PDF

VENICE

IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

 

A SKETCH OF VENETIAN HISTORY FROM THE CONQUEST OF CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE ACCESSION OF MICHELE STENO. A.D. 1204-1400

BY

F. C. HODGSON

 

 

CONTENTS

CHAP.

·        I. The Latin Empire of Romania

·        II. The Restored Greek Empire and Genoa—Venice in Negropont and Crete

·        III. The Emperor Frederic II.

·        IV. Giacomo Tiepolo and Venetian Legislation

·        V. Ecelino da Romano ....

·        VI. Rivalry of Venice and Genoa in the Levant

·        VII. Form of Election of Doge—Homage of the Arti

·        VIII. Venetian Supremacy in Adriatic .

·        IX. The “Serrata del Consiglio,” 1299.

·        X. Troubles at Ferrara—Conspiracy of Tiepolo and Creation of Council of Ten

·        XI. Rivalries of Anjou and Aragon, and of Venice and Genoa

·        XII. The Catalonian Company at Constantinople and Athens

·        XIII. Marco Polo and his Successors

·        XIV. The Beginnings of the Terra Ferma and the New Palace

·        XV. The Age of Andrea Dandolo 

·        XVI. Marin Faliero

·        XVII. Peter I of Cyprus

·        XVIII. The Carraras at Padua

·        XIX. War of Chioggia

·        XX. Venice and the Visconti 

·        XXI. The Senate of Venice 

 

CHAPTER I

THE LATIN EMPIRE OF ROMANIA

 

When Pietro Ziani, a rich and virtuous nobleman, who had been Podestà of Padua and Count of Arbe, and was at this time one of the doge’s counsellors, was elected to succeed the great doge, Enrico Dandolo, who had died at Constantinople, it must have seemed doubtful to him and to those who elected him, whether the part he would be called upon to play would be that of an Italian prince, or that of a despot in the East. The conquest of Constantinople had necessarily complicated the position of Venice and doubled her role. She remained, as she had been in the struggle between Frederic Barbarossa and the Lombard republics, a powerful factor in the affairs of Italy, soon to be almost as disturbed as before the Peace of Venice; but she was also called upon to play a leading part in the affairs of the Latin East. We have seen that her policy was at first to minimise this part, that she took no steps to occupy much of the Byzantine territory that had come to her by the treaty of partition, and confined her energies in the main to the islands, and especially Crete. But she could not help being concerned with the troubled and chequered fortunes of the Latin Empire and the lesser Frankish seigneuries—the Kingdom or Empire of Thessalonica, the Principality of Achaia, the Dukedom of Athens, and others that established themselves for a longer or shorter time on the ruins of the Byzantine dominion. The power of Venice in the Eastern Mediterranean was destined to last longer than any of these principalities, but at first it had much less hold on the land.

Henry of Flanders, who in 1206, was elected Emperor of Romania on the death of his brother Baldwin in captivity, and reigned till 12T6, was a chivalrous and able ruler, who conciliated and employed the ablest of his Greek subjects, and held his own in the very difficult circumstances in which he was placed. He kept on good terms with the Latin Church, his most powerful ally, but to do so he was obliged to resign all hopes of popularity with the Greek population, who were devoted to their own Church and bitterly hostile to Rome, and had close at hand, as powerful supporters in need, the Greek princes Theodore Lascaris and John Dukas, named Vatatzes, who were endeavouring to maintain the succession of Byzantine Emperors at Nicaea. But besides the hostility of his Greek subjects he had to contend with that of his brother’s rival, Boniface of Montferrat, now calling himself King of Saloniki or Thessalonica, and claiming a superiority over the Frankish barons settled south of that city. Boniface indeed died in 1207, the year after Henry became Emperor, killed in battle against the Bulgarians. Demetrius, Boniface’s son by the Empress Margaret, Isaac Angelus’ widow, who succeeded on his father’s death, was a child of two years old; but the regent or bailo for the young King, the Count of Biandrate, one of the chief nobles of North Italy, was ambitious on his own account and on that of the kingdom of Thessalonica, and refused to do homage to Henry, claiming feudal superiority over all Southern Greece, for that kingdom. Henry temporised, referring the question at issue between himself and Biandrate to the Court of the Barons of the Empire held at Ravenika in Macedonia, at which it was decided that the southern feudatories were directly dependent on the Emperor, and Henry was allowed to enter Thebes, and apparently Salonika also, as suzerain. Biandrate did not resist, but retired to Italy.

While the Emperor Henry was still on the throne two Frankish barons established themselves in Southern Greece—Otho de la Roche, a Burgundian nobleman, at Athens and Thebes, William de Champlitte at Andravida in the Morea, which in those days was the name of only the western half of the Peloponnesus. Otho took the title of “Grand Sire” of Athens, which his nephew Guy afterwards exchanged for that of duke. William de Champlitte stayed only a few years in the East, and then returned to France, but Geoffrey de Villehardouin (the younger, nephew to his famous namesake, the Marshal of Champagne), who superseded Champlitte, had from the first the title of Prince of Achaia, and revived the claim to superiority over the South of Greece originally put forward by Boniface. Frankish dukes of Athens and Frankish princes of Achaia, frequently hostile to one another, maintained themselves in Greece long after the Frankish Empire in Constantinople had ceased to have any real existence.

That Empire, besides the disadvantage it suffered from its unpopular alliance with the Popes, and its feudal constitution, that was alien to the customs of the Greeks, was singularly unfortunate in the failure of a regular succession. By what seems almost a malignant destiny, the succession to the Latin Empire, as to the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem, where above all things a warrior was needed to rule, was constantly falling to a woman or a minor. When Henry of Flanders died, the electors chose as his successor Peter de Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, whose only claim to the office was that he was husband of Yolande of Flanders, the sister of Baldwin and Henry. And on Peter’s murder by Theodore, despot of Epirus, before he had even taken possession of his throne, Yolande governed as regent for her son Philip, Count of Namur, who remained in Belgium. When Philip decided not to come to the East, his younger brother Robert was elected Emperor, and reigned for nine disastrous years (a.d. 1219-1228). He lost early in his reign Conon of Bethune, whom we have met with as one of the most brilliant leaders of the Fourth Crusade, who had stayed with the Emperors Baldwin and Henry and been their wisest counsellor. The young Emperor’s own character was not such as to fit him for his difficult and dangerous position. The event that occupies most space in the accounts we have of his reign is an act of cruel and hideous vengeance perpetrated by a rival lover on the Emperor’s mistress, which he had not the courage to resent or punish. So when, in 1228, he died in the Morea, when returning from a mission to the Pope, the electors would not run the risk of a long minority by electing his brother Baldwin, then ten years old, but appealed to John de Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, an old man over eighty, but a Crusader, who had ten years before fought for the Cross under the walls of Damietta, to take the crown of Constantinople. It was agreed that the young Baldwin should marry John’s daughter, and at the age of twenty have the government of the trans-Bosporine province of the Empire, and on John’s death succeed to the whole Empire, John’s heirs being compensated by the territory west of Adrianople or east of Nicomedia, if either could be conquered from Bulgarians or Greeks.

John of Brienne, we are told by Georgius Acropolita who had seen him, was a man of magnificent physique, and his military reputation was high. He was indeed a soldier of fortune who had fought his way to a kingdom and an empire. But naturally, at the age of eighty, his energy was not what it had been, and he allowed himself to sink into indolent luxury in the palace of Constantinople. Acropolita says that John reproached himself for keeping out of the Empire one who could have governed it so well as his namesake John Vatatzes, who had succeeded Theodore Lascaris at Nicaea. Under this brave and capable sovereign the bounds of the Empire of Nicaea were considerably extended, so that the Latin Emperors’ territory in Asia had shrunk to a few places in the peninsula between Nicomedia and the Bosporus. Nor did their European territories remain long unattacked. Adrianople had never been secure in their possession; the neighbourhood of the Bulgarian King, who, as much as themselves, enjoyed the favour of the Pope, constantly threatened them, and another power sprang up in the twenty years following the Latin conquest that for a time seemed  likely to put an end to the Latin dominion. This was the despoteia established in Epirus by Michael, the illegitimate son of an uncle of Isaac Angelos. He continued the old Byzantine government as an independent prince in all the country from 'Dyrrachium to Naupactus, the seat of his government being at Janina or Arta, but acknowledging a nominal subjection to Theodore Lascaris. He and his brother and successor, Theodore, who assumed the three royal surnames of Angelus, Comnenus, and Ducas, established a strong military force of Greeks, Wallachians, and Albanians. Michael was assassinated in 1214, but Theodore maintained himself in his brother’s place, and in 1217 he took prisoner and killed, as we have seen, Peter Courtenay, the Latin Emperor. In 1222, he put an end to the reign of Demetrius, the son of Boniface of Montferrat, and proclaimed himself Emperor of Thessalonica.¹ He next made advances to the northward, towards Adrianople, till John Vatatzes, fearing he might get the start of himself in recovering Constantinople for the Greeks, stopped his further progress by forming a close alliance with Asan the Bulgarian King, in virtue of which in 1230 the latter defeated, took prisoner, and blinded Theodore. But Asan soon afterwards, marrying his prisoner’s daughter, released his father-in-law, and helped him to recover Thessalonica, of which he refused to be Emperor on account of his blindness, but made his son John Emperor and governed in his name. John Vatatzes was, however, able to stir up Theodore’s two brothers, Manuel and Constantine, who invaded Thessaly, and some years of civil war between uncles and nephew followed, under which the power created by Michael and Theodore crumbled away, till in 1234 Thessalonica was taken and John compelled to renounce his claim to empire and accept the position of despot under the Emperor of Nicaea.

The disappearance of the Empire of Thessalonica left no power but the Empire of Nicaea and the Kingdom of Bulgaria to try conclusions with the Latins. John of Brienne still held the capital, but had been driven out of all but one or two strongholds in Asia Minor, and now began to be straitened also on the European side of the Bosporus. On the other hand, John Vatatzes and the Bulgarian King were firmly united and were daily increasing in power. A marriage took place between Theodore, the son of John Vatatzes, and Helen, Asan’s daughter, both children under twelve; and an army of Greeks and Bulgarians carried on active operations against the Latins almost under the walls of Constantinople. It was agreed that when the imperial city was recovered a partition of the European dominions should be made, John taking the Chersonese and the Maritza valley, Asan the country north of Adrianople.

John of Brienne had been five or six years in Constantinople, when the course of his Greek rival was simplified and smoothed by the fall of the Empire of Thessalonica. During these years he had made more than one endeavour to bring about a modus vivendi between the Greek and Latin Churches, but had been frustrated by the Pope’s objection to any compromise of his claims. He had some hopes that Leo Gavalas of Rhodes might cause a diversion by his rebellion against John Vatatzes; but the year 1235 found Gavalas, though still probably disaffected, commanding John Vatatzes’ fleet and blockading the Golden Horn. A Venetian fleet came to the rescue of the Latin Emperor, and Leonardo Querino and Marco Gausono, its commanders, won a decisive victory over Gavalas under the eyes of the Emperor’s army encamped on the shore, and took twenty-four galleys, thus restoring confidence to the Latins.

In 1237 John of Brienne died. His successor, Baldwin II, was at the time abroad, soliciting from the princes of the West men and money to uphold the cause of the Latin Church in the East. He did not return to Constantinople till 1238. Pope Gregory IX and St. Louis had given him money and troops that the Greek writers speak of as amounting to 60,000 men. About the same time the Bulgarian King deserted the alliance of John Vatatzes and endeavoured to save the Latin Empire from destruction. He was a trimmer by nature, and at this time his position on the frontiers of civilisation, in face of the hordes of heathen Mongols, whose irruptions were among the most important historical events of the thirteenth century, made him disinclined to involve himself in an offensive alliance with the Empire of Nicaea. An indirect result of the Mongolian advance westward was that the Comans, a horde of Pagan savages not unknown before in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, were driven over the Danube, and, being allowed to pass by the Bulgarians, took service under Baldwin II, in whose army “one could see,” in the words of Daru, “French, Venetians, Crusaders of different nations, Greeks, Mahometans and Barbarians, marching with the Pope’s bull in their hands against the Emperor of Nicaea.”

The Bulgarian King was soon again on the side of the Greeks, but John Vatatzes did not live to see Constantinople in Greek hands. He died in T254, and during the last fifteen years of his life he conquered Thessalonica and recovered most of Thrace from the Bulgarians. Nor did Theodore II., his son, in his reign of nearly four years, though an able administrator like his father, succeed in driving out the Latins. That achievement was reserved for the first prominent member of a family that played from this time till T452 a leading part in the affairs of the Eastern Empire. We have already met with George Paleologus as commander of the garrison of Durazzo in the war that Alexius, the first of the Comnenian Emperors, had to wage against Robert Guiscard: the family had continued to occupy a prominent position during the century and a half that had passed since that time. Michael Paleologus, the present head of the family, was the son of Andronicus Paleologus, by Irene, Alexius III’s daughter, the elder sister of Anna, who had married Theodore Lascaris I. Irene had, after her first husband’s death, married John Vatatzes, and her virtues and talents had contributed not a little to the successes of that Emperor’s glorious reign. Michael had, therefore, been very near the throne ever since its removal to Nicaea, and had more than once incurred the jealous suspicion of Theodore II, whose violent temper attacks of epilepsy sometimes excited, till it was beyond the control of his ordinarily excellent understanding. But Michael Paleologus, always cool and patient, was an adept at the soft answer that turns away wrath, and continued in favour throughout Theodore’s reign, and was in high military employment when the Emperor’s death placed John IV, a boy of eight, on the throne. The regent, Muzalon, was unpopular with the nobles and populace of the Empire, but Michael, instead of taking advantage of this to supplant him, had allowed him to continue in office until his unpopularity had brought to maturity a conspiracy against him. Only a few days after Theodore II’s death Muzalon was assassinated in the church of the monastery of Sosander in Magnesia, where Theodore died and was buried, and Michael, supported by the army and the patriarch and clergy of Nicaea, was first made guardian to the young Emperor and despot, and, as soon as any danger from foreign enemies arose, was elected Emperor on the 1st of January 1259.

Meanwhile Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor, who eighteen years before had returned from the West to take possession of his uneasy throne, saw his dominions gradually narrowing and his treasury emptying. Few of the fendal nobles, whose fathers had fought under the Counts of Flanders or the Marquis of Montferrat, remained, and many of the Latin clergy had abandoned their benefices and returned to the West, sometimes carrying with them the sacred vessels and relics of their Eastern churches. Baldwin was related to St. Louis, and his wife was niece to Blanche, the King’s mother, and both King and Queen had given him encouragement and substantial help during his long sojourn in the West. The France of St. Louis was wealthy, and coveted relics, and the Latin Emperor of Constantinople still had many precious relics left from the spoil taken in 1204. In particular there was the “inestimable pearl,” the Crown of Thorns, which the Saviour, who had worn it as part of the shame endured for us, would surely wish to be reverently honoured by His subjects on earth “till, on His coming to judgment, He should again place it on His head in sight of the world assembled for judgment.” But the sale of so holy a treasure would have appeared a profanity to Louis: so it was agreed that Baldwin should present it to the King, who had already done so much, and would in the future do more, to sustain the falling Latin Church in the East. Circumstances enabled the King’s bounty to assume almost the shape of a purchase: for when his envoys—two Friars Preachers, one of whom had been prior of their order at Constantinople and could identify the Crown—with an envoy from Baldwin, reached Constantinople, they found the Crown had already been pledged to some Venetian citizens, who had advanced a large sum on its security, and was sealed up in a casket for despatch to Venice. The King’s envoys accompanied the Crown to Venice, escaping both the storms of winter and the galleys that the Greek Emperor, John Vatatzes, sent to intercept them ; and leaving the Crown in the Treasury of St. Mark, in the keeping of one of their number, Friar Andrew, the other returned hastily to France, and came back with the money requisite to redeem the treasure, the Emperor Frederick II. giving them a safe conduct through his dominions. The Venetians were loth to part with it, but the Day of SS. Gervasius and Protasius, on which the pledge was to be forfeited, had not come, and they did not venture to retain it. It was carried to France unhurt by heat or rain, and at Villeneuve l’Archeveque, five leagues from Sens, was met by the King. Seals were compared to make sure of the genuineness of the relic, and on St. Laurence’s Day, the 10th of August, it was carried to Sens and thence to Paris, where after being shown to the people near the church of St. Antoine, in that famous suburb, and afterwards in Notre Dame, “the pontifical church of the blessed Virgin,” it found a resting-place in the chapel of St. Nicolas in the royal palace, on the site of which was erected the chapel built specially for the Holy Crown by St. Louis, the “Sainte Chapelle” we now all know, in the Palais de Justice, that has succeeded the Palace of St. Louis.

Besides the subsidies sent by St. Louis, Baldwin negotiated a loan from the Venetian house of Capello, giving his son Philip as a hostage for its payment. He stripped the copper from the domes of churches in Constantinople and sold it. But all these efforts were to no purpose. Money could not save an Empire lacking supporters and an Emperor lacking courage. The lands round the capital had passed from the feudal lords, who had mostly returned to Europe, to the cultivators of the soil, who were Greeks, as were also the farmers of the confiscated lands of the Greek Emperors. So when at last the Emperor Michael Paleologus and his able general, Alexis Strategopoulos, had overcome the obstinate power of Michael II, Theodore’s nephew, who was then despot of Epirus—the last hope of the Latin Empire—and were able to make a joint attack on the imperial city, they found a Greek party in its walls, willing to betray its Latin masters. Accident helped the assailants. The Venetians in Constantinople, unlike the Frank Crusaders, had never relaxed their hold on the city. Their colony still held the wharfs and landing-places on the Golden Horn, where they had settled under the Comneni. The Emperor Michael had allied himself with the Genoese against them, and a Genoese fleet was to arrive in 1261. To balance this, a new podestà sent from Venice in that year, Marco Gradenigo, brought with him some galleys, and Baldwin’s advisers took advantage of this arrival to send an expedition to recover Daphnusia (now Sozopolis) a safe harbour in the Black Sea, near Bourgas, which would be useful in the probable event of a struggle with Genoa for the supremacy in those waters. This expedition stripped the city of troops, and the Greek partisans of the Emperor of Nicaea at once conveyed information of this to Strategopoulos, who was able that night to scale the walls and occupy the city without resistance. Baldwin might have held out in the palace till his allies came back from Daphnusia, but lost courage, embarked on a Venetian ship he found in the port, and fled to Euboea.

A guard maintained by the Venetian merchants had been long the most efficient part of the garrison of Constantinople, and so much of this as had not gone on the expedition to Daphnusia was ready and willing to defend the Venetian houses and wharves on the Golden Horn. Even when the Greek general had burned the streets in which Franks and Venetians lived, and forced them to put their women and children and movable goods on shipboard, they presented so formidable a front that he was glad to make a truce, under which their non-combatants, with the most portable of their possessions, were removed to Euboea, though not without very severe sufferings.

The Latin Empire had lasted but fifty-seven years, and it seemed likely, so far as the royal city and the district round it were concerned, to leave not a rack behind. We have seen that the Frankish chiefs had been gradually quitting their fiefs and returning to the West, and that their places had been taken by Greek proprietors or farmers. The Latin Church in Romania had not been more flourishing; the Roman clergy had been unwilling to accept the position of missionaries in the midst of a hostile population of obstinate schismatics. As early as 1206, Innocent III had written a long letter of instructions to the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, authorising him first, after three citations, to deprive bishops who were contumacious to him, or had deserted their sees in Romania, and with less formality, priests who had absented themselves from their cures for an unreasonable time; secondly, to cumulate several sees on one bishop rather than to unite dioceses, where for any reason a sufficient number of bishops could not be found; thirdly, for dioceses where all the inhabitants were Greeks, to consecrate Greeks as bishops, if such could be found “devoted and faithful to thee and to us ”; fourthly, to allow Greek priests to persist in their own ritual “ as to sacrifices and sacraments” until the Holy See should decide on these questions.

These concessions show how warily even so uncompromising an assertor of Papal supremacy as Innocent III. had to walk in dealing with a Church that had been “inobediens et rebellis” before the Latin conquest, and in which there would seem to have been more local independence of individual churches than was in accordance with Papal ideas. In Cyprus, and other places, where before the conquest the churches had been exempt from the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the Latin patriarch’s authority was not to be pressed, “lest Pisans and Venetians and other foreigners having churches of this kind at Constantinople should be provoked against the Latin Empire, who ought to be rather attracted by indulgence, till the Empire is established on a solid and immovable basis.”

The reference to the Pisans and Venetians in this passage is not friendly, and still less friendly is a passage that follows, ordering the patriarch to compel the Venetians to pay tithes to the persons and churches entitled to receive them at Constantinople, disregarding the custom of Venice, where a tenth was paid only at death on all the property acquired during life, so that the Church of Constantinople was defrauded of its rights in the case of every Venetian, who, after living and earning property there, returned to end his days at Venice.

Three days after the date of this letter to the patriarch, the long-threatened censure for the diversion of the Crusade to Zara was launched in a letter from the Pope to the doge and people of the Venetians. The censure was milder than might have been expected. The Venetians were reminded that they had turned aside the army of the Lord, and carried it to attack a Christian people instead of faithless Saracens, that they had contemned the sentence of excommunication, and broken the vow of the Cross. They had at Constantinople plundered the treasures of churches, and taken forcible possession of Church property, and had claimed Church offices as the hereditary right of Venetians. How could they make good to the Holy Land the loss it had suffered by the diversion of so vast a host, raised at such cost, which had shown itself strong enough to subjugate Constantinople and Greece, and might as easily have recovered Jerusalem, and wrested Alexandria and Egypt from the hands of the infidel? Though it was pleasing to the Pope that Constantinople returned to the obedience of Holy Church, he would have been better pleased if Jerusalem had been replaced in the power of the people of Christ. And often the inflicter of a just punishment is displeasing to God. But though the exposition of their sins is forcible, the penalty inflicted is small. The Pope suspends the sentence of excommunication, “which almost all the world thinks ought to be inflicted,” waiting patiently for their correction. The only penalty actually inflicted is the withholding from the bishop elect of Zara of the pallium, that conferred the rank of metropolitan, a rank originally granted as a special favour to Venice.

We can form some notion of the want of harmony between the Holy See and the Venetians from a letter of January 1207, from Innocent to the Patriarch of Constantinople, that is amusing in itself, and curious, as showing the Pope in the character of a Rationalist. The Emperor Henry had bestowed on the church of St. Sophia an icon of the blessed Virgin Mary, painted by St. Luke, that was venerated throughout Greece, and some relics found in the chapel of the Great Palace. The Venetian Podestà claimed that the icon had been previously given to him, and demanded its surrender, which the patriarch refused, “adding ironically, that the Podestà might take it, if he could find it in the church.’' The icon was in the sacrarium under a triple lock, one of the locks being that of the church door. But by the podesta’s order a man was let down from the roof by a rope, who, not finding the icon, forced one of the great doors of the church, so as to let in a crowd of Venetians. These were told by a worthless Greek where the icon was, and began to break down the doors of the sacrarium. The narrative is given us in the second person, the Pope describing to the patriarch his own action: “You then, getting on the roof of the ala or side gallery, and looking down on the church robbers, inhibited them by threat of interdict and excommunication from carrying their purpose into effect, and, this not stopping them, you publicly and solemnly, with lighted candles, knotted the chain of anathema round the aforesaid Podestà with all his counsellors and abettors. Notwithstanding this they broke open the doors of the sacrarium, and carried off the icon by force to the church of the Pantocrator (i.e. of God Omnipotent), on which you went to the Cardinal of St. Susanna, the Pope’s legate, who confirmed your sentence, subjecting to interdict all the churches which are in the quarters of the robbers.” The Pope’s letter confirms the legate’s action, but adds the singular qualification, that he does so only to prevent the crime of sacrilege from going unpunished, “although the Holy See by no means approves the opinion of certain Greeks, that the spirit of the blessed Virgin abides in the said image, on which account they perhaps pay it undue veneration, and detests as unlawful the agreement entered into for sharing the relics taken in the city.”

The unfortunate Patriarch of Constantinople, Thomas Morosini, was in a position that deserves the sympathy of the most hard-hearted. While he was denounced by a grave Greek historian as better fed than a fatted pig, and ridiculed for his smooth-shaven chin, his gloves of leather and tight-fitting sleeves, he was between hammer and anvil in the matter of the Venetian claims to all the ecclesiastical patronage in the Latin Church of Constantinople. Innocent sent him a letter censuring him for having sworn to institute no one to a canonry of St. Sophia who was not a Venetian by birth or beneficed for ten years in the Church of Venice, and ordering him peremptorily to abjure. We have the patriarch’s reply in a letter to the Pope, written by three Latin bishops of sees in the neighbourhood of Constantinople; in this letter the bishops quote verbatim a speech the patriarch had made at a conference of clergy called at Constantinople to consider the Pope’s letter. The speech told a cruel story of persecution. When he was returning from Rome to his patriarchate he had to pass through Venice, where he found, as soon as he touched the shore, a tumultuous crowd of the common people, led by a son of the doge and some counsellors, waiting for him. A rumour had gone before him that he had the Pope’s orders to administer his patronage in Romania without regard to nationality, and the Venetians held, truly enough, that this was an infringement of their rights under the agreement at the time of the partition of the Empire, which provided that, if the Emperor was a Frank, the patriarch and the canons should always be Venetians. They tried to induce Morosini to swear he would appoint none but Venetians, and when he refused this, said he should not have a passage to Constantinople or stir out of the city. And there was worse to come; for creditors to whom he had sworn to repay a loan while in Venice, when they found that he was to be detained in Venice, would allow him no delay, and he could find no one who would lend him money to pay off the debt. He says that he feared that some Venetians, who were ready to start for Constantinople, would lay hands upon the funds in the treasury of St. Sophia, on which he and the clergy of his Church depended for their daily bread. In this strait he admits that, by the advice of the wisest friends he could find, he took the oath the Venetians required of him, but inserted a clause saving his obedience to the Apostolic See and the oath he had made to Innocent, and also any special order the Pope or his successors might send to him. Notwithstanding this careful hedging about of his oath, he professed his willingness to abjure it, and did so there and then, laying his hands on the book; he proceeded also to admit to their stalls in the choir all the canons desired by the Pope, one of them being Blasius, a priest of Piacenza.

The claims of the Venetians to Church patronage in Romania gave trouble to the Papal Court again in 1211. We have a letter of Innocent III. dated in August of that year to the chapter of St. Sophia and the heads (pralati) of the conventual churches in Constantinople. The Pope appears to have issued some instructions to the chapter as to their action in view of a probable vacancy of the see. The patriarch was then grievously ill in Thessalonica, and the chapter had met to discuss what they should do in anticipation of his death, but had adjourned for three days on account of the absence of some members of their body. At the end of the three days they found a mob of Venetians in the church, in arms, irreverently crowding into the stalls or round the altar, threatening loudly to murder and mutilate all who opposed the election of a Venetian. The Venetian party in the chapter, while the rest of that body were still waiting outside, nominated the dean, a Venetian, the excluded members being able to do nothing but sign, in the presence of witnesses, their appeal to the Pope, and choose three names to submit to him, with a request that he would select one of them. The Pope’s reply from which our knowledge of these facts is derived, refused to recognise the irregular election or to select a patriarch himself, and bade the chapter meet again and, with the aid of the Holy Spirit invoked, begin the proceedings de novo.

But this did not settle the difficulty, and just a year afterwards, on the 17th August 1212, Innocent had the matter again before him. A double election had taken place, or rather one candidate had been elected, but the supporters of another alleged that the election had been by a minority, and called upon (“ postulated ”) the Pope to declare their candidate to be lawful patriarch. The facts are not very clear to us, and appear to show that there was much confusion in the regulations of the Latin Church of Romania. The rival parties were not agreed as to who were the electors, or whether absent electors could vote by their proctors, or without formally appointing proctors, or whether the canons of St. Sophia and the praepositi and praelati of certain other churches stood on the same footing. The point that is most interesting to a historian of Venice is that both candidates were Venetians: the elected candidate the plebanus or parish priest of St. Paul in Venice, his rival the Archbishop of Heraclea on the Propontis. The supporters of the latter asserted that they had chosen a Venetian “ to avoid offence ”; no doubt they feared a rising of the Venetian mob in the capital if the new patriarch had not been a Venetian: but they contended for the admission of a larger electing body than their opponents allowed, on the ground that the constitution of their Church had increased the number of electors to thwart the designs of those who wished to make God’s sanctuary a hereditary estate; apparently wishing, by adopting the Pope’s language as to the Venetian compact, to suggest that he should reject both candidates and choose one who was not a Venetian. Each party alleged that the candidate of the other party was unworthy, the supporters of the Venetian priest saying that the archbishop was immoral and illiterate, those of the archbishop that the priest had been ordained sub-deacon so recently that the canons must have believed, when they elected him, that he was only in minor orders and so ineligible. As to their own candidate they asserted that he was “etsi non eminenter, competenter literatus,” and that, if his opponents were right as to his immorality— and it appears that a son “in monachatu genitus" was known in Constantinople—a long subsequent course of virtue had atoned for it. The archbishop was supported by the Emperor Henry, by the suffragan bishops, and by the desires of the people.

The Pope did not decide the dispute in Rome: but sent Maximus, his notary, to go first to Venice to inquire into the past record of each candidate, and then to go on to Constantinople to report as to the character of the several electors and the conduct of the election. He had large powers to choose either candidate or reject both, and refer the decision, either by agreement of the parties or of his own authority, to the Apostolic See. We learn from a subsequent letter that Maximus held an inquiry at Venice, but was unable to get a passage from thence to Constantinople; on which the Pope committed the remaining part of the inquiry to the Cardinal Bishop of Albano, his legate at Constantinople. The legate was not able to reconcile the opposing parties, and we learn from a contemporary annalist, the monk Godfrey, that in 1215, when the fourth Lateran Council was sitting, the Archbishop of Heraclea and the priest of San Polo arrived at Rome, both claiming to be recognised as lawful patriarch. Innocent laid the matter before the Council, by which the claims of both were rejected and a third candidate chosen. We do not know for certain the name of this candidate, some authorities calling him Gervasius and others Everardus; but it seems certain he was not a Venetian: Alberic of Trois Fontaines, a contemporary, says that he came from Tuscany. In 1220 the see was again vacant, and the electors, not being able to agree, asked Honorius III to nominate a patriarch, and he chose one Matthew or Matthias, who was a Venetian and had been Bishop of Equilium in the Lagoons. Of this patriarch we know that he crowned the Emperor Robert in the year 1221. The Pope may have chosen a Venetian to avoid trouble with the Venetians at Constantinople; but this object does not seem to have been attained, as in the next year the Pope had to take the patriarch to task, upbraiding him in scriptural language with showing himself a hireling and not a shepherd, caring more for the milk and the wool of his sheep than for reclaiming those who strayed and supporting the weak; seldom celebrating mass, communicating with those whom the Pope’s legate had excommunicated, and “ entering into unlawful agreements with the Venetians against other nations.” I presume that the last words reveal the true ground of the Pope’s censure, and that the patriarch had endeavoured to gratify the Venetian clergy of his diocese by reviving the old rule that Venetians only should receive preferment in his Church. Or it may refer to a fact which we learn from Dandolo’s Chronicle, that Matthew at the request of the Patriarch of Grado consented to the churches of Venetians in Romania being exempt from the jurisdiction of Constantinople, as they had been in the time of the Greek emperors, an arrangement that would have contributed more to the ease of the patriarch than to the good discipline of his Church.

It is not improbable that Simon, the Archbishop of Tyre, who was chosen by the Pope in 1227 to succeed Matthew, was a Venetian, but hardly anything is known of him. He was succeeded in 1234 by Nicolas, who had been Bishop of Spoleto. Nicolas fell on troublous times, and in 1236 Pope Gregory IX had to appeal to the Latin bishops of the Morea to come to the relief of the necessities of the patriarch, who “ from the fortune of war and the wickedness of the Greeks had lost nearly all his rents and other property, and had expended what was left to him in the defence of the Empire of Romania, so that there was not left to him sufficient to maintain himself.” We do not know what response was made to the Pope’s appeal; but in 1245 the Patriarch Nicolas, who two years before had been made Innocent IV’s legate in the Crusading army, was himself present at the Council of Lyons, and there set forth the calamities of his Church, whose suffragan bishops had been reduced from thirty to three. He died in 1251 at Milan.

His successor, Pantaleone Giustiniani, who lived to see the Greek reconquest of his city, was certainly a Venetian patrician, and Innocent IV, by whom he was chosen (he had been one of the Pope’s chaplains) went out of his way to celebrate the constant devotion of the Venetian people to the Apostolic See, “from their obedience to which nothing had been able to tear them away, whatever flood had beaten upon the foundation of the Catholic faith.” The shortness of the Pope’s memory for the backslidings of the Venetians of the Fourth Crusade must no doubt be ascribed to his hope to stir up their successors to take the Cross and contribute their wealth for another Crusade. The patriarch was authorised to show them an example by mortgaging the property of his Church for 1000 marks, but we may doubt whether the security would have found favour in the eyes of Venetian money-lenders.

Alexander IV, the next Pope, again appealed to the bishops and abbots of Romania to provide a yearly income of 500 marks of silver for the patriarch : and the Franciscan friars, who had already become a power in the Church, were commissioned to preach through East and West the duty of coming to the rescue of the Latin Church in the East. But all was in vain, and in 1261 the patriarch Giustiniani fled with the Emperor Baldwin from Constantinople and took refuge in Italy. Giustiniani lived till 1286, but seems never to have returned to the East. On his death, one Peter, of whom nothing is known, was elected by the dispersed canons; he lived partly at Venice, partly at Negropont till 1301. His successor was elected by one canon, the only survivor of the chapter. After him the right of election was taken, by Boniface VIII, into the hands of the Pope. The succession has been kept up to the present day, both of patriarchs and other Oriental bishops, but since the hope of restoring the authority of the Roman Church in lands inhabited by Christians of the Eastern Church or by Mohammedans has faded away, these dignitaries have been treated as bishops  “in partibus infidelium” and have been generally employed as coadjutor Bishops in dioceses of the West.

We find in other documents in the great collection of Tafel and Thomas, evidences of the position of independence enjoyed in the Latin Empire of Constantinople by the doge and his podesta. In 1217 the Emperor Peter and his wife Yolande, on the eve of their departure from Italy on the expedition against Theodore of Epirus that proved fatal to the Emperor, confirm to the doge, as ruler of the Empire of Romania, the treaty of partition and all other agreements made by their predecessors Baldwin and Henry, and by Boniface of Montferrat with Enrico Dandolo, and with Marino Geno the podestà. Their rights under the partition included, it was specially provided, the possession of three-eighths of the city as well as of the rest of the Empire, and they were thus, in their factories on the Golden Horn, no longer privileged guests, but sovereign owners. The privileges they had formerly obtained by treaty with the Comneni, they now stipulated for with other powers in the Levant, with Theodore Lascar for example, and with the Seljukian Soldan at Iconium. In 1219 Jacopo Teupulo (or Tiepolo), the doge’s Podestà in Constantinople, made a treaty for five years with Theodore Lascar, “Emperor faithful to God in Christ and Governor of the Romans, and ever Augustus” : in this treaty trading privileges, protection of shipwrecked sailors, and of the goods of merchants dying in the Emperor’s dominions are promised in similar words to those of so many treaties before the conquest, while the Emperor promises not to send galleys or corsairs to Constantinopolitan waters without the Venetians’ consent, and either party promises not to coin money of the same form as the coinage of the other. In 1220 the same Podestà makes a treaty with the Soldan of Turkey (i.e. of Iconium), Ala-eddin Kaikobad, stipulating for the protection of Venetian merchants and travellers in Syria and other parts of the Soldan’s dominions.

It is interesting to note in the first of these documents how the practical mind of the Venetian governor does not scruple to sign a treaty of commerce with Theodore Lascar, in which the latter calls himself Emperor of the Romans, although the Latin Emperor set up by the Venetians themselves claimed the exclusive right to that title. Such matters of ceremony were not to be weighed for a moment against the all-important questions of the security of Venetian merchants trading in foreign lands. The Venetians, like other Christians of that day, thought much of the duty of recovering the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidels, and of restoring the Greek Church to the obedience of the older Rome. But questions of trade interested their patriotism towards their own city, as we can now see that they also concerned the interests of the world present and future, which must not be deprived, for reasons of policy or sentiment, of its natural right to rectify, by free exchange of commodities, the hard condition, imposed, as Virgil says, at the time of Deucalion’s flood, that different lands should produce different fruits. Any general admission that such a right as this existed, was far indeed from the thoughts of the men of the early thirteenth century : but the Venetians, acting on an instinctive belief in it, held on a consistent course through good report and evil report. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, and for some time afterwards, it was evil report: they were censured by Popes, and probably blamed by the general opinion of the Christian world, for taking Constantinople instead of Jerusalem, and for making treaties of commerce with unbelievers. In the next century, a great Venetian merchant and statesman, Marino Sanudo the elder, in his famous treatise, Secreta Fidelium Crucis, sketched out a plan by which the interests of this world and the next might be reconciled, the Holy Sepulchre might be recovered, and Venice obtain the control of the trade with India and China. He and his contemporaries clearly saw that Egypt was the head and centre of Mussulman power, and that her strength came from the wealth that the Indian trade poured into her lap; and he proposed an elaborate system (in default of the conquest of Egypt by Venice, which he looked on as the best solution of the problem) for destroying the wealth of Egypt by diverting the Indian trade to Syria and Greece a system of prohibitory duties and blockades, that a recent French writer has aptly compared to Napoleon’s scheme of a blocus continental against England. Had Sanudo’s designs been reduced to practice, they would probably have failed, as did Napoleon’s; for the routes taken by trade are determined by natural laws, and it is difficult or impossible, in the long run, for any government to stop an exchange of goods that is greatly to the advantage of both buyer  and seller. But Sanudo’s treatise remains to show us how a Venetian of the beginning of the fourteenth century anticipated one of the most characteristic of the Idees Napolioniennes, and how it was possible for a religious Venetian of that age to combine the Crusading spirit with a zeal for extending the trade of his city, modifying the former to something quite different from what it was to Innocent III, so that it might not interfere with, but rather subserve, the latter.