‘The Works of Hell’

 

APRIL 1204

Both sides had learned from the attack on Constantinople ten months earlier that while the land walls were invulnerable, the sea wall along the Golden Horn was low and fragile, given the Venetians’ naval skill. The hostilities were to be a complete rerun – for the Venetians it must have seemed like running in a dream.

The two opposing armies prepared accordingly. The Venetians readied their ships, reconstructed their flying bridges and shipboard catapults. The Franks rolled out their own siege engines and wheeled shelters that would allow their troops to work away at the base of the wall, protected from bombardment from above. This time there were refinements. The Venetians prepared wooden frames over their ships and covered them with nets made from vines ‘so that the stone-throwing catapults could not shatter the ships into pieces or sink them’. They had hides soaked in vinegar draped over the hulls to lessen the risk from flaming arrows and firebombs, and they loaded siphons of Greek fire onto their ships.

Murtzuphlus however had also analysed the problem of the low sea wall and devised an ingenious defence. On top of the regular line of battlements and turrets the Greeks now built grotesque wooden structures of immense height – sometimes seven storeys high, with each storey hanging pendulously further out, like fantastical medieval houses crowding over a street. The overhang was critical. It meant that anyone propping a ladder against the wall from below would be confronted with an insuperable obstacle, and the task was made more daunting by trapdoors in the floors of the towers from which rocks, boiling oil and missiles could be rained down on the enemy. ‘There was never any city so well fortified,’ declared Villehardouin. The new emperor overlooked nothing. The turrets were protected with soaked hides; all the gateways were bricked up and Murtzuphlus erected his command headquarters, a vermilion tent, on a prominent hill in front of the monastery of Christ Pantepoptos – the All-seeing – which afforded him a panoramic strategic overview of the battlefield below.

These feverish preparations lasted most of Lent; the banks of the Golden Horn on both sides were abuzz with the sound of hammering and banging, the sharpening of swords on the blacksmiths’ anvils, the caulking of hulls, the fitting of the complex superstructures to the Venetian ships. In March the crusader leaders convened to work out a set of ground rules for a positive outcome: what would happen if they won? It was crucial to predetermine a division of spoils and the future of the city; experienced commanders knew well that medieval sieges could descend into fractious chaos at the moment of apparent victory. The March Pact set down rules for the division of booty: the Venetians to get three quarters of the proceeds until their debt of 150,000 marks was paid off; thereafter the spoils to be divided equally; an emperor to be chosen by a committee of six Venetians and six Franks; the crusaders to remain in Constantinople for another year. There was a further clause that was of little regard to the feudal knights of Europe but critical to the merchants from the lagoon: the chosen emperor would permit no trade with anyone at war with Venice. This provided the Venetians with a lockout of their maritime competitors – the Pisans and the Genoese. It was a potential goldmine.

In an attempt to impose discipline, the army was made to swear on sacred relics that they would hand in all booty worth five sous or more, ‘that they would use no violence against women or tear off their clothes, for whoever did so would be put to death … nor lay hands on any monks, cleric or priest, except in self-defence, and that they would not sack church or convent’. Pious words. The army had been outside the walls for eleven months. They were hungry and angry; they had been detained here against their will; they had seen the immense wealth of the city for themselves; they knew the customary rewards for taking a city by storm.

*

By early April everything was ready. On the evening of Thursday the 8th, ten days before Easter, the men were confessed, and boarded their ships; the horses were loaded onto the horse transports; the fleet lined up. The galleys were interspersed among the transports. The great ships with their high poops and forecastles towered over them all. As dawn approached they cast off to make the short crossing of the Horn, a distance of a few hundred yards. It was an extraordinary sight – the fleet strung out along a mile front with the outlandish flying bridges protruding from their masts, ‘like the tilting beam of a scale’s balance’, the great ships each with the flags of its lord fluttering in the wind as proudly as when they left the lagoon nine months earlier. Handsome rewards were offered for scaling the walls. From the decks the men could look up at the overhanging wooden superstructures,

On the rising ground behind they could see Murtzuphlus directing operations from in front of his tent, ‘and he had his silver trumpets sounded and his snare drums beaten and they made a mighty racket’. As they neared the shore, the ships slowed and winched themselves in; men started to disembark, splashing through the shallows and trying to advance ladders and battering rams under their sheltering roofs soaked in vinegar.

They were met by volleys of arrows and ‘enormous stone blocks … dropped on the siege engines of the French … and they began to crush them, shattering them to pieces and destroying all their devices so effectively that no one dared stay in or under the siege equipment’. The Venetians swung their flying bridges up towards the castellated battlements but were finding it difficult to reach the tall superstructures – or to steady their ships in a stiff contrary wind that forced the ships back from the shore – and the defence had been carefully organised and well stocked with weapons. The attack started to falter; the men ashore could not be supported by the buffeted ships pushed back by the wind; eventually the signal was given to withdraw. From the ramparts there were loud hootings and jeerings; trumpets and drums thundered; in a final gesture of triumphal mockery some of the defenders climbed up onto the highest platforms ‘and dropped their breeches and showed their backsides’. The army retired in despair, convinced that God did not want the city to fall.

That evening there took place in a church an agonised conference between the crusader lords and the Venetians about how to proceed. The problem was the opposing wind, but it was also morale. A proposal to attack the sea walls outside the Horn was opposed by Dandolo, who was well aware of the strong current along that shore. ‘And know’, declared Villehardouin, ‘that there were those who wanted the current or the wind to take the ships down the straits – they did not care where so long as they left the land and went on their way – and this was no wonder for they were in grave peril.’ The chronicler continuously brought a charge of cowardice against those with a distaste for the manner in which the crusade had been hijacked.

To raise morale, the ever obliging clergy resolved on a campaign of theological vilification of their fellow Christians within the city. On Palm Sunday, 11 April, all the men were called to service, where they heard the leading preachers in the camp deliver a unified message to each national group, ‘and they told them that because [the Greeks] had killed their rightful lord, they were worse than the Jews … and that they should not be afraid of attacking them for they were the enemies of the Lord God’. It was a message that drew on all the prejudicial motifs of the age. The men were bidden to confess their sins. In a short-term gesture of virtuous piety all the prostitutes were expelled from the camp. The crusaders repaired and re-armed the ships and prepared to launch a new assault the following day: Monday 12 April.

They adjusted their equipment for this second attempt. It was clear that a single ship throwing its flying bridge forward to attack a tower had not worked: the defenders could bring all the weight of numbers to bear on the one spot. It was now decided to link the high-sided sailing ships, the only vessels with the height to reach the towers, in pairs, so that the flying bridges could grapple with a tower from both sides like twin claws. Accordingly they were chained together. Again, the armada sailed out across the Horn to the din of battle. Murtzuphlus was plainly visible in front of his tent directing operations. Trumpets and drums sounded; men shouted; catapults were cranked up – the waterfront was quickly engulfed in a storm of noise, ‘so loud’, according to Villehardouin, ‘that the earth seemed to shake’. Arrows thocked across the water; gouts of Greek fire spurted up from the siphons on the Venetian ships; enormous boulders, ‘so enormous that one man couldn’t lift them’, were hurled through the air from the sixty catapults ranged on the walls; from the hill above, Murtzuphlus shouted directions to the men, ‘Go here! Go there!’ as the angle of attack altered. The defensive arrangements of both sides worked well. The Greek fire fizzled out against the timber superstructures on the ramparts, which were protected by leather casings soaked in vinegar; the vine nets absorbed the force of the boulders which struck the ships. The contest was as inconclusive as the day before. And then, at some point, the wind shifted to the north, propelling the giant sailing ships closer to the shore. Two of these vessels which had been chained together, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, surged forward, their flying bridges converging on a tower from both sides. The Pilgrim struck first. A Venetian soldier clattered up the walkway, sixty feet above the ground, and leapt onto the tower. It was a gesture of doomed bravery; the Varangian Guard advanced and cut him to pieces.

The flying bridge, responding to the surge of the sea, disengaged and closed on the tower for a second time. This time a French soldier, Andrew of Durboise, took his life in his hands and leapt the gap; scarcely grabbing the battlements, he managed to haul himself inside on his knees. While he was still on all fours, a group of men rushed forward with swords and axes and struck him. They thought that they had dealt him a death blow. Durboise, however, had better armour than the Venetian. Somehow he survived. To the astonishment of his assailants, he climbed to his feet and drew his sword. Appalled and terrified by this supernatural resurrection, they turned and fled to the storey below. When those on that level saw the flight, they in turn became infected with panic. The tower was evacuated. Durboise was followed onto the ramparts by others. They now had secure control of a tower and tied the flying bridge to it. The bridge however continued to dip and rear with the movement of the ship against the sea. It threatened to pull down the whole wooden superstructure. The bridge was untied, cutting off the small band of soldiers on their hard-won foothold. Further down the line, another ship struck a tower and managed to take it, but the crusaders on the two towers were effectively isolated, surrounded by a swarm of men on the towers either side. The contest had reached a critical point.

However, the sight of flags flying from these towers put new courage into the attackers now landing on the fore shore. Another French knight, Peter of Amiens, decided to tackle the wall itself. Spotting a small bricked-up doorway, he led a charge of men to try to batter it open. The posse included Robert of Clari and his brother, Aleaumes, a warrior monk. They crouched at the foot of the wall with their shields over their heads. A storm of missiles pelted down on them from above; crossbow bolts, pots of pitch, stones and Greek fire battered on the upturned shields whilst the men beneath desperately hacked away at the gate ‘with axes and good swords, pieces of wood, iron bars and pickaxes, until they made a sizeable hole’. Through the aperture they could glimpse a swarm of people waiting on the other side. There was a moment of pause. To crawl through the gap was to risk certain death. None of the crusaders dared advance.

Seeing this hesitation, Aleaumes the monk thrust his way forward and volunteered himself. Robert barred the way, certain his brother was offering to die. Aleaumes struggled past him, got down on his hands and knees and started to crawl through with Robert trying to grab his foot and haul him back. Somehow Aleaumes wriggled and kicked his way free to emerge on the far side – to a barrage of stones. He staggered to his feet, drew his sword – and advanced. And for a second time the sheer bravery of a single man, fuelled by religious zeal, turned the tide. The defenders turned and ran. Aleaumes called back to those outside, ‘My lords, enter boldly! I can see them withdrawing in dismay. They’re starting to run away!’ Seventy men scrambled inside. Panic rippled through the defence. The defenders started to retreat, vacating a large part of the wall and the ground behind. From above, Murtzuphlus saw this collapse with growing concern and tried to muster his troops with trumpets and drums.

Whatever the new emperor may have been he was no coward. He spurred his horse and started down the slope, probably virtually unaccompanied. Peter of Amiens ordered his men to stand their ground: ‘Now, lords, here is the moment to prove yourselves. Here comes the emperor. See to it that no one dare to give way.’ Murtzuphlus’s advance slowed to a halt. Unsupported, he drew back and returned to the tent to rally his forces further back. The intruders demolished the next gate; men started to flood inside; horses were unloaded; mounted knights galloped through the open gates. The sea wall was lost.

Meanwhile Peter of Amiens advanced up the hill. Murtzuphlus abandoned his command post and rode off through the city streets to the Bucoleon Palace, two miles away. Choniates bewailed the behaviour of his fellow countrymen: ‘The cowardly thousands, who had the advantage of a high hill, were chased by one man from the fortifications they were meant to defend.’ ‘And so it was’, wrote Robert of Clari from the other side, ‘that my lord Peter had Murtzuphlus’s tents, chests and the treasures which he left there.’ And the slaughter began: ‘There were so many wounded and dead that there seemed no end to them – the number was beyond computation.’ All afternoon the crusaders plundered the surrounding area; further north refugees started to stream out of the land gates.

At the day’s end the crusaders drew to a halt ‘exhausted by fighting and killing’. They were wary of what lay ahead: in the dense tangle of city streets, the soldiers and citizens could put up a spirited defence, street by street, house by house, raining missiles and firepots down on them from the rooftops, ensnaring them in guerrilla warfare which might last a month. The crusaders ferried all their men across and camped outside the walls, with detachments controlling the red tent and surrounding the well-fortified imperial palace of Blachernae. No one knew what was happening in the city’s labyrinth or how the four hundred thousand population would react, but if they would neither surrender nor fight, it was decided to wait until the wind was right and burn them out. They now knew how vulnerable the city was to fire. That night a fire was started pre-emptively by twitchy soldiers near the Horn, tearing out another twenty-five acres of housing.

In the heart of Constantinople, there was chaos. People wandered aimlessly about in despair or took to removing or burying their possessions, or left the city, heading north across the wide plain. Murtzuphlus rode here and there, trying to persuade them to stand their ground, but it was hopeless. Shaken by the rippling succession of disasters – the repeated attacks, the devastating fires, the short-lived and violent ends of successive emperors – they could summon no loyalty to the present incumbent. Fearing that he would, as Choniates put it, be ‘fed into the jaws of the Latins as a banquet if he were captured’, he abandoned the palace and boarded a fishing boat and sailed away from the city – yet another emperor at loose in the Greek back country, having reigned for two months and sixteen days. Choniates was a stickler for the dates. Once more ‘the ship tossed by storms’ lacked a captain.

What was left of the ruling clique struggled to absorb each fresh blow. There was a scrabbled attempt to find yet another emperor; early on 13 April, the tattered remnant of the imperial administration and the clergy convened at Hagia Sophia to elect the successor. There were two candidates, evenly matched young men, ‘both modest and skilled in war’. The choice was made by drawing lots, but the winner, Constantine Lascaris, refused to put on the imperial insignia – he was not prepared to be identified as emperor if resistance proved futile. Outside the church, the Varangian Guard drew up in formation nearby at the Milion, the golden milestone, a ceremonial arch surmounted with the figure of Constantine the Great. This was the epicentre of Byzantium, the point from which all distances in the empire were measured. They stood there, axes in hand, awaiting orders from the new emperor, according to tradition.

It did not start well for Lascaris. He harangued the large number of people gathered at the ancient heart of the city, ‘cajoling them to resist … but none of the crowd were swayed by his words’. The Varangians asked for a pay rise to fight. This was granted. They marched off, but never fulfilled their orders, quickly realising the odds were against them, so that ‘when the heavily armed Latin troops appeared, they promptly scattered and sought safety in flight’. Lascaris had already realised all was hopeless. The briefest of all the brief reigns in Constantinople was over within hours. The ‘emperor’ entered the palace, just a few hours after Murtzuphlus had vacated it, and followed suit: he took a boat across the Bosphorus to Asia Minor, where Byzantium would live to fight again.

Down by the Horn, the crusaders started a perplexing day. They nervously prepared for the hard street fighting ahead. Instead they encountered a religious procession coming down the hill from Hagia Sophia to their camp. The clergy advanced with their icons and sacred relics, accompanied by some of the Varangian Guard, ‘as was the custom in rituals and religious processions’, and a host of people. In a city undergoing a period of repeated civil wars this was practised procedure: to welcome in a new emperor deposing the old. They explained that Murtzuphlus had fled. They had come to acclaim Boniface as the new emperor – to honour him and lead him to Hagia Sophia for his coronation.

It was a moment of tragic misunderstanding. To the Byzantines this was customary regime change. To the Franks it was abject surrender. And there was no emperor – according to the March Pact that had still to be decided – only an ugly, angry, desperate army to whom the idea had been preached, not two days before, that the Greeks were treacherous people, worse than the Jews who had killed Christ, worse than dogs.

They started to advance into the heart of the city. It was true: there was no opposition; no trumpets or defiant martial clamour. They quickly found that ‘the way was open before them and everything there for the taking. The narrow streets were clear and the crossroads unobstructed, safe from attack.’ Stupefied, ‘they found no one to resist them’. The streets were apparently lined with people who had turned out ‘to meet them with crosses and holy icons of Christ’. This pacific, abject, trusting, desperate ritual was horribly misjudged. The crusaders were utterly unmoved: ‘At this sight their demeanour remained unchanged, nor did the slightest smile cross their faces, nor were their grim and furious expressions softened by this unexpected spectacle.’ They just robbed the bystanders, beginning with their carts. Then they started a wholesale sack.

At this point the chronicle of Niketas Choniates breaks out into an anguished cry of pain: ‘O City, City, eye of all cities … have you drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury?’ Over the space of three days Choniates watched the devastation of the most beautiful city of the world, the destruction of a thousand years of Christian history, the plunder, rape and murder of its citizens. His account, frequently descending into a threnody of semi-articulate pain, unfolds in a series of vivid snapshots as an eyewitness to profound tragedy. He barely knew where to start: ‘Which actions of these murderous men should I relate first, and which should I end with?’

To the Byzantines, Constantinople was the sacred image of heaven on earth, a vision of the divine made manifest to man, a vast sacramental icon. To the crusaders it was a treasure house waiting to be stripped. The previous autumn they had visited Constantinople as tourists and seen the extraordinary wealth of the place. Robert of Clari was one of many open-mouthed at the glimpse of riches afforded to the warrior class of underdeveloped western Europe: ‘For if anyone should relate to you even a hundredth of the richness, beauty and magnificence that was there in the convents, monasteries, abbeys and palaces of the city, he would be taken for a liar and you would not believe him.’ Now it all lay at their mercy.

The two crusader leaders, Boniface and Baldwin, hurried to secure the richest prizes – the sumptuous imperial palaces, the Bucoleon and the Blachernae, ‘so rich and so magnificent that no one could describe it to you’, where the crusader deputations had been repeatedly overawed by the wealth of the Byzantine court. Elsewhere there was indiscriminate plunder. All the vows made before the attack were forgotten. The crusaders targeted both churches and the mansions of the rich. The Greek accounts are vivid with rhetorical anguish:

They battered their way into Hagia Sophia and started to strip the place. The high altar, fourteen foot long, ‘so rich that no one could estimate its value’, whose surface was ‘made of gold and precious stones broken and ground up all together’, ‘blazing with every sort of precious material and wrought into an object of extraordinary beauty, astonishing to everyone’ – this was hacked to pieces. The overarching canopy, supported on slim columns, all of solid silver, was dragged down and broken up; the hundred silver chandeliers suspended each by a great chain ‘as thick as a man’s arm’, the columns studded with ‘jasper or porphyry or some other precious stone’, the silver altar rails, the golden censers and sacrificial vessels – ‘and the pulpit, a wonderful work of art, and the gates … completely faced with gold’, all were chopped into transportable lots. Axes, crowbars and swords hacked, wrenched and prised out. Every corner of the church was probed for the valuables it might contain, the monks tortured for hidden treasures, casually despatched for trying to protect a venerated icon or particular relic; women were raped there, men were killed.

To the Greeks it was if these crusaders who had come in the name of God were filled with a kind of terrible madness,

Mules and asses were led into Hagia Sophia to carry away the loot but were unable to keep their footing on the polished floors of ancient polychromatic marble and slipped and fell; somehow maddened by this difficulty, the looters slashed the terrified animals open with their knives. The floor became slippery with blood and the muck of excrement from their punctured bowels. A prostitute, evidently not expelled from the camp, was set on the patriarch’s throne ‘and started to sing a wretched song and danced about, spinning and turning’.

Some of this ecclesiastical looting was nominally in a religious cause. Abbot Martin of Pairis learned that the Church of the Pantocrator Monastery housed an extraordinary collection of relics. Hurrying there with his chaplain, he entered the sacristy – the depository of the most sacred objects – where he encountered a man with a long white beard. ‘Come faithless old man,’ bawled the prelate, ‘show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.’ The trembling monk showed him an iron chest, containing a trove of treasures, ‘more pleasing and more desirable to him than all the riches of Greece’. ‘The abbot greedily and hurriedly thrust in both hands, and as he was girded for action, both he and the chaplain filled the folds of their habits with sacred sacrilege.’ With their robes stuffed with religious treasure, the two men waddled back to their ship, with the old monk in tow. ‘We have done well … thanks be to God,’ was the abbot’s laconic reply to passers-by.

An extraordinary list of the religious treasures of the Orthodox world made it back to the monasteries of Italy and France: the Holy Shroud, hair of the Virgin Mary, the shinbone of St Paul, fragments of the crown of thorns, the head of St James – the venerated objects were carefully itemised in the chroniclers’ accounts. Dandolo obtained for Venice a piece of the True Cross, some of Christ’s blood, the arm of St George and part of St John’s head. Many of the great icons and valued religious talismans of the Byzantine Church were just lost in the rampage – probably smashed to pieces by men intent only on precious metal. By the Church of the Holy Apostles, where Constantine himself and all the emperors were buried, they plundered all night, ‘taking whatever gold ornaments, or round pearls, or radiant, precious and incorruptible gems were still preserved within’; crowbarring open the tombs, they gazed on the face of the great Justinian, builder of Hagia Sophia, dead for seven hundred years. His corpse was not decomposed in the airtight tomb. They looked upon this sight as if it were a miracle – then looted the body for its valuables. And everywhere there were acts of terrible molestation:

The murders and rapes appalled:

‘Thus it went on,’ continued Choniates, thunderous with rage, ‘in the squares, in corners, in temples, in cellars – everywhere terrible deeds.’ ‘The whole head’, he said, ‘was in pain.’ In a final taunting gibe, he contrasted the generous treatment by Saladin at the recapture of Jerusalem seventeen years earlier. ‘They allowed everyone to go free and left them everything they possessed, content with just a few gold coins’ ransom on each head … thus the enemies of Christ dealt magnanimously with the Latin infidels.’

There were just a few brief moments of human sympathy. The crusaders looting the Church of St George of Mangana were stopped dead in their tracks by the spiritual presence of the saintly figure of John Mesarites, a bearded ascetic, who told the intruders that his purse was so empty that he feared no thieves. They stood before him in silence. Led to the baron in charge, he sat on the floor. The baron placed him in the seat of honour and knelt at his feet. His unearthly sanctity impressed the Norman warriors. He was fed, according to his brother’s sardonic account, ‘like some ancient saint by thievish, man-eating magpies’.

Choniates, who himself showed considerable personal courage, was also the recipient of acts of extraordinary humanity. His palace had been destroyed in the devastating fire of the previous year. At the moment of the sack he was living quite humbly. ‘My house, with its low portico, was difficult to approach because of its cramped location’, hidden away near Hagia Sophia. Despite his detestation of the Venetian invaders, this polished aristocrat obviously had sympathetic personal relations with some resident foreigners. Most had fled before the final attack, but he had taken into his household a Venetian merchant and his wife and protected them. When the looters finally reached the house, Domenico the merchant acted with considerable presence of mind. Donning armour so that he looked like one of the invading Italians, he resisted all attempts to sack the house, claiming that he had already gained possession of it for himself. The intruders gradually became more insistent, particularly the French, ‘who were not like the others in either character or physique’. Realising that he could not hold out indefinitely, and fearing the rape of the women, Domenico moved them all to the house of another Venetian. The net closed on this house too. Domenico moved them again. The servants fled.

The proud Byzantine nobles found themselves reduced to the status of common refugees. Abandoned by their servants, ‘We had to carry the children who could not walk on our shoulders and a baby boy, still a suckling, in our arms; thus we were compelled to make our way through the streets.’ Domenico ingeniously dragged them along as if they were his captives. Choniates realised that it was essential to leave. On 17 April, five days after the siege, a small group of nobles started the dangerous walk up the main thoroughfare towards the Golden Gate – a distance of three miles. They wore ragged clothes to conceal their origins; the patriarch, with no sign of his rank as archbishop, took the lead. It was a wet and windy day. Choniates’s wife was heavily pregnant and some of the young women in the group were temptingly beautiful to the French soldiers lounging about; the men cordoned the girls in the middle of the party, ‘as if in a sheep pen’, and instructed them to rub mud into their faces to disguise their looks. ‘We passed through the streets like a line of ants,’ said Choniates. All went well until they passed a church. Suddenly ‘a lecherous and wicked barbarian’ thrust himself into the band of refugees and snatched a girl, the young daughter of a judge, and dragged her away. The judge, who was ageing and ill, tried to run after him but stumbled and fell in the mud. Lying there he called on Choniates to free the girl.

Choniates took his life in his hands. ‘Immediately I turned on my heels in pursuit of the abductor.’ In tears, he called out to passing soldiers to take pity and help, and even grabbed some by the hand and persuaded them to follow. The whole party and a group of soldiers followed the abductor back to his lodging where he had secured the girl and barred the door. He now defied the crowd to do their worst. And there Choniates made an impassioned speech, wagging his finger at the potential rapist, shaming the crusaders he had gathered with a ringing address, reminding them of their vows before God, appealing to them to remember their families and the precepts of Christ. Somehow it worked. Enough was transmitted across the barrier of language. He incited their anger and won them round. The crowd threatened to hang the villain on the spot. Sulkily he surrendered the girl to her father, who was weeping with joy.

And so they made it out of the Golden Gate. From there they could look back along the rippling line of defensive land walls, intact for eight hundred years, now powerless to prevent this disaster. For Choniates the moment was too much. ‘I threw myself headlong on the ground face down and cursed the walls, because they were completely untouched by the disaster, neither did they weep, nor had they collapsed in a heap, but were still standing, insensible.’

*

In the immediate aftermath, Constantinople witnessed a lewd and grotesque carnival. ‘The beef-eating Latins’, as Choniates dubbed them, roamed through the streets, ‘riotous and indecent’, mimicking the dress and customs of the Byzantines. They dressed themselves in Greek robes, ‘to mock us and placed women’s headdresses on their horses’ heads, and tied the white bands which hang down their backs round their beasts’ muzzles’, and planted the distinctive Greek hats on their horses’ heads and rode through the streets with abducted women on their saddles. Others, ‘holding scribes’ reed pens and inkwells, mimicked writing in books, mocking us as secretaries’. To Choniates’s refined palate, these men were barbarians, guzzling and carousing all day long, gorging themselves on delicacies and their own disgusting, crude, pungent food – ‘the chines of oxen boiled in cauldrons, chunks of pig mixed with bean paste and cooked up with a marinade of garlic paste and foul-smelling garlic’.

To this debauchery would be added the wholesale destruction of a thousand years of imperial and religious art. In the aftermath, the conquerors, with their hunger for precious metals and the copper and bronze from which to mint coins, cast into the furnace an extraordinary catalogue of statuary, much of which was ancient even at the city’s founding in the fourth century, collected from across the Roman and Greek world by Constantine the Great. To Choniates the destruction was endless, ‘like a line stretching out to infinity’. Under the blows of hammers and axes they felled the giant bronze figure of Hera, so immense that it took four oxen to cart the head away, and an enormous equestrian statue from its plinth in the Forum of the Bull, carrying a rider who ‘extended his right hand in the direction of the chariot-driving sun … and held a bronze globe in the palm of his hand’. All these were melted down for coins.

The Venetian role in this rape and pillage goes largely unrecorded, though one German chronicler, keen perhaps to point a finger elsewhere, declared that the Italian merchants expelled from the city, particularly the Venetians, were responsible for the slaughter in a spirit of revenge. Choniates, who loathed Dandolo as a sly cheat largely responsible for the catastrophe, picked out the French crusaders as the most muscular pillagers of his beloved city – and owed the safety of himself and his family to the courage of a Venetian merchant. The Venetians at least had perhaps a more discerning attitude to the works of art that they plundered.

All the parties had solemnly sworn that the booty would be centrally collected and equitably divided according to clearly agreed rules. Baldwin of Flanders wrote that ‘an innumerable amount of horses, gold, silver, costly tapestries, gems and all those things that people judge to be rich is plundered’. Much was never handed in; the poor, according to Robert of Clari, were again cheated. But the Venetians received the 150,000 marks owed to them under the terms of the agreements, and another hundred thousand to share amongst themselves. In material terms Dandolo’s gamble seems to have paid off.

When it came to appointing a new emperor, Dandolo, in his nineties, excused himself from consideration, judging that, apart from his age, the election of a Venetian would be enormously contentious. There were two rival candidates, the counts Baldwin and Boniface. The Venetians probably threw their weight behind Baldwin, judging his rival too closely tied to Genoa. Venice’s prime concern was above all to secure stability for its trading interests in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Latin Empire of Constantinople, as it came to be known, was shaky from the first; it was beset by internal squabbles between the feudal lords and outside pressure from the Byzantines and the neighbouring Bulgarians. For most of the surviving protagonists it would end badly. Murtzuphlus, who had escaped from the city, was treacherously blinded in exile by the other exiled rival, Alexius III; recaptured by the crusaders, he was prepared for a special end, reputedly devised by Dandolo. ‘For a high man, I will detail the high justice one should give him!’ He was taken to the base of the tall column of Theodosius, prodded up the internal steps to the platform at the top; sightless, but grasping his imminent fate, and watched by an expectant crowd, he was pushed off. Baldwin, the first emperor of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, died slowly in a Bulgarian ravine, his arms and legs chopped off at the joints; his rival, Boniface, also killed in a Bulgarian ambush, had his skull despatched to the Bulgarian tsar as a gift.

The blind doge survived, shrewd to the last. With a cool head, he masterminded a successful withdrawal of a crusader army almost encircled by the Bulgarians in the spring of 1205. Everyone who came in contact with the old man recognised his unique powers of discrimination and prudence. His superior judgement had saved the crusade from repeated disaster. He was, according to Villehardouin, ‘very wise and worthy and full of vigour’ to the end. Even Pope Innocent paid a kind of backhanded tribute to a man whom he heartily loathed. The Venetians had committed to stay at Constantinople until March 1205. A resident population remained to occupy their share of the city, but with the year up many more prepared to sail home. Dandolo, knowing that the end of his life was near, applied to the pope for release from his crusader vows and to be allowed to return too. Innocent had the last laugh – insisting that the aged old doge should proceed with the army to the Holy Land, to which it would never now go. ‘We are mindful’, he began smoothly,

It must have afforded Innocent some impious satisfaction to gain the advantage, though he finally lifted the sentence of excommunication on the old man in January 1205. Dandolo spent his last days a long way from the lagoon. Like his father before him, he died in Constantinople. In May 1205 he breathed his last and was buried in Hagia Sophia, where his bones would remain for 250 years, until another convulsion racked the imperial city.

Innocent had initially applauded the deeds of the crusaders in bringing the Byzantines under the Catholic Church. Dandolo had been dead for two months before the truth about the city’s fall finally reached him. His verdict fell on the crusaders like a scourge. Their enterprise had been ‘nothing but an example of affliction and the works of hell’. The sack of Constantinople burned a hole in Christian history; it was the scandal of the age and Venice was held to be deeply complicit in the act. It would reinforce papal views of the merchant crusaders, who traded unapologetically with Islam, as enemies of Christ. The label would be regularly reapplied down the centuries. But for Venice it was an extraordinary and unlooked-for opportunity. They had set out in the autumn of 1203, banners flying, to conquer Egypt. The fortunes of the sea had carried them away to unforeseen destinations. As for their actual part in the proceedings they kept silent. There are no contemporary Venetian accounts of the crusade that was intended to take Jerusalem via Cairo but ended up in Christian Constantinople.

*

On 1 October 1204, the Byzantine Empire was formally divided among the victorious parties. The merchant crusaders returned from Constantinople with a rich array of trophies, marbles and holy relics. Where the Frankish crusaders hacked up and melted down, the Venetians picked their plunder like connoisseurs, carrying back to the lagoon intact works of art to beautify and ennoble the city. Along with the bodies of saints – Lucia, Agatha, Simeon, Anastasius, Paul the Martyr – they acquired caskets, icons and jewelled treasures, statues, marble columns and sculptured reliefs. Much of this went to adorn St Mark’s; a pair of ancient bronze doors was installed at its entrance; a Roman statue was used to form the body of St Theodore with his crocodile atop one of the twin columns nearby; Dandolo himself was said to have selected from the Hippodrome the four bronze-gilt horses caught in dramatic and frozen motion with nostrils flaring and hooves raised, which came, along with the lion of Venice, to define the Republic’s sense of itself: proud, imperial – and free. Dandolo had ensured that the Venetians, alone of all the participants in the Fourth Crusade, did not pay homage to its new emperor; they kept themselves clear of the whole edifice of feudal obligation.

The spoils of war

 

Along with their exquisite spoils of war, winched ashore on the quays of Venice after the sack of 1204, the city acquired something else. Overnight it had gained an empire. Of all the parties that had set out in the autumn of 1202, it was the Republic that had profited most handsomely. Dandolo had taken the opportunity and shaped, for the lagoon dwellers, an extraordinary advantage.