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

his galley, fully armed and with the banner of St Mark set up in front of him’, in the admiring words of Villehardouin. He could evidently hear the sound of battle raging around him – the shouts and cries, the crash and fizz of arrowsand missiles; whether he sensed that the Venetians were now hanging back is unclear; more likely he was told. Evidently he realised the seriousness of the situation. The doge peremptorily ordered his galley to row forward and put him ashore, ‘or else he would punish them severely’. The vermilion galley rowed hard for the shore, into the barrage of Greek missiles; as it landed, the banner of St Mark was seen being carried onto dry land; the other vessels followed, shamefacedly, in its wake.
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    After the mosaics that commemorate the body of St Mark sailing to Venice, this is the single most iconic image in Venetian history – the blind doge, standing erect at the prow of his ship with the red-and-gold lion banner of St Mark fluttering in the wind as his ship grounds beneath the menacing city walls; battle rages around him, but the wise old merchant crusader stands unmoved, urging his fleet on. The memory of this moment, endlessly recounted, would send shivers of martial patriotism down the spines of the Venetian people for hundreds of years; it would become the rallying cry in times of intense national danger, cited as the supreme example of the old heroic qualities on which the wealth of the Republic was built. Four hundred years later Tintoretto would be commissioned to recreate the scene in the council chamber of the doge’s palace in vivid, if anachronistic, detail. With hindsight the Venetians understood what it meant. Dandolo’s initiative made possible, via a train of events that no one could predict at the time, the Republic’s ascent to Mediterranean empire. If that day the Venetians had failed by sea, as the French had by land, the whole expedition would probably have collapsed.
    But it did not. Shamed by the blind doge, the Venetian galleys surged up onto the beach; the assault was renewed; then the red and gold of St Mark was seen fluttering from one of the towers, probably by the men on the flying bridges. A battering ram was set to the walls. Suddenly overwhelmed, the defenders withdrew, leaving the Venetians to open gates and stream into the city. In a short time they were in control of twenty-five or thirty towers– a quarter of all the walls along the Golden Horn. They started to push up the hill among the narrow streets of wooden houses, capturing booty, including valuable warhorses.
    Now Alexius seems to have stirred himself from a complacent belief in the strength of his defences. For days he had ‘sat back as a mere spectator of events’, watching passively from the windows of the Blachernae Palace. With the Venetians inside the walls, he now had to act. He sent down detachments of the Varangian Guard to force the intruders out. The Venetians were unable to withstand this counterattack and fell back towards their newly captured towers. Desperate to retain a foothold they began torching the houses as they went, to create a barrier of fire between themselves and the advancing Greeks. In the heat of a July day with a stiff breeze blowing off the Golden Horn, the flames started to eat their way up the lower slopes of the north-eastern sector of the city, ripping through the densely packed streets, ‘sending the inhabitants flying in all directions’. The sharp crackle of combusting wood and plumes of ominous smoke filled the air; the wall of fire advanced unpredictably in the erratic breeze; ‘everything from the Blachernae hill to the Monastery of Evergetes was consumed by fire’, remembered Choniates, and ‘rushing flames were carried as far as the district of Deuteron’. By the time the fire was finally halted on the steepening slopes leading to the Blachernae Palace the following day, 125 acres of the city had been reduced to ashes; maybe twenty