commercial opportunity, shadowed by considerable risk. It would require the undivided attention of the whole Venetian economy for two years: a year of preparation – shipbuilding, logistical arrangements, manpower recruitment, food sourcing – followed by a second year of active service by a sizeable section of the male population and the use of all its ships. It would commit the Venetians to the largest commercial contract in medieval history; it would mean the cessation of all other trading activity during the span of the contract; failure at any point would mean disaster for the city, because all its resources were involved. It was small wonder that Dandolo had studied the letters of authority so closely, drawn the contract so carefully and asked for half of the proceeds. The two dimensions were time and money; both had been scrupulously weighed. The Venetians were seasoned merchants; contracting was what they did and they believed in the sanctity of the deal. It was the gold standard by which Venetian life operated: its key parameters were quantity, price and delivery date. Such bargains were hammered out on the Rialto every day of the trading year, though never on this scale. The doge might have been surprised that the crusaders agreed so readily after only an overnight consideration. The envoys were particularly impressed by the Venetian offer to contribute fifty galleys at their own expense. It was not without significance. Nor was the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘wherever that may take us’ inserted in the contract without purpose.

The interior of St Mark’s

 

The doge might have been driving the deal, but Venice defined itself as a commune, in which all the people theoretically had a say in the major decisions of the state. In this case their whole future was at stake. It was critical to obtain wide consent for the deal. Villehardouin recorded the process of Venetian democracy at work. The transaction had to be sold to an ever widening audience: first the Great Council of fifty, then to two hundred representatives of the Commune. Finally Dandolo called the general populace to St Mark’s. According to Villehardouin, ten thousand people were gathered together in expectation of dramatic news. In the smoky darkness of the great mother church, ‘the most beautiful church that might be’, wrote Villehardouin, who was evidently as susceptible as anyone to the atmosphere of the place, glimmering like a sea cave shot through with shafts of obscure light and the smouldering gold of its mosaic saints, Dandolo constructed a scene of mounting drama, using ‘his intelligence and powers of reason – which were both very sound and sharp’. First he requested ‘a mass to the Holy Spirit and to beg God that he might guide them concerning the request the envoys had made to them’. Then the six envoys entered the great doors of the church and walked down the aisle. The Frenchmen, doubtless wearing their surcoats emblazoned with the scarlet cross, were the object of intense interest. People craned and jostled to catch a glimpse of the foreigners. Clearing his throat, Villehardouin made a powerful address to his audience:

The marshal flattered their maritime pride and their religious zeal, as if they had been personally called upon by God to perform this mighty deed. All six envoys fell weeping to the floor. It was an appeal direct to the emotional core of the medieval soul. A thunderous roar swept through the church, along the nave, mounting to the galleries and up into the swirling heights of the dome. People ‘called out with one voice and raised their hands up high and cried “We agree! We agree!”’ Dandolo was then helped to the pulpit, his sightless eyes sensing the moment, and sealed the pact: ‘My lords, behold the honour God has done you, because the finest nation on earth has scorned all others and asked your help and co-operation in undertaking a task of such great importance as the deliverance of Our Lord!’ It was irresistible.

The Treaty of Venice, as it came to be known, was signed and sealed the following day with all due ceremony. The doge ‘gave them his charters … weeping copiously, and swore in good faith on the relics of saints to loyally hold to the terms in the charters’. The envoys responded in kind, sent messengers to Pope Innocent and departed to prepare for crusade. Under the terms of the treaty, the crusading army would be gathered on the auspicious St John’s Day, 24 June the following year, 1202, and the fleet would be ready to receive them.

Despite the fervent assent of the population, the Venetians were, by nature, a cautious people, in whom the mercantile spirit had bred shrewd judgement, not given to flights of fancy, and Dandolo was a cautious leader. Yet any measured risk analysis of the Treaty of Venice would suggest that it involved hazarding the whole economy of the Commune on one high-stakes project. The number of men and ships required, the sums of money to be laid out – the figures were breathtaking. Dandolo was probably over ninety years old with presumably only a few years to live. He personally was responsible for pushing through this enormous project. On the face of it he had much to lose. Why on earth should he risk his declining years in this gamble?

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:

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.