City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (5 page)

*

The doges’ assumption of their new title, Dux Dalmatiae, marked a moment of unparalleled change in the sea power of the eastern Mediterranean. For four hundred years the Adriatic itself had been ruled from Rome; for another six hundred the sea, and Venice itself, had been subject to its Greek-speaking successor, the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. By the year 1000, this power was starting to wane and the Venetians were engaged in a stealthy act of substitution. In the small stone cathedrals of Zara, Spalato, Istria and Trau, the Venetian doge was remembered in
prayers only after the name of the emperor in Constantinople, but it was purely a ritual formula. The emperor was far away, his power no longer stretched much north of Corfu, at the gates of the Adriatic, and along the Italian shore. The lords of Dalmatia were in all fact the Venetians. The power vacuum created by weakening Byzantine control would allow Venice to move up the scale progressively from subjects, to equal partners and finally, in tragic circumstances, to usurpers of the Byzantine sea. The lords of the Dalmatian coast were embarked on the ascent.

The relationship between Byzantium and Venice was one of intense complexity and longevity, chafed by mutually contradictory views of the world and subject to wild mood swings, yet Venice always looked to Constantinople. This was the great city of the world, the gateway to the east. Through its warehouses on the Golden Horn flowed the wealth of the wider world: Russian furs, wax, slaves and caviar, spices from India and China, ivory, silk, precious stones and gold. Out of these materials, Byzantine craftsmen fashioned extraordinary objects, both sacred and profane – reliquaries, mosaics, chalices chased with emeralds, costumes of shot silk – that formed the taste of Venice. The astonishing basilica of St Mark, reconsecrated in 1094, was designed by Greek architects on the pattern of the mother church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople; its artisans recounted the story of St Mark, stone by stone, in imitation of the mosaic styles of St Sophia; its goldsmiths and enamellers created the Pala d’Oro, the golden altarpiece, a miraculous expression of Byzantine devotion and art. The whiff of spices on the quays of Venice had been carried a thousand miles from the go-downs of the Golden Horn. Constantinople was Venice’s souk, where its merchants gathered to make (and lose) fortunes. As loyal subjects of the emperor, the right to trade in his lands was always their most precious possession. He, in turn, used it as the bargaining chip to rein in his uppity vassals. In 991 Orseolo gained valuable trading rights for Venetian support in the Adriatic; twenty-five years later they were tetchily withdrawn again in a spat.

Differing attitudes to commerce marked a sharp dividing line. From early on the amoral trading mentality of the Venetians – the assumed right to buy and sell anything to anyone – shocked the pious Byzantines. Around 820 the emperor complained bitterly about Venetian cargoes of war materials – timber, metal and slaves – to his enemy, the sultan in Cairo. But in the last quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire, such a durable presence in the Mediterranean basin, started to decline, and the balance of power began tilting in Venice’s favour. In the 1080s the Venetians defended the empire in the Adriatic against powerful Norman war bands, intent on taking Constantinople itself. Their reward was sumptuous. With all the imperial pomp of Byzantine ritual, the emperor affixed his golden seal (the
bulla
) to a document that would change the sea for ever. He granted the city’s merchants the rights to trade freely, exempt from tax, throughout his realms. A large number of cities and ports were specified by name: Athens and Salonica, Thebes and Antioch and Ephesus, the islands of Chios and Euboea, key harbours along the coasts of southern Greece such as Modon and Coron – invaluable staging posts for Venetian galleys – but above all Constantinople itself.

Here Venice was given a prize site down by the Golden Horn. It included three quays, a church and bakery, shops and warehouses for storing goods. Though nominal subjects of the emperor, the Venetians had effectively acquired their own colony, with all the necessary infrastructure, in the heart of the richest city on earth under extremely favourable conditions. Only the Black Sea, Constantinople’s grain basket, was barred to the avid traders. Quietly echoing among the solemn, convoluted lines of the Byzantine decree was the sweetest Greek word a Venetian might ever want to hear: monopoly. Venice’s jostling rivals in maritime trade – Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi – were now put at such disadvantage that their presence in the city was almost futile.

The Golden Bull of 1082 was the golden key that opened up the treasure house of eastern trade for Venice. Its merchants flocked to Constantinople. Others started to permeate the small ports
and harbours of the eastern seaboard. By the second half of the twelfth century Venetian merchants were visible everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Their colony in Constantinople grew to around twelve thousand and, decade by decade, the trade of Byzantium imperceptibly passed into their hands. They not only funnelled goods back to an avid market in continental Europe, they acted as intermediaries, restlessly shuttling back and forward across the ports of the Levant, buying and selling. Their ships triangulated the eastern seas, shipping olive oil from Greece to Constantinople, buying linen in Alexandria and selling it to the crusader states via Acre; touching Crete and Cyprus, Smyrna and Salonica. At the mouth of the Nile in the ancient city of Alexandria they bought spices in exchange for slaves, endeavouring at the same time to perform a nimble balancing act between the Byzantines and the crusaders on one hand and their enemy, the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, on the other. With each passing decade Venice was sinking its tentacles deeper into the trading posts of the East; its wealth saw the rise of a new class of rich merchants. Many of the great families of Venetian history began their ascent to prominence during the boom years of the century. It heralded the start of commercial dominance.

With this wealth came arrogance – and resentment. ‘They came’, said a Byzantine chronicler, ‘in swarms and tribes, exchanging their city for Constantinople, whence they spread out across the empire.’ The tone of these remarks speaks a familiar language of xenophobia and economic fear of the immigrant. The upstart Italians, with their hats and their beardless faces, stood out sharply, both in manner and appearance, in the city streets. The charges levelled against them were many: they acted like citizens of a foreign power rather than loyal subjects of the empire; they were fanning out from their allotted quarter and were buying properties across the city; they cohabited with or married Greek women and led them away from the Orthodox faith; they stole the relics of saints; they were wealthy, arrogant, unruly, boorish, out of control. ‘Morally dissolute, vulgar … untrustworthy, with
all the gross characteristics of seafaring people’, spluttered another Byzantine writer. A bishop of Salonica called them ‘marsh frogs’. The Venetians were becoming increasingly unpopular in the Byzantine Empire and they seemed to be everywhere.

In the larger geopolitics of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Byzantines and their errant subjects was marked by ever more violent oscillations between the poles of love and hate: the Venetians were insufferable but indispensable. The Byzantines, who complacently still saw themselves as the centre of the world, and for whom land ownership was more glorious than vulgar commerce, had given away their trade to the lagoon dwellers and allowed their navy to decline; they became increasingly dependent on Venice for maritime defence.

The imperial policy towards the pushy foreigners veered erratically. The emperor’s one throttle on them was control of trading rights. Repeated attempts were made over a century to loosen Venice’s hold on the Byzantine economy by playing the Republic off against its commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa. In 1111 the Pisans were also granted trading rights in Constantinople; forty-five years later the Genoese were similarly admitted. Each was awarded tax breaks, a commercial quarter and landing stages in Constantinople. The city was a crucible for fierce rivalry between the Italian republics that would, in time, flare into full-scale trade wars. When the Spanish Jew Benjamin Tudela came to the city in 1176 he found ‘a tumultuous city; men come to trade there from all countries by land and by sea’. The city became a claustrophobic arena for competition. Ugly brawls broke out between competing nationalities, hemmed into adjacent enclaves along the banks of the Golden Horn. The Venetians were jealous of their monopolies which they felt had been earned in the Norman wars of the last century; they deeply resented the manner in which successive emperors rescinded them or favoured their rivals. The Italians had become, in the eyes of the ruling Greeks, an uncontrollable nuisance: ‘a race characterised by a lack of breeding which is totally at variance with our noble sense of order’, they pronounced
with aristocratic hauteur. In 1171, the emperor Manuel I took the whole Venetian population in his empire hostage and detained it for years. The crisis took two decades to resolve and left a bitter legacy of mutual mistrust. By the time Venetian merchants were readmitted to Constantinople in the 1190s any special relationship was dead.

It was against this background that the pope called for a new crusade in the summer of 1198.

The Blind Doge

1198–1201

The Fourth Crusade opened with a furious blast:

After the miserable destruction of the territory of Jerusalem, after the mournful massacre of the Christian people, after the deplorable invasion of the land on which had stood the feet of Christ and where God, our Father, had seen fit before recorded time to work out salvation in the middle of the earth … the apostolic seat [papacy], disquieted by the misfortune of such a great calamity, was sorely troubled … [it] cries out and raises its voice like a trumpet, desiring to arouse the Christian people to fight Christ’s fight and to avenge the outrage against Him who was crucified … Therefore, my sons, take up the spirit of fortitude, put on the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, trusting not in numbers nor in brute force, but rather in the power of God.

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 …’

… hoping that because of this concession you will be strongly moved to provide help to the province of Jerusalem, and making sure that you do not try any fraud against the apostolic decree. Because there can not be the slightest doubt that he who tries fraudulently, against his own conscience, to cheat this order, will be bound tight by divine sentence.