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

thousand people had lost their homes. In its place was a great charred open space – an ugly wound within the city’s heart. To Choniates, ‘That day produced a pitiful spectacle; it demanded rivers of tears to match the terrible fire.’ He had as yet seen nothing that fire would inflict on his beloved city in the cause of war.
    Meanwhile with the fire raging and the Venetians consolidating their position behind it, the quick-witted Dandolo started to ferry the captured horses up to the French camp. The success at the sea walls put new heart into the despondent crusaders at the land walls. Within the city, the emperor was under pressure.Constantinople was burning. An ominous murmur reached his ears of the people’s discontent: their houses had been destroyed; the Venetians were in control of the walls. ‘He saw’, observed Choniates, ‘the mob stirred up by anger, heaping unrestrained curses and abuse on him.’ Given the charged atmosphere, this was a dangerous moment for an emperor. It was time for decisive action.
    Alexius drew up his forces and marched them out of the city gates to confront the crusader army on the plain. As the crusaders watched them pour out and form up, the spectacle took their breath away. They were greatly outnumbered: ‘So many people marched out’, reported Villehardouin, ‘that it seemed as if the whole world was moving.’ Despite the numerical advantage, Alexius’s objective was probably a limited tactical one: to put sufficient pressure on the land army to push the Venetians back from the sea walls they were currently occupying. The Byzantines were wary of heavy western cavalry and had no need to risk battle in open terrain. If they could expel the Venetians, then the walls could still wear down the crusaders’ morale.
    And the land army was now in a position of supreme peril. Forced back at the walls, short of food, weary from days of feints and alarms around their camp, it seemed that they again had to do or die. Rapidly they lined up their forces in front of the palisaded encampment: lines of archers and crossbowmen, then knights on foot who had lost their horses, then the mounted knights, each of whose horses was magnificently ‘adorned over all its other coverings with a coat of arms or a silk cloth’. They were formed up in disciplined order with strict instructions not to break ranks or charge intemperately. Yet the prospect in front of them was daunting. The Byzantine army seemed so huge that ‘if they were to go out into the countryside to engage the Greeks, who had such a vast number of men, they would have been swallowed up in their midst’. In desperation, they turned out all their servants, cooks and camp followers, dressed in quilts and saddle cloths for armour, with cooking pots for helmets, brandishing kitchen utensils, maces and pestles in a grotesque parody of a military force– an ugly Brueghelesque vision of an armed peasantry. These men were tasked with facing the walls.
    Tentatively the two armies closed on each other, each side keeping good order. From the walls and the windows of the palace, the ladies of the imperial court looked down on the unfolding spectacle like spectators at the Hippodrome. At the sea walls, Alexius’s show of force was having its desired effect. Dandolo ‘said that he wanted to live or die with the pilgrims’, and ordered the Venetians to withdraw from the sea walls and make their way up to the palisaded camp by boat.
    Meanwhile, the crusaders were being drawn forward, away from the detachments guarding the camp. As they did so, it was pointed out to Baldwin, leader of the crusader army, that they would soon be out of reach of help if battle were engaged. He signalled a strategic withdrawal. The command was not well received. Within the chivalric code of knighthood, retreat was a smirch on honour. A group of knights disobeyed and continued the advance. For a short while the crusader ranks were thrown into disarray; a seasoned