Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade by David M. Perry (review)

The conquest of Constantinople by the crusader troops in 1204 is an event that has been much discussed from a number of points of view. David Perry, an ecclesiastical historian, brings forward still another take on the subject. Who besides the Venetians benefited from the takeover of the richly endowed city of Constantinople, and how did they explain themselves?

Often excoriated as “the infamous Fourth Crusade,” the crusade was proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in 1198, another attempt to bring lands of the East back into the Christian fold. It has a dramatic history quite unlike that of the others. After a drawn-out series of negotiations that has engendered several books of its own, the original plan to attack Egypt as a step on the way to Jerusalem fell by the wayside. The crusader troops finally set sail from Venice in 1202. Diverted—largely, it has been argued, due to Venetian maneuvering—the galleys went to Zara to secure the Venetian hold on the city, arriving in 1204 at the gates of Constantinople. Here were riches of an almost unimaginable splendor, the most famous relics of Christendom. Perry lays out the stages of acquisition. The first wave of greedy and chaotic pillaging in which churches were ruthlessly stripped of value comes across vividly in eyewitness reports such as the impassioned denunciation by the Greek historian Niketas Choniates. This was followed by a more orderly appropriation and then the slow, steady export of precious relics to the West during the period of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, 1204–64. Gifts of relics were made to powerful Western rulers, one major example being the gift of the Crown of Thorns in 1239 by Baldwin II, installed as the Latin emperor of Constantinople, to his cousin, Louis IX, king of France—a relic later to be extravagantly enshrined in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Reactions to the despoiling of the treasures of Constantinople were immediate and harsh, especially on the part of Rome.

The core of the book lies in Perry’s discussion of nine narratives that “collectively offer an interpretation . . . that celebrates the very behaviour condemned by the papacy and other critics” (p. 111). The author makes it clear that his work is heavily indebted to Paul Édouard Didier Riant’s two-volume Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae (Geneva, 1877–78), the canonical study of the deployment of the relics of Constantinople and one of the masterpieces of late-nineteenth-century French scholarship.

Perry’s study stands as something of a gloss on Riant, placing key sources collected by Riant within an interpretive framework. The nine texts used by Perry draw from Riant’s three categories: official accounts, contemporary reports, and posterior narratives. After a brief summary, the argument set forth in each text is analyzed and compared from the point of view of an authorized transfer (“translatio only,” p. 111) versus texts that celebrate the acquisition as an act of reverence (“pious-theft,” p. 111 f.) Discrete portions of the texts used are quoted in the book; full references are given in the notes and bibliography. Treating the texts within groups rather than as individual pieces leads to some confusion but serves Perry’s aim of emphasizing the shared goals of the reports in separating their relic acquisition from the wanton behavior of the marauding crusaders. The major beneficiaries of the deployment of the relics of Constantinople were, of course, the Venetians. Two of Perry’s analyzed texts relate to Venetian relic acquisition, and the last section of the book is given over to a review of relic management in Venice before, during, and after the Fourth Crusade. Perry draws skillfully here on an extensive literature devoted to Venice’s skill at myth-making and its use of relics to support a script that made Venice the recipient of a divine plan for success.

The study is designed to...