[Cont'd from previous post]
There was certainly no surviving heir to the throne. Alexios IV, for whom the Crusade had gone out of its way, had been the last in the line of hereditary succession; and he had been murdered, in his bath, according to Canale. The crusaders' code of chivalry assured them that his murderer had no right to call himself emperor. A man who killed his sovereign lord had no right to anything. A new emperor must therefore be found. They felt entitled to find one from among themselves, by right of conquest. He might be a Frank or he might be a Venetian. This was a new idea. They could have helped themselves to the loot of Constantinople as their just reward for a just war and gone on their way, leaving the Greeks to sort out their own constitutional muddle and lick their wounds. They decided to stay; and they made their decision in advance of the outcome of their just war. Something, or someone, had convinced them that the goose of their Crusade was about to lay its golden egg.
The crusaders were not in the habit of setting up committees to elect their sovereign lords. Yet this is precisely what they proposed to do among themselves in 1204. The procedure which they adopted for the election of a Latin Emperor was foreign to Frankish tradition. But it was not unlike that for the election of a Doge of Venice, as it had been revised in the late twelfth century. The emperor elected by the committee was Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Da Canale records that the geat Dandolo, Doge of Venice, magnanimously declined to accept the imperial crown which he so richly deserved. Dandolo contented himself with three-eighths of all the Empire, the patiarchate and all the ports of the sea and many fine places on the mainland of Greece. It may have been the first indication that Enrico Dandolo, having achieved what had been somewhere in the back of his mind from the outset, was on the way to realising a yet greater dream. One of the reasons why the Venetians had reformed the system of electing their Doges in the twelfth century was to put a curb on their absolutism and their dangerous ambitions.
Later generations of Venetians proudly boasted that Enrico Dandolo had, with God's help, made the Greeks pay the penalty for the wicked crime committed against them by the Emperor Manuel. At the time too the people of Venice were no doubt proud of what had been done in their name. But they may also have been anxious. The situation was without precedent in their political history. Their Doge showed no sign of coming home. He had extended his limited contract with the crusaders for a second year. His son Reniero continued to act as his regent in Venice while Dandolo pursued his new career as defender and promoter of the Venetian cause in Byzantium. Martin da Canale's Histories were unpopular partly because his glorification of the Doges, Dandolo among them, was not to the taste of the new ruling oligarchy of Venice in his day. Enrico Dandolo behaved like a Doge of an earlier age. The Venetians in Constantinople were naturally glad to have him in their midst. The Venetians in Italy were not so sure. The Latin Empire envisaged in the treaty of 1204 was in theory a condominium between Venetians and crusaders. Baldwin of Flanders, as Latin Emperor, conferred on Dandolo the Byzantine title of Despot. Dandolo had much influence and freedom of action. He was not bound by the feudal laws of the Franks. He was not obliged to do homage to the Emperor Baldwin as his lord. Furthermore, he knew better than any of them where he was; he was among friends; and he knew the lie of the land. He had been wise to decline the title of emperor and accept the only slightly lesser dignity of Despot. But he enjoyed sporting the purple buskins of a Byzantine emperor. Professor Zakythenos long ago suggested that Dandolo and his admirers were the first exponents of a Regale era, a Great Idea, Venetian style. They saw Constantinople not as the New Rome but as the New Venice. The capture of the City had, after all, been retold in the Sibylline prophecies.
When Dandolo died in June 1205 Venice as well as the Venetian community Constantinople were left without a head. The old Doge had not relinquished either office; nor had he given any advice for the future. Those in Constantinople at once elected a new leader for themselves. He was Marino Zeno; and he adopted the title of Podestà and Dominator or Lord of one quarter and one eighth of the whole Empire of Romania. The Venetian colony Constantinople seemed to be claiming an independent status equivalent to if not greater than that of Venice itself. Some thought that the time had come to move their capital from Venice to Constantinople. The very idea was enough make the people of Venice still more anxious about the child that they had spawned in Byzantium. Dandolo had indeed inspired and helped to promote a separatist movement among the Venetians whose ambition was nothing less an the byzantinisation of Venice. It was even assumed that all territories which had been assigned to the Venetians in the partition treaty would come under the direct authority of the Podestà in Constantinople. These claims and assumptions had to be promptly stifled by the new Doge, Pietro Ziani, who as elected in Venice in August 1205. For the future each new Podestà in Constantinople was required to take an oath of loyalty to the Doge and Commune of Venice; and even the title of Dominator was taken from him. Pietro Ziani thus nipped the Great Idea in the bud and established a proper balance of power between the government in Venice and its colonies in Byzantium.
Perhaps we ask the wrong questions about the Fourth Crusade. Only modern historians, equipped with a different set of moral values, have agonised about apportioning blame for the diversion. To the crusaders and the Venetians it was more a matter for congratulation, once the dust of plunder settled and Byzantium was under western control. No one could excuse the barbarous and rapacious behaviour of the crusaders in the sack of Constantinople. The pope condemned them bitterly. But even he soon came round to the view that the end had justified the means; for the Crusade had been God's way of bringing the wayward Greeks into the fold of Rome. To this end at least the Venetians, though excommunicated, had been his agents. They alone knew in advance what were the risks and what the benefits were likely to be, in material and perhaps also in spiritual terms. The Greeks at the time were surely right in suspecting that it was the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, who steered the crusaders to Constantinople and then arranged things in such a way that they had a moral pretext for conquering it. As a general rule the Venetians considered crusades to be bad for business, unless they could see some financial profit to be made out of them. The Fourth Crusade was the most expensive gamble that they had ever undertaken; and it proved to be unbelievably good for business.
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