Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
University. The provost’s office and the Department of History at Dominican University provided support for image rights, maps, and indexing.
I am exceptionally grateful to Kathleen Rhoades, the interlibrary loan librarian at Dominican University, who made it possible for me to access books from libraries across North America and Europe. I am also grateful to the staffs at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidese in Milan, and the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives for their assistance. The Procuratoria of the Basilica of San Marco, the Patriarchate of Venice, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople all opened many doors for me along the way and periodically allowed me to photograph sacred objects.
Last, I would like to thank my family. The research and writing of this book has overlapped with my marriage to Shannon Leslie and the birth of my two children, Nicholas and Elisabeth. Miracles fill the medieval narratives that I study, but none seem as amazing as my family’s enduring love and support.
On April 12, 1204, around midday, a Venetian sailor leaped from the assault bridge of a massive ship called the Paradiso. He grasped the top of a tower on the seawall of Constantinople, where the blades of the Varangians and Byzantines made short work of him. His name is unknown. But as the waves drove the Paradiso against the walls a second time, a French knight, André d’Ureboise, clambered atop the tower. Managing to unsheathe his sword, he cleared a small space for his comrades as they climbed onto the battlements and claimed several towers. Inspired by this success, men from other ships emulated their heroic actions and surged atop the great walls. “Holy Sepulcher!” they cried.
Even with this foothold, the army of Latin-speaking soldiers had not yet won the day; hordes of Greeks still remained in battle dress at the foot of the great walls. But when an armed priest and crusader, Aleaumes of Clari, emerged from a small gate and brandished his sword, the Greek defenders at the scene fled. Soon, other units of the poorly trained Greek army abandoned the defense, followed by their emperor, Alexius V Doukas Mourtzouphlos. The next day, the Latins prepared to subdue the civilian population but instead found Greek citizens lining the streets, ready to welcome a new Latin emperor. The crusaders, however, had not yet chosen one, and without an emperor no single leader could keep the army in check. The troops overran the gathered citizens and the sack of Constantinople began.1
The battle of April 12 and the coronation of Count Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin emperor of Constantinople on May 16, 1204, closed the long, complex saga of the Fourth Crusade. This book concerns itself with the contest over memory and meaning that followed.
Here, I trace the ways in which that contest shaped the emergence, development, and cultural influence of a distinct body of hagiographical texts known as translatio narratives. These texts all describe the movement of relics from the East to the West in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. I argue that as the new Latin Empire failed to cohere, critics of the crusade, especially Pope Innocent III, blamed the failures on the loss of God’s favor and fixated on the looting of churches as the cause of this loss. Meanwhile, sacred plunder began arriving in the West, and the medieval traditions of translatio required beneficiaries of relics to craft valorizing counternarratives that placed these objects within local sacred geographies. In most cases, these beneficiaries, or the mostly anonymous hagiographers they commissioned, labored to memorialize their newly acquired relics so as to exempt them from broader scrutiny or criticism. In other cases, particularly within Venice and its expanding empire, the translatio narratives served broader cultural purposes. These relic-focused counternarratives and the interpretative modes they revealed played a key role in reshaping Venetian cultural development over the thirteenth century and beyond.
Going to Constantinople, let alone conquering it, was never part of the original plan for the crusade. In fact, the leaders of the crusade had commissioned a massive fleet from Venice in order to launch an amphibious assault upon Egypt. The crusaders and their sponsors hoped that the wealth of Egypt would sustain a campaign in the Holy Land and provide the means for regular resupply and reinforcement. But controversy and unanticipated challenges had dogged the enterprise since nearly the beginning. Despite innovative attempts to organize leadership, transportation, and financing so as to avoid problems of past crusades, the crusaders found themselves in debt, stuck in Venice, and commanded by a sometimes disorderly committee. Constantinople’s wealth eventually lured the crusaders into a Byzantine dynastic struggle that left them in little better financial condition, far from their original destination, and excommunicated by the pope. As emperor after emperor fell to internal pressures and Greek and Latin antipathy intensified, the crusaders decided to launch a last-ditch assault on the city. Much to everyone’s surprise, it succeeded.
Initially, the Latins who conquered Constantinople, supporters back home, and even some critics of the crusaders were extremely optimistic in the wake of the conquest. This feeling did not last. Although Rome tried, Constantinople’s Greek citizens did not convert to the Latin rite in large numbers. The empire was immediately beset by various Greek pretenders to the throne as well as outside invaders. The first Latin emperor soon died in battle. Moreover, despite carefully laid plans concerning the division of plunder that were meant to forestall conflict, the victors argued among themselves over the spoils and then argued collectively with papal legates who came to assert authority over the churches of Constantinople and their vast possessions.
Meanwhile, narratives about the conquest proliferated in diverse genres, with varying degrees of relationship to the events themselves and largely in isolation from one another. And yet, in an act of surprising unanimity, both those most critical of the crusade and those who directly benefitted from it fixated on the looting of the city and its churches. For critics, faced with the inarguable signs of divine favor in the successful assault, blasphemous looting provided a new set of sinful acts to explain why God had subsequently turned his face from the new empire. Pope Innocent III numbered chief among these critics of postconquest sacrilege, but even the crusader-chroniclers Robert of Clari and Geoffrey of Villehardouin identified looting-related impropriety as having caused the loss of divine favor.
Writers within religious institutions newly enriched by sacred objects and saintly patrons from Constantinople faced a distinct set of issues. As sacred relics of all degrees and stature arrived in the West in a great holy diaspora, their presence created the potential for both fiscal enrichment and rise in stature for the Western churches and monasteries. Mere possession of a new relic, however, was not sufficient to transform potentiality into actuality. For that, a relic needed a story.
This book explores the widespread hagiographical memorialization of the Fourth Crusade that took place roughly in the decade following the conquest of Constantinople. Translatio narratives, a subgenre of hagiography that focuses on the movement, or “translation,” of relics, are a peculiar group of texts. Their erratic relationship to actual events in the East renders them unreliable as military or political sources. In number and content, they are unusual in the history of crusade memorialization as well. Relic discovery and translation occur throughout the history of the crusades to the Holy Land, but translatio narratives are rare at best. And yet, after 1204, diverse religious houses with no known points of contact with one another responded to their sacred plunder by generating new hagiographical narratives. The circumstances of the composition, content, and cultural impact of this unique intersection of hagiography and memory in the wake of 1204 make up the core of this book.
These texts exist as a body to be