Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
they had claimed as their own. These matters directly pertained to questions of church and papal prerogative. Where agendas came into conflict, the debate often unfolded along moral or spiritual lines. The specifics of the contest over memory and interpretation emerged from that debate.
A short letter from Innocent to Baldwin from November 1204 reveals the pope’s approach to the surprising conquest. Baldwin had sent his first letter to Innocent in May, but Genoese privateers captured the courier and delayed the letter’s arrival.7 Innocent began his letter by praising the miraculous nature of the conquest. This was not mere window dressing. The providential nature of the conquest was invoked by all involved across diverse genres (sermons, chronicles, diplomatic letters, poems, and so forth). But Innocent used his statement about God having miraculously effected the victory in order to assert his prerogatives over the new empire. He wrote, “[God] has deigned to work magnificent miracles with you for the praise and glory of His Name, for the honor and profit of the Apostolic See, and for the benefit and exaltation of the Christian people.”8 He placed Baldwin and his “land and people under the primary protection of St. Peter and under our special protection, resolutely ordering all archbishops, bishops, and all other church prelates, also kings, dukes, counts, and other princes, and all peoples that they support and defend your [Baldwin’s] lands and people, and they neither personally molest them nor have them molested by others.”9 Innocent promised to order his prelates to excommunicate and place under interdict any who might “molest” the new lands, and he instructed all of his clerics to assist the new emperor. He also extended the papal crusade indulgence, offering a remission of sins to those “lay crusaders” who helped defend the new Latin Empire. Innocent pledged to send Baldwin additional assistance, because he recognized that by helping Latin-ruled Constantinople, “the Holy Land might be more easily liberated from pagan hands.”10
Then Innocent issued a warning. In his view, the Byzantine Empire fell because God wished to punish the Greeks for defying Rome. He reasoned, “After the kingdom of the Greeks turned away from the obedience to the Apostolic See, it continuously descended from evil to worse evil until, by the just judgment of God, it was transferred from the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the obedient, from the schismatics to followers of the Latin rite, so that it might rise through the virtue of obedience to goodness because through the sin of disobedience it fell into evil.”11 Therefore, Innocent continued, Baldwin had best remain “in obedience” to Rome lest the same fate befall his empire. Innocent informed Baldwin that to obey Rome he would have to “diligently and faithfully make sure that ecclesiastical goods, both fixed and moveable, are protected until they might be properly organized in accordance with our authoritative decision, so that those things that are Caesar’s might be rendered to Caesar, and those things that are God’s might be rendered to God without confusion.”12 Placed at the close of the first formal communication between pontiff and new emperor and closely approximating biblical phrasing, this reference has considerable rhetorical weight.13 Innocent linked the survival of the empire to obedience to Rome and questioned the fate of church property. He probably suspected that some “confusion” had already taken place.
Innocent’s letter epitomizes his approach to the postconquest situation. First, he affirmed the miraculous nature of the victory. Second, he demanded specific actions from crusaders who wanted to avoid divine retribution for their sins. He coupled his historical analysis and providential interpretations with specific warnings. Carrot and stick—Innocent offered his support while demanding obedience. The fate of the vast wealth of the Greek church particularly concerned him.
Although chaos had initially reigned in the days after the Latin soldiers took Constantinople, “confusion” was not the biggest obstacle to satisfying the pope—and the chaotic looting of church property might well be labeled “confusion.” Rather, it was the more systematic appropriation of church wealth and position that demanded papal action. Two tenets of the March Pact addressed church matters. Following passages that detailed how six Venetians and six Franks would elect an emperor, the next section mandated that whichever party—the Franks or the Venetians—lost the election, that party would receive authority over Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate. Moreover, as noted above, the pact stated that “sufficient quantities of the possessions of the churches ought to be provided to the clerics and the churches so that they might live and be sustained in an honorable fashion. The remaining possessions of the churches, indeed, should be divided and distributed in accordance with the aforesaid agreement.”14 To secure this agreement, the parties asked that the pope “bind by the chain of excommunication” anyone who broke the pact.15 Innocent had no quarrel with much of this treaty, including the method of choosing an emperor, the clauses that refused access to the empire to anyone at war with Venice, the creation of a council to determine who received which fiefs, and even the means of dividing the secular loot. No pontiff, however, could have accepted the provisions for church property and the patriarchate, let alone given them official papal sanction.
The patriarch of Constantinople was arguably the second most powerful prelate in Christendom, following only the pope himself. Thomas Madden argues that the Venetians had always planned on losing the imperial election and taking control of Hagia Sophia, since Doge Enrico Dandolo had neither the authority to claim the city for the Venetian republic nor the desire to start his own imperial dynasty. Moreover, along with the title of patriarch came the control of the cathedral itself and all of its vast properties, leadership of the local church, and, most important, the ability to keep the newly Latin patriarchate from eroding the privileges of the Venetian-dominated patriarchate of Grado, the patriarchal seat located on an island not far from Venice.16 Under no circumstances would Innocent allow secular figures to determine the fate of the patriarchate, but his relationship with the Venetians and their leader had been especially fraught, and perhaps this contributed to the ensuing tensions over the issue.17 These tensions would linger well into the second decade of the Latin patriarchate’s existence.
The distribution of church property was an even more contentious problem.18 The pope’s urgent concern stemmed from the crusaders’ decision to give themselves the right to redistribute the vast wealth of the Greek church.19 The crusaders had agreed to reserve the churches—the actual buildings—for various clerics on the crusade, but such was the limit of their generosity. The churches of Constantinople controlled vast quantities of land and property throughout the medieval city. This city had served as the “new Jerusalem” for generations of Greek emperors and garnered wealth from the donations of pilgrims and the bequests of the devout.20 The crusade leadership decided that it would give its priests only as much of the goods and property of the churches as the priests would need to sustain themselves appropriately. All other plunder taken from the churches was fair game for the secular crusaders. Furthermore, these secular leaders decided how much a given church needed to support itself.
Innocent was likely aware of at least the basic tenets of the March Pact by the time he wrote that first letter to Baldwin in November 1204. The pact itself was not enregistered in Rome until January 1205, and Alfred Andrea speculates that Baldwin delayed sending it to Innocent because he knew that it would “provoke papal ire.”21 A long letter from Baldwin to Rome from May 1204 (as opposed to the short missive that was delayed, as mentioned above) details the course of the conquest but does not mention the fate of the churches. Baldwin describes the battles, the multiple elections to determine the emperor in the last weeks before the sack, and his own election, and offers many hopeful words for the future, but he obfuscates the details of the pact, already enacted. He pretends, for example, that the appointment of electors occurred nearly of its own accord, rather than having been scrupulously planned out in detail weeks before the final assault.22
One might posit that Baldwin suspected that the provisions concerning the churches would cause problems. He may have wanted more time to assess and divide church property before receiving a specific papal edict forbidding any such action. Throughout the crusade, the army’s leaders used fait accompli to counter papal objections, and they seem to have continued in this mode. This would explain Baldwin’s delay in informing the pope of what, precisely, was going on in Constantinople. The word “confusion” in Innocent’s first letter to the new emperor indicates that any attempts at suppression