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

shaped, hewed, sewn and forged. Ships started to grow from the keel up; others were refitted or adapted. In the arsenal war machines were under construction – stone-throwing catapults and siege towers in kit form which could be dismantled for the voyage.

    Shipbuilding in Venice
     
    The logistical requirements of the crusade demanded vessels of different types. The 4,500 knights and twenty thousand foot soldiers would be carried in round ships – high-sided sailingvessels with fore and aft castles, of varying sizes from a handful of immense prestige ships, assigned to the nobility, to the standard crusader transports that crammed six hundred men below decks, then down to smaller craft. The 4,500 horses would be carried in 150 specially adapted oared galleys, fitted with hinged landing doors either in the side or the bows, up which the horses could be walked into the belly of the vessels, then secured in slings to counteract the rolling motion of the sea. The doors, which would be below the waterline, had to be caulked shut for the voyage, but could be swung open on a shelving beach to permit a fully armoured knight to ride out, terrifying any unsuspecting foe. In total, the Venetians probably had to provide 450 ships to carry the army and all its impedimenta. Then there were the fifty galleys which the Venetians themselves would provide and the recruitment of sailors and oarsmen to man the fleet. To row and sail thirty-three thousand men across the eastern Mediterranean required another thirty thousand maritime specialists – half the adult population of Venice, or replacements recruited from the sea-going cities of the Dalmatian coast. Many volunteered ascrusaders but the numbers still had to be made up. Men from each parish of the city were impressed by a lottery drawn using wax balls – those who drew a ball containing a scrap of paper were ordered to the Republic’s service.
    A parallel effort of hardly less magnitude was required to provision the armada. The Venetians carefully quantified the provisions for each man for a year: 377 kilos of bread and flour, two thousand kilos of cereals and beans, three hundred litres of wine: the mathematics of provisioning a crusader army stacked up huge numbers. The agricultural hinterland of Venice was scoured for produce; wheat was secured from regional centres – Bologna, Cremona, Imola and Faenza – and double-baked in Venetian ovens to make the durable ship’s biscuit which formed the staple of the maritime diet. Not all this food would have been sourced in Venice. Undoubtedly Venetian planners sought to reprovision along the way as they sailed down the coast of Dalmatia, but fulfilling the contract was an enormous challenge.
    All this work had to be paid for. The Venetian mint was compelled to produce extra quantities of small silver coins, the grosso , to pay the master carpenters, caulkers, rope makers, sail makers, smiths, sailors, cooks and bargees who laboured unceasingly for a year to ready the fleet. In effect, the Republic was living on credit, anxiously awaiting the fulfilment of the contract, and payment.
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    By early summer 1202, the Venetians had assembled the enormous fleet needed to transport and maintain an army of thirty-three thousand men 1,400 miles across the eastern Mediterranean and maintain it for a year. ‘The Venetians had fulfilled their side of the bargain and more so,’ acknowledged Villehardouin. ‘The fleet which they had prepared was so large and so magnificent that no Christian man had ever seen better.’ It was, by any account, an extraordinary feat of collective organisation and a testimony to the effectiveness of the Venetian state, which would in time contribute enormously to the development of the Republic’s maritime capabilities.

    The fleet was fully prepared for the scheduled departure date, St John’s Day, 24 June 1202, but the crusade itself was badly coordinated and running late. The word was given for the crusaders