City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire by Roger Crowley Read Free Book Online

returning argosies set a pattern of expectation: that what would be unloaded at the Basin of St Mark would enrich, ennoble and sanctify the city. A hundred years earlier a doge had raised to the status of patriotic duty the demand that merchant ships returning from the East should bring back antiquities, marbles and carvings for the decoration of the newly rebuilt Church of St Mark. A successful expedition in 1123 had given the Republic lively expectations of the commercial benefits that might be derived from crusade. In the new treaty of Venice, the maritime contract alone would give a good profit, and half of all the spoils might yield unknown wealth.
    As a youth, Dandolo had probably personally witnessed the religious fervour and national that had accompanied the departure of crusading fleets and heard the impassioned words of the doge of his childhood, extolling their spiritual and material glory:
Venetians, with what immortal glory and splendour will your name be covered from this expedition? What reward will you gain from God? You will win the admiration of Europe and Asia. The standard of St Mark will fly triumphantly in far-off lands. New profits, new sources of greatness will come to this most noble city … Roused by the holy zeal of religion, excited by the example of all Europe, hurry to arms, think of the honour and the prizes, think of your triumph – with the blessings of heaven!
     
    Dandolo had other personal reasons. He came from a family of crusaders; probably a desire to emulate his forefathers struck a deep chord in him. And he was an old man: concern for his soul would also have weighed heavily. The promised absolution of sins was one of the most powerful incentives for crusades. He had impelling national, personal, spiritual and family motives for signing the treaty.
    The blind but percipient doge had evidently glimpsed a moment of destiny – as if everything in Venetian history led up to this extraordinary opportunity. But there was something else, buried at the heart of the treaty, which would have lent it considerable appeal. What was kept from all but a handful of signatories and the crusading lords back in France and Lombardy was that the expedition, which had stirred the rank and file vaguely to ‘take pity on the Holy Land overseas’, had no intention initially of going there. It was bound for Egypt. As Villehardouin confessed in his chronicle, ‘It was secretly agreed in closed council that we would go to Egypt, because via Cairo one could more easily destroy the power of the Turks than by anywhere else, but publicly it was just announced that we were going overseas.’
    There were sound strategic reasons for this. It had long been recognised by shrewder military tacticians that the wealth of Egypt was a reservoir of resource for the Muslim armies in Palestine and Syria. Saladin’s victories had been built on the riches of Cairo and Alexandria. As Richard the Lionheart had realised, ‘the keys to Jerusalem are to be found in Cairo’. The problem was that such an oblique approach to recapturing the Holy City was unlikely to stir the popular imagination. The ardently pious sought salvation by fighting for the ground on which Jesus had stood, not strangling Islam’s supply lines in the souks of the Nile Delta.
    But to the Venetians this offered a further extension of commercial opportunity. Egypt was the wealthiest region in the Levant and another natural access point to the highly lucrative spice routes. It promised richer commercial prizes than the harbours of Tyre and Acre could ever provide. ‘Whatever this partof the world lacks in the matter of pearls, spices, oriental treasures, and foreign wares is brought hither from the two Indies: Saba, Arabia, and both the Ethiopias, as well as from Persia and other lands nearby,’ wrote William of Tyre twenty years earlier. ‘People from East and West flock thither in great numbers, and Alexandria is a public market for both worlds.’ In