Read The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage for Free Online

Constantinople was the capital of half the world. It was also one of the supreme cities of the Christian faith: deep though the gulf was between the Latin and the Orthodox rites, Constantinople was a city to be reverenced even by Catholics. ‘I can assure you,’ says Villehardouin, ‘those who had never seen Constantinople before gazed very intently at the city, having never imagined there could be so fine a place in all the world.’
    There was no mistaking the historical impact of the occasion, or its beauty. ‘It was something so beautiful as to be remembered all one’s life.’ The fleet, so Villhardouin thought, ‘seemed as it were in flower’, spread out in magnificent array across the Marmara under a cloudless sky: first the terrible war-galleys, rowed with a steady stroke, then the mass of tall transports, and then like a cloud behind, as far as the eye could see, all the small craft of the fleet-followers, the independent fortune-hunters, the hopeful entrepreneurs, the rogues and scavengers, who had attached themselves to the Crusade on its progress to the east.
    To the soldiers from France, Belgium or Germany, Constantinople was more than just a city, it was a myth and a mystery. The Russians called it Tsarigrad, Caesar’s City, the Vikings Mickle Garth, the Mighty Town, and it had long before entered the legends of the west. Young men grew up with a vision of it. The City on its seven hills, the grand repository of classical civilization – the greatest city of them all, rich beyond imagination, stuffed with treasures new and ancient, where the wonders of ancient learning were cherished in magnificent libraries, where the supreme church of Santa Sophia, the church of the Holy Wisdom, was more like a miracle than a work of man, where countless sacred relics were kept in a thousand lovely shrines, where the emperor of the Byzantines dressed himself in robes of gold andsilver, surrounded himself with prodigies of art and craftsmanship, and lived in the greatest of all the palaces among the palaces of the earth, the Bucoleon. It was the City of the World’s Desire. It was the God-Guarded city. It was the city of the Nicene Creed – ‘Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible!’
    For the worldly-wise Venetians the sight of the city doubtless provided frissons of another sort. It was not so strange to them. Many of the sailors had been there before. Countless others had relatives who had traded there or worked in the shipyards. There was a large Venetian colony in the city at that moment. To the Venetians, especially perhaps to the old Doge Dandolo as he scented the air of Byzantium upon his nostrils, it was not the sight of Constantinople that was exciting that day, but the circumstances of this landfall. Never before had a Venetian fleet approached the city in such overwhelming force, carrying an army of the strongest and fiercest soldiers in Europe, and bringing with it too, as the Doge’s particular puppet, a claimant to the imperial throne – Young Alexius, who had eagerly acquiesced in the plan for his future, and joined the fleet at Zadar.
    Crusaders though they were, sailing to a Christian city, they made no attempt at a peaceful approach. When some of those fishing boats got in the way, they instantly attacked them; and when the fleet sailed, as we did, close under the walls of the city, the soldiers on deck were already cleaning their weapons for battle. It was the feast day of St John the Baptist, whose head was among the most precious of the relics enshrined in Byzantium: the ships flew all their flags in honour of the saint, and the noblemen hung out their decorated shields again all along the gunwales.
    The people of Constantinople swarmed to the ramparts in their thousands to watch the fleet sail in. The soldiers looked back in awe at the walls towering above their ships. This was the most perfectly fortified city in the world. On its landward side, cutting off the