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

Following the sack of Constantinople in 1204, countless precious spolia were taken and relics ‘translated’ to churches and monasteries through Western Europe. Today one only need survey the wealth of Venice’s Basilica of San Marco and its treasury to appreciate just how much that city gained. But how did the faithful make sense of where these objects came from, how they suddenly arrived at churches and monasteries, and their impact on the community? As David M. Perry notes in his introduction to Sacred Plunder, when it came to enrichment and an elevated profile, ‘Mere possession of a new relic […] was not sufficient to transform potentiality into actuality. For that, a relic needed a story’ (p. 3).

The stories of how these post-1204 relics were spatially ‘translated’ form a subgenre of hagiography, and it is on these translatio narratives that Perry focuses, exploring the memorialization and search for meaning found in them. He confines his study within two broad parameters: time, as he concentrates more or less on the decade following 1204, and the source for the narratives he examines, Paul Édouard Didier Riant’s two-volume Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae (Leroux, 1877–78). Thus, despite its title, the study does not focus exclusively on the reception and understanding of the relics that arrived in Venice after 1204, but rather on the Western European contexts in which the relics were to be found following their dispersal, and the translatio narratives that arose from these.

In Section 1, ‘Contexts’, Perry explores the 1204 hagiographies from two perspectives. First, he examines the chronological moment in which certain relics were acquired; second, he considers the conceptual frameworks of those who acquired them. Central to Chapter 1 is the question of how relics were acquired: whether in haphazard or organized looting, whether authorized or not. Chapter 2 explores the specific papal responses to their taking, from using claims of sacrilege for advantage, to extending papal control over the patriarchate of Constantinople.

Section 2, ‘Texts’, turns from these contextual understandings to specific post-1204 translatio narratives. Perry explores nine: Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy’s enrichment of Soissons cathedral, Bishop Conrad von Krosigk’s work in Halberstadt, the translation of St Mamas’s head to Langres, the arrival of the relics of St Theodore Tyro in Gaeta, the relics of St Andrew in Amalfi, the relics of St Simon the Prophet and St Paul the New Martyr in Venice, the arrival of St Clement’s relics at Cluny, and a narrative exploring Abbot Martin’s collection of relics in Pairis, Alsace. Perry examines how the texts respond to grave charges— for example sacrilege or unauthorized looting—as they discuss, with unique responses to their contexts, the necessary movement of the relics. The Venetian texts, for example, frequently invoke the events of the Fourth Crusade, while a number of the others shy away from them. Perry observes in Chapter 4 that the narratives’ authors often seek to absolve their actors of any misconduct: first, by suppressing any mention of the Fourth Crusade (‘translatio only texts’); and second, by finding a powerful narrative in what Geary termed, in 1978, furta sacra (‘pious-theft narratives’).

In Section 3, ‘Outcomes’, we turn more closely to Venice. Chapter 5 explores the historical role of translatio narratives in Venice before and after 1204, where it is possible to trace ‘the metamorphosis of Venetian identity that began after the Fourth Crusade’ (p. 137), and Chapter 6 examines the intersection of that identity with the burgeoning myth of Venice. Perry’s case studies are taken from art, such as certain marble reliefs at the Basilica of San Marco; and from correspondence and chronicles, such as a letter sent by Doge Ranieri Zeno to the pope after a fire in the basilica’s treasury in 1231. Perry observes that one change in Venetian translatio...