cause, and discussed the critical question of how to pay the enormous costs of supporting thousands of soldiers for years on end.
They decided to sail. The first choice for a fleet was the merchant powerhouse Venice, one of the largest cities in Europe. Its ships were the top dogs of the Mediterranean due to the expertise gained from the large volume of trade with Muslims, which had been conducted with special permission from the pope. Since 1192 the Venetian Enrico Dandolo had held the leadership position of doge; ninety years old and blind, his dedication to the Church was surpassed only by his love of making money and stockpiling power for his beloved city. Dandolo was the man.
After negotiating with the doge, the crusaders reached a deal in April 1201. The doge agreed to build a navy, transport the army, and feed all of them for nine months. All this for the low, low price of 85,000 marks, about twice the annual income of the king of France. As a special deal, for this Crusade only, the crusaders could pay on the installment plan.
Eager to kill Muslims and recapture Jerusalem, the crusaders signed the deal and headed home to France, unaware that their poor skills in drafting the agreement had planted the seed for their venture’s doom. The price was based on transporting an army of 35,000 men plus 4,500 horses, an army bigger than all but that of the First Crusade. No provision was made, however, if fewer troops showed up for the sailing date. The full price would still have to be paid for the half-empty fleet. This meant a higher cost per crusader.
But such trivial details were not in the minds of the crusaders as they made their way home after making their down payment of 5,000 marks to the doge. The Venetians put aside all their business and turned the city into one vast workshop for making ships to meet the June 1202 sailing date.
The deal, like many blockbuster deals, contained a secret clause. The fleet would first sail not to the Holy Land but to Alexandria in Egypt. While this was a sound strategic move as the attack could knock out Egypt as an enemy, making the conquest and holding of Jerusalem easier, it was somewhat controversial. So controversial in fact that the doge kept this detail hidden from crusading troops. For him, this little secret clause was the key to the whole deal. He would get paid to sail to Alexandria, then use the crusaders to capture the city and turn it over to him, further expanding the Venetian trading power into a huge and megarich metropolis. The doge would get a double shot of victory: Jerusalem for the spirit, and Alexandria for the wallet. His grin probably lasted for days.
In May 1201, the first disaster hit the crusaders. Thibault died. Of the three leaders he had been the most dynamic and well liked. Recruitment dropped like a rock. To make up for the loss the crusaders picked up Boniface, the marquis of Montferrat, a city in Northern Italy, as their new leader. Boniface was fifty years old and hailed from a long line of crusaders. He accepted the offer with great enthusiasm.
In early 1202 the crusaders set out for Venice. Upon their arrival they were warmly welcomed by the Venetians, handed their bill, and shown their new home, Lido Beach, a barren sandbar miles from the city. The doge wanted them close, but not close enough to cause trouble. Now the second bit of bad news hit the crusaders. Thousands of crusaders were no-shows. The leaders waited and waited, but as the spring turned to summer on Lido Beach, like a third-rate resort, the crowds simply never materialized.
The doge, Boniface, and the other leaders did a head count, and fingered their worry beads. Only about 12,000 soldiers had shown up, about one-third of the estimated number. This meant that the price per crusader would now be three times as originally planned. Everyone coughed up more coin, but it was not enough to cover the doge’s huge tab. The doge refused to lower his price. First, because a deal is a deal, but more important, having spent an entire year building this massive fleet, he needed every promised penny to pay off his bills. To help focus the minds of his crusading brethren he stopped supplying them with food and water until his bill was paid.
As the army slowly wasted away, and desertions started to chip away at their already meager ranks, Boniface and the others dug even deeper and handed over virtually all their valuables to the doge. He counted his booty and told them they were still 35,000 marks short. The army teetered on total dissolution. They didn’t even have the food to make the humiliating return home to France where the sum total of their experience would be the equivalent of a cheap beach-side T-shirt proclaiming, “I went on a Crusade and only got as far as Venice.”
The doge then proposed a way out from under their crushing debt. He asked them to run an errand for him: sail down and recapture the city of Zara (now known as Zadar in Croatia), which had slipped out of Venice’s control in 1181. The crusaders would conveniently overlook the fact that Zara was a Catholic city and part of Hungary, a firm supporter of the Crusades. The attack meant postponing the Crusade to Jerusalem in order to fight a war against Christians so that the Venetians could expand their little merchant empire. The move was pure doge.
The crusaders at first resisted but the doge knew that sometimes you have to join them to beat them. He took the crusader’s oath in St. Mark’s church and the impressionable crusaders were swayed. He was no longer just some money-hungry contractor but a part of the team, on board for the big win. That October the huge fleet sailed down the coast with the deal-making doge in the lead. It was the blind leading the desperate.
Word of the Zara gambit soon filtered back to the pope. He wasn’t happy. Coastal raids on Christian cities clearly violated the spirit of “crusading” as the papal world had come to define it. But the pope’s emissary, embedded with the army, sensing that the only two realistic options were to crush Zara or go home in failure, gave the crusaders the thumbs-up. The pope had the last word, however, and played the big hand. He wrote a scathing letter declaring that those who attacked Zara would get excommunicated from the church, meaning eternal damnation. As in forever. At this point the crusaders were destined for the fires of hell along with the Greek Christians, the Muslims, and all the other infidels crawling the earth in wretched existence.
On November 11, 1202, the crusader fleet reached Zara just as the pope’s letter reached the leaders ordering them not to attack. The leaders split on what to do next. Some — led by the deal-making doge — favored attacking the city; others recoiled from assaulting fellow Christians in flagrant defiance of the pope and the fires of hell. The doge argued that the pope’s order was important, but not as important as the crusaders’ contract with him. The road to Jerusalem, they convinced themselves, ran through Zara, especially since the alternative was to go home in shame. The pope’s letter was slipped into a drawer, never revealed to the soon-to-be-excommunicated army. The crusaders attacked. It was now the doge’s army.
Two weeks later Zara fell, and the army surged into the city to reap its booty. But the vaults were empty. After counting up every loose coin, the crusaders still did not have enough money to cover the rest of their trip. The only thing the attack earned them was a one-way ticket to the blistering shores of Hades.
As the crusaders sat in Zara, having committed a massively unholy act that called down the heavy wrath of the pope and still lacking the money to reach Jerusalem, the ambassadors of Prince Alexius showed up. The wandering prince, still cruising the backroads of Europe looking to pick up a ride home, suddenly displayed a level of acuity that had previously escaped him: he presented them with a tantalizing solution to their debt problem and the now-bigger situation of the pope reserving the crusaders a suite in the ninth circle of hell, befitting betrayers of the faith.
Prince Alexius offered to finance the rest of the Crusade and provide additional troops. To top it off, he promised to end the schism between the Romans and the Greeks by recognizing the pope as top man in the Christian world. All the crusaders had to do was escort him to Constantinople and install him, Prince Alexius, as emperor. Then they would be able to easily skip down to Jerusalem and fulfill their crusading destiny. And the pope would achieve one of his top career goals. Prince Alexius had made them an offer they could not refuse.
Still, Byzantine politics being Byzantine politics, the leaders debated. The doge, to no one’s surprise, was enthusiastic for the novel Greek caper. The doubting Thomases reminded everyone their job as crusaders was to kill Muslims in Jerusalem on Christ’s behalf, not fellow Christians in Constantinople. They could have stayed home and done that. The doge, however, won the debate as usual with a twist of logic that would have made a theologian proud: he convinced the crusaders that restoring a Christian emperor to the throne — through what was surely promised to be a short and easy war — was in fact a very Christlike act.
Some of the troops, however, failed to go along with the doge’s impressive reasoning. Killing Christians just was not as fulfilling as killing Muslims. Many soldiers fled. On the bright side, Pope Innocent III had now retreated from his earlier position. He washed away all the crusading sins committed from the Zara gambit but made the crusaders swear they would never again attack a Christian city. The leaders, striving for new heights of duplicity, agreed, knowing that their secret plan to restore Prince Alexius would probably require attacking Constantinople.
In April 1203 the fleet sailed out of Zara after leaving it a smoky wreck. The churches, in the spirit of devotion of men on a high cause such as a Crusade, were spared.
The next month, halfway to their destination, the army stopped on the island of Corfu. Here a chunk of the
