Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas," by Roger Crowley.
The city’s prosperity rested on nothing tangible—no landholdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that, if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.
They started to advance into the heart of the city. It was true: There was no opposition; no trumpets or defiant martial clamor. 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 demeanor 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 openmouthed 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:
Then the streets, squares, two-storied and three-storied houses, holy places, convents, houses of monks, and nuns, holy churches (even God’s Great Church), the imperial palace, were filled with the enemy, all war-maddened swordsmen, breathing murder, iron-clad and spear-bearing, sword-bearers and lance-bearers, bowmen [and] horsemen.
They battered their way into Hagia Sophia and started to strip the place. The high altar, fourteen feet 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 prized out. Every corner of the church was probed for the valuables it might contain, the monks tortured for hidden treasures, casually dispatched for trying to protect a venerated icon or particular relic; women were raped there, men were killed.
To the Greeks, it was as if these Crusaders who had come in the name of God were filled with a kind of terrible madness:
baying like Cerberus and breathing like Charon, pillaging the holy places, trampling on divine things, running riot over holy things, casting down to the floor the holy images of Christ and His holy Mother and of the holy men who from eternity have been pleasing to the Lord God, uttering calumnies and profanities, and in addition tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men.
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 Günther 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 passersby.
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 Saint Paul, fragments of the supposed crown of thorns, the head of Saint James—the venerated objects were carefully itemized in the chroniclers’ accounts. Dandolo obtained for Venice a piece of the True Cross, some of Christ’s blood, the arm of Saint George and part of Saint 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 that were still preserved within”; crow-barring 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:
They slaughtered the newborn, killed prudent matrons, stripped elder women, and outraged old ladies; they tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. Mortal blood was spilled on holy altars, and in place of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of the universe, many were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs the wretches slew the innocent. Such was the reverence for holy things of those who bore the Lord’s Cross on their shoulders.
The murders and rapes appalled:
There was no one spared grief—in the wide streets and the narrow lanes; there was wailing in the temples, tears, lamentations, pleas for mercy, the terrible groaning of men, the screams of women, the tearing to pieces, the obscene acts, enslaving, families torn apart, nobles treated shamefully and venerable old men, people weeping, the rich stripped of their goods.
The game that was now being set out across the waters and shores of the Byzantine Empire was being played for high stakes. Venice and Genoa were involved in a contest for both survival and wealth. By the thirteenth century Europe was in the middle of a long boom from which the Italian maritime republics were uniquely placed to profit. Between classical times and 1200 no Western city had a population that surpassed 20,000. By 1300 there were nine cities in Italy alone of more than 50,000. Paris swelled from 20,000 to 200,000 in a century; Florence had 120,000 by 1320; Venice, 100,000, fed by immigration from the Dalmatian coast. The population of northern Italy was immense. It would continue to climb until an ominous day sometime in early 1348 when an unknown ship from the Black Sea tied up near Petrarch’s house in the Basin of Saint Mark. The population would not be surpassed again until the eighteenth century.
From the fruits of the long boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice was transforming itself. By 1300 all the separate islets had been joined by bridges to form a recognizable city, which was densely inhabited. The streets and squares of beaten earth were progressively paved over; stone was replacing wood for building houses. A cobbled way linked the centers of Venetian power—the Rialto and Saint Mark’s Square. An increasingly wealthy noble class constructed for themselves astonishing palazzi along the Grand Canal in the Gothic style, tempered with elements of Islamic decoration to which the traveling merchants had been exposed in Alexandria and Beirut. New churches were built and the skyline punctuated with their brick campaniles. In 1325 the state arsenal was enlarged to meet the increased requirements for maritime trade and defense. Fifteen years later, work was begun redeveloping the doge’s palace into the masterpiece of Venetian Gothic, a delicate traceried structure of astonishing lightness and beauty that seemed to express the effortless serenity, grace, good judgment, and stability of the Venetian state. The facade of the Basilica of Saint Mark was gradually transformed from plain Byzantine brick into a rich fantasy of marble and mosaic, incorporating the plunder of Constantinople and the East, and topped with domes and oriental embellishment that took the viewer halfway to Cairo and Baghdad. Sometime around 1260, the horses of the Constantinople Hippodrome were winched into place on its loggia as a statement of the city’s newfound self-confidence. Out of maritime trade, Venice was starting to dazzle and bewitch.
By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two-thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist. The survivors were literally treading on the dead. For centuries unwary fishermen, stepping ashore on certain deserted islands deep in the lagoon, scrunched on the whitening bones of the hastily buried victims. The Black Death radically altered the outlook of Venetian merchants. For 150 years, Venice had advanced on a rising tide of European prosperity, growing wealth, and booming populations. Maritime ventures, characterized by an optimistic culture of risk-taking, had brought rich returns. But it was the rampant materialism, the expansion of trade routes, and the commercial connections across vast distances that had brought not only silk, spices, ivory, pearls, grain, and fish, but also the plague bacillus from inner Asia. It was the Italian maritime republics who were charged with carrying death to Europe; the consequences were taken to be divine judgment for cupidity and sin.
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