The Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill Read Free Book Online

replied.
    ‘How?’
    ‘That’s easy, at least on the face of it. The Crusaders were mainly French and German. Small nobility andfarming stock, most of them. They were country bumpkins by the standards of Venetians – and Greeks, for that matter. They were far more sophisticated. The Crusaders ordered a fleet from the Venetians because their plan was to sail to Egypt and attack the Holy Land from the south.’
    ‘Were they sailors?’
    ‘No – but the Venetians were. What the Crusaders didn’t know was that Venice had just concluded a peace agreement with Egypt, which supplied them with grain, and a trade route to the East. Alexandria was to be a big centre of commerce.’
    ‘But Egypt was already a Muslim country.’
    ‘What did I just say about business?’ said Marlow. ‘Egypt was weak at the time, there’d been a civil war and the Nile had failed to flood for five years in a row, so food was scarce. The Egyptians didn’t want a crusading army marching through their country. Dandolo was prepared to guarantee that that wouldn’t happen, in exchange for the advantages I’ve just mentioned.’
    ‘I still don’t see how –’
    ‘Dandolo came from one of the oldest Venetian families – one of the ones which founded the city. He was already an old man when he was elected doge – in 1193. His one
overriding
ambition was to make Venice controller of European commerce. He wanted a monopoly. To that end, he needed to knock out any trade rivals, and he’d stop at nothing to do it. But apart from that’ – Marlow’s voice darkened –‘he had other ambitions …’ He turned to the newspaper report he’d been reading. ‘Well, he succeeded. “Pillaging and destruction” … “Maniacal Crusaders” …’
    ‘You mean –’
    ‘You should read some of the reports of the people of Constantinople who were writing at the time,’ Marlow went on. ‘There was one guy, Nicetas Choniates, who was a senior official there. He wrote a whole history of the siege of the city, and the sack of it which followed. The Crusaders burned down his library, along with others. Countless classics of antiquity must have been lost to us for ever. But not only that, they melted down or smashed up priceless statues and monuments, just to turn it all into ready money. They ran amok, in other words. Only the Venetians had the sense to hang on to some of the good stuff to ship back home as prizes. Look at the horses on St Mark’s in Venice. They’re just one of the trophies looted from Constantinople in 1204. And there were religious relics too – the Catholic priests who’d gone along with the Crusaders weren’t slow to snap up everything they could find. There are churches all over Europe today which display stuff – pieces of the True Cross, heads and limbs of saints, that kind of thing – which all came from the looting of Constantinople – the greatest city in the world at the time.’
    ‘I remember something about that,’ said Graves. ‘Louis IX of France bought the Crown of Thorns from the Venetians, in 1239, I think. He spent half the country’s GDP on it – 135,000 livres – and built the Ste-Chapelle to put it in.’
    ‘So what were the archaeologists looking for? What had they found?’
    ‘I think I read something in the background study about Nicetas,’ said Graves, catching some of Marlow’s urgency as she skimmed through notes of her own. ‘Hereit is:
They have spared neither the living nor the dead. They have insulted God; they have outraged his servants; they have exhausted every variety of sin.
That takes some beating.’
    ‘They did a thorough job. Even two hundred and fifty years later, when the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II finally took the city, it was still a kind of ghost of its former self. Mehmet was only twenty-one years old when he rode into Constantinople, and its ruin moved him to quote an old Persian poet:
Now the spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars. Now the