Free City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire by Roger Crowley

the Lido, led astray to attack Christian cities, impoverished and deceived. The clock was ticking steadily on the year’s contract with Venice and they were no step nearer the Holy Land, let alone Egypt. The spoils of Zara had been largely appropriated by the lords. ‘The barons kept the city’s goods for themselves, giving nothing to the poor,’ wrote an anonymous eyewitness, evidently sympathetic to the plight of the common man. ‘The poor laboured mightily in poverty and hunger.’ Collectively they still owed thirty-four thousand marks.
    Shortly after the sacking of Zara, popular resentment erupted into violence.
Three days later, a terrible catastrophe befell the army near the hour of vespers, because a wide-ranging and very violent fight broke out between the Venetians and the French. People came running to arms from all sides and the violence was so intense that in nearly every street there was fierce fighting with swords, lances, crossbows and spears, and many men were killed or wounded.
     
    It was with considerable difficulty that the commanders regained control of the situation. The crusade was hanging by a thread.

    What the ordinary crusaders did not know – and this would have horrified them far more – was that they had now been excommunicated for the attack on the city. In an exercise of creative crisis management, the crusading bishops simply bestowed a general absolution on the army and lifted the ban, which they had no authority to do. Over the winter of 1202–3 the rank and file whiled away the time on the Dalmatian coast in reasonable accord whilst waiting for the new sailing season, blissfully unaware that their immortal souls were still in grave peril. The Frankish barons decided to hurry an abjectly apologetic delegation back to Rome to try to sort the situation out. The Venetians refused point-blank to participate: Zara was their own business; on its capture was built the agreement which would lead to the return of the thirty-four thousand marks and as long as this debt remained outstanding, the whole Republic’s position was critical.
    Even before this delegation had left for Rome, word of Zara had reached Innocent and he was drafting a furious response. It began tersely enough: ‘To the counts, barons and all the crusaders without greeting’ and went downhill from there. In a series of battering sentences, like the rhythmic thud of a siege engine, he castigated the crusaders for their ‘very wicked plan’:
You set up tents for a siege. You entrenched the city on all sides. You undermined its walls, not without spilling much blood. And when the citizens wanted to submit to your rule and that of the Venetians … they hung images of the cross from their walls. But you … to the not insignificant injury to Him who was crucified, you attacked the city and its people, you compelled them to surrender by violent skill.
     
    He reminded the hangdog delegation when it arrived that the absolution granted by the bishops was absolutely illegal. He demanded repentance and restitution of the spoils. But his ultimate condemnation was reserved for the Venetians who ‘knocked down the walls of this same city in your sight, they despoiled churches, they destroyed buildings, and you shared the spoils of Zara with them’. In the biblical analogy of the man who fellamong thieves, the Venetians were cast as the plunderers, leading the crusade astray. Innocent also insisted that no more damage be done to Zara – an order the Venetians would roundly ignore – but at the same time, considering the crusaders’ plight and his own ardent desire that his crusade should not disintegrate, he established a process by which absolution could be achieved – from which the Venetians were pointedly excluded. Due to the fact that the letter with which the delegation returned plainly stated that the army was, as yet, still under papal ban and that some of its terms, such as the return of the spoils, were simply not