Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
suggests that Martin was concealing the relics from common pillagers, but he was likely also hiding his haul from other elites. As an abbot, perhaps he could have protected his plunder; other relic thieves were less fortunate. This conclusion may be drawn from the account of a successful theft carried out by seven crusading sailors from the parish of St. Simon the Prophet in Venice. Within days of the conquest, the sailors decided to steal the body of their parish’s patron saint from the church of St. Mary Chalkoprateia.50 According to the “Translatio Symonensis,” which survives only in a fourteenth-century manuscript, they laid their plans, reconnoitered the site, and then stole the relic on Palm Sunday (April 18, 1204). They selected the holy day in order to avoid notice, as the citizens and other crusaders would be busy celebrating.51
The heist went off relatively smoothly, although some of the Venetians got lost on their way to the church. Having stolen the body, the remaining thieves found that they could not leave the city because Doge Enrico Dandolo would not let any ships depart. This had nothing to do with the theft of St. Simon; rather, it was an attempt by the leaders of the new empire to keep the army intact. According to the translatio, the doge then heard of the relic’s theft and announced a reward for its recovery. After hiding St. Simon in an abandoned palace on the banks of the Bosphorus, the sailors waited for six months. Eventually, one of them received permission to leave Constantinople (by lottery) and took the body to his home parish.52
One can deduce many things about the looting of relics based on this rare narrative. First, these men clearly stole a relic as part of a heist. They did not simply authorize themselves to take possession of relics in their new church treasuries. Whereas Abbot Martin demanded to be taken to the most powerful relics and the looters he was avoiding grabbed whatever they came across, the Venetians were more discriminating. Theirs was a carefully planned and executed heist with a target chosen solely because of its particular value to the parishioners of St. Simon. Indeed, they even ignored the relics of St. Zachary, the patron of an important Venetian church, taking only the body of their own patron saint.53 If Dandolo’s attempt to obtain the stolen relic by offering a bounty is credible, as it may well be, another fact comes into focus. Had someone betrayed the fellowship of thieves and given the relic to the doge, the “Translatio Symonensis” would never have been written. We would not know about the band from the parish of St. Simon, although Dandolo might still have sent the relics to Venice in the end. Thus, we can conclude that there may have been other cases in which a member of the leadership, secular or clerical, confiscated a relic from a lower-status thief, condemning his story to oblivion, yet providing clues as to how bishops and counts acquired their relics.
The great majority of actions taken inside the churches of Constantinople remain invisible, and our few reliable examples cannot support a fully developed narrative. Yet our sources do suggest a range of possibilities. Bishop Nivelon and likely other leading clerics acquired relics by taking them out of churches under their control, confiscating them from errant pillagers, and receiving them as gifts. The deeds of the parishioners of St. Simon provide a counterexample, in which crusaders executed both a targeted and unauthorized theft. For Abbot Martin, the pursuit of saintly power, carried out surreptitiously, trumped other concerns about which specific relics he might acquire. The complaints from outsiders suggest that the stories of Martin and the Venetian parishioners may reflect a much larger, and now forgotten, pattern of theft and pillaging. If Dandolo and his cadre were ready to seize relics from lesser crusaders, no wonder most chose to remain silent.
The Second Phase: The Crusaders Go Home
Enrico Dandolo
Enrico Dandolo tried to recover the body of St. Simon at some point during the first six months after its initial theft. This attempted confiscation actually belongs to the second phase in the movement of the relics of the Fourth Crusade. In the weeks and months after the sack, the crusaders organized and disbursed their loot. They elected Baldwin of Flanders as emperor. The Venetians, as prescribed by the March Pact, took control of Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate. The crusade leadership divided up other properties and Greek territories, many still unconquered, in a process that led to great riches for some, conflicts among the Latin forces and other powers in the region, sales and exchanges, the settlement of Franks in Greece and Venetians in Crete, and many other changes. Boniface of Montferrat began his military operations in Thessalonica. The disastrous campaign against the Vlachs led to the death of the first Latin emperor of Constantinople and other leading nobles. Seeking to undermine the Venetian advantage, Genoa sent out privateers to plunder ships returning to the West. The pope attempted to reassert control. Peter Capuano lifted the crusade vows, and eventually the army dispersed.54 As the crusaders returned home, relics returned with them; some were sent ahead as gifts to reward friends or to grease the wheels of diplomacy, as detailed below. In this phase, Dandolo, Baldwin, and Capuano all emerged as particularly important players in the authorized acquisition and translation of relics. Unauthorized actions continued as well, though as always they are harder to locate in the record.
In the most important Venetian chronicle from the fourteenth century, the Chronica per extensum descripta of Andrea Dandolo, who was the doge of Venice from 1343 to 1354 and a member of the same family as Enrico, one finds a description of Venice’s share of the sacred plunder from Constantinople. Andrea lists an ampoule of Christ’s blood, the arm of St. George, a piece of the head of St. John the Baptist, the body of St. Lucy, and the body of St. Agatha, which Enrico gave to an unspecified Sicilian pilgrim.55 The chronicle depicts Enrico Dandolo as a grand distributor of relics. He probably brought back many more items, but any records of plunder housed in the treasury of the church of San Marco would have been largely destroyed in a great fire in 1231. However, relics from the conquest had also been distributed to other sites in Venice. And, in the 1260s, Doge Ranieri Zeno claimed that a small set of relics had miraculously survived the fire. These came to constitute the “official list” of crusade plunder that could be traced to Enrico Dandolo, and Andrea Dandolo’s chronicle reflects that list.56
How Enrico Dandolo acquired most of his relics is unclear. According to a late fourteenth-century translatio, Baldwin of Flanders gave the relic of St. Lucy to Dandolo for Venice, raising the possibility that the doge received other relics as gifts.57 Dandolo made some effort to acquire precious objects for the commune of Venice and San Marco, including, for example, the relics listed above, the relics of St. Simon the Prophet (although he failed), the quadriga that eventually adorned the church,58 and large quantities of marble and other precious materials.59 One cannot imagine the old, blind doge personally rummaging through a church treasury in Constantinople. Unlike the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt, Dandolo was not a cleric who could inspect and seize relics in the course of taking charge of a formerly Greek church. Perhaps Dandolo sometimes succeeded in using bribery and threats against lesser crusaders, as detailed in the story of St. Simon and the Venetian thieves, even though he failed to seize those relics. His experience with negotiation and exchange could only have helped him in such an environment. Shortly after Dandolo’s death, the Venetians demanded an icon of the Virgin in exchange for supporting Henry of Flanders’s ascension to the imperial throne after his brother Baldwin died.60 One suspects that the Latins traded with, offered gifts to, coerced, and bribed one another in order to acquire specific relics as the chaos of the capture subsided and they assessed their newfound lands and riches.
Baldwin of Flanders
Emperor Baldwin I figures in a number of letters and charters concerning relics. He used them in imperial diplomacy, thus continuing the practice of the emperors before him.61 Like Dandolo, Baldwin of Flanders sent relics to his homeland, but not exclusively. He also included relics and other sacred items among the gifts that he sent to Pope Innocent III and the Templars in Lombardy. Genoese privateers captured the ship bearing Baldwin’s emissary and pillaged it. According to the Genoese chronicles, the city’s leaders sanctioned this expedition in order to profit from the fall of Constantinople in their own way; moreover, they hoped to limit the gains of the Venetians.62 In November 1204, Innocent sent a letter to the archbishop of Genoa demanding restitution. By this time, the privateers had either released or received a ransom for the emissary, a Venetian named Brother Barozzi, who was the master of the Temple of Lombardy and about whom nothing else is known. Barozzi made his way