CHAPTER 7
At one time it was fashionable among historians to blame the outcome of the Fourth Crusade on Venice and Doge Dandolo, reasoning that since the Venetians profited from the conquest of Constantinople, they must have planned it. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this explanation was seasoned with a dash of Marxism that cast religion as a tool of bourgeois oppression. Thus, it was argued, the greedy Venetian capitalists used fake piety to persuade the naive crusaders to divert to Constantinople and win an empire for them. Crusade historians have long since abandoned this fiction for the simple reason that it makes no sense. The Fourth Crusade shattered the stable markets on which Venice depended and forced Venetian citizens to spend their lives and their treasure building an empire of their own to replace one that had been, for the most part, quite acceptable to them. Nonetheless, one still runs across in novels and guidebooks (the traditional last stand for poor history) those crafty Venetians cleverly twisting the Fourth Crusade to their own ends.
The entire period of the Latin Empire of Constantinople involved careful risk management for the Venetians. True, the doge had become “lord of three-eighths of the Roman Empire,” but just what did that actually mean? The Venetians never attempted to claim all the lands that had been given to them in the Treaty of Partition, remaining content to acquire islands and ports of strategic importance in the Aegean in order to safeguard their merchants. Three-eighths of Constantinople also belonged to them, yet it was not the great city it had once been. On the eve of the crusader conquest as many as four hundred thousand people lived within the walls of the capital and probably more than a million in the metropolitan area. By the 1230s the population of Constantinople had declined to around forty thousand. Much of the city lay in ruins, decimated by the fires of 1203–4 and abandoned by its citizens. Nevertheless, Constantinople remained a thriving port and the Venetians were at least able to exclude their enemies—which meant the Genoese—from doing business there. Venice was supposed to have control over the patriarchate of Constantinople, but that, too, never happened. Pope Innocent III refused to ratify the election of the Venetian monk, Thomas Morosini, to the patriarchate, although he later appointed him to the office to keep peace in Constantinople. Subsequent patriarchs were Venetian, too, but Innocent and his successors worked tirelessly to maintain the freedom of the Catholic Church in the Byzantine East—and that meant fighting any attempt to make the patriarch of Constantinople as Venetian as the patriarch of Grado.
The Venetian community in Constantinople grew substantially after the conquest. After all, it owned a large portion of the city and had no serious commercial rivals. This led to the expansion of a Venetian government in Constantinople headed by an official known as a podestà, who had his own court of advisers much like the doge in Venice. Friction sometimes occurred between the home and provincial governments, but there was sufficient movement of people and goods between Venice and Constantinople that the two were never estranged. In the sixteenth century the historian Daniele Barbaro claimed that the provincial government in Constantinople had become so powerful that the home government seriously considered moving the capital from Venice to Constantinople. Historians used to give this story some credence, but in truth it never happened. Not only was this momentous debate left unremarked by earlier Venetian historians, the plan itself makes little sense. Moving the capital to a troublesome colony is not a victory for the mother country but its complete demise. No colonial power in history has ever contemplated, let alone enacted, such a plan. Another complication is the fact that Constantinople was already the seat of an empire. Even if the Venetians could have removed the French rulers (not an easy prospect), it would have meant war with just about everyone. The French would naturally take it badly, but so, too, would the pope. A Crusade against Venice would then not be out of the question. In return for all this strife Venice would have acquired a dilapidated capital surrounded by enemies while leaving behind the impregnable and prosperous city of the lagoon. No one, especially not a patriotic Venetian, would seriously consider so foolish a proposal.
This is not to say that Venice gained nothing from the conquest of Constantinople. Venetian military power grew dramatically in this period—all of it in response to the suddenly dangerous world in which the Venetians found themselves. The thirteenth century saw the creation of the state Arsenale, a vast workshop for the production of war vessels that would remain active for centuries—indeed, it remains a military installation to this day. Venetian expansion into the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas also came at a fortuitous time. The recent victories of Genghis Khan in China and westward had allowed stable trade routes to develop along the Silk Road stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the markets of the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Syria. At the same time, the growth of towns, revival of trade, and return of capital in western Europe meant that there was now a ready market for Eastern luxury goods, which the Venetians were in an ideal position to exploit.
Although Venice did well in the thirteenth century, the Latin Empire of Constantinople did not. Almost from its beginning, the new state foundered. Rival Greek states at Nicaea, Epiros, and Trebizond, along with the troublesome Bulgarians, jostled for dominance in the region. Tattered Constantinople was habitually short of money and reduced to begging the West for military and economic aid. Emperor Baldwin II (1228–61) spent his teenage years traveling from one European court to the next, receiving fine meals and high promises, but very little help. He was in Paris when he learned that his barons in Constantinople had pawned the precious relic of the Crown of Thorns, venerated in the imperial city for nearly a thousand years. It appears that a consortium of Venetian merchants in Constantinople had loaned the barons a large sum of money and were given the crown as collateral. If the funds were not repaid on time, the relic would be retained and sent back to Venice. Needless to say, the Venetian merchants hoped that the money would never be repaid.
In Paris, Baldwin II begged his kinsman, the young king of France, Louis IX (later St. Louis), to redeem the Crown of Thorns. Louis agreed, provided that the emperor make a gift of the crown to the French monarchy in gratitude for its support and hope for future aid. Baldwin agreed. With that settled, Louis sent two Dominican friars to Constantinople to pay the debt and claim the relic. When they arrived, however, they heard that the Venetian merchants had already packed it aboard ship and were making final preparations to sail for Venice. It was an odd scene indeed—a creditor trying desperately to avoid payment for a loan he hoped would go into default. Eventually the Dominicans caught up with the Venetians and delivered a bill of guarantee for the loan from Louis IX. Strictly speaking, that was not payment, so the Venetian merchants had some room to negotiate. They finally agreed that they would all sail together to Venice, where the Crown of Thorns would remain until the king of France could pay the outstanding debt. This they did, although weather and Greeks unsuccessfully conspired to keep the relic from leaving Constantinople. For several months after its arrival in Venice in early 1239, the Crown of Thorns was placed proudly on display in the church of San Marco. But all too quickly it was again packed up and transported across the Alps to Paris, where Louis received it with great joy. To house the relic, he constructed the spectacular Sainte-Chapelle. Amazingly, the Crown of Thorns weathered the storms of revolution and remains in Notre Dame today.
No amount of Venetian money could save the Latin Empire. The Greek ruler in Nicaea, John Vatatzes, managed to eliminate his rivals and surround enfeebled Constantinople. It seemed only a matter of time before the city would fall to him. Nevertheless, Vatatzes continued to encourage every effort to overcome the differences between Greek Orthodox and Catholic clergy in a vain attempt to reunify the Church and thereby receive Constantinople freely from the pope himself. The theological sticking points were fairly trivial—the use of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father or from the Father and the Son, and the primacy of Rome over all other sees. What could not be overcome, however, was the ever-growing animosity that Greeks felt for western Europeans. They had always judged westerners to be rude barbarians, the descendants of those who had destroyed the Roman Empire in the West. As a result, they often chalked up theological disputes to the poor state of education in the backward West.
Yet by the thirteenth century that line of reasoning no longer carried much weight. Europe had, in fact, surpassed the Byzantine East in wealth, power, and learning. The universities in France, England, and Italy produced world-class scholars who could defend Catholic theology and refused to be dismissed with the shake of a Greek head. The proceedings of dialogues between Orthodox prelates and Catholic friars in Nicaea still survive, and it is clear from those records that the Greeks had their hands full keeping up with the new apologists. Any member of an ancient culture, supplanted by a new and occasionally ungainly one, naturally resents the upstarts. In Byzantium this resentment had been growing for centuries. The crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204 helped to feed it, but it by no means created it.
The Venetians stayed out of such theological discussions. They were busy enough simply policing the shipping lanes between Venice, Constantinople, Crete, and Syria. It was a difficult task, but the thirteenth-century Venetian chronicler, Martino Da Canale, assures us that they were extremely successful. An extraordinary amount of cargo made its way across the eastern Mediterranean and into Venetian markets, further expanding the wealth and population of the rapidly growing city. Venice’s primary rival at this time was Genoa, whose merchants did business in many of the same areas (although the Genoese remained unwelcome in Constantinople). On occasion Venetians and Genoese would swallow their dislike and band together against a common enemy, as they did with Emperor Frederick II, who waged war across Italy against the popes and the Lombards. But usually, the two powers entertained some level of aggression. It was not always easy to gauge their relations. Although Venice had an increasingly complex government to oversee their expanding empire, the Genoese did business in a much more casual manner, as families struggled against one another for dominance. Against their enemies Venetians sent war fleets; Genoese sent pirates.
In 1255 a major war broke out between Venice and Genoa. It began in Acre, the sprawling port city of the ever-diminishing crusader kingdom in Syria. Indeed, by 1255 there was little left of the old kingdom beyond Acre. But the growing danger from the Mamluk empire in Egypt did not draw the Christian groups together, so consumed were they by factionalism. The Venetians and Genoese each had their own quarters in Acre. A few years earlier a Venetian had murdered a Genoese resident, and anger over that incident grew so heated that a Genoese mob took up arms and attacked the Venetian Quarter, killing many. Venice retaliated by sending a fleet under the command of Lorenzo Tiepolo, the son of a previous doge, who broke the chain of the Acre harbor, burned the Genoese ships docked there, and occupied St. Sabas, a Genoese church or abbey on the border of the two quarters. Thus began the War of St. Sabas, a battle between two Western powers that would play out in the Eastern theater of Syria. After several major engagements at Acre and Tyre, the Genoese were at last defeated, giving Venice a bittersweet victory in a kingdom that was already approaching death.
Much the same could be said of Venice’s position at that time in Constantinople. Upset by their defeat at Acre, the Genoese allied themselves with Michael Palaeologus, the regent of the Nicene emperor who would soon take the crown for himself. Like Vatatzes before him, Palaeologus was determined to win back Constantinople and Genoa was determined to help—provided that it harmed Venice in the process. Indeed, even a papal excommunication and interdict of Genoa did not shake the Genoese commitment to supporting the Greeks. In 1261 a portion of Constantinople’s fortifications was left unguarded and Michael Palaeologus’s nearby forces simply entered and secured the city. The Venetians in Constantinople were prepared to fight, but when Michael offered to allow them to leave with their vessels and goods intact, they accepted. And so the Latin Empire, born of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, was in an instant extinct. In truth, it had rarely been more than the city of Constantinople. After seizing the Byzantine throne for himself, Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus rewarded the Genoese by allowing them to establish themselves in Constantinople at Galata as well as in port cities in the Black Sea. This last concession was a particularly harmful blow to Venice, for these ports were at the end of the Silk Road. The money that could be made in the Black Sea was extraordinary, and the Genoese had usurped Venice’s position there.
The loss of Constantinople did nothing, however, to diminish Venice’s holdings in the Aegean and the Adriatic, as well as the all-important island of Crete. Michael VIII may have hoped that the Genoese, who were now serving as Byzantium’s navy, could be used to neutralize Venetian power in the region. Yet Michael’s success did not transfer to Genoa. In battle after battle in the Aegean, the Venetians kept the upper hand against their rivals. Changing tactics, the emperor began to make overtures to the Venetians. He returned to their merchants some portions of Constantinople, although he still excluded Venice from the Black Sea. Finally, in 1268, the Venetians were fully reinstated in the Byzantine Empire. Once again they returned to their quarter in Constantinople, where they had done business for centuries. Genoa, of course, was less than pleased.
Although Venetians could be found in almost every market or town of any size in the East, few of them ever traveled as far away as Marco Polo—arguably the most famous Venetian who ever lived. The Polos were a well-established family in Venice who had made their fortune in overseas trade and had settled in various portions of the city. They were not adventurers, but they were good businessmen always seeking new markets. Marco’s father, Nicolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, had been doing business in Constantinople in 1260—just one year before it fell to Michael Palaeologus. There they had purchased a collection of jewels and sailed north into the Black Sea with plans to sell the precious stones to some Mongol princes, who had the money and taste for such lavishness. They traveled to the court of Barka Khan on the Volga River, where they made a good return on their investment and so decided to remain for the rest of the year. Just then, however, a war between Barka and the khan of Persia broke out, making the roads back to the Black Sea unsafe. When word reached the Polos that Constantinople had fallen and Venetians were no longer welcome there, they decided to venture eastward, crossing the desert to Bukhara (today in Uzbekistan), where they remained for three years, learning the languages and customs of the Mongols while continuing to make a good living buying, selling, and offering occasional advice about the West. While there, they became friendly with some ambassadors from the khan of Persia who were on their way to the court of the new ruler of the Mongol Empire, the Great Khan, Kublai. Several Catholic missionaries had been sent to the Mongols during the preceding decades. The ambassadors assured the Polos that Kublai was fascinated by the Catholic religion and western European culture in general, and that he would lavish the Venetians with gifts and honors if they would visit him. That was enough for the Polos. They enthusiastically joined the caravan and headed east.
When the Polo brothers arrived at the court of the Great Khan (which was probably at Karakorum in Mongolia), Kublai treated them like royalty and peppered them with every sort of question about the Western world, just as the Persians said he would. He was eager to know about the Roman emperors, by which he meant the German and Byzantine rulers. The new forms of learning that could be found in European universities also fascinated him. Indeed, he wrote a letter to Pope Clement IV (1265–68) asking him to send a hundred scholars who could teach the Mongols about thetrivium and quadrivium (advanced courses of study) and who could convince them of the truth of the Catholic faith. Kublai Khan was so interested in Christianity that he asked the Polo brothers to personally deliver his letter to the pope and, on the way, to acquire some of the oil used to light the lamp of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Duly tasked, the brothers made the long journey back to Venice, finally arriving in 1269. They discovered, however, that Clement was dead and the cardinals deadlocked on his replacement. Indeed, there would be no new pope until the election of Gregory X two years later. Gregory, who had previously been a papal legate in Egypt and Acre, was keenly interested in the Great Khan’s letter. Although the westward expansion of the vast Mongol Empire worried Europeans, many also saw in it a ray of hope. The Christian West had run upon hard times, and was in desperate need of allies wherever they could be found. Muslim power had soared under Sultan Baybars of Egypt, who waged relentless jihad against Christians with his fearsome slave armies, known as Mamluks. The battered remnants of the Christian states of the eastern Mediterranean were no match for him. In 1263 Baybars led a devastating raid into Galilee and destroyed the cathedral of Nazareth there. Two years later he conquered Christian Caesarea and Arsuf. In 1266 he took the Templar fortress of Safad, massacring the inhabitants after promising to spare their lives, and he did much the same to the city of Jaffa the following year. The greatest blow to Christendom, though, came with Baybars’s brutal conquest of Antioch in 1268. The sultan ordered the doors of the city closed and the inhabitants, including thousands of women and children, massacred. The atrocity shocked even Muslim chroniclers. Upset to learn that the ruler of Antioch, Count Bohemond VI, was absent for the event, Baybars even sent him a letter describing the carnage that he missed:
You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Gospels scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next, your palace lying unrecognizable, the Church of St. Paul and the Cathedral of St. Peter pulled down and destroyed; then you would have said: “Would that I were dust, and that no letter had ever brought me such news!”
With the relentless expansion of Islamic armies into Christian territories, it is not surprising that many in the West wondered when, or if, God would act to save them. More than a century earlier a story had begun circulating in Europe of a “Prester John.” It was said that this mysterious figure was a powerful and wise monarch who ruled over a vast and extraordinarily wealthy Oriental empire. Some claimed that he was the successor of one of the Magi who had adored Christ in Bethlehem. The story gained wide currency and was considered at least plausible by both peasants and potentates alike. Faced with the possibility of the extinction of the Christian West, Prester John seemed to offer a way out. If the Christians of Europe could inform him of their plight, surely he would come to their rescue by crushing their Muslim oppressors.
The Great Khan certainly seemed like Prester John. He had a vast empire that had already conquered Muslim Persia as well as the capital of the Muslim caliphate in Baghdad. Many of the Mongol leaders were, in fact, Eastern Christians known as Nestorians. Previous popes and even King Louis IX of France had written to earlier Great Khans seeking aid and information, but with less than encouraging results. In truth, the Mongols did not factor religion into their military campaigns, but simply conquered whoever was in their path. It just so happened that Muslims were in their path. Kublai Khan’s interest in Christianity, however, seemed like a breakthrough. Pope Gregory X penned a reply letter, which he gave to the Polo brothers to return to Kublai. Rather than send the requested hundred scholars (which would have been expensive and difficult in any case), the pope sent two Dominicans. The Polos were also joined by Nicolò’s son, the adventurous and occasionally theatrical seventeen-year-old Marco.
The group faced a long and difficult journey eastward, beset by war, storms, and severe cold. The Dominicans made it only as far as Armenia before local violence convinced them to return home. The three Polos pressed onward all the way to Beijing, now the capital of the Mongol Empire, where they found the Great Khan who was overjoyed to see them. He devoured the pope’s letter and revered the holy oil from Jerusalem. But he was most impressed by young Marco Polo, with whom he became quite close. In later years he would even send Marco to represent him in distant lands. Kublai Khan particularly liked Marco’s very Venetian approach to his ambassadorships. In Venice, ambassadors were essentially spies; it was their job not only to relate information to a foreign court but also to send back to the Venetian government dispatches reporting everything of importance, be it customs, rumors, or even local foods. Marco did the same for the Great Khan. For example, when reporting on the Hindus of central India, he wrote:
The people go to battle with lances and shields, but without clothing, and are a despicable unwarlike race. They do not kill cattle nor any kind of animals for food, but when they wish to eat the meat of sheep or other animals or birds they hire Muslims, who are not bound by the same laws and customs, to slaughter them. Both men and women wash their whole bodies in water twice every day, that is, in the morning and the evening. Until this ablution has taken place they neither eat nor drink; and the person who should neglect this observance would be regarded as a heretic. . . . When they drink they do not put the vessel to the mouth, but hold it above the head and pour the liquid into the mouth, not letting the vessel on any account touch their lips. When they give a drink to a stranger they do not hand the vessel to him, but, if he does not have his own vessel, they pour the wine or other liquid into his hands from which he drinks it as from a cup.
These detailed reports formed the basis of Marco Polo’s famous Travels, a book that devotes much more attention to foreign lands than to the royal court at Beijing.
Marco Polo remained under the employ of Kublai Khan for almost two decades. His travels brought him across the length and breadth of the massive Mongol Empire and as far beyond as Sumatra and perhaps even Japan. After so long away from home, the Polos finally petitioned the khan to give them leave to return. But Kublai refused, not wanting to lose so useful a friend as Marco. He was finally persuaded, however, to allow the experienced Venetian travelers to escort an important princess to her new husband, the khan of Persia. Kublai sent them away with many ships, much gold, lavish presents, and letters for the leaders of Europe. The journey westward was not easy, and it took several years for the travelers to make their way to Persia and then to reach Trebizond, Constantinople, and finally Venice. When they arrived the three travelers, dressed in rough Mongol garb and now more than twenty-five years older, were almost unrecognizable, even to their family. Word soon spread across Venice of the dramatic return of the Polos and, of course, everyone wanted to hear their stories. Marco never tired of telling them. They were tales of wonder so filled with multitudes of people, goods, and riches that many Venetians began to suspect Marco of rather blatant exaggeration. Indeed, he was soon known on the streets of Venice as Il Milione, which is perhaps best translated as “Mr. Millions.”
Although they might be suspected of hyperbole, no one could doubt that the Polos had returned with extraordinary wealth. They built a new family palazzo in the parish of San Giovanni Crisostomo, which still remains today at the Corte del Milion. Later Venetian writers told compelling stories about the return of Marco Polo, which, given the travelers’ love of the dramatic, may or may not be true. In one, told by Giambattista Ramusio in the sixteenth century, the three travelers gave a lavish banquet in their palazzo to celebrate their return. During each course, servants brought new robes of the richest satins and velvets for the Polos to wear. Finally, when the feast was concluded, Marco Polo left the chamber and returned in the dirty Mongol robe that he had worn during his journey to Venice. This naturally caused a stir among the guests—and not a little indignation. Then, on cue, Nicolò and Maffeo rose, approached Marco with daggers, and cut out the lining of the tattered garment. Onto the floor spilled hundreds of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies—the magnificent tokens of the Great Khan’s affection.
It was not the Polo fortune, though, that was enriching Venice in the thirteenth century. Every day in the Rialto markets sums of money that dwarfed the cascading gems of Marco Polo’s robe changed hands between Venetian and foreign merchants. Venice’s location near roads and rivers snaking into Europe and its maritime dominance of the Adriatic continued to make it a natural place to do business. Every sort of commodity could be found in Venice, which served as a major clearinghouse for East-West commerce. The burgeoning wealth of the Venetians could be seen clearly enough in the physical changes to the city. It was during the thirteenth century that the basic framework of the Venice that we see today was set. The canals were dredged, the land stabilized, the areas defined. No longer a collection of islands, Venice had become a single great and utterly unique city. It was probably during the reign of Doge Vitale II Michiel, whose murder ushered in Venice’s governmental reforms, that the city was divided into six sestieri (districts) for administrative purposes. Those six—San Marco, Castello, Canareggio, Santa Croce, San Polo, and Dorsoduro—are still used today, not only for local administration but also for the delivery of mail. (Addresses in Venice are notoriously difficult to decipher because they consist of only a number and a sestiere.)
The Piazza San Marco had already begun to take on its current form in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the Grand Canal did as well. Before 1200 the focus of life for most Venetians was the open campo outside each island compound’s church. However, as the city filled up, becoming one rather than many, the divisions between those compounds were blurred. The great open space of the Piazza San Marco became the city’s campo—a place for the citizens of a unified state to gather. In the same way, the Grand Canal became its central boulevard, filled with traffic of all kinds. Where the palaces of rich Venetians had previously faced their local campi, they now turned toward the Grand Canal. The wealthiest Venetians jostled for position along the waterway, each attempting to outdo the other in grandeur. The oldest surviving such palazzo is the Ca’ Farsetti, built by Ranieri Dandolo, the son of Doge Enrico Dandolo. This impressive Gothic structure near the Rialto Bridge is today used as Venice’s city hall. The old conquering doge, who came of age during the mid-twelfth century, had lived in a modest wooden family home facing the campo of San Luca on the site of what is today the Palazzo Corner-Valmaran. His son, though, built a grand stone structure that provided not only visibility for the Dandolo family but also room for various brothers, spouses, and children to live undisturbed, and warehouse space for conducting the family business. This style of palazzo would become characteristic of Venice—a family home that was at once attractive and functional. However, unlike family palaces in other Italian cities, the Venetian structures remained unfortified—a feature that speaks volumes about the lack of factionalism and lawlessness in the Republic of Venice.
Although the Christian world was shrinking during the Middle Ages, the people of Europe remained intensely pious. Indeed, the victories of Islam only underscored for Christians the displeasure of God and the urgent need to repent and return to him. Lay piety movements swept across Europe, especially in the growing towns and cities of the thirteenth century. Nowhere was this more evident than Venice, which continued to expand in wealth and size. Venetians donated much of their growing wealth to ecclesiastical institutions, which in turn meant larger parish churches and the promotion of additional monasteries. In the thirteenth century this also meant the rapid acceptance of the mendicant orders. The first of these new orders was founded by St. Francis of Assisi, the son of a wealthy Italian cloth merchant. Francis and his companions gave up all their possessions to preach and minister to the poor in the expanding urban centers of Europe. They embraced humility, closely following the simple instructions that Jesus Christ had given to his apostles in Matthew 10:8: “Freely have you received; freely give.” In 1210 Pope Innocent III had approved the new Order of the Friars Minor (Little Brothers), also known as the Franciscans. It grew at an astonishing rate. The friars were revered for their selflessness and holiness. As wealth grew in the commercial cities of northern Italy, many were the merchants who considered how rich men tended to fare in the parables and sermons of Christ. The Franciscans, who owned nothing, offered these wealthy men a way to spiritual fulfillment, either by joining the order or financially supporting its charitable work. St. Francis attained a level of popularity in medieval Europe similar to that of modern music and movie stars (although the quiet humility of Francis has no modern parallel in the entertainment industry). He visited Venice in 1219 on his way to join the Fifth Crusade and again in 1220 on his return from Egypt. According to tradition, Francis founded a new convent on a Venetian island, which was subsequently named for him and his voyage: San Francesco del Deserto.
The Franciscans were not the only friars in the streets of Venice. While Francis was forming his order, another preacher, St. Dominic, was working in southern France to combat the Cathar heresy, a dualist belief that rejected the Catholic Church. Innocent III approved the Dominican order in 1216 and it spread almost as quickly as the Franciscans. Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans lived and worked in the streets, owning nothing. But Dominic had founded an order of preachers equipped to defend the Catholic faith and to care for the souls of the faithful. Dominicans, therefore, valued education more than Franciscans did—at least at first. Both orders, however, typified a spirit of renewal and reform that permeated late medieval Europe.
In the early years of the Franciscan order one could support the friars with food, shelter, and other kindnesses, but little else. They had no churches—indeed, St. Francis had personally pulled apart a structure that the people of Assisi had attempted to build for him. But Francis died in 1226 and shortly thereafter Franciscan rules on property usage were modified. The Venetians, who included a good share of wealthy men concerned for the health of their souls, moved quickly to establish the friars in their own city. Among them was Doge Giacomo Tiepolo (1229–49), a man from one of Venice’s old families who had served as the first governor of Crete and podestà of the Venetian colony in Constantinople before his election as doge. Tiepolo donated empty lands in the city to the Franciscans and Dominicans for the construction of churches. To the Dominicans went a marshy area north of the parish of Santa Maria Formosa on which the friars had already built a small oratory. Tiepolo’s land grant of June 1234, which survives, has an urgency that medieval men and women often felt for the spiritual well-being of their community. “Their [the Dominicans’] presence in the city of Venice,” Tiepolo wrote, “is seen by us and the entire population as a pressing necessity.”
The Dominicans began at once building a stone church, which they dedicated to Saints John and Paul. The John and Paul in question, however, were not the famous apostles of the New Testament, but two fourth-century martyrs who were the patrons of the Dominican church in Rome. SS. Giovanni e Paolo (or, as it became known in Venetian, Zanipolo) was completed quickly, thanks to steady contributions from numerous devout Venetians. Indeed, so many donations continued to flow in even after the church was completed that the Dominicans decided to demolish it in 1333 and begin work on the present massive Italian Gothic structure. As preachers and theologians, the Dominicans had become the guardians of orthodox belief, the protectors of Christian truth. They were holy men and it is not surprising, then, that people wanted to be as close to them as possible. In Venice, this can be seen in the desire of doges to be buried in the Dominicans’ great church. At least twenty-five Venetian doges still rest in its confines. The old practice of donning a Benedictine habit on one’s deathbed and choosing burial among the monks of a monastery was replaced with a tomb among the friars wearing the coarse habit of the street preachers. The Dominicans’ benefactor, Doge Giacomo Tiepolo, was buried at SS. Giovanni e Paolo in a stone sarcophagus placed in a courtyard before the church. In 1431 his tomb—which also holds his son, Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo (1268–75)—was lifted off the ground and mounted on the facade of the new Gothic church. There it remains today, to the left of the main door, largely ignored by everyone save the Venetian children who use it as a soccer goal.
Two years after Doge Giacomo Tiepolo’s grant to the Dominicans, an abandoned abbey near the parish of San Tomà was likewise donated to the Franciscans. In 1250 they began construction there on a church dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (or just the Frari, as Venetians soon called it) benefited from the same levels of financial support that helped the Dominicans across town. The first Franciscan church was completed in 1338 and almost immediately a new one was begun. Like SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the new Frari was a magnificent Gothic church, rivaling the Dominican structure in every way. And, indeed, rivalry between the two orders was at least one factor in their respective efforts. Many were the prominent Venetians who wished to be buried in this soaring temple, although it was not as popular with the doges as Zanipolo. The Frari remains today an amazing structure, decorated with Renaissance masterworks, yet still maintaining its medieval ambience.
Doge Giacomo Tiepolo was also long remembered for his Statuto of 1242. This extensive codification of Venetian civil law was built on the work of Doge Enrico Dandolo (or perhaps his son as vice-doge) to produce an organized collection of laws and procedures for administering justice with regard to property claims. Because population was exploding within the confines of a shifting geography, thirteenth-century Venice had no shortage of property disputes. The wealthier and more populous the city became, the more cases came before the city’s judges. In earlier centuries these were argued before the doge, accompanied later by his court, yet the rise of the wealthy middle class in Venice and the ballooning caseload forced substantial changes in the system. Plaintiffs would bring their disputes to at least two judges and be represented by at least one advocate (usually someone well acquainted with the law, or at least with the judges). Preliminary hearings and testimonies could occur at various places in the city, but the final judgment for all cases still required the presence of the doge, who had almost nothing to do with the decisions themselves. Only when the judges were deadlocked could he decide a case. Tiepolo’s Statuto was of extraordinary importance, forming the basis of Venetian civil law for several centuries.
Venetian government also grew and evolved to meet the needs of the teeming metropolis. The conservative Venetians cherished their traditions, yet allied with their solid business sense was a constant search for improvement and refinement. The growing number of Venetian citizens and the skyrocketing levels of wealth continued apace. As had been true for centuries, new families who wanted political power to match their economic clout were able to percolate to the top of Venetian society. Throughout the early thirteenth century the number of councillors in the doge’s court continued to grow. Indeed, the group became so large that it began meeting separately from the doge and his Small Council. This larger group ultimately became the Great Council, the engine of the Venetian republic. Like its ad hoc predecessors, the Great Council was made up of important men from wealthy families, and as their numbers grew, they became the representatives of the people of Venice. They were not strictly representative, of course, since they were not directly elected by the citizens. Rather, membership in the Great Council was by internal election and the position was renewable indefinitely. However, the members, who numbered perhaps four hundred or more by the mid-thirteenth century, lived in parishes across the city and were closely associated with the laborers and guildsmen in their neighborhoods. Since all political power in Venice flowed from the people, the Great Council became the new face of that power.
As with any such body, there was a tendency toward factionalism and party loyalty. The Venetians, though, fought this tendency with every fiber of their will. Perhaps the well-traveled Venetians saw enough of the carnage and ruin that factional warfare had produced in other Italian cities and the Byzantine Empire to acquire a healthy fear of it at home. Or perhaps their aversion to factionalism was simply a determination by each wealthy family that if it alone could not rule Venice, no one else would. Whatever the case, the organization of the Venetian government would always be one of multitudes of checks and balances, each designed to keep any one man or group of men from acquiring extraordinary power.
This dynamic is most visible in the labyrinthine procedures that the Venetians developed to elect their doges. Gone were the days when the people would pour into an open area and begin shouting names. The election committee established in 1178 continued, although it was expanded to forty-one members to avoid the possibility of deadlock. But what if a faction was able to stack the forty-one to claim the dogeship for itself? The new Venetian system made that impossible. It was designed to filter out partisanship while enlisting the wisdom of men and the will of God to make the best choice for the people of Venice.
The election began with the assembling of the Great Council. After the procedures were read aloud, an urn was filled with wax balls, one for each member. Within thirty of those balls was a slip of parchment reading simply “Elector.” The Venetians prayed before and during the assembly that God would make his will known through the drawing of lots. In random order each of the members of the Great Council walked to the urn. A boy, who had been plucked from the streets at random, withdrew a ball for each of the councillors. If it contained parchment, the member’s name would be announced and he would go into an adjoining room. At the same time, any other members from the new elector’s family departed from the Great Council Chamber, since only one person from each clan was allowed to serve on any electoral committee. This process naturally took some time, but at the end the thirty electors were sworn in to do their duty.
Yet it was not these thirty who would elect the doge. Indeed, this was not the end of the process, but its very beginning. Another urn was promptly produced and the thirty drew wax balls again to reduce them by lot to nine. Then those nine prayed for wisdom and elected a committee of forty men, who were summoned to the chamber to take over the process. Wax balls were again produced and those forty were reduced to twelve. The twelve survivors then cast ballots for a new committee of twenty-five electors. When the twenty-five were sworn in, they marched to the urn and drew more balls until only nine remained. Those nine then elected a new committee of forty-five men. The forty-five drew wax balls and were reduced to eleven. After so many elections and lotteries it was the solemn charge of these eleven men to elect, not the doge, but the final electoral committee of forty-one!
The meeting of the final forty-one was filled with ceremony and prayer. The electors were locked away in the palace so that they could not be influenced by anyone outside. First, forty-one parchments—each with a number from one to forty-one—were randomly distributed to the electors. Then, beginning with the elector that held number one, each would stand and nominate a Venetian to be the next doge. There was a fair bit of repetition in these nominations, since there is no record of there ever having been more than seven or eight men nominated. After the nominations the first nominator would usually say something regarding his reasons for choosing this particular man. Then the nominee himself would be summoned (if he was not already an elector) and he would make a short speech. He would then be locked away in a small room while the electors brought up every rumor or reason they could muster why the nominee should not be doge. The nominee then returned to the chamber and the objections were read to him, without attribution to any members. This was his opportunity to refute the criticisms and charges. Afterward, he was again removed and the same opportunity was given to members who wished to cite reasons why the nominee was suitable. Finally, the forty-one members proceeded in order toward the head of the room, where there was a white box (for the nominee) and a red box (against the nominee). The electors anonymously placed a red ball inscribed with a cross into the box of their choice. After the ballot, the white box was opened, and if it had twenty-five balls inside, the nominee was elected. If not, the entire process was repeated for the second nominee, and then the third, and so on.
This process of choosing the highest office in Venice was obviously not meant to be streamlined. Quite the opposite—it was meant to be so cumbersome that only God could influence it. The new doge was still presented to the people of the city for their approval, but there was no means for them to reject him short of riot. The usual response, though, was one of joy—and not only because the newly crowned doge threw gold coins to the people. The peaceful and secure election was an affirmation of the stability of Venice—and stability is not only pleasant, but extremely good for business.