The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (9 page)

Having demonstrated the empty vanity of the pagan idols, Theodosius had them all brought to the Hippodrome of New Rome. On the raised
spina
that ran down the middle of the racetrack he erected an obelisk from Luxor, made two thousand years before by the pharaoh Thutmosis. It was joined by the column of brazen serpents from Delphi, made by the Greeks in the dawn of classical antiquity, and by the statue of Athene Parthenos captured in Athens. Among all these treasures was a bronze
quadriga
that, some said, had been taken from Nero’s arch, or from Augustus’s mausoleum in Rome.

Trapped on the
spina
, an island surrounded by a sea of sand and careering charioteers, these obsolete idols were captives on display: the booty of an old order that had been looted by a new one. But although the empire and the emperor were Christian, and laughed in the face of idolatry, they were a little frightened of their art collection. It represented the civilization that had mothered them; and over time, as that civilization disappeared from view, they came to regard their statues as the dwellings of demons, possessed of magical powers. The hoof of the bronze horse that supported the hero Bellerophon concealed, they said, the image of the future destroyer of Constantinople, while the colossal statue of Justinian hid a hoard of priceless jewels that would only be discovered on the day the city fell. There was a bronze snake whose magical power, they said, had cast out all the serpents of Constantinople, and a nymph atop a pyramid who answered to the call of the winds. These things were wonders; but they were also evidence that, in their fallen state, the Romans of Constantinople could no longer conjure the magic of their forefathers.

F
OUR HUNDRED AND
fifty years after the iconoclasm of Theodosius, when Constantinople was a great and thriving city, Venice was as yet merely a marsh inhabited by humble fishermen. Humble they might have been, but every evening, as they watched the sun set over the world’s flat edge, they dimly remembered that once upon a time they too had been Romans, and nobles at that. The Venetians
had escaped to this lagoon when Huns had attacked their ancient city of Aquileia. It is said that they gathered the carved stones of their temples and rowed out with them into the water to evade barbarian capture. (Take a boat today to the quiet island of Torcello, and you can still see these carvings, built into crumbling cathedrals of a much later date.) Hidden amid the shallows and the reeds, they remained inviolate, beyond the reach of siege engines, archers, and cavalry. Floating on the surface of the waters, suspended between the horizons of the Orient and Occident, the Venetians answered to no one. Their dwellings were made of the clay they dug up from their muddy islets and baked into bricks; when these buildings fell into ruin, they dissolved back into the slime from which they had come and disappeared.

Every morning, as they watched sun rise over the sea in the east, the Venetians dreamed of a destiny consonant with the greatness of their lost heritage. And so the people of Venice decided to steal themselves a past, in order to conjure themselves a future. They decided first of all to steal a patron saint, who would give them a pedigree, protect them from evil, and bring good fortune upon their enterprises; and they sent their boatmen out over the waters to find one.

At that time Alexandria was in the sway of the Fatimid caliphate; but two merchants of Venice, by the names of Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, went to the city and found an old church dedicated to Saint Mark the Evangelist. Saint Mark had been martyred in Alexandria, and his remains had been kept in this church ever since. The two merchants spoke with the guardians of the saint. They were in danger, these priests said, for the governor of Alexandria intended to demolish their church and send its marbles and columns to the caliph’s new palace in Babylon. The two merchants of Venice offered to conceal the body of the saint until the peril had passed, and the holy fathers agreed with gratitude.

One night, under the cover of darkness, the priests let them into the church. Torcello and Malamocco took the body of Saint Mark and substituted it with the body of another, less exalted martyr, Saint Claudia—although legend does not relate how her body had been acquired. They put the relics of the more venerable saint into a wicker basket, and they covered them with joints of pork, so that the Muslim
soldiers who guarded the city would not investigate what was apparently a container of defiled meat.

But the merchants had no intention of returning the body of Saint Mark once the danger had passed. Instead they made their way to the docks and loaded the wicker basket with its sacred contents onto their galley. As they cast off, it is said, a sweet smell started to emanate from the shrine of Saint Mark. The people of Alexandria ran to the shrine to see—or smell—what was going on; but they were fooled by the bones of Saint Claudia. The priests’ lips were sealed, and everyone went back to their homes, while the Venetians slipped away to sea. Thus did Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello steal the body of Saint Mark from under the noses of the Alexandrians.

A modest church was built in Venice to house the remains of the saint, the stolen patron of a city that had been stolen from the sea; but when this first church burned down in 976, the Venetians decided to replace it with something altogether more ambitious, and once again they looked east for inspiration. The new basilica of San Marco was built in imitation of the church of the Holy Apostles, which stood next to the Hippodrome in Constantinople. This church was known as the Heröon, because it had been built by Constantine, the founding hero of the city.

The Heröon that the Venetians made for their stolen founder followed precisely the form of the original. It was fashioned in the form of a Greek cross surmounted by five graceful domes. The domes were supported on heavy brick arches and piers that were themselves pierced by smaller domes and arches, as if the church were a series of microcosms nestled inside one another at ever decreasing scales. It was surrounded by arcades that opened onto the muddy space outside, facing the castle of the doge.

This church took some fifty years to build, and when it was finished the doge and the patriarch and the people marveled at the lofty vaults and fine pavements. They sensed, though, that there was something missing. Then they realized that they had forgotten where they had stored the body of Saint Mark.

The people wailed out loud at their loss, and they demanded a miracle from their forgetful masters. The doge Vitale Falier and the patriarch Domenico Contarini gathered them all in the new basilica,
and they began to pray. For hours their chant and their incense rose into the domes, and nothing happened. Then, after a while, a sweet smell began to pervade the church. Suddenly one of the piers to the right of the altar began to shake, and the masonry began to buckle. With a crash and a roar an arm appeared, then a shoulder, a torso, and a head; and then the whole body of Saint Mark fell lifeless onto the pavement of the sanctuary. The doge Falier placed this body in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt, and the Heröon of the Venetians received its patron saint.

The basilica of San Marco was now complete, but it was a bare sort of building, lacking in the ornaments that were surely proper to the shrine of the patron saint of a great republic. The Venetians knew what they had to do: just as they had sailed east and had stolen the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria, just as they had looked east and copied the design of his shrine from Constantinople, so they would sail east again to find the gold and the marble, the icons and the relics and the ornaments that would adorn their church.

Now at this time there lived in Venice a blind man by the name of Enrico Dandolo. Once upon a time, Dandolo had been a merchant in Constantinople, but he had caused so much trouble there that he had been expelled from the city. Dandolo returned to Venice, having been blinded, he claimed, by the Byzantine Imperial Guard; and he nursed hatred and bitterness in his heart against Constantinople. From year to year Dandolo plotted how he might avenge himself on the city that had cast him out. His cunning and his determination raised him through the ranks of the state until he became the doge himself. Still he waited, and then one day an opportunity presented itself.

In 1201, the pope had declared a crusade to reclaim Jerusalem for the faith. The Venetians, living as they did on the water, were unable to contribute knights or infantry, but they did offer to provide the fleet that would carry the crusading army to the Holy Land. “Give us 85,000 silver marks,” they declared, “and we will take the crusaders from Venice to certain glory.” The pope agreed, the Venetians started building their ships, and the knights of Europe left their northern manors behind and began making their way to Venice. By 1202 the ships were nearly built, but only a third of the thirty-three thousand promised knights had turned up. A savage rabble they were, and the
Venetians did not permit them to enter the city but kept them encamped by the surf of the Lido until their group might reach the promised number.

It never did, and the few knights who had come did not have enough money to pay the full 85,000 marks that the Venetians required. Things began to turn nasty, and it was at this point that Enrico Dandolo saw his chance. He made a proposal to the barbarians gathered on the beach. “You can purchase your fare to the Holy Land,” he suggested, “by acting as our agents along the way. You can fight our wars for us, providing us with the booty we require, until the 85,000 marks we need has been collected. Then we will take you to Jerusalem.” The crusaders readily agreed, and then they asked which infidel they would be sent to fight against. Dandolo licked his lips and told them: “the emperor of Constantinople.” Their faces fell. They had not come all this way to murder other Christians.

The emperor of Constantinople at the time was named Alexius III, and he had risen to the purple by imprisoning and blinding the emperor before him, Isaac II. Dandolo, who knew what it was like to be blinded and cast down by the Byzantines, told the crusaders that they could attain merit in heaven by restoring Isaac to his rightful throne. They would gain additional merit, he said, if they were also able to place Isaac’s son on the throne with him, a different Alexius. This other Alexius, he said, would bring Constantinople into the fold of the Catholic Church, from which it had long been separated by doctrinal schism. And by this specious argument, Dandolo refashioned a crusade against the Muslim unbelievers in the Holy Land into a war of vengeance against his old enemy. The reluctant crusaders, stuck as they were on the windy sands of the Lido, unacquainted with the intrigues of the Levant, had no choice. They set forth in their ships, not for Palestine but for Constantinople.

The people of that city heard of the Venetian plan, and they were terrified. Though their city was surrounded by gigantic walls and filled with priceless bronze statues, gorgeous sanctuaries, and gigantic palaces, their empire was not what it once had been, and their legions were small compared to the barbarian horde that was on its way to meet them. Riots and commotions disturbed the city, and it is said that a mob fell upon a statue of Athene and tore it to pieces because
her arm and her gaze were outstretched to the west—the direction from which, any day now, the Constantinopolitans expected their nemesis to arrive.

Then arrive it did. After nine months of byzantine politicking, awful cannonade, siege, parley, ecclesiastical council, and the deposition and murder of three emperors, including the very Isaac and Alexius they had come to restore, the crusaders took possession of the city in April 1204. The first to the walls was Dandolo himself. He and his soldiers fanned out through the city, spreading terror wherever they went. Nuns were dragged from their abbeys and raped, children taken into slavery, monks and bishops alike executed. The crusaders ran to the Heröon, the model for San Marco itself, and they tore it to pieces, despoiling the bodies of the emperors within. They broke into the church of Holy Wisdom, stripped its interior of its astonishing ornaments and relics, and set a whore on the throne of the emperor. They went to the church of Saint Polyeuktos and ripped pilasters, architraves, and sheets of marble from the building, leaving a denuded shell behind them.

The crusaders came in the end to the Hippodrome. The scholar Nicetas Choniates, who witnessed to the scene, later recalled how

these barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not pass over the destruction of the statues standing in the Hippodrome and other marvellous work. They cut these into coinage, exhanging great things for small ones and things laboured over at great expense for worthless small change . . . For a few staters, and what is more, copper, they consigned these ancient and revered objects of the nation to the smelting furnace.