Download PDF | David M. Perry - Sacred Plunder_ Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade-Penn State University Press (2015).

Download PDF | David M. Perry - Sacred Plunder_ Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade-Penn State University Press (2015).

266 Pages 

Acknowledgments

T e authors of medieval translatio narratives wrote with a profound sense of the community in which they were operating. T e community provided these authors with inspiration, audience, guidance, and even funding. As I bring my work on this book to a close, I f nd myself deeply aware of the debts that I owe to my family, friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutions. T e project owes much to the comments and advice from Alfred Andrea, Bernard Bachrach, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Michael Lower, Susan Noakes, T omas Madden, Kathryn Reyerson, Jay Rubenstein, Susanna T roop, John Watkins, Brett Whalen, and Diana Wright. 

I am deeply grateful to the anonymous readers for the Pennsylvania State University Press, as well as to my editor, Ellie Goodman, and to my copyeditor, Julie Schoelles, for their many useful suggestions. In the f nal stages of compiling the manuscript, I benef ted from the assistance of an extraordinarily competent research assistant, Breeanna Watral. Special thanks go to my parents, Lewis and Elisabeth Israels Perry, who by now have become quite expert in medieval Venetian studies. Funding for research trips to Italy and elsewhere was provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, the History Department at the University of Minnesota, and the Faculty Development Committee at Dominican University. T e provost’s of ce and the Department of History at Dominican University provided support for image rights, maps, and indexing. 

I am exceptionally grateful to Kathleen Rhoades, the interlibrary loan librarian at Dominican University, who made it possible for me to access books from libraries across North America and Europe. I am also grateful to the staf s at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidese in Milan, and the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives for their assistance. T e Procuratoria of the Basilica of San Marco, the Patriarchate of Venice, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople all opened many doors for me along the way and periodically allowed me to photograph sacred objects. Last, I would like to thank my family. T e research and writing of this book has overlapped with my marriage to Shannon Leslie and the birth of my two children, Nicholas and Elisabeth. Miracles f ll the medieval narratives that I study, but none seem as amazing as my family’s enduring love and support.

Introduction

On April 12, 1204, around midday, a Venetian sailor leaped from the assault bridge of a massive ship called the Paradiso. He grasped the top of a tower on the seawall of Constantinople, where the blades of the Varangians and Byzantines made short work of him. His name is unknown. But as the waves drove the Paradiso against the walls a second time, a French knight, André d’Ureboise, clambered atop the tower. Managing to unsheathe his sword, he cleared a small space for his comrades as they climbed onto the battlements and claimed several towers. Inspired by this success, men from other ships emulated their heroic actions and surged atop the great walls. “Holy Sepulcher!” they cried. Even with this foothold, the army of Latin-speaking soldiers had not yet won the day; hordes of Greeks still remained in battle dress at the foot of the great walls. But when an armed priest and crusader, Aleaumes of Clari, emerged from a small gate and brandished his sword, the Greek defenders at the scene f ed. Soon, other units of the poorly trained Greek army abandoned the defense, followed by their emperor, Alexius V Doukas Mourtzouphlos.

 T e next day, the Latins prepared to subdue the civilian population but instead found Greek citizens lining the streets, ready to welcome a new Latin emperor. T e crusaders, however, had not yet chosen one, and without an emperor no single leader could keep the army in check. T e troops overran the gathered citizens and the sack of Constantinople began. T e battle of April 12 and the coronation of Count Baldwin of Flanders as the f rst Latin emperor of Constantinople on May 16, 1204, closed the long, complex saga of the Fourth Crusade. T is book concerns itself with the contest over memory and meaning that followed.

Here, I trace the ways in which that contest shaped the emergence, development, and cultural inf uence of a distinct body of hagiographical texts known as translatio narratives. T ese texts all describe the movement of relics from the East to the West in the af ermath of the Fourth Crusade. I argue that as the new Latin Empire failed to cohere, critics of the crusade, especially Pope Innocent III, blamed the failures on the loss of God’s favor and f xated on the looting of churches as the cause of this loss. Meanwhile, sacred plunder began arriving in the West, and the medieval traditions of translatio required benef ciaries of relics to craf valorizing counternarratives that placed these objects within local sacred geographies. In most cases, these benef ciaries, or the mostly anonymous hagiographers they commissioned, labored to memorialize their newly acquired relics so as to exempt them from broader scrutiny or criticism. In other cases, particularly within Venice and its expanding empire, the translatio narratives served broader cultural purposes. T ese relic-focused counternarratives and the interpretative modes they revealed played a key role in reshaping Venetian cultural development over the thirteenth century and beyond.

Going to Constantinople, let alone conquering it, was never part of the original plan for the crusade. In fact, the leaders of the crusade had commissioned a massive f eet from Venice in order to launch an amphibious assault upon Egypt. 

T e crusaders and their sponsors hoped that the wealth of Egypt would sustain a campaign in the Holy Land and provide the means for regular resupply and reinforcement. But controversy and unanticipated challenges had dogged the enterprise since nearly the beginning. Despite innovative attempts to organize leadership, transportation, and f nancing so as to avoid problems of past crusades, the crusaders found themselves in debt, stuck in Venice, and commanded by a sometimes disorderly committee. Constantinople’s wealth eventually lured the crusaders into a Byzantine dynastic struggle that lef them in little better f nancial condition, far from their original destination, and excommunicated by the pope. As emperor af er emperor fell to internal pressures and Greek and Latin antipathy intensif ed, the crusaders decided to launch a last-ditch assault on the city. Much to everyone’s surprise, it succeeded.

Initially, the Latins who conquered Constantinople, supporters back home, and even some critics of the crusaders were extremely optimistic in the wake of the conquest. T is feeling did not last. Although Rome tried, Constantinople’s Greek citizens did not convert to the Latin rite in large numbers. T e empire was immediately beset by various Greek pretenders to the throne as well as outside invaders. T e f rst Latin emperor soon died in battle. Moreover, despite carefully laid plans concerning the division of plunder that were meant to forestall conf ict, the victors argued among themselves over the spoils and then argued collectively with papal legates who came to assert authority over the churches of Constantinople and their vast possessions. Meanwhile, narratives about the conquest proliferated in diverse genres, with varying degrees of relationship to the events themselves and largely in isolation from one another. And yet, in an act of surprising unanimity, both those most critical of the crusade and those who directly benef tted from it f xated on the looting of the city and its churches. 

For critics, faced with the inarguable signs of divine favor in the successful assault, blasphemous looting provided a new set of sinful acts to explain why God had subsequently turned his face from the new empire. Pope Innocent III numbered chief among these critics of postconquest sacrilege, but even the crusader-chroniclers Robert of Clari and Geof rey of Villehardouin identif ed looting-related impropriety as having caused the loss of divine favor. Writers within religious institutions newly enriched by sacred objects and saintly patrons from Constantinople faced a distinct set of issues. As sacred relics of all degrees and stature arrived in the West in a great holy diaspora, their presence created the potential for both f scal enrichment and rise in stature for the Western churches and monasteries. Mere possession of a new relic, however, was not suf cient to transform potentiality into actuality. For that, a relic needed a story. T is book explores the widespread hagiographical memorialization of the Fourth Crusade that took place roughly in the decade following the conquest of Constantinople. 

Translatio narratives, a subgenre of hagiography that focuses on the movement, or “translation,” of relics, are a peculiar group of texts. T eir erratic relationship to actual events in the East renders them un reliable as military or political sources. In number and content, they are unusual in the history of crusade memorialization as well. Relic discovery and translation occur throughout the history of the crusades to the Holy Land, but translatio narratives are rare at best. And yet, af er 1204, diverse religious houses with no known points of contact with one another responded to their sacred plunder by generating new hagiographical narratives. T e circumstances of the composition, content, and cultural impact of this unique intersection of hagiography and memory in the wake of 1204 make up the core of this book. T ese texts exist as a body to be studied en masse thanks to the work of a nineteenth-century French historian named Count Paul Èdouard Didier Riant (Comte de Riant). On October 14, 1874, Riant f rst presented his work on the spoliation of relics from Constantinople in the thirteenth century to the Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France at the Louvre. His report, which took another six meetings to complete, was eventually published in the memoirs of the society as “Dépouilles religieuses à Constantinople au XIIIe siècle.

 T e next year, Riant founded the Société de l’Orient Latin in Paris. In 1877, he published the f rst volume of his extraordinary Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae and began the process of establishing the scale and extant source base for the translation of relics from the East to the West af er 1204.  Scholars have since located a few additional sources, and Alfred Andrea, in particular, produced superior editions of select texts, essays on the authors and important f gures, and a number of extremely useful translations and commentaries. It was the Exuviae, however, that def ned the hagiographical accounts of the af ermath of 1204 as a corpus. T at said, my book benef ts from over a century of new scholarship on the crusade itself and new approaches to the study of medieval texts and culture. Riant sought to understand the truth behind the narratives and locate both the origin of specif c objects and their destinations in the West. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on single texts and f gures, explicating each one as fully as possible. 

Yet, while no work on the relics of 1204 can occur without reference to Riant or reliance on the critical editions and detailed commentaries of Andrea, this book asks new questions about the intertwining of memory and narrative. Part I, “Contexts,” establishes two dif erent types of context for the hagiographies of 1204. Chapter 1 places each act of relic acquisition in a chronological moment and conceptual framework. Rather than conf ating all types of acquisition as thef or looting, the framework distinguishes between authorized and unauthorized acts, as well as between early and late moments of acquisition. Chapter 2 explores the creation of normative Latin discourse on the crusade. Pope Innocent III f xated on the looting and disseminated his understanding of events throughout the Latin world; other voices followed his lead. T e hagiographers, all benef ciaries of the stripping of Constantinople’s sacred resources, sought a way to situate their new possessions in their own locales without directly contradicting papal interpretation.

Part II, “Texts,” turns to the hagiographies themselves. Chapter 3 lays out the whole of the corpus (from complete texts to fragments), stories from later centuries, and evidence of perdita (lost texts). Chapter 4 turns from content to method. It compares the techniques that hagiographers used to create didactic spaces in the midst of their tales. For some, these didactic moments drew attention away from the relic thef and the troubles with the crusade, while others operated more fully in the medieval mode of pious thievery, a tradition dubbed furta sacra by Patrick Geary. For the latter, the logic of pious thef enabled a full-throated defense of the Fourth Crusade as providential, including the looting of churches. Part III, “Outcomes,” turns to Venice. 

In ways distinct from other sites that received relics from Constantinople, the hagiographies of 1204 took root in Venice’s culture and f ourished. Chapter 5 links these texts to themes and mythographic practices extant in Venice both before and af er 1204. T e Venetian translatio texts, perhaps written without knowledge of competing interpretations from Rome or France, embrace the principles of sacred thievery in order to make broader claims about Venetian destiny. Chapter 6 traces the cultural af ermath of the Venetian hagiographies of the Fourth Crusade from the 1230s to the last centuries of the Middle Ages. In the later stages, Venetian mythographers shif ed from pinpointing recent temporal origins for Venetian greatness, such as the Fourth Crusade, to claiming an ancient grandeur for the city. Four topics require a brief overview to contextualize the work that follows: the Fourth Crusade itself, the medieval practice of translatio and hagiographical memorialization, the concept of commemoration and memory as used within this book, and the relationship between translatio and the Crusades before 1204. T e last is simple; there is almost none. T e relative explosion of translatio narratives af er 1204 stands out as a singular event of narrative innovation in part because of the absence of such textual creations during the twelf h century. 

True, the looting of Constantinople’s churches produced relics and the potential for forged relics on a scale unprecedented in Christian history. Relics had played a pivotal role, however, in the First Crusade, particularly during the saga of the Holy Lance and the use of the True Cross. T e inventio of relics of various sorts shaped the Catholicization of the newly conquered territory during that period. T roughout the twelf h century, crusaders acquired Holy Land relics and installed them in their home churches in the West, but only one contemporary translatio narrative of the style employed in the thirteenth century is known to exist. T is lone text relates the translation of the arm of St. George to Flanders, along with other relics, by Count Robert “of Jerusalem.” To this source, we might add Venetian translatio narratives that at least tangentially touch on the crusades, discussed in chapter 5. Otherwise, the post-1204 hagiographical writing stands on its own with little medieval precedent. 

Nevertheless, narrative had long been central to the practice of relic veneration in Western Christendom. Mere possession of ered little benef t without a story to promote the fact of possession. When the relic was already wrapped in stories from other sites or eras, narrative generation became paramount. Narrative controlled meaning. Cynthia Hahn, in her recent study of reliquaries, writes that “the real content of a treasury” is “the power and combination of narratives and ‘conversations’” among the sacred objects. For Hahn, the reliquaries themselves of en speak. But when meaning becomes contested, more explicit forms of memorialization must support visual programs and speaking objects. Two hagiographical subgenres—inventio for “found” relics and translatio for transported relics—provided explicit narratives for placing a new relic in its locality. Relocated reliquaries did not, and perhaps could not, simply carry old meanings along with the objects themselves.

 Rather, movement created the possibility for innovation and the establishment of new patterns of imaginative memory, sometimes in direct opposition to previous meanings. T e hagiographies of the Fourth Crusade reveal how a set of thirteenth-century voices responded to such a moment of narrative possibility through distinct commemorative acts. Memory, as a concept, stretches along a continuum from event into perpetuity, guided by conscious and unconscious choices of communities and those who shape communal memory. Mary Carruthers was among the f rst to introduce memory as a f eld of study for medieval scholars. In her work on mnemonic systems and the ways in which medieval people engaged with and interpreted the past, Carruthers emphasized diverse interpretive modes of recollection. James Fentress and Chris Wickham focused on the relationship of “the social function of the past to its narrative structures” in their chapter on historians who wrote during the Middle Ages.

 T ese pioneering works and the many that followed have generally examined the shaping of historical memories over time as we expand our understanding of medieval people and their perceptions of the past. Some engage retrospectively, starting with memorializing acts produced at some chronological remove from the time that they consider. Others, such as the essay “T e Venetian Version of the Fourth Crusade” by T omas Madden, work forward, starting at the event in question and tracing the development of ideas about it over time. My book, on the other hand, focuses on commemorative translatio narratives produced while the objects concerned were still trapped within a kind of cultural gravitational well formed by the conquest of Constantinople. T ese texts represent early reactions in a contentious environment, yet the mostly anonymous hagiographers had to think about posterity in order to craf a usable narrative that could accompany the relic into the treasury or below the altar, as well as into liturgical traditions and depictions in sacred art. As for the crusade itself, the publication of T e Fourth Crusade by Donald Queller, later revised with the help of T omas Madden, has shif ed scholarly debate away from an endless argument about blame and diversion.

 T ere is wide scholarly agreement about the basic facts of the crusade. Neither papal, military, nor Venetian leaders intended the crusaders to become badly indebted or to be diverted to Constantinople, but rather designed what seemed to be a reasonable plan to fund an amphibious assault on Egypt. Plans went awry and various actors took advantage of the situation. When the crusaders turned toward Constantinople, they still expected to set sail for Egypt in the near future. No one expected Constantinople to fall to the Latin forces—not even the Latins. But outside the narrow constraints of crusade and Mediterranean scholarship, the memory and meaning of the Fourth Crusade remain contested ground to this day, a contest that can still f xate on relics and narrative.

 On November 27, 2004—950 years since mutual excommunications of cially began the great schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and 800 years af er the Fourth Crusade—Pope John Paul II presented two relics to the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew I of Istanbul in Rome. T e relics were the bones of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nazianzus, both fourth- century prelates who played pivotal roles in the formation of normative Christianity. T e plan was that these relics would be placed in new reliquaries of crystal, given to the patriarch on the twenty-seventh, and reinstalled in Istanbul on November 30, the feast of St. Andrew, patron saint of Istanbul. A week before the handover, disputes between the patriarchal staf in Istanbul and the curia had soured the mood of reconciliation. On Sunday,November 20, the patriarch gave a sermon in which he praised the pope for his apologetic gesture. Bartholomew said, “For 800 years these relics have been in exile, although in a Christian country, not of their own will, but as a result of the infamous Fourth Crusade, which sacked this city in the year of our Lord 1204. . . . T is gesture dif erentiates them [John Paul and his curia] from the deeds of their predecessors eight centuries ago, who accepted the spiritual and material treasures that had been taken from our city and our Church.

T e patriarch concluded that the return of the relics was a “warning to all those who arbitrarily possess and retain treasures of the faith, piety, civilisation of others.” Note how Bartholomew invoked the concepts of the living saints, held imprisoned against their will in a wicked Rome. Such language would not have been out of place in an anti-Latin tract from medieval Byzantium. A Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, retorted that although “‘certain media’ had portrayed the pontif ’s gesture as a reparation and a means for the Pope to ‘beg pardon’. . . this interpretation . . . was ‘historically inexact.’ T e handover was a ‘return, not a restitution.’” Furthermore, although the patriarchate maintained that both relics had come to Rome through looting af er 1204, the Vatican was not so sure. 

Navarro-Valls claimed that Greek nuns had translated St. Gregory’s bones to Rome in the eighth century in order to protect them from Greek iconoclasts. T us, instead of being a piece of war booty, these relics went to Rome in search of protection, brought by those least warlike of beings—nuns. T e Vatican gave little ground on the relics of St. John as well, admitting only that the translation had probably occurred “at the time of the Latin empire of Constantinople.” Rome’s rhetoric tried to shape the exchange as a translatio, not a reparation af er an act of relic thef . Although John Paul apologized for the Fourth Crusade (and other wars between Latins and Greeks) in 2001, he was not apologizing for having received the relics. 

How could the Church apologize for the translation of relics, an act only possible if the saint wanted to be moved? T e relics were translated, and now they were being translated back—God wills it. T e exchange still took place, as planned, on November 27, but the episode shows that in 2004, as in 1204, mere possession of a relic was not enough. In order to control the meaning of possession, one also had to write a compelling narrative explaining why, and how, the saint wanted a new home. It takes a story to situate the translation of any relic in both its immediate and historical context.

A study of the hagiographers and their texts will not soothe modern conf icts between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, nor reveal mysteries about what really happened to all the relics. Instead, this study examines the shaping choices of the creators and manipulators of institutional and civic memory, the challenges of contested meaning, and the transformative potentiality of relics and their stories.  

Link 

Press Here