City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (12 page)

Intense preparations were made. The horses were caparisoned and saddled and walked back up the ramps onto the horse transports, accompanied by their knights. Helmets were laced tight, crossbows cranked. It was a fine summer morning just after sunrise. The Venetian galleys rowed out, towing the transports behind them to secure a safe passage across the fast-flowing Bosphorus currents, with Dandolo in charge. Ahead of them went oared barques packed with archers and crossbowmen to clear the shore as they swept in. The attack was accompanied by the tremendous noise of a hundred trumpets, ‘of silver and brass’, and the heavy thumping of drums. It seemed ‘as if all the sea were covered with ships’, according to Clari. The emperor had his troops massed on the shoreline ready to push them into the sea. As the armada closed on the beach, a shower of bolts and arrows forced the defenders back; knights with lowered visors splashed heavily through the shallows; archers followed, running and firing;
behind them the horse ramps were lowered and the mounted knights came thundering out of the belly of the ships, lances ready, silk banners streaming in the wind. It was probably the psychological impact of this sudden apparition that broke the Greek spirit. The mounted knights lowered their lances for a concerted cavalry charge, with the momentum ‘to make a hole in the wall of Babylon’, as one Byzantine writer once memorably put it. The emperor’s men ‘by God’s grace withdrew, so that we could hardly reach anyone even by an arrow shot’. For the Greeks, with the advantage of possession, it should have been as fiercely contested as a Normandy beachhead, but they tamely surrendered the position. It was not a good omen for the emperor.

Alexius still held the Galata tower – the key to the sea chain and the Golden Horn – but worse quickly followed. Next morning ‘at the hour of terce’, the Greeks made a counterattack. Men burst out of the tower and set upon the crusaders on the shore; at the same time a secondary force came across the Horn in boats. Initially the crusaders were caught by surprise but they regrouped and repulsed the Greeks, who attempted to flee back into the tower but failed to close the gate. It was quickly taken. The windlass that controlled the chain was now in the hands of the intruders. Sensing the moment, one of the great Venetian sailing ships, the
Eagle
, on the momentum of the Bosphorus winds, crashed through the chain and surged into the Horn. The puny force of Byzantine vessels gathered at the chain was scattered or sunk by pursuing galleys. The Venetian fleet now sailed into the calm waters of Byzantium’s inner harbour, close enough to start making the emperor very uncomfortable indeed. Four days later the crusaders moved closer still. The army marched up the east bank of the Horn and attempted to make a crossing at a small bridge opposite the north-eastern corner of the walls. Here was another opportunity for the Greeks to repel their adversary; they broke the bridge but failed to prevent the crusaders from repairing it and marching across. ‘No one came out of the city to oppose them, which was quite extraordinary, because for every man that
was in our army, there were two hundred in the city.’ The crusader army took up camp on a hill directly opposite the most favoured of the emperor’s residences, the Blachernae Palace, set into the massive land walls. The emperor and his enemies could look each other full in the face: ‘We were so near’, said Hugh of Saint-Pol, ‘that our arrows hit the palace roof and went through the windows below, and the arrows of the Greeks hit our tents.’

At last Alexius seemed to have roused himself from his torpor – or complacency – and began to harass the intruders in more determined fashion. Probing sorties were sent out by day and night to test the crusaders’ resolve; ‘They were never able to relax,’ recalled Villehardouin. They were ‘kept so hemmed in that six or seven times a day the whole army was called to arms. They could neither sleep, rest nor eat without being armed.’ A new sense of desperation infected the crusader camp. The force that had set out so bravely to win back the Holy Land nine months ago now found itself in the inconceivable position of having to do or die outside a Christian city. From their position at the north-eastern corner of Constantinople they could appreciate the size of the task. To the west, the land walls stretched away in an unbroken series of triple defences, cresting the rolling terrain to the horizon. A succession of towers alternated on the inner and outer walls, so close that ‘a seven-year-old boy could toss an apple from one turret to the next’. It was ‘a terrifying prospect; along the three leagues of Constantinople’s land walls, the whole army could only besiege just one gate … Never, in any city, had so many people been besieged by so few.’

Hunger was driving the army forward. Alongside the quest for money, the imperative to seek out food was a continual leitmotiv of the crusading venture. They only had three weeks’ supplies left, and they were being kept closely confined by the attentions of the Greeks. ‘They were unable to search for food more than four crossbow-shots away from the camp, and they had precious little flour and bacon … and no fresh meat apart from the horses that they killed.’ ‘I had become so desperate,’ recorded the aristocratic
Hugh of Saint-Pol, ‘that I had to exchange my surcoat for bread. However I did manage to hold onto my horses and weapons.’ The clock was ticking on their resolve. They needed to bring matters to a head with all possible speed.

Dandolo wanted the whole army to mount a ship-borne attack across the Golden Horn. The walls here were at their lowest – a single defensive line only thirty-five feet high. His plan was to lower ‘astonishing and magnificent devices’ – improvised flying bridges – from the masts of his tallest ships onto the walls so that men could pour into the city. The Venetians were expert at the practical engineering procedures needed to construct and operate such devices, and comfortable with mounting attacks suspended thirty feet above a pitching deck. These were mariners’ skills. The earth-bound knights paled at fighting in mid-air above a rolling sea and made their excuses; they would conduct their own assault on the land wall near the Blachernae Palace using battering rams and scaling ladders. In the end it was agreed to make a simultaneous attack by land and sea on the north-eastern corners.

On 17 July, after days of preparation, the Fourth Crusade readied itself for an all-out assault on a Christian city. The flying bridges had been constructed from the yard-arms of the sailing ships, lashed together and planked to create bridges wide enough for three men to walk abreast. They were covered with hide and canvas to protect the attackers from missiles, and mounted on their largest transports. If Clari is to be believed, these structures were a hundred feet long and were hauled up the masts on a complex system of pulleys. The Venetians also mounted stone-throwing machines on the prows of the transports and winched crossbowmen up to the tops in wicker cages; the decks, packed with archers, were covered with ox hides to protect them against the terrifying effects of ‘Greek fire’ – jets of burning petroleum projected from flamethrowers. ‘They organised their attack very well,’ according to Villehardouin. At the land walls, the Franks had mustered scaling ladders, battering rams, mining equipment and their own heavy catapults, ready for a concerted rush.

That morning they moved forward by land and sea. Dandolo had his fleet drawn up in a single line of ‘a good three crossbow-shots in length’. It advanced slowly across the placid Horn, protected by a torrent of rocks, crossbow bolts and arrows ripping across the sky at the sea walls. They were met by a similar hail of projectiles back, whipping across the decks, pelting the covered flying bridges. The huge sailing vessels – the
Eagle
, the
Pilgrim
, the
Santa Monica
– surged towards the walls until the flying bridges crashed against the battlements so that ‘the men on either side struck at each other with swords and lances’. The noise was extraordinary – the blowing of trumpets, the thudding of drums, the clash of steel, the smashing of rocks hurled by the mangonels, the shouts and screams. ‘The roar of the battle was so loud it seemed as if both land and sea shook.’

At the land walls, the crusaders propped up their ladders and attempted to force their way in. ‘The attack was forceful, good and strong,’ according to Villehardouin, but they were well matched by the emperor’s crack troops – the Varangian Guard, long-haired axe-wielding Danes and English – and the resistance was stubborn. Fifteen men made it up onto the walls; there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting but the intruders could make no progress; they were hurled back off the ramparts; two men were taken prisoner and the assault juddered to a halt ‘with a lot of men wounded and injured; the barons were extremely disturbed’. Critically, the Venetian attack also started to falter. The fragile low-lying galleys refused to follow the transports in, alarmed by the torrent of missiles being hurled down on them. The whole enterprise hung in the balance.

It was at this moment that the doge made a critical intervention, probably the single most significant action in the whole long maritime history of the Republic. Dandolo, old and blind, was standing ‘in the prow of his galley, fully armed and with the banner of St Mark set up in front of him’, in the admiring words of Villehardouin. He could evidently hear the sound of battle raging around him – the shouts and cries, the crash and fizz of arrows
and missiles; whether he sensed that the Venetians were now hanging back is unclear; more likely he was told. Evidently he realised the seriousness of the situation. The doge peremptorily ordered his galley to row forward and put him ashore, ‘or else he would punish them severely’. The vermilion galley rowed hard for the shore, into the barrage of Greek missiles; as it landed, the banner of St Mark was seen being carried onto dry land; the other vessels followed, shamefacedly, in its wake.

*

After the mosaics that commemorate the body of St Mark sailing to Venice, this is the single most iconic image in Venetian history – the blind doge, standing erect at the prow of his ship with the red-and-gold lion banner of St Mark fluttering in the wind as his ship grounds beneath the menacing city walls; battle rages around him, but the wise old merchant crusader stands unmoved, urging his fleet on. The memory of this moment, endlessly recounted, would send shivers of martial patriotism down the spines of the Venetian people for hundreds of years; it would become the rallying cry in times of intense national danger, cited as the supreme example of the old heroic qualities on which the wealth of the Republic was built. Four hundred years later Tintoretto would be commissioned to recreate the scene in the council chamber of the doge’s palace in vivid, if anachronistic, detail. With hindsight the Venetians understood what it meant. Dandolo’s initiative made possible, via a train of events that no one could predict at the time, the Republic’s ascent to Mediterranean empire. If that day the Venetians had failed by sea, as the French had by land, the whole expedition would probably have collapsed.

But it did not. Shamed by the blind doge, the Venetian galleys surged up onto the beach; the assault was renewed; then the red and gold of St Mark was seen fluttering from one of the towers, probably by the men on the flying bridges. A battering ram was set to the walls. Suddenly overwhelmed, the defenders withdrew, leaving the Venetians to open gates and stream into the city. In a short time they were in control of twenty-five or thirty towers
– a quarter of all the walls along the Golden Horn. They started to push up the hill among the narrow streets of wooden houses, capturing booty, including valuable warhorses.

Now Alexius seems to have stirred himself from a complacent belief in the strength of his defences. For days he had ‘sat back as a mere spectator of events’, watching passively from the windows of the Blachernae Palace. With the Venetians inside the walls, he now had to act. He sent down detachments of the Varangian Guard to force the intruders out. The Venetians were unable to withstand this counterattack and fell back towards their newly captured towers. Desperate to retain a foothold they began torching the houses as they went, to create a barrier of fire between themselves and the advancing Greeks. In the heat of a July day with a stiff breeze blowing off the Golden Horn, the flames started to eat their way up the lower slopes of the north-eastern sector of the city, ripping through the densely packed streets, ‘sending the inhabitants flying in all directions’. The sharp crackle of combusting wood and plumes of ominous smoke filled the air; the wall of fire advanced unpredictably in the erratic breeze; ‘everything from the Blachernae hill to the Monastery of Evergetes was consumed by fire’, remembered Choniates, and ‘rushing flames were carried as far as the district of Deuteron’. By the time the fire was finally halted on the steepening slopes leading to the Blachernae Palace the following day, 125 acres of the city had been reduced to ashes; maybe twenty thousand people had lost their homes. In its place was a great charred open space – an ugly wound within the city’s heart. To Choniates, ‘That day produced a pitiful spectacle; it demanded rivers of tears to match the terrible fire.’ He had as yet seen nothing that fire would inflict on his beloved city in the cause of war.

Meanwhile with the fire raging and the Venetians consolidating their position behind it, the quick-witted Dandolo started to ferry the captured horses up to the French camp. The success at the sea walls put new heart into the despondent crusaders at the land walls. Within the city, the emperor was under pressure.
Constantinople was burning. An ominous murmur reached his ears of the people’s discontent: their houses had been destroyed; the Venetians were in control of the walls. ‘He saw’, observed Choniates, ‘the mob stirred up by anger, heaping unrestrained curses and abuse on him.’ Given the charged atmosphere, this was a dangerous moment for an emperor. It was time for decisive action.

Alexius drew up his forces and marched them out of the city gates to confront the crusader army on the plain. As the crusaders watched them pour out and form up, the spectacle took their breath away. They were greatly outnumbered: ‘So many people marched out’, reported Villehardouin, ‘that it seemed as if the whole world was moving.’ Despite the numerical advantage, Alexius’s objective was probably a limited tactical one: to put sufficient pressure on the land army to push the Venetians back from the sea walls they were currently occupying. The Byzantines were wary of heavy western cavalry and had no need to risk battle in open terrain. If they could expel the Venetians, then the walls could still wear down the crusaders’ morale.