The hero of one country is almost inevitably the villain of another. If Enrico Dandolo has deserved well of Venice, the story of the Fourth Crusade may lead to the thought that he has deserved less well of Europe and the world.

The pretext for the diversion of the crusaders from their legitimate destination was aboard the Doge’s galley. As the ships fanned out into the Sea of Marmora, Alexius, the pretender to the throne of Byzantium, was nearing his goal. He waited to be proclaimed Emperor in his capital, Constantinople, with the backing of the same Crusading swords that had given Zara to the Doge. Insignificant though he was as a human being, the ambitions of this young man were to lead to a tragedy beyond all measure.

Alexius’s claim to the throne was based on the fact that his father, Isaac II, had been the Emperor for ten years until deposed by his brother in 1195. Isaac, who has been described as “one of the weakest and most vicious princes that occupied the Byzantine throne”, was imprisoned and blinded. Blinding was one of the penalties for failure in that world. Yet even so it was more merciful than the torture and death that were often the fate of deposed emperors. It could be maintained that it was by his reluctance to kill his brother that the new Emperor, Alexius III, had provided the Doge and his nephew with an excuse for the present expedition. Isaac II, father of the Alexius who now accompanied Doge Dandolo towards Constantinople, had lain imprisoned in the imperial dungeons of Constantinople for eight years. The proclaimed object of the Doge was to restore his heir to the throne.

It was natural enough that a son should wish to take vengeance upon the man who had maimed his father and usurped his throne. Nevertheless, the young Alexius had no rightful grounds for his claim to the imperial mantle and the scarlet buskins of the Byzantine Emperor. Although in the later centuries of the Empire, and especially after the period of the powerful Macedonian dynasty, the children of the reigning sovereign had been regarded as more or less legitimate inheritors of the throne, the real tradition of Byzantium was inherited from ancient Rome. The Emperor was the heir of the Roman Caesars and, as such, he was in essence no more than princeps or first citizen.

It is true that there was no constitutional way of deposing an emperor once he was upon the throne, but recourse had always been had to the equally ancient Roman system of armed revolution, led by the subject most pleasing to the people.

“If the coup failed, he met with the shameful death of a usurper; if it succeeded, his victory was the sign that God’s favour had abandoned the dethroned Emperor. Not a few emperors were forced to abdicate, or met a violent death as the result of revolts in camp or in the palace. Success legitimized the revolution. In a somewhat modified sense, Mommsen’s description of the Principate—‘the imperial power is an autocracy tempered by the legal right of revolution’—is applicable to the Byzantine Empire.”[2]

Young Alexius had no legitimate claim upon the throne of Byzantium, and Doge Dandolo was certainly aware of this. His interest in Constantinople and its empire was realistic. Why should the Doge of Venice care about the legitimacy, or not, of the reigning Byzantine Emperor? The star of Venice had been rising for centuries, just as that of Byzantium had been declining. Pragmatic Venice was, in theory at any rate, the servant of the Roman Church, while the city founded by Constantine was the capital of the Orthodox Faith. Between these two branches of the Christian religion (which in those days was still strong enough to tolerate feud, division and strife between its members) a deep schism had long existed.

If the Doge wished to assuage his conscience for his contemplated attack on eastern Christendom, he need only remember that, in the eyes of the Pope, the Byzantines were heretics. It is always pleasant to be able to combine the necessary evils of business with the blessings of God.

The Doge, the Venetians and the Crusaders had already incurred the wrath of the Pope for their attack on the Christian city of Zara. For the violation of their crusading oaths they had incurred the very real and terrifying penalty of excommunication. Something of the thought that “It is better to be hung for a sheep than for a lamb” may have occurred to the Doge and to Boniface, the Marquis of Montferrat.

Enrico Dandolo, that patrician with the morals of a merchant on the make, was one of the ablest politicians of his day. He understood the nature and character of the Pope. Innocent III was one of the greatest popes in history, but as a great ruler and a man of affairs rather than as a spiritual authority. Unlike Dandolo, however, Innocent was no cynic. He was possessed by the belief that it was the will of God that the Pope should be supreme over all temporal rulers—even though this entailed his being increasingly devoted to mundane affairs. He genuinely regretted this involvement: “I have no leisure to meditate on supermundane things; scarce I can breathe. Yea, so much must I live for others, that almost I am a stranger to myself…” At the same time he made the claim (which he failed to see was at variance with Christ’s “My Kingdom is not of this world”) that “The Lord left to Peter the governance not of the Church only but of the whole world.”

The supreme claim of the Papacy to dominion here on earth was made in the reply of Innocent III to the ambassadors of Philip Augustus of France when he had compelled that monarch to repudiate his wife Agnes and take back the wife whom, in the Pope’s eyes, he had wrongfully divorced.