This had as little effect upon the Doge as did the presence of Cardinal Peter. Despite protests from the Cistercian Abbot of Vaux (the only cleric apparently, who was unable to swallow his Christian principles), the city of Zara was attacked. It was captured on November 24th after five days’ fighting.

The attack on Zara was a foretaste of what was to come, and of all the evil that was to follow in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. The city was sacked and looted, and the inhabitants were forced to take refuge in the hills. Zara’s ancient churches were not spared by this army of Christians. Finally, in the course of their undisciplined looting, the Venetians and the Crusaders came to blows over the division of the spoils.

The whole episode was sordid and contemptible. It was contrary to every tenet, however slender, that had for centuries maintained the fabric of supposedly-Christian Europe. Innocent III on hearing the news was horrified and infuriated. He passed immediate sentence of excommunication upon all who had taken part—Venetians and Crusaders alike.

The effect of the Pope’s action upon the ordinary Crusader can easily be imagined. He had left his home and family to take part in a ‘sanctified’ war against the heathen. Somehow or other he had been trapped into aiding the Venetians in a private act of warfare against a city belonging to the King of Hungary. Now he found that he was excommunicated, and he was still as far away as ever from the original object of his service. It was little wonder that relations between the ordinary soldiers and the Venetians became so bad as to end in open conflict. It was not only the loot that divided them, for the Crusaders felt ashamed of their action, and it took all the abilities of their leaders to patch up peace between the unwilling allies.

Throughout the winter that the army passed encamped in and around Zara, it was hardly surprising that there were many defections from the army. Some made their way north overland back to their homes, others who had the price of their passage embarked in visiting merchant ships. “Thus,” Villehardouin wrote, “our forces dwindled from day to day.”

From the very beginning of his account of the Fourth Crusade, Villehardouin placed most of the blame for the position in which the army found itself in Venice on the shoulders of those Crusaders who had made their own way to the Holy Land or Syria. It is indeed true that it was the failure of so many of the knights and soldiers to reach Venice which led to the inability of the Crusade to pay its way. At the same time, it is unlikely that Villehardouin was as ingenuous as he made out. He must have been aware that it would be impossible to calculate with any certainty just how many men would finally reach Venice. As one of the leaders of the Crusade, he needed to find every possible excuse for what occurred. It is hardly surprising, then, that one even finds him stigmatising as traitors the men who left the army after that gross violation of their Crusading oaths—the attack on Zara.

During the winter a deputation was sent to the Pope to beg him to lift his interdict from the army, and to restore them to the body of the Church. It was from these envoys that Innocent III heard the true story of what had happened. They explained how the Crusaders had been unable to pay the Venetians for the fleet, and how the Doge had proposed the attack on Zara as a solution to their difficulties. Their statement that they thought it better to keep the army together, and thus fulfil their ultimate purpose, rather than let it be disbanded before they had even left the island of Saint Nicholas, was no doubt true. Innocent III understood only too well what had happened—it was what he, with his knowledge of the Venetians, had always feared would befall the ingenuous Crusaders. But what was done could not be undone, and he could see no reason why the army should not proceed to Egypt in the spring of 1203. He agreed, therefore, to lift the penalty of excommunication from the Crusaders. As for the Doge and the Venetians, they were to remain excommunicated—a fact which does not seem to have troubled Enrico Dandolo unduly.

The loot taken in the sack on Zara was divided between the leaders of the army and the Venetians. Very little of it reached the men-at-arms and lesser knights, but even so the total does not seem to have amounted to very much. Certainly there was not enough to pay the Venetians the 34,000 marks that were outstanding.