The Glory of the Crusades (24 page)

Innocent III’s focus on the Crusades is exemplified not only by the number of Crusades he called (seven in total) but also by the innovations he brought to the Crusading movement.
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In his 1213 bull
Quia Maior
, Innocent made Crusading a moral imperative. He linked Crusading to eternal salvation, writing of those who failed to go: “To those men who refuse to take part, if indeed there be by chance any man so ungrateful to the Lord our God, we firmly state on behalf of the apostle Peter that they . . . will have to answer to us on this matter in the presence of the Dreadful Judge on the Last Day of Severe Judgment.”
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Innocent envisioned armed pilgrimages managed and administered by the Church, an innovation that was needed but, as events illustrated, impractical to enforce. Money was always an issue during the Crusades, and Innocent tried to address that concern by taxing the Church and its clergy to finance the armed pilgrimages. Previously, married men needed permission from their wives to take the cross; by Innocent’s pontificate, men were using that stipulation as an excuse to not go on Crusade. So he abrogated the requirement.

Innocent increased access to the spiritual benefits accorded to Crusaders by granting indulgences not only to those who fought in person, but also for those who paid for proxies to fight in their place, to the proxies themselves, and even to those who provided donations to Crusaders. Furthermore, the Crusading vow had always assumed duration of indeterminate length but Innocent changed that by granting indulgences to men who vowed forty days a year of combat service.
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The Calling of the Fourth Crusade

Innocent III called for a new Crusade on August 15, 1198. It was six years after the end of the Third Crusade and 102 years to the day after the departure of the First. This Fourth Crusade would go down in history as “an episode colored by brutality and determination, depravity and avarice, political intrigue and religious zeal.”
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The notoriety of the Fourth Crusade comes from its (originally) unintended conquest of Constantinople. It was the Crusade in which Christians fought Christians, to the horror of Innocent III and the scandal of modern-day Catholics. The sack of the Queen of Cities was a momentous event, the memory of which reverberates through the centuries to the modern day. Pope John Paul II recalled it when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I visited Rome in the summer of 2004. The story of how the Fourth Crusade came to Constantinople and how a Flemish knight became the Roman emperor is one of the most intriguing and fantastic in the entire history of the Crusades.

Innocent III could not have chosen a worse time to call a Crusade. The political climate of Christendom was marked by conflict and confusion. Two men contested for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and each claimed important allies. Philip of Swabia was allied with France and Otto of Brunswick counted the English in his court. The conflict in Germany prevented a strong ruler from that realm embracing Innocent’s call to Crusade. The boy-king Frederick with his mother Constance as regent ruled the Kingdom of Sicily. The important Italian maritime powers of Genoa and Pisa were locked in war, as were the kings of England and France. Recognizing the importance of the English monarch and Third Crusade veteran to his Crusading effort, Innocent sent his legate Cardinal Capuano to negotiate a truce to the war between Richard and Philip. The cardinal successfully negotiated a five-year truce between the warring monarchs, which gave Innocent hope that his Crusade would finally materialize; so the muster date for warriors was set for the spring of 1199. However, King Richard the Lion-Hearted’s death in April cast doubt once again that the Crusade would ever form, let alone actually travel to the Holy Land.

The Council of Barons

The Fourth Crusade seemed in doubt until Count Thibaut III of Champagne decided to take the cross. A young man in his twenties, he seemed to have it all. His lands were “one of the largest, richest, and most prestigious lordships in western Europe.”
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He was politically well connected as the nephew of both King Richard and Philip. Thibaut came from illustrious stock that viewed participation in the Crusades as a family obligation. His father, Count Henry I, visited the Holy Land twice, the first time as a participant in the Second Crusade. His older brother was Henry II of Champagne who reigned as ruler of Jerusalem after the death of King Guy de Lusignan. Thibaut’s grandparents were the famous King Louis VII, leader of the Second Crusade, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thibaut vowed to go on Crusade while at a major tournament he hosted at Ecry-sur-Aisne on an Advent Sunday in 1199. Thibaut’s decision at such a large public gathering influenced many others, finally providing the spark needed to light the Crusade—fifteen months after Innocent’s call.

Joining Thibaut in taking the cross was the aged Geoffrey of Villehardouin, his chief military advisor. Geoffrey was a veteran of the Third Crusade who had been captured at the siege of Acre on November 4, 1190 and spent four years in a Muslim prison. Despite this negative experience and his age (he was in his fifties) the Crusading zeal burned brightly enough for Villehardouin to go once more unto the breach.

Count Thibaut and the other major French Crusaders met to discuss operational plans for the expedition. The Crusaders discussed the timetable and goals for the Crusade and set their initial objective as Alexandria, with the follow-on goal of liberating Jerusalem. The decision to go to Egypt first was kept hidden from the rank and file because the goal of any Crusade for the average soldier was always Jerusalem. Recruitment of the necessary infantry and support personnel might suffer if word of Egypt as the objective leaked out. The meeting of barons also produced the decision to travel by sea rather than over land since a sea journey was substantially faster than a land march. The nobles agreed to pursue the sea route but (since none of them had a fleet) their decision required the assistance of allies.

Mission to Venice

The barons chose six men to travel to Italy and negotiate a contract for transport to Egypt. Genoa and Pisa were engaged in war, so the ambassadors decided to go to Venice, where they knew they would receive a warm welcome and an attentive disposition. Venice’s ruler (also known as the doge) was the aged, brilliant, and politically astute Enrico Dandolo (r. 1195–1205).

Dandolo was “benevolent, eloquent, and universally respected. He possessed a great and penetrating sense of politics. He was also an ingenious and skilled diplomat and an equally skilled strategist and tactician. He was one of those men whose qualities make others turn naturally to them for leadership.”
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His leadership skills would be put to the test mightily during the events of the Fourth Crusade.

He came from a family that lived well beyond the median life expectancy for the time. It is believed he was eighty-five when elected doge and ninety-four when the Crusader ambassadors arrived in Venice.
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Despite his advanced age, Dandolo was in excellent health—except for his blindness, which had resulted from an accident involving a blow to the head.

The Crusade ambassadors arrived in Venice in March of 1201 and were granted a meeting with Dandolo. They requested that the Venetians provide transport for 4,500 horses, 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry, or a combined force totaling 33,500 men. Such a large request demanded a large payment; Dandolo proposed a total cost of 94,000 marks of Cologne for the requested transport. The rate, although high, was not exorbitant for the time period.
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The Crusaders considered the offer and countered with a rate of four marks per horse and two marks per man for a total of 85,000 marks, which was the equivalent of 60,000 pounds sterling or twice the annual income of the kings of England and France.
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Such a large request demanded consultation and discussion. Dandolo informed the Crusaders that he needed to seek the acceptance of the Great Council, an oversight group of forty, and the Venetian people. This consultation was needed because “he would be asking his people to embark upon the most ambitious step in their commercial history.”
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A modern comparison of the immense request the Crusaders were seeking of Venice is a “major international airline ceasing flights for a year to prepare its planes for one particular client, and then to serve that client exclusively for a further period afterwards.”
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The significant payment was enough of a financial incentive for the Great Council’s immediate acceptance of the Crusader’s offer, and so all that remained for approval of the treaty was the consent of the people. Dandolo called a popular assembly of 10,000 citizens to participate in a Mass of the Holy Spirit for discernment of the Crusaders’ request. After the Mass, Crusader ambassadors were given the opportunity to address the crowd. The oration so moved the people that they cried out, “We consent! We consent!”
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The Treaty of Venice was a momentous arrangement for both parties. The Crusaders needed to deliver the large number of troops upon which the cost of the expedition was calculated. For the Venetians, it was the largest enterprise in their history and “the largest state project in western Europe since the time of the Romans.”
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The size of the army expected by the Crusaders required 450 transport ships with a crew of 14,000 men. In order to construct the ships within the stipulated timeframe (ready by the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul: June 29, 1202) Dandolo suspended all commerce for eighteen months—a large risk to the economy of Venice.
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The Flaw in the Treaty

The Fourth Crusade would ultimately deviate from its objective primarily due to the fundamental flaw in the treaty the Crusader ambassadors signed with Venice, specifically the calculation of payment based on the number of potential troops. “The terms of the treaty acted as a vice from which the Crusaders were unable to escape for the simple reason that the fundamental calculation on which the agreement was based proved spectacularly wrong.”
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The envoys based the treaty on a future unknown number of potential recruits, not on the known number of warriors at the time of negotiations. They seemed to ignore the reality that warriors not under vassalage to the French barons were not obligated to travel from Venice and could make their own travel arrangements to Outrémer. The fundamental miscalculation of the number of expected troops shaped the later decisions of the Crusade leadership—and guaranteed their failure.

The treaty was sent to Rome for confirmation from Pope Innocent III. He approved it in early May of 1201, with the clear caveat that the Crusaders “should not harm Christians unless they wrongfully impeded the passage of the Crusade or another just or necessary cause should occur.”
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Leadership of the Crusade

The Crusade faced an immediate crisis when Count Thibaut died unexpectedly on May 24, 1201. Thibaut’s burial inscription illustrates his great desire to participate in the Crusade: “Intent upon redeeming the Cross and the land of the Crucified, he paved a way with expenses, an army, a fleet. Seeking the terrestrial city, he finds the heavenly one; while pursuing his goal far away, he finds it at home.”
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Thibaut’s death once more placed the Crusade in jeopardy, as the barons struggled to find a replacement. Faced with the prospect of launching a major expedition without a significant nobleman in command, Villehardouin suggested the nobles seek out the support of Boniface of Montferrat in northern Italy. He was an older man in his fifties and one of the best-known military commanders of the day. It was a controversial suggestion, for the French nobles did not know Boniface personally, but only by reputation. Boniface did not speak French, and his lack of personal commitment to the Crusade became an issue during the expedition.

Arrival in Venice

As the Crusaders made their way to Venice in the summer of 1202, it soon became obvious that the numbers were substantially lower than the Crusade ambassadors had estimated. Ultimately, only 13,000, or a third of the expected 33,500 warriors, assembled in Venice.
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The reasons for the low turnout were numerous. Some neglected their vows; others could not afford to fulfill them. There was no papal directive ordering warriors to assemble in Venice, so many troops found their own passage to the Holy Land. The papal legate, Peter Capuano, arrived in late July and was appalled at the number of poor, sick, women, and non-combatants. He dispensed their Crusade vow, which was a humane decision, but it further lowered the number of Crusaders in Venice and deeply upset the Venetians, who refused even to recognize Peter as legate of the Crusade.
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When Boniface of Montferrat strolled into Venice on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, August 15, he faced the first major issue of his command. Since the expected number of Crusaders did not materialize in Venice, the Crusade leaders were unable to provide full payment in accordance with the treaty. The situation was tense as “the greatest commercial city in Latin Christendom faced a financial disaster. The evil consequences of the foolish treaty now stood starkly revealed. The Crusaders could not pay; the Venetians could not renounce payment.”
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