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

going to be met, the contents were again suppressed. It was given out that full absolution had been granted. The pope’s ability to manage his crusade was plainly limited.
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    If Innocent thought that his deepest fears about the snares of a sinful world had been realised, he was wrong. Things were about to get far worse. The propulsive forces that drove the whole enterprise forward – the spiritual thirst, the Venetian debt, the shortage of funds, the secret agreements, the continuous betrayals of the rank and file, the repeated threat of disintegration, the months passing on the maritime contract – these were about to deliver another extraordinary twist to the direction of events. On 1 January 1203, ambassadors came to Zara from Philip of Swabia, king of Germany. They brought with them an enterprising proposal for the crusade to consider. It involved the whole complex back story of Byzantium and its fraught relationship with western Christendom. And like many of the secret deals that ensnared and propelled the crusade, its contents were already known to some of the leading knights.
    Put baldly, the ambassadors said this: they had come on behalf of Philip’s brother-in-law, a young Byzantine nobleman called Alexius Angelus, to plead for help in regaining his rightful inheritance – the throne of Byzantium – from his uncle. Angelus’s father, Isaac, had been deposed and blinded by the present emperor, Alexius III. In fact, by the strict laws of succession, theyoung man had no rightful claim to the throne, but the niceties of Byzantine imperial protocol were probably lost on the French knights. The ambassadors came with a cunningly framed and carefully timed proposal that suggested an intimate knowledge of the crusaders’ plight. It combined a garbled appeal to Christian morality with an offer of hard cash:
Since you campaign for God, right and justice, you must also return the inheritance to those who have been wrongly dispossessed, if you can. And Angelus will give you the best terms that anyone has ever offered to a people and the most valuable help in conquering the land overseas.
Firstly, if God allows you to restore his inheritance to him, he will put the whole of Romania [Byzantium] in obedience to Rome, from which it has been severed. Next, because he understands how you have given everything you have for the crusade so that you are now poor, he will give two hundred thousand silver marks to the nobles and the ordinary people together. And he himself will personally go with you to the land of Egypt with ten thousand men … he will perform this service for a year, and for the rest of his life he will maintain five hundred knights in the land overseas at his own expense.
     
    The terms were extraordinarily generous. They seemed to offer everything to everyone. The papacy could achieve one of its most ardent objectives: submission of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople to Rome; the crusaders could not only handsomely repay their debt, they would gain the military resources both to conquer and to retain the Holy Land. The pope, it was suggested, would actually welcome such an action. And it would be easy: Angelus had many supporters in Constantinople; the gates would be flung open to welcome the liberators from his tyrannical uncle, the emperor Alexius III. ‘Sirs,’ concluded the envoys in the tone of persuasive salesmen offering a once-in-a-lifetime bargain, ‘we have full authority to conclude these negotiations should you wish to do so. And you should be aware that such generous terms have never been offered to anyone. He who turns them down obviously has no real appetite for conquest.’
    Some of what they said was wish-fulfilment; some was simplyuntrue. In fact Angelus had called on Innocent with an outline of this plan the previous autumn and been given a very dusty response. Innocent had already warned the crusaders off supporting such a scheme, which would involve yet another attack on Christian