Italy | Venice | Family of Enrico Dandolo

Despite of the claims of Joseph Farrell, the Dandolos do not appear to have been descended from Mesopotamian slaves. Later, when they were one of the most prominent families in Venice, the Dandolos would promote the notion that their ancestors were among the leaders of the the refugees who had fled the depredations of the Goths and the Huns in the fifth century and that thus they were one of the founding families of Venice. This was a common claim among the families of Venice who wanted to assert that they did indeed belong to the aristocracy, much like Americans who place great stock in the claim that their ancestors come to the New World on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock. According to the legend favored by the Dandolos themselves, they were prominent citizens of Padua before moving to the islands in the Venetian Lagoon, where they took their rightful place among the Rialto elite. The truth is less clear. There is no mention of them at all in the earliest histories of Venice, written in the first half of the eleventh century. A history known as the  Venetiarum Historia, dating to the 1360s, does aver that the Dandolos were among a latter wave of refugees who in 630 had fled the town of Altino, about ten miles inland from the Venice Lagoon. According to this account they settled first on the island of Torcello, north of the Rialto islands. The historicity of the Venetiarum Historia has been questioned, however, making it a less than authoritative source for Dandolo family history.

The first mention of the Dandolo family name on a contemporary document dates to December 20, 982. On this date Doge Tribuno Menio (r. 979–91), three church officials,  and 131 prominent citizens of Venice signed an agreement to donate land for the foundation of a Benedictine monastery on a small island south of main Rialto islands, now known as the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The first two citizens to sign the document were Stefano Coloprino and Domenico Morosini, two of the most powerful men in Venice at the time. Other names appeared in order of importance. The forty-second signature on the list of 131 was one Vitale Dandolo, presumably an ancestor of Enrico Dandolo. From this we may include that the Dandolos had joined the ranks of the prominent families of Venice but were not yet among the highest ranking elite. Yet the family was clearly on ascendant. By 992 one Lucio Dandolo was serving as Procurator, or financial manager, of San Marco, and another Dandolo,  Carlo,  was appointed to the same office in 1033. The leader of the clan, however was Domenico Dandolo, who was actively involved in trade with Constantinople in the years 1018–25 and owned at least one boat.

The family added luster to their name by bringing back from Constantinople the body of Saint Tarasius and adding it to the large collection of relics already found in the city. Tarasius (c. 730—806) was born and raised in the Byzantine capital and was later the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. He was a noted Iconodule who believed in the veneration of icons, in staunch opposition to the iconoclasts who had come to power after Byzantine Emperor Leo III had ordered the destruction of many icons back in the 720s and 730s. Before accepting the post of Patriarch of Constantinople in 784, Tarasios made the Empress Irene promise that she would restore the veneration of icons, which she did. He was also active in the movement to unite or at least reconcile the Roman and Orthodox churches. For this he was granted sainthood by both branches of the faith. His feast day is celebrated on February 25  by the Eastern Orthodox Church, using to the Julian Calendar, and on March 10 by Roman Catholics, the same day according the Gregorian Calendar.

Tarasius’s rule as a unifier of the two churches resonated strongly in Venice, which throughout the first centuries of its existence had swerved back and forth between allegiance to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople and Catholic Church in Rome.  By the eleventh century it was firmly in the Catholic camp in religious matters, but due to its trade ties with the East it was still inextricably linked with the Orthodox world of the Byzantines. Not for nothing was it known as the westernmost city of the Orient. These bonds, it was thought, would be further strengthened by having the body of Saint Tarasius, the unifier, in Venice where it would be properly venerated. No less, it would attract pilgrims from all over the Catholic world who would drop a lot of cash in  the city, pilgrims at the time being the equivalent of today’s tourists.

Some enterprising Venetians merchants and priests in Constantinople soon located the body in a monastery near the city and concocted a plan to steal it. Surreptitiously they moved the remains of Tarasius to an awaiting ship belonging to Domenico Dandolo, who then transported it back to Venice. Dandolo was greeted with hosannahs  and the body was transported with great ceremony to the Convent of St Zaccaria, the church of which had been created to house the body of yet another saint, Zaccarios (Zechariah), This relic had actually been the gift of Byzantine Emperor Leo V the Armenian (r. 813–820 and had not been stolen. Zechariah appears both in the Bible, where he figures as the father of John the Baptist and the husband of Elizabeth, a relative of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and in the Quran, where he  named as the guardian of Mary and also as the father of John the Baptist.

The Convent of St Zaccaria itself was home to Benedictine nuns, many of them from the city’s most affluential families, who over the years had acquired a reputation for less than strict observance of their monastic vows. In 855 Pope Benedict III was granted refuge here during the upheavals surrounding the ascension of the notorious Antipope Anastasius, named pope over the objections of church hierarchy by Roman Emperor Louis II. Anastasius was eventually sent packing and Benedict III placed on the papal throne. In gratitude to the sisters who had succored him in his hour of need (I am not suggesting anything untoward here), Pope Benedict donated to the convent a significant collection of relics, including the remains of the Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–298—373) and a piece, one of many, of the True Cross. (Athanasius is also a saint according to the Egyptian Coptic tradition. During a visit to Rome in 1973 Pope Paul VI gave the Coptic Pope Shenouda part of Athanasius’s remains, which were then taken back to Egypt. The relics are now in Saint Mark's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo. Most of Athanasius’s remains are still in the Church of St. Zaccaria.)

 Tomb of Saint Zaccaria and Saint Athanasius in the Church of St. Zaccaria (click on photos for enlargements).

 Painting of St. Zaccaria Church and adjacent Monastery by Francesco Guardi (1790)

The Church of St. Zaccaria became famous for its assortment of relics and was soon a magnet for pilgrims visiting the city. The addition of the body of Saint Tarasius, spirited from Constantinople by Domenico Dandolo, only added to its luster.  The acquisition the relic—overlooking the small detail that it had been stolen—also added the esteem to the Dandolo family as a whole. In 1055 Domenico’s son Bono was named as one of two ambassadors to the court of Henry III of Germany, where he met with Henry and negotiated a trade treaty with the Germans. The next step in the Dandolo family’s ascendency was the founding of a parish church. Many Venetian families had cemented their membership among the elite by funding new churches and now it was the turn of the Dandolos. Teamed up with another local family, the Pizzamanos, they built the Church of Saint Luca (Luke) near one of the first Dandolo residences. The oldest document mentioning the church dates to 1072, although it may have been actually founded decades earlier.

The church in front of which I am now standing is on the site of the original Church of Saint Luca. The structure was largely rebuilt in the early 1600s and was reconsecrated in 1617. The exterior is rather plain, but the interior contains frescos by  Sebastiano Santi (1789–1866) and other works by Palma il Giovane (c. 1548–1628 and Paolo Veronese (1528–1588).

Exterior of the Church of San Luca

Interior of Church of San Luca

Ceiling Fresco by Sebastiano Santi

Veronese, one of sixteenth century Venice’s greatest painters, mentioned in the same breath as Titian and Tintoretto, is perhaps most famous for his monumental “The Feast in the House of Levi”. Measuring 18.20 by 42 feet, it was one of the largest canvasses painted in the sixteenth century. It was intended to be a painting of the Last Supper, a conventional enough theme. Veronese included in his painting, however, dwarfs, buffoons, drunken Germans (a common depiction, but an obvious anachronism), dogs, and a host of other extraneous characters that seemingly had no place in a painting of the Last Supper. The Inquisitors of the Catholic Church soon called Veronese on the carpet and demanded to know just what he had meant by this seemingly blasphemous treatment of such an important event in the life of Christ. Given three months to alter the painting or else, Veronese countered by changing the name of the painting to “The Feast in the House of Levi”, in reference to episode in the Gospel of Luke:

And Levi made himself a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of tax collectors and of others that sat down with them. But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

The Inquisitors relented, perhaps because the painting did appear to contain sinners, and the painting was hung in the church of  San Zanipolo in the Castello district of Venice. It now covers an entire wall in Venice’s Accademia art gallery.

I eventually visited the Accademia and was able to see Veronese’s “The Feast in the House of Levi”. It is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, and I had to wait for an hour before I could take this photo without someone standing in front of it. The time was well spent, however, since the painting presents a host of intriguing details. Especially amusing were the Black Africans peeping around the columns. Were they casing the joint? None of this, of course, has anything to do with the Last Supper, or with the Feast of Levi for that matter. 

Given his familiarly with the Gospel of Luke it is perhaps understandable that he was called upon to produce a work for the Church of Saint Luca (Luke). His altarpiece, which can still be seen in the church, portrays the Virgin Mary appearing to St. Luke as his writes Gospel. Presumably the work was done for an earlier version of the current church, since, as mentioned, the church underwent major renovations in the early seventeenth century, after Veronese had died in 1588. That a parish church like Saint Luca was able to acquire the work of a master like Veronese would seem to indicate that it enjoyed a certain degree of affluence long after the Dandolos were gone from the scene.

Oddly enough, nowadays the church turns up in tourist guides and history books not because of its association with the Dandolos and famous artists like Veronese but because  it was the burial place of the notoriously licentious gadfly and poet Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Alessandro Marzo Magno, in his engrossingly entertaining  Bound in Venice (2013), a study of the early publishing industry in the city, tells us that Aretino was:

A genius. A pornographer. A pervert. A refined intellectual. Pietro Aretino has been called all of these and more. And, at the end of the day, all of them are justified. He published what can be defined as the first pornographic book in history. And he . . . invented the figure of the author-celebrity, the writer-star that droves of nameless readers throng to see.

Born out of wedlock in Arezzo (Aretino = “from Arezzo”), the young Aretino first achieved literary fame with a pamphlet entitled "The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno”, Hanno being the pet elephant of Pope Leo X which had died in 1516. This bitterly satirical work, which lampooned both the Pope and other political and religious panjandrums, and other similar works earned him the title of “the Scourge of Princes”. But royalty also avidly sought his friendship. The King of France, François I, presented him with  a three-pound gold chain with links in the form of serpent’s tongues as a token of his affection. One of his most notorious literary productions was entitled Sonetti Lussuriosi (Salacious Sonnets):

Let’s fuck, heart of mine, let’s fuck soon
Since to fuck is what all of us are born to do
And while it’s the cock that you adore, it’s the vulva that I love more.

Pornography it may be, but as poetry it is not exactly Wordsworth. Also, the sentiment expressed about himself may have been less than sincere, since Aretino was a bisexual who once complained that the women of Venice were so seductive that they induced him to ignore his male lovers.

Aretino died of an apoplectic fit brought on by laughing too hard at an obscene joke he had heard about his sister and was entombed in San Luca Church. For part of his life he lived nearby and was probably just interred in the nearest parish church. The staid San Luca Church has no other known connection with pornographers. A blasphemous epigram on his tombstone was effaced during the Inquisition in Venice and his tomb disappeared sometime later. The only surviving copy of Sonetti Lussuriosi, his pornographic masterwork, was sold in 1978 by Christie’s art house in New York to an unknown buyer for $38,000. Despite Aretino’s rather questionable place in the ongoing history of civilization it is still his name that pops up first when the  Church of San Luca is mentioned in many current-day sources.

 Portrait of Potty-Mouthed Poet Pietro Aretino by Titian

Italy | Venice | Enrico Dandolo #4

According to tradition, the city of Venice was founded at the stroke of noon on Friday, March 25, a. d. 421. On the Catholic calendar it was the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating the day when the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would be the mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The story goes that around this time three Roman consuls from the city of Padua on the mainland came to a group of islands two miles from the coast known as  the Rivoalto,  or “high bank”. On slighter higher ground on both sides of a deep channel running through the area settlers from the mainland had established a small community. The area where they settled became known as the Rialto, a corruption of rivoalto, and adjacent channel was eventually transmogrified into the Grand Canal. The three consuls had supposedly come to the Rialto to set up a trading post and found a church dedicated to St. Giacomo (James), thus sanctioning the small settlement.  A church of St. Giacomo di Rialto still exists, just north of the Rialto Bridge across the Grand Canal, but the building itself apparently dates to around the eleventh century. The area around the Rialto Bridge, where Venice was founded, remains to this day the most commercial and often most crowded part of the city. 

 

The Lagoon of Venice with Venice in the center of photo. It is separated from the rest of the Adriatic Sea by long narrow barrier islands (click on photos for enlargements). 

 Venice in center of photo. The S-shaped Grand Canal can be seen running through the middle of the city.

It is understandable that the promoters of the origins legend wanted to link the founding of the city to the Day of the Annunciation, an extremely important event on the Catholic calendar. It is not clear why the origins legend states that the city was founded precisely at the stroke of noon. Was this when the church dedicated to St.  Giacomo was consecrated? We don’t know. Indeed, the historicity of the whole legend has been questioned. Could it possible havebeen contrived simply to add luster to Venice, a city which as it evolved was never lacking in its sense of self-importance? We do know, however, that people were living on the island of the Rivoalto in the early fifth century. A few may have been long-time residents, isolated groups of fishermen, hunters, and salt gatherers. Some may have been criminals, hiding out from the authorities on the main land. Most, however, were refugees from the Goth invasions. 

Today the Goths are known mainly for giving their name to horrible pop music, even more execrable clothing, and a dubious lifestyle. At one time, however, they were a potent political force in Europe.  For centuries the Goths, a Germanic people possibly originating in Sweden, had been fighting their way south towards the Mediterranean Sea. Prior to the beginning of the Christian era they had crossed the Baltic Sea into what is now Germany and by the second century the tall, light-skinned, largely blonde-haired marauders, notoriously for their ferocity, were causing havoc all along the northern border of the Roman Empire. They eventually broke into two groups, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. In the 390s the first Visigoth ruler, Alaric I, even dared advance on Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine, or East Roman, Empire. His attack  on the capital having been thwarted by the Byzantines, he turned his army to the southwest, into Greece, where he sacked Corinth, Sparta, Piraeus (the port of Athens), and other cities. He then set his sights on the Western Roman empire and its capital of Rome. Utilizing the superb Roman-built roads he and his army soon founded themselves in the ancient region of Veneto, positioned on the broad strip of land between the Adriatic Sea and the Dolomites and other mountains of the Alps to the north. Blessed with numerous rivers, plentiful rainfall, fertile soil, and bountiful forests, its famously industrious people had made this one of the richest regions in the Roman empire, dotted with prosperous cities like Padau, Vicenza, Asolo, Patavium, Concordia, Altino, and Montagnana. The provincial capital of Aquileia, with a population of 100,000, was deemed by the fourth-century Roman poet and scholar Ausonius (c. 310—c. 395) to be one of the nine great cities in the world, mentioned in same breath as Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and others.

In 402 Alaric and his rampaging Goths thoroughly pillaged noble Aquileia, sending shockwaves of panic throughout Veneto and beyond. Those with the means to do so fled in advance of the Goth onslaught. Some sought refuge on the islands of the Rivoalto, where it was hoped the Goths had neither the desire nor means to pursue them. Alaric was indeed focused on Rome, which he finally ransacked in 410. He moved south to Calabria, the toe of the Italian peninsula, planning from there to cross the Mediterranean and invade Africa, but he died the same year, 410, before this plan could be carried out. Meanwhile, some of the people who had fled to the islands of Rialto decided to stay there, perhaps surmising, correctly as it turned out, that Alaric would not be the last barbarian from the north to rampage through their  former abodes on the mainland to the north (not one had yet heard of Attila the Hun, but they soon would), and that they were safer on the islands in the Laguna Veneta, the lagoon of Venus. This, then, were the people met by the three Roman consuls who came to the Rialto on the Feast of Annunciation in 421.

The citizens of Veneto at the time of the Goth incursions were a mixed lot. The belt of land between the Adriatic Sea and the mountains to the north served as a bridge between western Europe and the land to the east—the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, Asia Minor, and beyond, and for centuries people from both the Occident and Orient had been traveling through the region. Excellent roads, including the ancient Via Pustumia (built c. 148 b.c. by Roman consul consul Spurius Postumius Albinus Magnus), which began in Aquileia, the capital of Veneto, and continued the whole way across the top of the boot of Italy to Genoa on the western coast of the peninsula, facilitated travel and the relatively easy movement of trade goods. The ports of Veneto at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea attracted travelers and trade from the entire Mediterranean, linking the province with the ports of western Europe, northern Africa, and the Levant. With all the people passing through Veneto it was inevitable that some, attracted by its fertile countryside and rich cities, would decide to stay. Over the centuries this emigration resulted in a rich bouillabaisse of cultures. In addition to the ancient local stock there were Romans and other Italians, other Europeans from further west, Greeks, Levantines, north Africans, Arabs, and probably even Persians and Mesopotamians, backwash from the Roman Empires’s many wars in the Mid-East.

One alternate historian, Joseph Farrell, in his provocatively entitled book Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance has even suggested that slaves brought back from Mesopotamia by Roman legions eventually settled in Veneto and it was they who went on to found the city of Venice. He claims that the real hard core Venetians down through the centuries were mostly of Mesopotamian descent and that the great lengths to which the Venetian aristocracy would eventually go to impede marriage outside of their own circle was in fact a stratagem to maintain these bloodlines dating back to the ancient Mesopotamia. He also maintains that the legendary financial acumen of Venetians was a result of the arts of accounting and money management first invented by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia and refined by their descendants, who eventually ended up in the Lagoon of Venice. Mesopotamia was, after all, where money was invented.

I know of no mainstream historian who agrees with the postulation that Venice was founded by Mesopotamian slaves (DNA studies of living members of the Venetian aristocracy would certainly be interesting, however). Mainstream historians like Jane Gleeson-White do provide tantalizing links between Mesopotamia and finance as it evolved in Venice. In her breathtakingly suggestive book Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, she points out that writing, invented in Mesopotamia, started out as a way of counting objects: keeping count, or “accounting.” She adds:

Apart from its role in the invention of writing, accounting is significant for human civilization because it affects the way we see the world and shapes our beliefs. To take this early example, the invention of token accounting in Mesopotamia was important not only because it facilitated economic exchanges and generated writing, “but because it encouraged people to see the world around them in terms of quantifiable outcomes”. For the first time we had tools which allowed us to count and measure— to quantify— the world around us and to record our findings.

She goes on to trace how the art and science of accounting, founded by Mesopotamian pebble counters—an early version of today’s bean counters— developed in ancient Greek and Rome and eventually became practiced in the mercantile cities of Italy. It would be honed to perfection in Venice. By Enrico Dandolo’s time the Venetians had become masters of a world-view dominated by ”quantifiable outcomes”. Balancing of their ledger books became the all important consideration. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 was motivated by the need of the Venetians to even their accounts with the Crusaders, who owned them a vast amount of money, and then add a quantifiable profit to compensate for the risk they had taken. Enrico Dandolo was above all a masterful book-keeper. The Mesopotamians pebble counters would have been proud.

Italy | Venice | Enrico Dandolo #2

The Hotel Casanova where I am staying is located on Frezzeria Street, named after the arrow (frecce) shops with which it was once lined. Arrows were an important commodity in fourteenth century Venice, when all adult males were expected to be proficient in the use of the crossbow. Arrows have gone the way of Zip discs; now the street hosts hotels, restaurants, and up-scale clothing stores geared toward tourists. The legendary swordsman and memoirist Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) once lived just off Frezzeria Street, in the Corte del Luganegher; no doubt the hotel got it name from this association. The English gadabout, poet, and prime-time cad Lord Byron (1788–1824) found lodging just up the street from my hotel at building number 1673 when he first arrived in Venice in 1816, and he very quickly managed to seduce his landlord’s wife, the delectable twenty-two year old Marianna, who according to Byron was “in her appearance altogether like an antelope.” Presumably this was meant as a compliment. Near Byron’s former lodging I veer into a coffee bar for a double expresso and latte chaser. This is literally a bar. Sissified customers requiring stools or tables and chairs need not enter. You drink your coffee standing at the bar the way God intended it to be done. Locals, tradespeople from the neighboring shops, pop in for a quick expresso bracer which they toss down at one go, like a cowboy downing a shot of whisky in an old-time saloon, and then quickly depart. The only thing missing is the swinging doors. 

The first item on my agenda is the birthplace of Enrico Dandolo. There are, of course, no cars in Venice. Travel is by foot or boat. I set out on foot. Venice consists of six sestieri, or districts: San Marco, Cannaregio, Castello, Dorsoduro, San Polo, and Santa Croce. My hotel and the birthplace of Dandolo are in the San Marco district. Each district has numerous campi (singular campo = square) and campielli (smaller squares). The easiest way for the visitor to navigate the city, assuming that he is unfamiliar with the byways, seems to be to proceed from square to square, although this may not be the shortest route to where one is going. The Dandolo residences—there were several Dandolo families in the area—are near the San Luca (St. Luke) Church, itself close to the Campo Manin. The church is indicated on detailed maps of the city, but the residences, to my knowledge, are not on any maps, nor do they appear in any tourist guides I am aware of. I have been able to locate them only by means of a scholarly biography of Enrico Dandolo and some recondite articles in obscure journals. My map of Venice indicates that I have to go through five campi or campielli to get there. 

The first is the Campiello San Moise, the small square in front of the San Moise Church. Although the church itself is ancient, build in the eighth century, the elaborately baroque facade, festooned with any number of rococo sculptures, dates from the 1660s. It was this facade that had infuriated the extremely opinionated nineteenth-century historian John Ruskin, one of Venice’s most famous, notorious even, elucidators. I had read, or at least glanced through Ruskin’s classic The Stones of Venice during a brief Anglophile period when I was a college student, and last night in my hotel room I had downloaded a copy to my Kindle and skimmed through it again. “I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418,” intoned Ruskin, “the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later.” To him the floridly ornamented facade of San Moise represented a perfect example of the frivolousness to which the once stern and austere Republic of Venice had devolved since the Fall. The facade was “frightful,” he railed, adding that it was “one of the basest examples of the basest school of the Renaissance.” 

Facade of the Church of San Moise. John Ruskin was not amused (click on photos for enlargements). 

The half dozen people in the campo taking photos of the facade, including two using serious looking cameras on tripods, are no doubt blissfully unaware of Ruskin’s fulminations. Few twitter-era people have the desire or fortitude needed to wade through the swamps and thickets of Ruskin’s notoriously dense Victorian prose. If he is remembered at all by most people it may be because of the 2014 movie Effie Gray, starring the adorable Dakota Fanning as Euphemia Chalmers Gray, better known as Effie, the wife of John Ruskin, and heartthrob Greg Wise as the great historian himself. According to the commonly accepted story (the truth may be more nuanced), on their wedding night Ruskin was so shocked by the sight of his bride’s naked body—he was particularly appalled by her pubic hair (apparently Victorian ladies did not shave)—that he was rendered impotent, and remained so for the rest of their married life. Bizarrely, Ruskin had had a crush on Effie ever since she was twelve years old, but apparently he had not thought through the physical aspects of the relationship, at least not until their wedding night, when he made his disquieting discoveries. Claiming that the marriage had never been consummated, Effie was eventually granted an annulment and went on to marry her ex-husband’s erstwhile friend and protégé John Everett Millais, with whom she had eight children. For more on this unfortunate threesome see Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais.

On the far side of the campo is the canal called Le Rio (rio = canal) de San Moise. The bridge across it is called, predictably, Le Ponte San Moise (ponte = bridge). This is the first canal west of tourist-magnet Piazza San Marco and thus the bridge is a very popular spot for hiring gondolas. At least fifty people are lined up on both sides of the canal waiting to board their boats. Every one of them is Chinese. They appear to be members of at least three tour groups. The tour leaders shout in Mandarin, trying to direct their charges, some of them elderly and not too sturdy on their pins, onto the awaiting gondolas. The usual rate, I have been told, for using a gondola is about $100 for a forty minute ride with up to six people, although the prices can vary considerably. So a ride are not especially cheap but hey, what’s Venice without a gondola ride? The first thing you are going to be asked when you get back to Shanghai is “did you take a gondola ride?” and you better be prepared to say yes.

 Chinese tourists waiting to board a gondola

Chinese tourists setting out on a gondola ride

From the Le Ponte San Moise I mosey down Calle Larga XX Marzo (calle = street) to the end, then hang a left onto Calle de Ostreghe, which soon makes a dogleg turn to the right. After crossing a bridge I emerge into the Campo Santa Maria del Giglio. On the northern side of the square is the Church of Santa Maria del Giglio (Saint Mary of the Lily), of some note because its flamboyantly rococo facade contains no religious images at all, but is instead a bombastic memorial to one man, Admiral Antonio Barbaro (d. 1679). Barbaro had an extensive military and political career, holding posts in Rome, Padua, Corfu, and elsewhere, but most notably on the island of Crete, once part of the Byzantine Empire but which Enrico Dandolo claimed as war booty in the name of the Republic of Venice after the fall of Constantinople in 1204. Crete became the Republic’s first overseas colony and served as one of the most important way-stations in the trade networks linking Venice with Constantinople and Alexandria. Candia, the capital (now known as Heraklion), was believed to be the most strongly fortified city in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1648 the Ottoman Turks, intent on seizing Crete, invested Candia, resulting in a siege lasting twenty-one years, one of the longest in military history. Barbaro served as the governor of Candia and was also one of its defenders during the siege. Finally, in 1669 the Ottomans captured Candia and they soon controlled the entire island. 

It was a terrible blow to Venice, which had lost one of its most important trading and military strongholds. Barbaro emerged unscathed, however, and he when died he left a considerable amount of money (30,000 ducati) for the refurbishment of the church on the northern side of the square. Dating back to the ninth century, the original structure was known as known the Church of Santa Maria Zobenigo, named after the Jubanico (Zobenigo being a corrupted form of Jubanico) family who had donated much of the money for its construction (some maps still call the square Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo). Barbaro’s 30,000 ducati bequest was used to update the church, most notably adding the baroque facade. A relief the Barbaro family coat-of-arms can be seen at the top of the facade. In the center is statue of Barbaro himself, with representations of Honor, Virtue, Fame, and Wisdom on either side. The entrance is flanked by statues of various family members. Also depicted are marble relief maps showing the various places where Barbaro served.

Facade of Church of Santa Maria del Giglio, with statue of Barbaro in the middle

A representation of Fame trumpeting Barbaro’s deeds to passersby in the square

Barbaro family members on the facade

All of the self-glorification seen on the facade of Church of Santa Maria del Giglio might be considered excessive, especially when we consider that Crete, one of the jewels on the Venetian necklace of islands stretching across the eastern Mediterranean, was lost during Barbaro’s watch. The easily irritated John Ruskin, predictably, was utterly appalled by this spectacle of baroque self-indulgence, yet another example of the decadence into which once noble Venice had devolved. The church reeked of “insolent atheism,” he fumed, adding that it was “totally destitute of religious symbols and entirely dedicated to the honour of [the Barbaro family].” He had plenty of opportunities to hone his outrage, since for eight months he had lived just three hundred feet away. The Campo Santa Maria del Giglio opens onto another square, the Campo del Traghetto, which extends south to the Grand Canal. By the side of Campo del Traghetto, facing the Grand Canal, is the Palazzo Gritti, where Ruskin and his long-suffering wife Effie rented rooms in 1851–52. Aficionados of American literature may recall that the character Colonel Cantwell in Ernest Hemingway’s novel Across the River and into the Trees also stayed here, as did Hemingway himself. Now the palazzo is home to a very up-scale hotel, the Gritti Palace (cheapest room $538 a night; cheapest suite is $1,934 a night). I would stay here myself, but I am experiencing a cash flow problem, one that, unfortunately, has been dogging me for decades. 

Italy | Venice | Enrico Dandalo #3

To the west Campo Santa Maria del Giglio opens unto a smaller square known as Campiello Feltrina. From here Calle Zaguri crosses a canal known Rio de S. M. Zobenigo.  The bridge over the canal, the Ponte de la Feltrina, is one of 435 bridges in Venice (including the island of Guidecca, south of the six districts name earlier) that cross the city’s 182 named canals. It is also considered to be of the more picturesque. I know this because I hear a tour group leader pointing it out to her ten or so charges. On the other side of the bridge is a Chinese tour group of some fifteen people led by a women carrying a long stick topped by a yellow flag that she frantically waves to assemble her wandering troops. Young Chinese women on the bridge itself pose in varying degrees of allure for photos while others jockey for positions from which to take selfies. Attracted to this site by the tourists are four beggars, two on each end of the bridge. Two are decrepit old men, obviously locals, with crutches, perhaps props, and two are black men in their twenties dressed in the gangsta style favored by American rappers. I ask one where he is from and he answers, “Nigeria.” Several people are taking his photo. In Venice he is just part of the scenery.

The mob thins out as I move along Calle Zaguri to Campo San Maurizio. The church on the northern side has been deconsecrated and now serves as a museum dedicated to the music of Baroque Venice. I have on my Kindle three novels, Whispers of Vivaldi,  The Iron Tongue of Midnight, and Cruel Music, all by Beverle Graves Myers, that I have been dipping as a relief from the sometimes impenetrable  profundities of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. The novels are part of a series starring Tito Amato, a castrato singer in one of Venice’s main opera houses during the flowering of Baroque music. Castratos are, of course, men who have been castrated as boys in order to preserve their pure soprano voices. Castrato singers were all the rage in eighteenth century Venice and the most successful could demand enormous fees for appearing in an opera (Ruskin, thankfully, did not comment on this phenomenon). In addition to singing in operas, Tito Amato is also an amateur detective who gets called upon to solve the various crimes which are forever plaguing those somehow connected with the world of opera. His investigations take him into all levels of Venetian society, from the most uppity of the upper crust to the lowest beggars, and thus offer an entertaining and often amusing view of Venice in the eighteen century. I am very tempted to wander into the Baroque music museum to see what more I can learn about this tantalizingly intriguing era but Enrico Dandolo calls. 

Exiting Campo San Maurizio I follow Calle del Spezier to Campo San Stefano. The street itself is named after the many pharmacies (spezieri) found here. Most are now gone, giving way to stores focused on the tourist trade. Campo San Stefano is the largest in the San Marco district, big enough to have hosted bull fights in the eighteenth century. Its southern end extends to the Accademia Bridge over the Grand Canal, beyond which is the district of Dorsoduro. At its northern end is the Church of San Stefano, an austere old Gothic pile dedicated to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr (I had earlier visited the Church Of St. Stephanos In Iran). “An interesting building of central Gothic, the best ecclesiastical example of it in Venice,” according to John Ruskin, the grand old pile stands as a silent rebuke to the rococo extravagances of the churches of San Moise and Santa Maria del Giglio. It has played a storied role in the history of Venice, although not always a salubrious one. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the church had to be reconsecrated six times because of the blood spilled on its floor from various acts of violence.

 Campo San Stefano, with the church of San Stefano on the right (click on photos for enlargements)

Church of San Stefano. It warmed the cockles of John Ruskin’s heart.

From the front of the San Stefano church Calle Frati leads to yet another square, Campo Sant Angelo. Looking back from here, we get the best view of the famous campanile, or bell tower, of Church of San Stefano. It was first erected in 1544, but in 1585 it was struck by lightening and collapsed. The lightening was so intense it melted the bells in the tower. The rebuilt version was two hundred feet high, with bells imported from England. After an earthquake in 1902 the campanile listed six feet off center, giving the Leaning Tower of Pisa stiff competition as Italy’s most famous leaning tower.  If and when it does fall over into the crowded environs of the Church of San Stefano the results are not going to be pretty. 

Campo Sant Angelo, with leaning Campanile of the Church of San Stefano beyond

Yet another street called Calle del Spezier (there are several in Venice) exits the northern corner of the square, and after changing names twice leads directly to Camp Manin. I cannot however resist the urge to make a slight detour to Rio Terra dei Assassini. A rio terra is a filled-in canal which serves as a street. Assassini is of course the Italian for assassins. In centuries past this area of narrow streets and dark allies was notorious for its criminal element, and one ventured here at one’s own risk. The dangers of traipsing around in Venice after dark were noted by many travelers, including the irrepressible English gadabout Thomas Coryat (1577–1617), whose wanderings, mostly on foot, took him through much of Europe, and on to Turkey, Persia, and India.  He has been widely credited with popularizing the use of the table fork in England (he was nicknamed Furcifer, Latin for “fork-bearer”), a habit which he may have picked up in Venice, and with introducing the word umbrella into the English language. He was most famous, however, for the wildly popular accounts of his travels, including the touchingly entitled Coryat’s Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five Moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Orisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany and the Nether lands; Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome, published in London in 1611.  In Crudities he tells us that:

There are certaine desperate and resolute villaines in Deiperate Venice, called Braves, who at some unlawfull times do commit great villainy. They wander abroad very late in the night to and fro for their prey, like hungry Lyons, being armed with a privy coate of maile, a gauntlet upon their right hand, and a little sharpe dagger called a stiletto. They lurke commonly by the water side, and if at their time of the night, which is betwixt eleven of the clocke and two, they happen to meete any man that is worth the rifling, they will presently stabbe him, take away all about him that is of any worth, and when they have throughly pulled his plumes, they will throw him into one of the channels: but they buy this booty very deare if they are after apprehended. For they are presently executed. 

 These cut-throats had been plaguing Venice since at the very least the twelfth century, when Doge Domenico Michiel (1118– 30)  had to enact special laws to deal with the criminal elements that haunted certain areas of Venice. The Rio Terra degli Assassini and nearby alleys were especially fertile hunting grounds for thieves and cut-throats because wealthy Venetians used them to sneak in the back way to the  brothels on nearby Calle della Mandola. Eventually the authorities dealt with the crime problem by illuminating Rio Terra degli Assassini with cesendeli, or small lanterns, making it one of the first streets in Venice with street lighting. The problem persisted into the eighteenth century, however when Venetian chronicler G. B. Gallicciolli noted:

It had become common to wear false beards in the style of the Greeks, with the consequence that great evil was done by night, and especially in cramped passageways, like . . . the Ponte degli Assassini. Many were found murdered and no one knew who was responsible, because no one could recognize the malefactors. So throughout the territories of Venice these beards were banned by day and night, on pain of the gallows. (quoted in Ian  Littlewood’s Venice: A Literary Companion).

From this we know that by the eighteen century the bridge (ponte) and presumably the street associated with it were named after assassini—assassins. The street and bridge, however, could not have had this name back in the twelve century, when Doge Domenico Michiel addressed the problem of violence in Venice, for the simple reason that the word did not then exist in Italian or any other European language. The word assassini (singular assassino) is derived from the Arabic word hashishi, which means a user of hashish, the drug extracted from marijuana. It was used in a derogatory sense to describe low-life drug addicts, the way we nowadays might call someone a pothead or doper. In the Mideast during the twelfth century the word was used by mainstream Muslims to denigrate members of the Ismailis, a sect which had broken off from the main body of Shiite Muslims. Because of their unorthodox teachings the Ismailis were considered heretical by Sunni and mainstream Shiite Muslims alike. The Ismailis, based in Persia and Syria (I have visited Alamut, their headquarters in Persia), were notorious for murdering the leaders of their religious and political opponents. This was done by carefully trained men who often managed to insinuate themselves into the lives of their victims. They were usually killed on the spot by bodyguards or others after murdering their victims, making them martyrs for the Ismaili cause.  Sunni Muslims and other of their victims became convinced that the men who carried out the murders used hashish as a stimulant and were thus hashishi. Most modern scholars dismiss this idea, but the name stuck, and Ismailis in general became known as hashishi. 

One of Venice’s most famous sons, Marco Polo, brought back to the Occident one of the first accounts of the Ismailis, although by his time the sect had in large part been destroyed or driven underground by the Mongols under Khülegü Khan, grandson of Chingis Khan, who had captured their headquarters of Alamut in 1256. The peripatetic Polo apparently did not call them hashishi in his famous book, but the word was broadcast by other Occidental travelers and writers and soon seeped into European languages. The corrupted forms of the word—assassino in Italian and assassin in English—were eventually used to describe anyone who carried out murder for political purposes or, more generally, a professional killer. It is probably in this latter sense that the word was used to name Rio Terra degli Assassini, although most of the murders that took place here were probably linked to robbery. If we could find out when the street was named we would know that by then this foreign word had became permanently embedded in the Italian language. Unfortunately I have not been able to discover any further history of the street and so this questions must remain unanswered.  

Street sign for Rio Terra degli Assassini. All the literature uses the word delgi, but the sign uses dei. Perhaps some Italian language maven could point out the reason for this discrepancy?

Now the street is perhaps most famous for the Osteria ai Assassini, or Restaurant of the Assassins, which despite its rather intimidating name gets very decent reviews on internet tourist sites. The restaurant has not yet opened for the day, however, and I am the only tourist on the street. Is it just my imagination, or do several of the men who pass me in the street, obviously locals, look suspiciously furtive? Deciding not to linger on Rio Terra degli Assassini, I find my way back to Calle del Spezier, which soon turns to Calle della Mandola, now appearing to be devoid of whorehouses, although there are some skanky-looking women in the street. Calle della Mandola soon becomes Calle Cortesia, which then crosses a lovely little bridge into Campo Manin, graced by a statue of Venetian patriot Daniele Manin (1804–1857), who led the resistance against the ultimately successful Austrian invasion of Venice in the late 1840s. 

 Bridge over the Rio de San Luca

Campo Manin

The residences of the Dandolo family are just north of here, near the Church of St. Luca. Exiting the the square at its northern corner, I walk a couple hundred feet, turn left into Campiello  di San Luca, then continue on to the canal. There, fronting the canal is the Church of St. Luca, the parish church of the Dandolo family. It was in this neighborhood, a thousand feet or so from the Rialto, the ancient center of Venice, that the man who instigated the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was born. 

Campiello  di San Luca

 Church of San Luca (Saint Luke)

Plaque on the front of the Church of San Luca

Italy | Venice | Enrico Dandolo #1

After my Visit To the Tomb of Enrico Dandolo in Istanbul I wandered further west to Venice. I wanted to see his birthplace and the four copper statues of horses that he had expropriated from Constantinople after the sack of the city in 1204. The flight from Istanbul to Venice takes two hours and twenty-five minutes, landing at Marco Polo (what else?) Airport at 12:50 p.m. local time. A paved pathway leads several hundred yards from the airport exits to the water buses that transport arrivals two miles across the lagoon to Venice. Although I have read John Julius Norwich’s magisterial  A History Of Venice (who hasn’t?) and several other books about Venice and its role at the ultimate western terminus of the Silk Road I was woefully ignorant about the details of actually visiting the city. All I knew I had gleaned from the internet the night before in my hotel room in Istanbul and in the Turkish Air business lounge at Ataturk Airport.

The water bus made seven stops before arriving at the San Marco Piazza stop more than a hour after leaving the airport. I had booked a hotel based solely on its proximity to the Church of San Luca (Luke), which my preliminary researches had indicated was near the birthplace of Enrico Dandolo. The hotel was located on the far side of San Marco Piazza— Plaza of St. Mark—and although all tourist information warned about the notorious difficulty of finding one’s way around Venice I had the GPS coordinates of the hotel and my GPS and did not expect any difficulties. Although anxious to get settled in I could not help but stop for a few moments in the vast plaza and gaze at St. Mark’s Church at it eastern end. Sure enough, there on the facade were four statues of the horses. I knew, however, that these were replicas of the four statues expropriated by Enrico Dandolo after the sack of Constantinople. The originals were in a museum inside the church itself. They must wait.

St. Mark’s Plaza and the Church of St. Mark (click on photos for enlargements)

 Church of St. Mark

Replicas of the statues of four horses brought to Venice by Enrico Dandolo on the facade of St. Mark’s Church

 Another view of the statues

Leaving one of the northern exits from the plaza I quickly homed in on my hotel using my GPS. Arriving there I was somewhat flummoxed to find the door of the hotel locked and the lobby plunged into darkness. I pounded on the door but got no response. I was about to leave and ask someone in the next-door store about the hotel when I noticed an envelope taped to the door. It was below my waist level and I had not noticed it before. Glancing at the envelope, I saw that it was addressed to “Mr Corner”, a common misspelling of my name. A note inside stated that the hotel had been closed because of unforeseen maintenance problems but that I should proceed to the Hotel Casanova, where a room had been reserved for me. A map was attached showing the way to the eponymous Hotel Casanova. It turned out it was just a hundred feet or so from the western exit from St. Mark’s Plaza. After checking into my tiny, rather shabbily furnished room, I retired across the street to a restaurant where I had a plate of pasta and a half liter of refreshingly perky red house wine. There were six waitresses in this restaurant and all of them appeared to be Chinese. For a moment I thought I was back in Beijing. My waitress was preternaturally attentive. I had only to raise one eyebrow to bring her scurrying to my table. Later I went back to my hotel room to see what more I could dig up on the internet about the family of Enrico Dandolo.

Turkey | Istanbul | Hagia Sophia | Enrico Dandolo

From the Obelisk of Theodosius I wandered east through Sultanahmet Square, soon passing by the the Kaiser Wilhelm Fountain, an octagonal domed structure built by the German government in 1900 to mark the German Emperor Wilhelm II's visit to Istanbul in 1898. Near here would have stood the starting gates used for horse and chariot races in the old Byzantine Hippodrome which occupied the area now taken up by Sultanahmet Square. 

Mounted above the starting gates were larger-than-life size copper statues of four horses. Their provenance is unclear (an Entire Book has been written on this issue and the horses in general) but they were probably made in what is now Greece and used to ornament some monumental structure there. Greece having been subsumed by the Byzantines, Theodosius II, the same Theodosius who built the Land Walls, expropriated the horses and had them moved to Constantinople, where they were used to ornament the Hippodrome. When the Crusaders and Venetians sacked Constantinople in 1204 the horses were claimed as war booty by the Venetians and taken to Venice, where they can still be found today.

 An artist’s rendering of the Hippodrome starting gates. The horses can be seen on top of the gate in the middle. The dome of Hagia Sophia is behind, to the right  (click on photos for enlargements).

Leaving Sultanahmet Square I arrive at the entrance to Hagia Sophia, the immense church built in the  a.d. 530s by Justinian I. It is now a museum. One of the architectural wonders of the world, it is visited by millions of people a year—3,574,043 visitors in 2014. Usually around opening time there is a line of several hundred people waiting to get in. Today, three days after the suicide bombing at the nearby Column of Theodosius, there is no one in line. I have been inside Hagia Sophia several times, but each time it was crowded with hundreds, of not thousands of people. I thought today, when it would not be so crowded,  might be a good day to visit again. Inside I was surprised to find several hundred people, almost all of them members of tour groups. They had apparently arrived right at opening time and used a special entrance reserved for guided groups. I spent an hour or so wandering around the ground floor, studying the many stone pillars ransacked from various lands conquered by the Byzantines, and then climb the broad stone staircase to the South Gallery. 

Hagia Sophia

On the east wall of the western buttress in the South Gallery can be seen the mosaic known as the Deesis. It probably dates to the fourteenth century. John Freely, author of Strolling through Istanbul, considers it “one of the very greatest works of art produced in Byzantium.” Only part of the mosaic has survived, but we can see Christ in the middle flanked by Mary and St. John the Baptist.

The Deesis: Christ in the middle, Mary on the left; St. John the Baptist on the right

Detail of the Deesis

Everyone who visits the South Gallery stops and gazes at the Deesis, most taking photos with their smart phones or iPads. Almost no one notices a small tombstone set level with the floor at the base of the buttress facing the Deesis. Most walk by it without a glance. Few realize that it is a memorial to the man who instigated what may well be the greatest crime ever perpetrated in the name of Christianity. I am speaking of Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo and Sack of Constantinople in 1204. John Freely:

Set into the pavement just opposite to the Deesis is the tomb of the man who ruined Byzantium. Carved in Latin letters on the broken lid of a sarcophagus there, we see the illustrious name, HENRICUS DANDALO. Dandalo, Doge of Venice, was one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade and was the one chiefly responsible for persuading the Latins to attack Constantinople in the years 1203–4. After the final capture of Constantinople on 13 April 1204, Baldwin of Flanders was crowned in Haghia Sophia as Emperor of Rumania, as the Latins called the portion of the Byzantine Empire which they had conquered. But the Latin Emperor did not reign supreme even in his capital city, for three-eighths of Constantinople, including the church of Haghia Sophia, was awarded to the Venetians and ruled by Dandalo. The old Doge now added the title of Despot to his name and thereafter styled himself “Lord of the fourth and a half of all the Roman Empire.” But proud Dandalo had little time to lord it over his fractional kingdom, for he died the following year, 16 June 1205, and was buried in the gallery of Haghia Sophia. After the Conquest, according to tradition, Dandalo’s tomb was broken open and his bones thrown to the dogs.

 Memorial to Enrico Dandolo

Detail of Enrico Dandolo

 We might assume that whatever marker covered his tomb was also destroyed. The current tombstone was installed later, when and by whom is it not clear (if anyone has any information about this please let me know). Thus the marker here in the South Gallery is not actually the grave of Enrico Dandolo (or Dandalo; both spelling occur in the literature) but rather a memorial to him. From the memorial I walk over to the balcony and gaze down on the hundreds of people milling around the floor of Hagia Sophia. The scene on April 13, 1204, would have been quite different. We have the account of the Byzantine historian Niketas or Nicetas Choniates (1155–1217), who was an eye-witness to the Sack of Constantinople:

What then should I recount first and what last of those things dared at that time by these murderous men? O, the shameful dashing to earth of the venerable icons and the flinging of the relics of the saints, who had suffered for Christ's sake, into defiled places! How horrible it was to see the Divine Body and Blood of Christ poured out and thrown to the ground! These forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents and harbingers of his anticipated ungodly deeds, seized as plunder the precious chalices and patens; some they smashed, taking possession of the ornaments embellishing them, and they set the remaining vessels on their tables to serve as bread dishes and wine goblets. Just as happened long ago, Christ was now disrobed and mocked, his garments were parted, and lots were cast for them by this race; and although his side was not pierced by the lance, yet once more streams of Divine Blood poured to the earth.
The report of the impious acts perpetrated in the Great Church are unwelcome to the ears. The table of sacrifice, fashioned from every kind of precious material and fused by fire into one whole-blended together into a perfection of one multicolored thing of beauty, truly extraordinary and admired by all nations-was broken into pieces and divided among the despoilers, as was the lot of all the sacred church treasures, countless in number and unsurpassed in beauty. They found it fitting to bring out as so much booty the all-hallowed vessels and furnishings which had been wrought with incomparable elegance and craftsmanship from rare materials. In addition, in order to remove the pure silver which overlay the railing of the bema, the wondrous pulpit and the gates, as well as that which covered a great many other adornments, all of which were plated with gold, they led to the very sanctuary of the temple itself mules and asses with packsaddles; some of these, unable to keep their feet on the smoothly polished marble floors, slipped and were pierced by knives so that the excrement from the bowels and the spilled blood defiled the sacred floor. Moreover, a certain silly woman laden with sins, an attendant of the Erinyes, the handmaid of demons, the workshop of unspeakable spells and reprehensible charms, waxing wanton against Christ, sat upon the synthronon and intoned a song, and then whirled about and kicked up her heels in dance.
It was not that these crimes were committed in this fashion while others were not, or that some acts were more heinous than others, but that the most wicked and impious deeds were perpetrated by all with one accord. Did these madmen, raging thus against the sacred, spare pious matrons and girls of marriageable age or those maidens who, having chosen a life of chastity, were consecrated to God? Above all, it was a difficult and arduous task to mollify the barbarians with entreaties and to dispose them kindly towards us, as they were highly irascible and bilious and unwilling to listen to anything. Everything incited their anger, and they were thought fools and became a laughingstock. He who spoke freely and openly was rebuked, and often the dagger would be drawn against him who expressed a small difference of opinion or who hesitated to carry out their wishes.
The whole head was in pain. There were lamentations and cries of woe and weeping in the narrow ways, wailing at the crossroads, moaning in the temples, outcries of men, screams of women, the taking of captives, and the dragging about, tearing in pieces, and raping of bodies heretofore sound and whole. They who were bashful of their sex were led about naked, they who were venerable in their old age uttered plaintive cries, and the wealthy were despoiled of their riches. Thus it was in the squares, thus it was on the corners, thus it was in the temples, thus it was in the hiding places; for there was no place that could escape detection or that could offer asylum to those who came streaming in.
O Christ our Emperor, what tribulation and distress of men at that time! The roaring of the sea, the darkening and dimming of the sun, the turning of the moon into blood, the displacement of the stars—did they not foretell in this way the last evils? Indeed, we have seen the abomination of desolation stand in the holy place, rounding off meretricious and petty speeches and other things which were moving definitely, if not altogether, contrariwise to those things deemed by Christians as holy and ennobling the word of faith.
Such then, to make a long story short, were the outrageous crimes committed by the Western armies against the inheritance of Christ.

The Crusader State established in 1204 by Enrico Dandolo and his co-conspirators lasted until 1261, when Constantinople was retaken by the Byzantines. But a candle always flickers most brightly one last time just before it goes out, and Byzantium soon proved itself to be a spent force. On May 29, 1453 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror entered Constantinople and claimed it for Islam. He himself rode into Hagia Sophia and ordered that it be turned into a mosque. After 1123 years Byzantium was gone forever, and what is now Turkey became part of the Muslim geosphere.

As John Julius Norwich put it in Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, volume three of his magisterial history of the Byzantine Empire:

There are few greater ironies in History than the fact that the fate of Eastern Christendom should have been sealed—and half of Europe condemned to some five hundred years of Muslim rule—by men who fought under the banner of the Cross. Those men were transported, inspired, encouraged, and ultimately led by Enrico Dandolo in the name of the Venetian Republic; and, just as Venice derived the major advantage from the tragedy, so she and her magnificent old doge must accept the responsibility for the havoc that they have wrought on the world.

Among the vast amount of loot claimed by Enrico Dandolo were the four copper statues of horses that graced the Hippodrome. As mentioned above, they are now in Venice. While standing there overlooking the floor of Hagia Sophia I decide I must go to Venice to see the horses and the birthplace of Enrico Dandolo, the man who has had such an incalculable effect on world history.

Turkey | Istanbul | Hippodrome | Obelisk of Theodosius

The morning after my Arrival In Istanbul I emerged from my hotel slightly before daybreak.  A slight drizzle was falling as I walked up past the remnants of the Miliarum Aureum, or Golden Milestone, which during Byzantine times was used a zero reference point for the milestones on the many roads which extended throughout the empire. A modern signpost next to the ruins shows the air miles to Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and other points of interest. I crossed what the Byzantines called the Mese, the main thoroughfare running through old Constantinople, now called Divan Yolu, into Sultanahmet Meydani, or square. Istanbul is not an early rising town, at least not here in the main historical and tourist district. Not a soul can be seen on Divan Yolu except for one taxi driver asleep in his car and the square is also empty except for two police cars parked near the Column of Theodosius, where the suicide bombing took place three days earlier. The historical center of a city said to have over fifteen million residents is eerily deserted. 

The square is about 950 feet long and 190 feet wide. It is flanked on the southwest by the Sultanahmet Mosque, or Blue Mosque, built between 1609 and 1616 by Sultan Ahmet I. With its vast central dome and cluster of half-domes and its six minarets it is surely one of the most iconic mosques in the world. On the northwest is the old mansion of Ibrahim Pasha (1493–1536), grand vizier of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1523–1536). Reputed to be the biggest personal residence ever built in the Ottoman Empire, is it now an art museum. (Ibrahim paid for his extravagance with his live; Suleiman had him executed in 1536 for, in effect, getting too big for his breeches.) On the southern end of the square are the buildings of Marmara University. 

Sultanahmet, or Blue Mosque (click on photos for enlargements)

Running in a line down the center of the square are three monuments that predate the Ottoman era. At the southwest end of the square is a 104-foot column of rough stone said to be been erected by Theodosius the Great (a.d. 347–395) or Constantine the Great (a.d. 272–337). It was later sheathed with gilded bronze plaques by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 912–59). The bronze plaques were reportedly stripped off and claimed as booty by the Crusaders and Venetians who sacked Constantinople in 1204. The middle monument is the famous Serpent Column which once graced the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in what is now Greece. The brass column, which consisted of thee intertwined serpents, was cast to celebrate the Greek defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Plateae (479 b.c.). The bronze shields of Persian soldiers killed in the battle were reportedly melted down and the metal reused to cast the snake memorial. The names of the thirty-one Greek cities who participated in the Battle of Plateae were inscribed on the bottom of the column. Constantine the Great, the founder of Constantinople, appropriated the column from the Greeks, by then subsumed by the Byzantine Empire, and used it to adorn his new capital. It may have first been placed in the courtyard of nearby Haghia Sophia and only later moved to the Hippdrome. Originally the three snake heads at the top of the column supported a golden bowl. The golden bowl disappeared during the sack of the city in 1204. Later the heads were broken off under unclear circumstances. It has long been rumored that In 1700 an employee of the Polish Embassy to the Sublime Port chopped off one of the heads for a souvenir. Another eventually ended up on the Istanbul Archeological Museum, where it can still be seen today. Thus only the snake column without the heads can now be seen in Sultanahmet Meydani. The third monument in the square is the Obelisk of Theodosius, where the suicide bombing took place.

The Blue Mosque and the residence of Ibrahim Pasha were built during Ottoman times. The three monuments that now stand in Sultanahmet Meydani were placed there during Byzantine era, when the square and the surrounding area were occupied by the Hippodrome, a huge stadium where horse and chariot races and other sporting events were held. It also served as the city’s social center and as a forum for the airing of political disputes. The three monuments marked the spina, or central line, which ran lengthwise through the middle of the Hippodrome. The original Hippodrome (from the Greek hippos, horse, and dromos, pathway or track) was built by the Emperor Septimus around a.d. 203. In 324 Constantine the Great established Constantinople as his new capital and embarked on a building spree during which the Hippodrome was renovated and enlarged. The new version was considerably larger than current-day Sultanahmet Square, measuring about 1575 feet in length and 385 feet in width. It could reportedly seat 100,000 or more people, making it as big as the largest football stadiums today in the USA (Michigan Stadium, in Ann Arbor, seats 107,60; AT&T Stadium [Jerry World], home of the Dallas Cowboys, seats a mere 80,000). On the southeastern end of the stadium was the Kathisma (Emperor's Loge), where the reigning Byzantine emperor and his family and court sat. The Kathisma could be entered directly from the Great Palace of the Byzantines—long since gone; Sultanahmet Mosque now stands on part of the area once covered by the Grand Palace—and thus protected from the hoi polloi, who were not slow to express their disfavor toward unpopular emperors. The square northeast end of the stadium hosted the Hippodrome Boxes, which served as the starting gates for the chariot races. Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates (1155–1217), who must have visited the Hippodrome many times, reports:

 . . . in the Hippodrome there was a tower which stood opposite the spectators; beneath it were the starting posts, which opened into the racecourse through parallel arches and above were fixed four gilt-bronze horses, their necks somewhat curved as if they eyed each other as they raced round the last lap.

These larger-than-life statues of four horses have survived; as we shall see, they have had a long and intriguing history.

Byzantine Constantinople, showing the area around the Hippodrome

The drizzle has turned into a pelting rain, and a keening wind sweeps through the square as I approach the Column of Theodosius. One of the cops in the two cop cars nearby briefly glances my way, then quickly goes back to his newspaper. Turkish flags have been attached to the railing around the obelisk and mourners have left a heap of red carnations. Signs, mostly in German—it had been confirmed that eleven of the twelve people killed in the attack were German tourists—have been placed atop the carnations and tied to the railing.  The suicide bomber, it turned out, was twenty-eight year-old Nabil Fadli. Born in Saudi Arabia, he grew up in the town of Manbil in northern Syria, an area currently under control of ISIS.  He had entered Turkey on January 5, 2016, claiming to be a refugee from the conflict in Syria. It was eventually determined that he was an ISIS soldier and probably had entered Turkey specifically to carry out the suicide bombing. Tourists may have been targeted as a means of striking a blow to the tourist industry and thus the Turkish economy in general. It appears unlikely that Germans had been specifically singled out. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Memorials left at the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius

The stated goal of ISIS is to create a new world-wide Caliphate. The last Caliphate to claim universal leadership of the Islamic world had been overseen by the Ottomans, with the sitting sultan holding the title of Caliph. The secular government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate on March 3, 1924, leaving the Islamic geosphere as a whole without a recognized leader. ISIS now intends to right what is perceives to be this historical wrong. The bombing here in Sultanahmet Meydani, less than a hundred feet from the entrance to the Blue Mosque, one of Islam’s greatest monuments, is an attack not only on the Turkish state, which had outlawed the last Caliphate, but also on the mainstream Islamic world that has so far failed to recognize the Caliphate headed by ISIS. 

Entrance to the Blue Mosque

A few people have begun to wander through the square, probably locals on their way to work. They scurry by the obelisk without a glance, their heads down against the glancing rain. Terrible as this bombing has been, it was not the worst Turkey has seen recently. In July of 2015 more than thirty people died in a suicide attack near Turkey’s border with Syria. In October of 2015 suicide bombs at a peace rally in Turkey's capital of Ankara killed more than 100 people. Suicide bombings have been woven into the fabric of everyday life. I stand and stare at the obelisk, on whose four sides are carved Egyptian hieroglyphs oddly enough celebrating the victory of Egyptians over the inhabitants of Mesopotamia—now partly controlled by ISIS—over 3500 years ago.

The obelisk had originally been erected by Egyptian pharoah Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 b.c.) at the Temple of Karnak, the immense religious site at Luxor, on the right bank of the Nile 315 miles south of Cairo. Thutmose III, sixth pharaoh of the Eighteen Dynasty, was one of Egypt’s greatest military leaders. He led at least seventeen military campaigns, capturing some 350 cites. He advanced south in Nubia, in Black Africa, reaching the Fourth Cataract on the Nile, 750 miles south of Cairo as the crow flies, and invaded what are now the countries of Israel, Jordan, Syria, northern Iraq, and southwest Turkey. Over fourteen hundred years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth he created what could be called the world’s first superpower. One campaign took him  through what is now Syria and then beyond the Euphrates River into Mesopotamia (now Iraq), then ruled by the Indo-Aryans known as the Mitanni. 

Thutmose III

To celebrate the crossing of the Euphrates and his victory after the Mitanni Thutmose erected one of the several obelisks that would mark his reign. Carved from granite, this obelisk was originally ninety-eight feet long and weighed some 800 tons. Around a.d. 357 Constantius II, the son of Constantine the Great, had this and another obelisk from Karnak transported, presumably by barge, down the Nile to the port city of Alexandria. One of the obelisks was then taken to Rome, where it was erected on the spina of the Circus Maximus. Known as the Lateran Obelisk, it still stands there today. For reasons unknown the other obelisk remained in Alexandria until 390. During the reign of Theodosius I it was shipped to Constantinople and eventually erected on the spina of the Hippodrome. At some point in its journey from Luxor to Constantinople the obelisk had broken into two or more pieces. Only the top sixty feet of the column was erected in the Hippodrome. The granite used to make the obelisk must have been very hard. The column shows no signs of age, and the four rows of inscriptions on its sides are so clear and sharp they could have been carved yesterday. 

The Obelisk of Theodosius 

For 3500 years the obelisk has existed, bearing witness to the greatness of Thutmose III and the eventual fall of Pharaonic Egypt; the subsumption of  Egypt by the Roman Empire; and the rise of Byzantine Empire around Constantine the Great’s capital city, which he wanted to call the New Rome, but then had to settle for having it named after himself. It witnessed all the momentous events which took place in the Hippodrome, including the Nika revolt of 532, when rebels tried to seize the crown of Justinian I. The insurgences unwisely gathered in the Hippodrome, where on Justinian’s orders his loyal troops led by the generals Belisarius and Mundus blocked the exits and then waded into the crowd, killing some 35,000 of them. According to legend many of the dead were buried where they fell on the floor of the Hippodrome, which means I might at this moment be standing on their remains. The obelisk stood as a silent witness when on May 29, 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror led his troops into  Constantinople. He rode into Haghia Sofia, just a few hundred yards away and  claimed it for Islam, thus bringing to an end the 1123 year-old Byzantine, or East Roman Empire, and initiating the Ottoman Empire. The obelisk also kept its silent vigil when the Ottomans fell and the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished. And now it has witnessed the deaths of twelve visitors to Istanbul by a suicide bomber hoping to further the cause of a new Caliph arising in Syria and Mesopotamia, the same lands conquered by Thutmose III 3500 years ago, and whose defeat by Thutmose caused the obelisk to be erected in the first place. The Wheel of Time grinds slow, but fine.