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

fact Venice had a poor share of this market, despite the recent permission from Pope Innocent. Genoa and Pisa dominated the trade with Egypt. Dandolo had been to Alexandria; he knew at first hand both its wealth and its defensive frailties, and the city held a powerful emotional attraction for the Republic. It was here that St Mark had died and whence Venetian merchants had spirited away his bones. In essence, a victorious campaign in Egypt with half the proceeds as reward gave Venice a glimpse of riches that might far exceed all its previous commercial triumphs. It could, at a stroke, deliver a large part of the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean into its grasp, and permanently discomfit its maritime rivals. Tax-free monopoly trading was an irresistible lure. The potential returns were evidently worth the risk, and this was why the Venetians had thrown in fifty war galleys at their own expense. They were not designed to fight sea battles off the coast of Palestine, but to nose their way up the shallow reedy deltas of the Nile for a strike against Cairo.
    This secret agenda was just one worrying co-ordinate of a treaty that was destined to exert a malign influence on the crusade. The others were time – the Venetians had committed themselves finally to a nine months’ finite maritime contract, from St John’s Day, 24 June 1202 – and crucially, money. It seems likely that the final agreed sum was knocked down to eighty-five thousand marks, still a staggering amount. Even if the per capita rate was reasonable, Villehardouin’s estimate of thirty-three thousand crusaders was exceptionally high. Villehardouin had experience of estimating crusader armies but his overnight acceptance of the doge’s terms would prove a colossal blunder. He had dramatically miscalculated the number of crusaders who could be assembled;he had also failed to realise that those on whose behalf he had signed the treaty were not themselves bound to it: they were under no obligation to sail from Venice. The crusade was under financial pressure from the start: Innocent had attempted, and failed, to raise funds through taxation. The six delegates had to borrow the first down payment on the deal – two thousand marks – on the Rialto. Though no one knew it at the time, the Treaty of Venice contained the active ingredients for serious trouble, which would render the Fourth Crusade the most controversial event in medieval Christendom.
    Villehardouin jingled his way back over the Alpine passes. The crusaders of France, Flanders and northern Italy – the Franks, as the Byzantines referred to them – made their vows and their wills, donned their surcoats and laboriously began the long-winded preparations for departure; in the lagoon, the Venetians set to work preparing the largest fleet in its history.

Thirty-four Thousand Marks
     

     
     
1201–1202
     
    The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city’s previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial activities and to recall merchant vessels from overseas as the whole population threw itself into the preparations. They had thirteen months to complete the work.
    The shipbuilding and refurbishment alone were a huge project, which required immense quantities of wood, pitch, hemp, ropes, sailcloth, and iron for nails, anchors and fixings. The Italian mainland was scoured for resources. Quantities of fir and larch were floated down the rivers that fed into the lagoon; oak and pine came from the Veneto and the Dalmatian coast. The state arsenal, established in 1104, was the industrial hub of the work, but much of it was carried on in private yards scattered across the islands of the lagoon. The air rang with the sound of hammering and sawing, the blows of axes and the rasping of adzes; cauldrons of pitch bubbled and steamed; forges glowed; rope makers paid out hundreds of yards of twisted hemp; oars, pulleys, masts, sails and anchors were