BIRDS IN CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND FESTIVAL
The crowing of a cock ushered in the momentous tragedy that closed the
earthly career of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus had told one of his disciples
in the evening of the Passover, that “the cock shall not crow this day
before that thou shalt twice deny that thou knowest me” (_Luke_, xxii,
34). Later that same night Jesus was arrested and taken into the house
of the Jewish high priest, and when, one after another, three persons
had identified Peter as one of the Disciples Peter each time denied it,
“and immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew.”
Although the cock and his brood have had a part in Oriental and
classical superstitions, ceremonies, and myths since these things began,
it is probable that Jesus had in mind nothing more than the time of
“cock-crowing,” which among the Jews was a recognized name of the third
watch of the night, beginning at three o’clock in the morning. Mark
enumerates the four watch-divisions when he says: “Ye know not when the
master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the
cock-crowing, or in the morning.”
Out of this simple matter, a natural habit of the bird, the early
Christians, with the avidity of zealots for inspired pegs on which to
hang new devotions, set up many theories and customs. For instance, I
find in the English periodical _Nature Notes_ (VI, 189) the following,
translated from the _Treasury of Brunetti Latini_, a teacher of Dante in
the poet’s youth: “By the song of the cock we may know the hour of the
night, and even as the cock before it singeth beateth its body with its
wings, so should a man before he prays flagellate himself.” To this
added a fourteenth-century chant, as follows:
Cock at midnight croweth loud,
And in this delighteth:
But before he crows, his sides
With his wings he smiteth:
So the priest at midnight, when
Him from rest he raiseth,
Firstly doeth penitence,
After that he praiseth.
Ratzel mentions that in Abyssinia cocks were often placed in churches as
living alarm-clocks. It is a tradition that at the moment of the great
Birth the cock crowed: _Christus natus est!_ Hence as early as the 4th
century arose the belief in its crowing always on Christmas eve—a legend
alluded to by Shakespeare:
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Whereon our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
By a similar passage in _Hamlet_, where Bernardo, Heraldo, and Marcellus
are discussing the apparition of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the
reader learns of another ancient superstition:
_Bern._ It was about to speak when the cock crew.
_Her._ And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine: and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
_Mar._ It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Not only ghosts, but the Devil and all his powers of darkness,
especially warlocks and witches, must disappear at Chanticleer’s
cheerful warning that daylight is at hand.
Domestic fowls had become common in Palestine at the time of Jesus,
having been received long before from Persia. According to the _Mishna_
Jews were prohibited from selling a white cock to the heathen because it
was suitable for sacrifice, but if it were defective it became
unsuitable. Cyrus Adler tells us that they used to cut off a toe, and so
circumvent the prohibition. Says the Talmud: “There be three that be
unyielding—Israel among the peoples, the dog among beasts, and the cock
among birds” (Beca, 56).
No doubt it is true, as Mr. R. L. Gales pointed out a few years ago in
the _National Review_, that the sacred mythology of the Nativity and
Passion, which is far wider than my immediate use of it, sprang up when
the minds of people constantly dwelt on the Faith in a spirit of
devotion rather than of controversy. “It seems, too, that there was in
the Christianity of the earlier ages something that we may perhaps call
a pantheistic element, which has since disappeared.”
Russians tell the story that while Christ was hanging on the cross the
sparrows were maliciously chirping _Jif! jif!_ that is, “He is living,
He is living!” in order to urge the tormenters to fresh cruelties; but
the swallows cried, with opposite intent, “_Umer! Umer!_” “Dead! Dead!”
Therefore the swallow is blessed, but the sparrow is under a curse, and
ever since that time it hops, because its legs are tied together, for
its sin, by invisible bonds. Another story is that the sparrow was the
bird that betrayed the hiding-place of Jesus in the Garden at
Gethsemane, whereas all other birds tried to entice away the officers
who were searching for him, especially the swallow, whose erratic flight
still shows that it is seeking to find him.
The oystercatcher is still known among the Gaels of northern Scotland as
St. Bride’s lad, says Seton Gordon (_Nineteenth Century_, 1923, p. 420)
from the fact that when that saint first visited Long Island she carried
an oystercatcher in each hand; also, there is an old Gaelic tradition
that this bird covered Jesus with seaweed when his enemies appeared in
hot pursuit. The oystercatcher was therefore blessed, and still shows,
as it flies, the form of a cross on its plumage.
A Spanish legend asserts that the owl was once the sweetest of singers;
but that, having been present when Jesus died, from that moment it has
shunned daylight, and now only repeats in a harsh tone _Cruz! Cruz!_
Most of the legends of the Cross, so far as concern birds, at least,
seem to have arisen in Sweden. The Swedes say, for example, that a
swallow hovered over the Crucifixion crying _Svale! Svale!_ “Cheer up!
Cheer up!” and it is therefore called in their country the bird of
consolation. A similar story is current in Scandinavia of the stork,
which is said to have cried to the Redeemer, as it flew about the Cross,
_Styrket! Styrket!_ “Strengthen ye.” In both cases there is a play on
the Swedish names of these birds; but they testify that the stork, now
virtually mute, formerly had a voice. In Sweden, where the red crossbill
is a familiar winter bird, arose the tradition that its peculiarly
crossed beak became twisted by its efforts to pull the nails from
Christ’s hands and feet:
Stained with blood and never tiring
With its beak it doth not cease,
From the Cross ’t would free the Saviour
Its creator’s son release.
And the Saviour speaks in mildness:
Blest be thou of all the good!
Bear as token of this moment
Marks of blood and holy rood.
So Longfellow paraphrases Julius Mosen’s little German hymn.
The same loving service has been attributed to the red-browed goldfinch
of Europe in a legend current in Great Britain—a story put into verse in
_The Spectator_ (London, 1910) by Pamela Tenant, partly thus:
Held in his slender beak the cruel thing,
Still with his gentle might endeavoring
But to release it.
Then as he strove, spake One—a dying space—
‘Take, for thy pity, as a sign of grace,
‘Semblance of this, my blood, upon thy face
‘A living glory.’
The complaining love-note of the wood-pigeon has, in the northwestern
part of Europe, become the subject of a well-adapted and pathetic myth,
as Watters[57] denominates it in his entertaining _Birds of Ireland_.
“It is said that a dove perched in the neighborhood of the holy cross
when the Redeemer was expiring, and, wailing its notes of sorrow, kept
repeating the words ‘Kyrie! Kyrie!’ [Kyrie eleison—Lord have mercy!] to
alleviate the agony of his dying moments.”
Of all the legends connecting birds with this awful scene those relating
to the little robin-redbreast of Europe are most familiar, for they have
been celebrated in poems that everyone reads. The story is that the
robin, pitying the pain of the cruel crown pressed on the Saviour’s
brow, plucked away the sharpest of the thorns; and some say that before
that moment the bird was all gray, and was bound to remain so until it
had done something worthy of its having a red breast. A forgotten
writer, whose lines have been preserved in an old volume of _Notes and
Queries_, tells the story thus:
Bearing his cross, while Christ passed by forlorn,
His Godlike forehead by the mock crown torn,
A little bird took from that crown one thorn,
To soothe the dear Redeemer’s throbbing head.
That bird did what she could; His blood, ’t is said,
Down-dropping dyed her tender bosom red.
Since then no wanton boy disturbs her nest;
Weasel nor wildcat will her young molest—
All sacred deem that bird of ruddy breast.
The Spaniards, however, believe swallows—also “redbreasts” in their
way—to be the birds that pulled the thorns from Christ’s crown—two
thousand of them!
Another northern tradition is that the robin carries in its beak daily a
drop of water to those shut up in the “burning lake,” and that its
breast is red because scorched by the flames of Gehenna. This old
Swedish legend gave Whittier the inspiration for an exquisite poem:
He brings cool dew in his little bill,
And lets it fall on the souls of sin;
You can see the mark on his red breast still
Of fires that scorch as he drops it in.
Still another theory explains that its reddish front remains tinctured
by the stain it received in trying to staunch the blood that flowed from
the Redeemer’s pierced side.
Almost all boys in Great Britain are, or used to be, collectors of
birds’ eggs, before bird-protecting societies and public enlightenment
restricted their destructive enthusiasm; but the nest of the “ruddock”
(robin) was rarely disturbed by the most careless of them, who, if
undeterred by any soft sentiment, were frightened by the superstition
that bad luck followed any such vandalism. Many maxims to this effect
might be quoted, one of which, a proverb in Cornwall, runs:
He that hurts robin or wren
Will never prosper, boy or men.
In Essex they repeat to children a little ballad like this:
The robin and the redbreast,
The robin and the wren;
If ye take out o’ their nest
Ye’ll never thrive again.
The robin and the redbreast,
The martin and the swallow;
If ye touch one o’ their eggs
Bad luck will follow.
The Scotch say it a little differently:
The laverock and the lintie,
The robin and the wren;
If ye harry their nests
Ye’ll never thrive again.
Let me digress here for a moment. “Laverock” is Scottish for lark,
meaning the skylark. De Gubernatis,[54] who discourses learnedly on the
mythical connotations of the name in India and ancient Greece, finds
that the significance of this bird in popular tales is due to its crest,
which he shows to be an indication that it was among the birds of the
sun. “The crested lark,” he says, “is the same as the crested sun, the
sun with its rays,” and he continues: “In the legend of St. Christopher
I see an equivoque between the word _Christos_ and the word _cresta_,
crest, and either way I see the sun personified.”
Whatever these speculations may be worth the old stories attribute to
the lark that funereal charity which belongs to several birds, among
them the European robin; and this brings us back to the main track and
to the pretty story of the Babes in the Woods. Away back in bad old
times a Norfolk gentleman left legacies to two infant children, which
were to pass to their uncle if the babies died. After a year this uncle
hired ruffians to take the children into a forest and kill them, but
instead the men left them there to starve. For a time they ate
blackberries, but soon became exhausted, lay down, and went to sleep,
and expired.
Their little corpse the robin-redbreast found,
And strew’d with pious bill the leaves around.[8]
More modern poets have made many allusions to this touching tale, which
Shakespeare knew, for in _Cymbeline_ he makes Arviragus say over Imogen—
Thou shalt not lack
The flowers that’s like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured harebell.... The ruddock would
With charitable bill bring thee all these.
And in William Collins’s _Dirge to Cymbeline_ are the lines:
The redbreast oft at evening hours
Shall kindly lend his little aid,
With heavy moss, and gathered flowers,
To deck the ground where thou art laid.
The conceit is far more ancient than Shakespeare or Gay or even than
Robert Yarrington—who, in 1601, wrote a ballad on it concluding,
No buriall this pretty pair of any man receives
Till Robin Redbreast piously did cover them with leaves—
for Horace relates in one of his poems how he as a child wandering one
day on Mount Vultur fell wearily asleep, and was covered by protecting
doves with laurel and myrtle leaves.
The robin is always remembered at Christmas in the rural villages and
farms of northern Europe, for it is not migratory. In South Germany the
custom is to put grain on a roof for the redbreasts, who come trustfully
about houses at that season, and find welcome shelter in barns and
straw-stacks: and in Sweden and elsewhere an unthreshed sheaf of wheat
is set up on a pole for their winter fare.
It will have been noticed that in the ballads quoted, the wren is
associated with the robin in a protective way. A whole book might be
written about this least of birds, which, although the least, is called
“king” in every European language. We are told that a wren was in the
stable at Bethlehem when Christ was born; and an Irish proverb runs:
“The robin and the wren are God’s two holy men.” How surprising, then,
to read of a custom called Hunting (or in some places Burying) the Wren,
which once prevailed in southern France, in Keltic parts of England, in
Wales, and also in Ireland, where it persisted until abolished by the
British Government about the middle of the 19th century. Accounts of the
practices, songs, etc., connected with it may be found in antiquarian
histories, for example the following from Miles’s book of Christmas
customs:
In the Isle of Man very early on Christmas morning, when the
church-bells had rung out midnight, servants went out to hunt the
wren. They killed the bird, fastened it to the top of a long pole;
and carried it in procession to every house, chanting these words:
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for Jack of the Can,
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for everyone.
At each house they sought to collect money. At last, when all had
been visited, they laid the wren on a bier, carried it to the
church-yard, and buried it with the utmost solemnity, singing Manx
dirges.
It is evident that this is a very ancient practice, and embodies in its
utterly degenerate state a religious idea or symbolism, the meaning of
which has been forgotten. Why, for example, should the feathers of the
murdered Manx wrens be preserved, one by one, among the coast families,
as a talisman preserving the possessor from shipwreck, unless some
religious sanction was involved, and this may be connected with St.
Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death; for this
savage custom belonged to St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, as well as to
Christmas, or locally in place of Christmas. But why the wren, rather
than some other bird? The matter is interesting enough to justify
quoting the broad account of the matter furnished by Swann:[47]
An old Irish custom on St. Stephen’s Day, and one that has not quite
died out, was the “hunting of the wren” by boys. When captured it
was tied, alive but maimed, to a pole (or, according to Vallancey—De
Reb. Hib., IV, 13—tied by the leg in the center of two hoops placed
at right angles with one another) and paraded around the
neighborhood, a few doggerel verses being repeated at each house,
while a donation was requested, one version being;
The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze,
Come, give us a bumper, or give us a cake,
Or give us a copper, for Charity’s sake.
Yarrell records a similar practice in Kerry, where the peasantry on
Christmas Day used to hunt the bird with two sticks, “one to beat
the bushes the other to fling at the bird.” Bullock also mentions it
as prevalent in the Isle of Man, both on Christmas Eve and St.
Stephen’s Day, and tells us it was founded on a tradition of a
beautiful fairy who lured the male inhabitants to a watery grave in
the sea, and who to escape subsequent destruction took the form of a
wren, which form she was supposed to be doomed by a spell to
reassume each succeeding New Year’s Day, ultimately perishing by
human hands.... To my own knowledge this custom of a “wren hunt”
existed in Nottinghamshire also within recent times, the bird being
hunted along the hedgerows by boys armed with stones, but I do not
recollect that anything was done with the bird when killed or
maimed....
In connection with this belief [alluded to above] in the kingship
over other birds, a Twelfth Day custom of parading a caged wren in
Pembrokeshire, with the lines recited, is described in Swainson’s
_Folklore of British Birds_, O’Curry has recorded that the wren,
like the raven, was kept domesticated on account of the auguries
derived from it, which were employed by the Druids. An Irish proverb
asserts that “The fox is the cunningest beast in the world barring
the wren.” According to Dalyell the wren is considered an unlucky
token in Scotland, but the robin a lucky one.
Explanations of this revolting yet long persistent custom have been many
and various. A totemic sort of theory is that the bird “was once
regarded as sacred, and the Christmas hunting is the survival of an
annual custom of slaying the divine animal, such as is found among
primitive peoples. The carrying of its body from door to door is
apparently intended to convey to each house a portion of its virtues.” I
know of no facts in history to support this theory as applied to the
Keltic race. One authority tells us that the “crime” for which the bird
must be punished so ferociously is that it has “a drop o’ the de’il’s
blood in its veins,” but so has the magpie, which is not persecuted.
Lady Wilde[60] assures us that “the wren is mortally hated by the Irish
for on one occasion, when the Irish troops were approaching to attack a
portion of Thomas Cromwell’s army the wrens came and perched on the
Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the English
soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed them all.” For this
tragic incident we are given no time or place; and it happens that the
same report was made respecting a battle between Irish and Danish
invaders some 800 years before Cromwell’s campaigns in the Emerald Isle
or anywhere else.
The real clue to the puzzle is contained in the fact that in their
barbarous hunt for wrens the men and boys kept yelling words that in
Cormac’s _Glossary_ (10th century) are explained as “draoi-en,”
Druid-bird. We know that the Druid priests were accustomed to draw
auguries from the chirpings of the wren—a divination to which the early
Christian missionaries objected strenuously. It is probable that they
condemned the little songster as a symbol of heathen rites, and
encouraged their converts to kill it at the time of the annual Christian
feast as a sign of abnegation of Druidical connections. The stoning of
the birds on St. Stephen’s Day might be regarded as a vengeful reminder
of the manner of that martyr’s murder by a mob.
One more bird-story is connected with Christianity in general—that
alluded to in _Hamlet_, where Ophelia says: “Well, God ’ield you! They
say the owl was a baker’s daughter!” This enigmatical remark probably
had reference to the story formerly, and perhaps still, common among the
peasantry in the English Midlands, of a baker’s daughter that was
transformed into an owl by Jesus as a punishment for reducing to a very
small size the large piece of dough which her mother had agreed to bake
for him. The dough, however, swelled in the oven to enormous
proportions, to the girl’s great astonishment, and she gasped out “Heu,
heu, heu!” This owl-like noise suggested her transformation into that
bird. The story is told to children as a warning lesson against
illiberal treatment of the poor. It is evidently alluded to, also, in
Beaumont and Fletcher’s play _The Nice Valour_, where the Passionate
Lord says, after speaking of a nest of owls, “Happy is he whose window
opens to a brown baker’s chimney! he shall be sure there to hear the
bird sometimes after twilight.” In northern Germany they say a baker’s
man was the offender; and that he was changed by Jesus into a cuckoo,
the white spots in whose wings show where the flour was sprinkled on the
man’s dun coat. The Norse people apply the same moral by means of their
common woodpecker, whose pattern of dress is indicated in the legend
known to Norse children as the Gertrud story, which is prettily related
by Miss Walker.[39] Brewer’s _Handbook_ notes that a maid-servant of the
Virgin Mary, who had purloined one of her mistress’s dresses, was
converted into a lapwing and condemned forever to cry “Tyvit, tyvit!” (I
stole it). The source of the anecdote is not given, nor the language of
the one who interprets it, but it reminds one of Tennyson’s.
With a lengthened loud halloo,
Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.
The Greeks, according to Andrew Lang, had a similar legend of feminine
impiety, by which they mystically explained the origin of owls and bats.
The prevalence of a belief in such transformations as these by Jesus is
very widespread; the traditions vary somewhat, as we have seen, in
different countries, but it is evident that the root is in the primitive
notion that such miracles were not only possible, but natural. Rather
more remote and obscure is the connection of birds with certain other
religious feasts, such as the substitution of turkey for boar’s-head as
the central dish for the Christmas dinner among the English Dissenters,
attributed to the fact that turkeys became common about the time of the
Reformation, and acquired a meritorious character on that account among
those who wanted to continue the Christmas feast without the taint of a
dish partaking of the customs of the hated Papists. Is our New England
custom of a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day traceable to this,
remembering that the Puritans paid little or no heed to Christmas?
For centuries, and until comparatively recent times, among the sports
and jollifications recalling the Roman carnival (at the same date) that
marked Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent, both in Britain and in
France, along with the eating of unlimited pancakes, cock-fighting and
“throwing at cocks” had the most prominent place. The last-mentioned
sport consisted in fastening live cocks in a certain position, and
letting men compete in throwing clubs at them, the man who killed the
bird winning it. This atrocious form of amusement did not shock the
populace of a time when bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and the pitting of
dogs against each other or against badgers and rats were popular; yet a
few protested, and even in the 17th century antiquaries were searching
for the origin of the custom. Hearne asserted that it was in memory of
English victories over the French (symbolized by the Gallic _coq_) in
the time of Henry V; but the sport was customary in France itself long
before that time. A writer quoted by Smith[61] records that “the common
account of it is that the crowing of a cock prevented our Saxon
ancestors from massacring their conquerors, the Danes, on the morning of
a Shrove Tuesday while asleep in their beds,” which recalls one of the
explanations of the Irish wren-hunting. My own opinion is that the
custom had no particular significance, but was just a sportive way of
getting without much cost the material for a good dinner, as were the
“turkey shoots” of our western frontier; and that Erasmus was fairly
right when he remarked that “the English eat a certain cake on Shrove
Tuesday, on which they immediately run mad and kill the poor cocks.”
Lent closes with the joyful celebration of Easter, an occasion in which
the eggs of birds, at least, have a persistent and prominent part, and
doves find a place in several Old World ceremonies of the Church.
In the matter of the almost universal and everywhere popular custom of
playing with colored eggs at Easter, I can do no better than quote _The
Catholic Encyclopedia_, article “Easter”:
Because the use of eggs was forbidden during Lent they were brought
to the table on Easter Day, colored red to symbolize the Easter joy.
This custom is found not only in the Latin but also in the Oriental
Churches. The symbolic meaning of a new creation of mankind by Jesus
risen from the dead was probably an invention of later times. The
custom may have its origin in Paganism, for a great many pagan
customs, celebrating the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The
egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring. Easter
eggs, the children are told, come from Rome with the bells which on
Thursday go to Rome and return Saturday morning. The sponsors in
some countries give Easter eggs to their god-children. Colored eggs
are used by children at Easter in a sort of game which consists in
testing the strength of the shells. Both colored and uncolored eggs
are used in some parts of the United States in this game, known as
“egg-picking.” Another practice is the “egg-rolling” by children on
Easter Monday on the lawn of the White House in Washington.
A quaint feature in this pagan survival in a Christian celebration of a
momentous incident and idea is the connection with it of the rabbit.
Wherever colored Easter eggs are displayed, images of a rabbit are
likely to accompany them. Children are told that the Easter Rabbit lays
the eggs, for which reason they are, in some countries, hidden in a nest
in the garden. The strangeness of the association disappears when we
remember that the date of the feast is determined by the time when the
moon first becomes full after the spring equinox, and that the rabbit,
which has from time immemorial been a symbol of fertility, is
representative of the moon-goddess, Luna, which was worshipped annually
at a date coinciding with the Easter festival. Thus, like many other
pagan rites and symbols significant of reviving nature, it became
confused with the Christian celebration of the Resurrection.
At the feast of the Pentecost, on Whitsunday, commemorating the descent
of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, doves were formerly always employed
in Europe in staging the solemnities.
On Whitsuntide, white pigeons tame in strings from heaven fly,
And one that framed is of wood still hangeth in the skie,
as we are told by Neogeorgus (1511–63), speaking of the custom in
Germany; and elsewhere we learn that in Spain pigeons with cakes tied to
their legs were let loose in churches, where representations of the Holy
Ghost were a part of the celebration. This last fact accounts for the
use of the dove—an emblem of the third element of the God head, as we
shall see.
To a similar old custom, if Marion Crawford, the learned author of
_Salve Venetia_, is not mistaken, we owe the picturesque fact that
pigeons are a feature of the plaza of St. Mark in Venice—one of the
“sights” of that wonderful city:
The Venetians always loved processions, and it is to one of these
pageants that the pigeons of St. Mark’s owe their immunity. As early
as the end of the fourteenth century it was the custom to make a
great procession on Palm Sunday, in the neighborhood of St. Mark’s.
A canon of the Cathedral deposited great baskets on the high altar
containing the artificial palms prepared for the Doge, the chief
magistrates, and the most important members of the clergy....
According to the appointed service the procession began immediately
after the distribution of the palms; and while the choir chanted the
words “_Gloria, laus et honor_” of the sacred hymn, a great number
of pigeons were sent flying from different parts of the façade down
into the square, having little screws of paper fastened to their
claws to prevent them from flying too high. The people instantly
began to catch the birds, and a great many were actually taken; but
now and then one, stronger than the rest, succeeded in gaining the
higher parts of the surrounding buildings, enthusiastically cheered
by the crowd.
Those who had once succeeded in making their escape were regarded as
sacred forever with all their descendants. The state provided them
with food from its granaries, and before long, lest by mistake any
free pigeons should be caught on the next Palm Sunday the Signory
next decreed that other birds must be used on the occasion.
F. Hopkinson Smith, in his _Gondola Days_, gives a more secular account
of the origin of the regard felt by the Venetians for these “pets of the
State,” whose ancestor, the genial artist writes, brought the good news
to Venice of the capture (in 1205) of Candia by Admiral Enrico Dandolo.