Enrico Dandolo

Doge of Venice (r. 1193-1205)

• Born: c. 1107
• Birthplace: Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: 1205
• Place of death: Constantinople (now in Istanbul, Turkey)

As doge of Venice from 1193 to 1205, Enrico Dandolo presided over the Republic of Venice and founded its commercial, colonial, and maritime empire in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. He was the outstanding leader of the Fourth Crusade and played the key role in its diversion from the Holy Land to Constantinople.

Early Life

Enrico Dandolo (DAHN-doh-loh) was born about 1108 into the Venetian merchant aristocracy. This birth date, which the best and earliest sources provide, has been called into question by some modern historians, who doubt that a nonagenarian who was blind and a businessman to boot could have led chivalric Crusaders into battle. The primary sources from the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) agree that Dandolo was blind and very aged, and modern doubts would seem to involve latent prejudices about old age and physical handicaps rather than any real evidence. The birth date in 1108 would have Dandolo eighty-five years old in 1193 when he was elected doge (or duke) of Venice, which agrees well with the earliest sources.

During the early twelfth century, Dandolo made no special mark, so his early life has left little record. It may be presumed that he had the characteristic career of scions of the Venetian merchant aristocracy and served in the navy and marines; on a succession of government boards, assemblies, and councils; and in diplomatic posts overseas. In Venetian diplomatic service, Dandolo rose to the top by 1170 to become ambassador of Venice to the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople. He also worked in his family’s business, married, and had children, including a son who acted as his deputy in Venice when Dandolo was overseas on crusade.

During the twelfth century, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa were commercial rivals in the Mediterranean, but Venice was almost a satellite of the Byzantine Empire, culturally in its shadow, politically often under its thumb, and economically beholden to it for trade concessions and favors. Venice’s territorial ambitions along the Adriatic Balkan coast and in the islands of the Ionian and Aegean seas brought the republic into collision with the Byzantine Empire and the rising Balkan power of Hungary, which became a vassal kingdom of the Papacy. At the head of the Adriatic Sea, Venice was also placed in an exposed position between the Papacy and its allies and the Holy Roman Empire. Venice’s geographic and economic situation required inspired diplomacy to maintain the republic’s freedom and to increase its power.

Life’s Work

While Dandolo was the Venetian ambassador at Constantinople in 1170, his life suddenly and terribly changed. In the anti-Latin rioting that year in Constantinople, the Byzantines arrested and blinded Dandolo. There survive several accounts of his blinding, the most credible being the obscure Novgorodskaia letopis (1016-1471; The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, 1914), which is also the one most consistent with the other evidence.

Byzantine agents had identified Dandolo as the ablest of the Latins and a statesman very likely to rise to power in the Republic of Venice. The Byzantine emperor therefore ordered him seized and blinded by a fiendish apparatus of glass that used concentrated reflected sunlight to destroy his retinas without changing the appearance of his eyes or leaving any apparent injury. The intent was to disable Dandolo, demoralize and depress him, disqualify him from future leadership positions, and, in a devious manner, discredit him should he try to explain his blindness.

The disability would have crushed most men, but Dandolo persevered in his quest for the dogeship. He was not only undeterred by his disability but also strengthened in his resolve and purpose of liberating Venice from Byzantine influences. The blind Dandolo saw more perceptively than his contemporaries and even later historians the strategic geopolitical realities around 1200, when the traditional Crusade aimed at Jerusalem had become obsolescent, peripheral, and largely irrelevant.

Dandolo’s notion of crusading combined diplomacy, mastery of the seas, and a plan to attack directly at centers of power in Egypt and Asia Minor, not at symbols such as Jerusalem. In this, he anticipated the later development of crusading. More controversially, Dandolo regarded the Byzantine Empire not as a necessary buffer state between Western Christendom and Islam but as a degenerate, wicked, and treacherous ally that really was an obstacle to the attainment of the goals of crusading. Dandolo’s familiarity with the East and his cosmopolitan sophistication were very different from the naïve chivalry and piety of the French Crusaders, for whom crusading meant armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem, not mastery of complex power politics.

To achieve his ends, Dandolo capitalized on a series of opportunities that chance provided. First, in 1201, he negotiated the Treaty of Venice with the French Crusaders contracting for transportation across the sea to Egypt. By 1202, however, too few Crusaders had assembled at Venice to pay their part of the contract. Venice faced financial catastrophe because the republic had overextended itself on shipbuilding and provisioning the Fourth Crusade on Crusader credit.

Dandolo renegotiated the treaty and drove a hard bargain. It was argued that the Fourth Crusade would not proceed directly to Egypt but instead divert to besiege Zadar, a Christian port on the Adriatic Sea that had rebelled against the Venetian empire. Late in 1202, Christian Zadar fell to the Fourth Crusade, much to the shock of Christendom.

At Zadar, Dandolo and the Crusaders renegotiated their agreement, and taking advantage of dynastic turmoil in the Byzantine Empire and the private ambitions of some great Western noblemen, Dandolo secured another diversion of the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders were to move from Zadar in 1203 to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, ostensibly to place an exiled pretender on the throne where he would further the Crusade.

In July of 1203, the Fourth Crusade stormed the fortifications of Constantinople. The Venetians breached the seaward walls, led by Dandolo in front with the Venetian banner, setting the example of bravery. He was at this time about ninety-five years old and blind. After this first conquest of the capital, new dynastic turmoil soon led to the expulsion of the Crusaders. In April of 1204, the Crusaders took Constantinople a second time and sacked the city, plundering it for three days.

The Fourth Crusade ended here and never reached the Holy Land. The Crusaders chose Baldwin of Flanders as the new emperor of what would prove to be the ill-fated Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261) and divided the city and Byzantine territories. Venice received three-eighths of the city; trade concessions; the lion’s share of the booty in religious relics, works of art, and precious commodities; and a network of island and peninsular territories in the Aegean and Ionian seas, the foundations of Venice’s vast maritime empire. His work done, Dandolo died in Constantinople in 1205.

Significance

The long life span of Dandolo saw the transformation of the crusading ideal from the religious fervor and idealism that had marked the First Crusade to the political realism and secularism that marked the Fourth Crusade. Dandolo had been trained in the hard school of power politics and could capitalize on this transformation in the interest of the Republic of Venice, which he probably regarded as in line with the interest of all Christendom. Some romantic medievalists may criticize this crusty old bourgeois businessman for lacking the visionary idealism of a naïve French knight, but in the new age Dandolo’s commercial bourgeois values certainly were more realistic and successful. Perhaps more important, Dandolo overcame serious physical disabilities and achieved resounding victory for his Republic of Venice. This blind nonagenarian businessman of unexampled bravery, vigor, and imperial vision was medieval Venice’s greatest doge, diplomat, naval commander, and statesman.

Bibliography

Bartlett, W. B. An Ungodly War: The Sack of Constantinople and the Fourth Crusade. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000. An overview of the Fourth Crusade, focusing on the sack of Constantinople.

Brand, Charles M. Byzantium Confronts the West, 1180-1204. 1968. Reprint. Aldershot, Hampshire: Gregg Revivals, 1992. The Fourth Crusade and its background from the perspective of its Byzantine victim. Predictably hostile to Dandolo and skeptical about his blindness and old age, though grudgingly appreciative of his great abilities.

Clari, Robert de. The Conquest of Constantinople. Translated and edited by Edgar Holmes McNeal. 1936. Reprint. Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Medieval Academy of America, 1996. Primary account of the Fourth Crusade by a French knight from the Crusader rank and file. Robert de Clari certainly admired Dandolo, though it was difficult for the knight to appreciate the doge’s bourgeois values.

Madden, Thomas F. Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. A biography of Dandolo that focuses on his role in governing Venice. Bibliography and index.

Queller, Donald E., and Thomas F. Madden. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. A scholarly and detailed study, sympathetic to the Venetians and an excellent secondary source on the Crusade.