preached by Foulques de Nuilly under the authority of Innocent III.
After much discussion of practical ways and means, with which they
were less amply provided than with spiritual enthusiasm, they made
choice of six ambassadors who should procure the necessities of the
enterprise, Jofroi de Villeharduin, Mareschal of Champagne, Miles li
Brabant, Coëns de Bethune, Alars Magnarians, Jean de Friaise, and
Gautiers de Gaudonville. Venice was decided on by them as the State
most likely to provide what they stood in need of--ships for the
journey--and they departed to sound the mind of the Republic, arriving
in the first week of Lent in the year 1201. Venice, in the person of
the Doge, Henry Dandolo, opened the negotiations; the messengers were
made to feel it was no light thing they asked. They were received and
lodged with highest honour, but they were made to wait for a Council
to assemble, which should consider the matter of their request. After
some days they were admitted to the Ducal Palace to deliver their
message; and its purport was this: “Sir, we are come to you from the
high barons of France who have taken the sign of the Cross to avenge
the shame of Jesus Christ, and to conquer Jerusalem if God will grant
it them; and because they know that no people have such power as you
and your people, they pray you for God’s sake to have pity on the land
over seas and the avenging of the shame of Jesus Christ, so that they
may have ships and the other things necessary.” The spiritual and
sentimental appeal is left unanswered by the Doge. He asks simply, “In
what way?” “In all ways,” say the messengers, “that you recommend or
advise, which they would be able to fulfil.” Again the Doge expresses
wonder at the magnitude of what they ask, bidding them not marvel
if another eight days’ waiting is required of them before the final
answer can be given. At the date fixed by the Doge they returned to the
Palace. Villeharduin excuses himself from telling all the words that
were said and unsaid, but the gist of the Doge’s offer was this, that
it depended on the consent of the Great Council and the rest of the
Republic. Venice should provide vessels of transport for four thousand
five hundred horses and squires and twenty thousand foot soldiers, and
viands to last the whole company nine months. The agreement was to
hold good for a year from the time of starting, and the sum total of
the provision was to be eighty-five thousand marks. But Venice would
go further, for the love of God, and launch fifty galleys at her own
expense on condition of receiving the half of all the conquests that
were made by land and sea. Nothing remained but to win the consent of
the Great Council and ask a formal ratification from the people. Full
ten thousand persons assemble in “the chapel of San Marco, the fairest
that ever was,” and the Doge recommends them to hear the Mass, and to
pray God’s counsel concerning the request of the envoys. It will be
seen that all is practically accomplished before the question is put
to the people or God’s grace asked on the undertaking, but no item of
the formality is omitted. The envoys are sent for by the Doge that they
may themselves repeat their request humbly before the people, and they
came into the church “much stared at by the crowd who had never seen
them.” Again the appeal is made, Jofroi de Villeharduin taking up the
word by the agreement and desire of the other envoys. We can picture
the strange thrill that ran through the great multitude as that single
voice broke the silence of St. Mark’s with its burden of passionate
tribute to the greatness of Venice: “‘Therefore have they chosen you
because they know that no people accustomed to going on the seas have
such power as you and your people; and they commanded us to throw
ourselves at your feet and not to rise until you had consented to have
pity on the Holy Land beyond the seas.’ Now the six messengers knelt,
weeping bitterly, and the Doge and all the others cried out with one
voice and raised their hands on high and said, ‘We grant it, we grant
it.’ And the noise and tumult and lament of it were so great that never
had any man known a greater.” Then the Doge himself mounted the lectern
and put before the people the meaning of the alliance that had been
sought with them in preference to all other peoples by “the best men of
the world.” “I cannot tell you,” says Villeharduin, “all the good and
fair words that the Doge spoke. At last the matter was ended, and the
following day the charters were drawn up and made and sealed.”
[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER FROM GALLERY OF SAN MARCO.]
The time of gathering for the pilgrims was fixed for the following
year 1202, at the feast of St. John, and amid many tears of piety and
devotion the Doge and deputies swore to abide by their charters, and
the envoys of both parties set out for Rome to receive the confirmation
of their covenant from Innocent III. But the drama which had begun
amid such moving demonstrations of good will and Christian sentiment
necessarily had its dilemmas and its complications. It was essential
to the fulfilling of the pact that all the crusaders should assemble
at Venice to pay their toll, and embark on the ships; otherwise the
crusaders could not hope to provide the money due to the Venetians.
The Republic, for its part, had amply fulfilled its compact. All who
arrived were received with joy and lodged most honourably at San Nicolo
del Lido. The chronicle can find no parallel for the richness of the
provision made for the would-be crusaders. But there were, alas, three
times as many vessels as there were men and horses to fill them.--“Ha!
it was a great shame,” bursts out Villeharduin, “that the rest who
went to the other ports did not come here.” The dilemma was a serious
one. Even of those who were there, some declared themselves unable to
pay their passage, and the money could in no way be made up. Some were
for sacrificing their whole estate that the Venetians should not lose
by the defection of the others, but the counsel found small support
among those who now wished to be rid of their bargain. But the small
party who felt themselves, in a sense, the conscience of the Crusade
carried the day. “Rather will we give all we possess and go poor among
the host, than that it should disperse and come to naught; for God
will render it to us at His good pleasure.” So the Counts of Flanders,
Loys, Hues de St. Pol and their party began to collect together all
their goods and all they could borrow. “Then you might have seen a
vast quantity of gold and silver borne to the palace of the Doge to
make payment. And when they had paid, there still was lacking from
the covenant thirty-four thousand marks of silver. And those who had
kept back what they possessed and would give nothing were very glad at
this, for by this means they thought the expedition would have failed.
But God who counsels the disconsolate would not so suffer it.” The
Doge put before his people that not only would their just claim remain
unsatisfied though they should exact from the crusaders the utmost
they could collect, but they would bring discredit on themselves by
acting as strict justice would permit. He suggested the combining of
two advantages, a material and moral. Let them, he suggests, demand the
reconquest of Zara as substitute for the debt, that they may not only
have the fame of possessing the city but the praise of generosity.
And Dandolo, the old wise doughty Doge, has yet another suggestion
to propose. There was a great festival one Sunday in San Marco, and
the citizens and barons and pilgrims were assembled before High Mass
began. Then amid the silent expectation of the great gathering the
Doge mounted the lectern and made the famous offer of his own person
as leader of the host. “‘I am an old man,’ he said, ‘and feeble, and
should be feeling need of repose, for I am infirm in body. But I see
there is none who could so well rule and lead you as I who am your
lord. If you will consent that I take the sign of the Cross to preserve
and guide you, and that my son remain in my stead and keep the city,
I would gladly go to live and die with you and with the pilgrims.’
And when they heard, they cried all with one voice: ‘We pray you for
God’s sake to grant us this, and to do so and to come with us.’ And the
people of the city and the pilgrims, felt deep compassion at this, and
they wept many tears, thinking how that valiant man had so much need
to stay behind, for he was an old man, and though his eyes were still
fair to look on he could not see with them on account of a wound which
he had received in his head. Nevertheless he had a great heart. Ha! how
little they resembled him who had gone to other ports to avoid danger!
So he came from the pulpit and went to the altar and knelt down,
weeping bitterly, and they sewed the cross for him on a great cotton
cap because he desired that the people might see it. And the Venetians
began to take the cross in great numbers, and many on that very day,
and still the number of crusaders was few enough.” It was no wonder
that the pilgrims had great joy in the crusaders for the good will and
valour they felt to be in them. Whatever aim may previously have been
uppermost as an incentive to enthusiasm and self-oblation, there was no
doubt that Venice now was giving of her best. This retiring of the old
Doge from his ducal throne to embark on a more arduous leadership is
one of the most moving episodes in the annals San Marco.
But at this moment an event occurred that changed, or rather diverted
into a new channel the current of the Crusade, providing in fact,
as our chronicler Villeharduin remarks, the true occasion of his
book. Into the midst of the pilgrims assembled at Verona on their
way to Venice there came Alexius, son of Isaac the deposed Emperor
of Constantinople, in quest of help against his usurping uncle. What
more opportune than the neighbouring host of “the most valiant men
on earth” for aiding in the recovery of his lost kingdom and the
reinstatement of his tortured father. To the crusaders, and especially
we may believe, to the Venetians, this new motive did not come amiss.
It is startlingly like life, this Fourth Crusade, with its original
aim thus gradually becoming but a secondary purpose in a far more
complicated scheme, a middle distance in an increasingly extended
horizon. The relief of the Holy Sepulchre, the avenging of the shame of
Christ, assume in fact a rather shadowy outline in a prospect dominated
by Zara and Constantinople.
The departure from Venice did not mark the term of the obstructions
to which the Crusade was fated. The disgraceful contest between the
French and the Venetians within the streets of Zara, the defection of
a number of the pilgrims, the death of others at the hands of the wild
inland inhabitants of Dalmatia--all these causes reduced the already
meagre company before it had well started on its way. The Pope was
placed in the dilemma of strongly disapproving the secular turn given
to the Crusade, while realising that the Venetian fleet was the only
means for accomplishing his ends in Palestine. His solution was to
absolve the barons for the siege of Zara, permitting them still to use
the fleet--though the devil’s instrument--while Venice, the provider,
remained under interdict. We here come into contact with an element
of singular interest in the relations of Venice and the East--her
attitude towards the Papacy. The independence of San Marco was one of
the essential articles of the Venetian creed. In spiritual matters
none could more devoutly bow to the Apostle of Christendom; but the
spiritual supremacy was an inland sea to Venice: it must be stable,
fixed, defined; it must not flow with a tide upon the temporal shores
where her heart and treasure lay. The authority of San Marco was a
political principle. All state ceremonies were bound up with San Marco;
the Ducal Palace itself was subsidiary to the Palace of St. Mark. How
should a State that had sheltered, traditionally at least, a Pope
“stando occulto propter timorem” that had acted as mediator between
Pope and Emperor and seen the Emperor’s head bowed to the ground on the
pavement of San Marco--how should such a State be subordinate to any
rule but its own complete self-consciousness? Venice always followed
the eminently practical rule of allowing much freedom in non-essentials
in order to preserve more closely her control over the really material
issues. The attitude always maintained by her with regard to the
Inquisition is so closely parallel to her relations with the East and
the pagans of the East, constantly deprecated by the Pope, that we may
fitly quote here Paolo Sarpi’s admirable reply to the papal protests
against conferring the doctorate in Padua on Protestants; the principle
is the same, though limited in that instance to a particular and
seemingly divergent issue. “If anyone openly declared his intention
of conferring the doctorate on heretics, or admitted anyone to it who
openly and with scandal professed himself to be such, it might be said
that he had failed to persecute heresy; but, it being the opinion of
the most Serene Republic that heretics and those who are known for
such should not be admitted to the doctorate, and it being our duty
to consider Catholic anyone who does not profess the contrary, no
smallest scandal can accrue to the religion even though it should
chance that one not known for such were to receive the doctorate. The
doctorate in philosophy and medicine is a testimonial that the scholar
is a good philosopher and physician and that he may be admitted to the
practise of that art, and to say that a heretic is a good doctor does
not prejudice the Catholic faith; certainly it would prejudice it if
anyone were to say that such a man was a good theologian.” This was the
position of Venice with regard to her pagan allies, the meaning of her
superbly fitted lodges for Turk, infidel and heretic. The Saracen, the
Turk and the Infidel might not be a good theologian, but he was a good
trader, a channel for the glories with which Venice loved to clothe
and crown herself. He was a part of her life more essentially and more
irrevocably than the prelates of holy Church; his ban would have been
more terrible to Venice than papal thunders. It was not primarily as
hot sons of the Church, consumed with fire for the shame of the Holy
Sepulchre that the Venetians with such generous provision prepared
their ships for the Crusade: it was as men of business with no small
strain of fire in their blood and a high sense of the glorious worth
and destiny of their city.
[Illustration: THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO, LOOKING SOUTH.]
There were moments of inspiration for the Crusaders amid all their
toils and internal strife, and not least was the first view of
Constantinople which had been for so long the emporium of Venice. The
fleet had harboured at the abbey of St. Etienne, three miles from
Constantinople, and Villeharduin describes the wonder and enthusiasm
of those who saw then for the first time the marvellous city “that
was sovereign over all others,” with its rich towers and palaces and
churches and high encircling walls. “And you must know there was no
heart there so daring but trembled.” We are reminded of this picture
of Constantinople when we stand face to face with Carpaccio’s city in
the _Combat of St. George_. It so successfully combines solidity and
strength with the airy joy of watch-towers and towers of pleasure, that
at first we have only the impression of fantastic play of architecture;
but by degrees we come to feel the seacoast country of Carpaccio, that
at first seemed so wild and unmanned, to be in fact bristling with
defence and preparation. It is immensely strong in fortifications, no
dream or fairy citadel. It is begirt with towers and walls along the
water; strongholds lurk among the loftiest crags; towers of defence and
battlements peer over the steep hillside; and, if we look closer, we
see the towers are thronged with men. We remember Villeharduin’s note,
“There were so many men on the walls and on the towers that it seemed
as if they were made of nothing but people.” It is a sumptuous city,
too, that we see in glimpses through the gateway, the city of a great
oriental potentate.
We cannot follow Villeharduin through the vicissitudes of the siege
and counter-siege. He himself confesses in the relation of one point
alone that sixty books would not be able to recount all the words
that were spoken, and the counsels that were given and taken. In the
simple, terse and trenchant style that Frenchmen, and especially the
Frenchmen of the old chronicles, know how to wield so perfectly, he
tells us of the Doge’s wise counsel that the city should be approached
by way of the surrounding islands whence they might gather stores; of
the lords’ neglect of this counsel, “just as if no one of them had
ever heard of it”; of their investment of the palace of Alexius in
the place named Chalcedony, that was “furnished with all the delights
of the human body that could be imagined befitting the dwelling of a
prince”; of the capture of the city and the ravishing of its treasures
that were so great “that no man could come to an end of counting the
silver and the gold and plate and precious stones and samite and silken
cloth and dresses _vaire_ and grey, and ermines and all precious
things that were ever found on earth. And Jofroi de Villeharduin, the
Marshall of Champagne, will bear good witness that to his knowledge
since the centuries began there was never so great gain in a single
city.” The division of the booty necessarily occasioned heart-burning
and revealed certain vices of “covetoise” undreamed before. And as time
went on and still the passage to Palestine was delayed the sanctuaries
of the Greek Church were treated with barbarous irreverence and
despoiled of their treasure and sacred vessels. Then with the retaking
of Constantinople from Marzuflo there followed a time of abandonment
of men and leaders to their fiercest passions and the almost total
destruction of the city. Here again Venice stepped in, as the merchant
had stepped in to rescue treasure from the pile of Savonarola, to
enrich herself from the ruins of Constantinople.
The taking of Constantinople opened another door into the Eastern
garden from which Venice had already begun to gather so rich an
harvest. Picture the freights that Venetian vessels were bearing home
in these years of crusade and conquest, to be gathered finally into
the garner of St. Mark’s! It is strangely thrilling to imagine the
first welcome of the four bronze horses, travel-dimmed no doubt, who
only found their way to their present station on the forefront of St.
Mark’s after standing many times in peril of being melted down in the
Arsenal where they first were stored. But at last, says Sansovino,
their beauty was recognised and they were placed on the church. It
is only by degrees that we come to accost and know the exiles one by
one. The more outstanding spoils, the Pala d’Oro, the great pillars
of Acri, the bronze doors, the horses, the four embracing kings,
these are among the first letters of St. Mark’s oriental alphabet; but
there are many lesser exiles which have found a shelter in the port of
Venice, which as we wander among the glorious precincts of San Marco
impress themselves upon us one by one; such is the grave-browed, noble
head of porphyry that keeps solitary watch towards the waters from
the south corner of the outer gallery of San Marco, as if it had been
set down a moment by its sculptor and forgotten on the white, marble
balustrade. The whole being of San Marco is bound up with the East,
and it is another token of the magic of Venice that she has been able
to embrace and furnish with a life-giving soil those plants that had
been ruthlessly uprooted and had made so long and perilous a journey.
The official records, that tell of the arrival from one expedition and
another of Eastern vestures for the clothing of San Marco, are not mere
inventories to us who have walked upon the variegated pavement between
the solemn pillars and seen the sunlight illumine one by one the
marbles of the walls, with their imbedded sculpture and mosaic, or gild
the depths of the storied cupolas and the luxuriant harmonies of colour
and design on the recesses of the windows. They are significant, these
records, like the entry in a parish register of the birth of some one
whom we love; for the church of San Marco, though in fact a museum of
many treasures, is not a museum of foreign treasures. Her spoils are
not hung up in her as aliens like the spoils that conquerors bore to
ancient temples; they found her a foster-mother of their own blood and
kin. She herself is sprung from a plant whose first flowering was not
among the floating marshes of the lagoon.
[Illustration:
_By permission of the Hon. John Collier._
THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO, LOOKING NORTH.]
Turn, on a sunny day, from the Molo towards San Marco, passing below
the portico of the Ducal Palace adjoining the Piazzetta. Framed by the
pointed arch at the end is a portion of the wall which once formed
the west tower of the Ducal Palace. This delicate harmony of coloured
marbles and sculptured stone seems a rare and beautiful creation, not
of stone but of something more plastic, more mobile, so responsive is
it to the light, so luminous, so full of feeling. As we draw nearer and
it becomes more clearly defined, we see great slabs of marble sawn and
spread open like the pages of a book, corresponding in pattern as the
veining of a leaf. They are linked by marble rope-work, and between
them are inserted smaller slabs of delicately sculptured stone and a
wonderful coil of mosaic. It is a veritable patchwork wall, but no
less beautiful in its effect of harmony than in its details--the four
porphyry figures of embracing kings its corner-stone. This wall is
truly a key to the fabric of the church itself; it is like a window
into St. Mark’s, that treasury of Eastern spoil; the East is in every
vein, in every heart-beat of it. The spoil of the temples of ancient
gods furnished forth the Church of San Marco as it furnished the saint
himself. In this one angle we have cipollino and porphyry, serpentine
and verd-antico, marmo greco and eastern mosaic, pillars of granite
profound and glittering, breccia africana and paonazetto. The weight
of centuries is upon it all; ages of lives have gone to its making,
and it came to Venice only when generations had passed over its head.
For the human race it has never been but old; the mind loses itself in
speculation on that stupendous past that lies between us and the time
when stone was not. And yet how strangely through that long, enchanted
silence, when the centuries were endowing it with an immensity of
strength and hardness and endurance for which we have no word of
parallel but in its own nature, it has kept the similitude and mobility
of life, at once withholding and revealing the riches of its beauty.
How can we wonder that da Contarini, the strange and learned dreamer
of the Cinquecento, burst out into a rapture of mystic joy in the
presence of San Marco, “that golden church, built by the eternal gods,
of our protector, Messer San Marco”? He celebrates the pinnacles and
shining columns, the throng of glittering figures that burn like golden
spirits in the sunlight, the sculptured marbles polished with soft
Ethiopian sand. “It might be said that it has been gathered together
from all parts of the world.” He then proceeds to seek among the
marbles of San Marco those mysterious correspondences which the wonder
of men has always felt to exist between human nature and the nature of
the stone; he loses himself in contemplation of one after another of
the precious marbles that in wide surface or minute mosaic form the
priceless garment of St. Mark’s temple: diaspro, which must be seen in
broad extent to realise its strange radiance, like flocks of cloudlets
fleeting before the wind in the full illumination of the setting sun,
dazzling our eyes with light; or that other adamantine marble of
Africa, the breccia adriana di Tegoli, a harmony of greens before which
serpentine and verd-antico must bow; or the most precious porpora of
deep and glowing red; or that queen of all the stones, imperial in its
beauty, a magnetic stone indeed, drawing the spirit into its luminous
depths, weaving round it an enchanted web of secrecy, of divine
inter-relations, till the human soul seems to commune with the very
soul of colour--_diaspro sanguinoso_. What would not Sir Thomas Browne
have read in those eloquent and secret pages where wave follows wave of
colour, deep ocean green, pure carmine, translucent amethyst. Diaspro
sanguinoso! in the setting of a ring, in the mosaic of a pavement, it
is seen a dense green stone spotted with crimson--bloodstone. It is
as if you saw the human eye in one of those weird, symbolic paintings
of old time, isolated in its socket without the illumination of the
human countenance about it. This sanguinary jasper is too subtle, too
delicate, too mystical to belong to that titanic family of the stones
of Africa. The dreaming soil of Egypt might have given it birth; it
might own kinship with the myth of Aurora’s kiss; but to us it seems
fraught with the magic of a more distant East.
There have been many vindicators of the freedom of Venice; many
assertors that, though in appearance subject some time to Byzantium,
she has always been politically independent. To us it seems a matter
of lesser moment; but whether, in fact or in form, Venice were or
were not ever politically dependent on Byzantium, the fact of her
artistic dependence is one which she cannot deny without perjuring
herself before a thousand witnesses. Document after document more
durable than parchment--though many have already perished and many
perish daily--attests the debt of Venice to the East. Till she perish
altogether at the hands of a relentless, unregarding tyrant--a bastard
child of Time misnamed Progress--she must continue to bear witness to
her debt. So long as she breathes, each breath confesses it and the
East will lay her tribute on the tomb of Venice dead--lamenting as for
one of her own children.
Chapter Seven
TWO VENETIAN STATUES