The triple-deal-making doge and the bulk of the army survived and returned to Constantinople. The blind Venetian leader died of old age in June of 1205. He was buried in the Hagia Sophia, never having reached the Holy Land or returned to Venice. He magnificently channeled the energies of the crusading spirit into profits for his beloved Venice and the city-state flourished for centuries afterward.
Pope Innocent III was livid when he heard the crusade had ended without Jerusalem having entered his realm. When he learned of the full extent of the destruction of Constantinople he blanched in horror. He cheered up, however, when he realized his Catholics were now in charge of the Greek empire. He issued no further excommunications because of the massive deaths his own army caused.
The Latin Empire lasted until 1261 when the Greeks retook the city. Constantinople underwent resurgence but never regained its former glory, and it eventually fell to the Turks in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. The Catholics held out in the Holy Land, buttressed by a series of further crusades, until 1291. Europeans didn’t make it back to Jerusalem until 1917 when the British captured it.
The Greeks never forgave the crusaders and the pope for unleashing their hellacious army on their city and pillaging their holy places. The break between the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox had become too great to fix. The Great Schism was complete. The two wings of the Christian Church would never reunite.
In 2001 Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for the odious deeds of the Fourth Crusade.
THREE.
THE WHISKEY REBELLION: 1794
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness make for warm and fuzzy reading in declarations of independence. But when push comes to shove, what really matters is money. The glorious new American republic was no different. Shortly after birth its essential character had already been formed: financial matters took precedence over everything else, including the continued enslavement of an entire race, the slow-motion holocaust of Native Americans, and the disenfranchisement of half of the population based on sex.
The Whiskey Rebellion was a haphazard, unorganized, poorly armed struggle by frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania against what they felt to be unfair taxes, the very philosophy upon which the United States of America had been founded in its struggle against the British Crown just a few short decades earlier. Most of the rebels were newly minted white Americans who depended upon only one handout from the government to sustain themselves on the edge of the new nation: freedom.
To these hardy souls freedom meant the freedom from taxation; in a nation whose focus was making money, tax-free status was the highest blessing that could be bestowed upon a citizen. But Alexander Hamilton had other ideas. The treasury secretary, super busy building the financial bedrock of the new country, felt that the tax base needed to be diversified beyond a dependency on taxing British imports. Thus was born his whiskey tax, an excise tax. It was the country’s first tax on internally made products.
It drove the frontiersmen to rebellion. It would take three years of unrest before a cautious George Washington succumbed to Hamilton’s pleadings to unleash an army planned, outfitted, and headed by Hamilton himself into western Pennsylvania to crush the resistance to his diversified excise tax-funding scheme.
THE PLAYERS
Alexander Hamilton — the quintessential new yorker, an ambitious, foreign-born, mercantile-minded, highly efficient multitasker and pioneer Thomas Jefferson–hater.
Skinny — Since he was born on St. Croix he could not become president. But he could become king.
Props — Washington’s chief-of-staff during the Revolution, one of the founders of the Bank of New York, first secretary of the treasury, and key drafter of The Federalist Papers.
Pros — His far-reaching fiscal genius laid the financial footing of the modern U.S. economy.
Cons — His far-reaching fiscal genius couldn’t comprehend why poor frontiersmen wanted to dodge paying a tax on home-brewed whiskey.
George Washington — Western Pennsylvania land speculator, slave owner, first president of the Republic, lousy businessman, father of the country.
Skinny — Started the great American tradition of American president’s retiring to make loads of money.
Props — His previous experience running a war against white people made him aware of the political difficulties in seeking a high enemy body count.
Pros — Graciously pardoned the two rebels eventually convicted of rebellion.
Cons — Unleashed “General” Hamilton on the world.
THE GENERAL SITUATION
Western Pennsylvanians in 1790 faced a daunting existence. The forks of the Ohio River, formed by the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, today the site of the city of Pittsburgh, lay at the ragged edge of the American frontier. The main problem for settlers was that marauding bands of Native Americans often emerged from the woods to kill them. The land was sparsely settled and defended by local militias, who occasionally blundered out into the wilderness to attack the shadowy Native Americans, without much success. Government attempts to push back the Native Americans by alternating military ethnic cleansing operations with unfaithful negotiations had not worked very well up to this point. Life was stressful. Whiskey helped.
From Pennsylvania down to Georgia these hardy backwoodsmen, the genesis of the “Daniel Boone” icon, faced attacks on all fronts. Not only did they have to worry about Native Americans and hostile actions from British, Spanish, and French forces, they also suffered from the near constant inattention and underinvestment by their own government as they toiled to clear and farm land for absentee landlords — such as their own president.
Naked of all other aspects of orderly government, hugging the muddy banks of great rivers as they hacked out the new American empire from the sea of forest, the settlers were isolated. Pittsburgh was a village with 376 citizens, according to the 1790 census. To make ends meet, many small farmers distilled whiskey from excess corn to drink or trade. Bartering was a way of life for these hardy settlers. Home-brewed whiskey was a great product in a frontier economy; it was wanted by nearly everyone and was easy to store and transport.
Washington’s government and his frenetic treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, had agreed that one of the best ways to bind together the young country was through federal taxation. To get things rolling, Hamilton came up with a blockbuster deal. In July 1790 the federal government agreed it would “assume” the debt that each state had piled up in order to win the Revolutionary War. It was called the “assumption” deal. To close the deal Hamilton had to bargain away to the powerful Virginians the permanent seat of the government, sacrificing his personal goal of making New York City the new country’s permanent capital. On the other hand he succeeded in making many of his banker friends very rich. When you help to start a brand-new country, sometimes money just happens.