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215 chapter nine Paul the Martyr and Venetian Memories of the Fourth Crusade david m. perry It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was both dark and stormy according to the Translatio corporis beatissimi Pauli martyris de Constantinopoli Venetias, a story of relic-theft that was written shortly after 1222 by an anonymous monk from the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. A Venetian ship on its way home from Constantinople ran into terrible weather near the Ionian island of Kefalonia. The ship lost its oars, beam, and mast. People started to panic. The captain, Pietro, suddenly guessed that he might have the body of a saint hidden in his hold. The podestà of Constantinople, the ruler of the Venetian quarter in that city, had asked Pietro to bear the merchant Giacomo Grimaldo and a precious casket to Venice, but not to inspect the cargo. When the casket had been brought to the ship, Giacomo told the captain and crew that it contained glass painted with gold (and thus it was handled very carefully), but Captain Pietro now realized, in a flash of insight that our author credits to God, that he had been duped. Surely it was a blessed body, not a bejeweled image. He had the casket brought to the deck and demanded that it be opened. Giacomo demurred, saying that he had no key and that he was escorting this casket for Prior Marcus of San Giorgio Maggiore, who was currently residing in Constantinople in order to manage the formerly Greek Monastery of the Pantepoptes. The prior, with miraculous forethought, had sent the key with a deacon on a separate ship, just in case someone like Captain Pietro tried to get inside the casket. Neither the prior nor Giacomo wanted suspicious sailors to open the container and somehow damage the secret cargo, which he now revealed was actually the body of St. Paul the Martyr.∞ Some of the sailors grew angry at the deception. They accused the saint 216 institutional memory and community identity of being a second Jonah who had doomed them all and demanded that the body be cast into the sea. Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed, and the imperiled crew chose a more pious approach. They knelt. They prayed. They begged the saint to intercede and protect them. Within the hour, the sea calmed and all rejoiced. Of course, the ship had lost its oars, but then a divine breeze sprang up to propel the ship homeward, and the sailors marveled at the awesome power of Paul the Martyr. The author draws three lessons from this episode—first, that one should not question the judgment of God, even when circumstances seem dreadful ; second, that no matter how deep the darkness becomes, it cannot hide divine light; and third, that although enabled by deceit and marred by doubt, the presence of Paul the Martyr in Venice would bring great benefits to the city. These are not atypical lessons to draw from a story of relic theft, even though in this case no relic theft had actually occurred. Furthermore, the author links the imaginary theft to the Fourth Crusade, even though the crusade’s connection to the deed was tenuous. In this chapter, I contend that these incongruities—theft where there was no theft, casting this tale as a crusade-narrative even though the war had ended almost twenty years before the ‘‘theft’’—reflect the author’s attempt to use the theological force of the genre of furta sacra to construct a new, strictly Venetian interpretation of the crusade and the crusade’s significance for Venice.≤ I begin by discussing what actually happened in Constantinople in 1222, then turn to the narrative and its representation of the crusade, and finally examine the lessons that the author draws from both crusade and relic theft. The Act of Translation The translation of relics out of Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade is a well-known consequence of the formation of the Latin Empire, although the narrative sources recording acts of translation often gloss over both the details of the crusade and the process by which a given crusader acquired his new relics.≥ Clerical authors, most of whom resided in religious houses that received Eastern relics, seem to have tried to avoid connecting their new sacred possessions to a crusade that had not achieved its stated goal—liberating Jerusalem. In the case of Paul the Martyr, however , we find precisely the opposite; the anonymous monk of...

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