The doge, Boniface, and the other leaders did a head count, and fingered their worry beads. Only about 12,000 soldiers had shown up, about one-third of the estimated number. This meant that the price per crusader would now be three times as originally planned. Everyone coughed up more coin, but it was not enough to cover the doge’s huge tab. The doge refused to lower his price. First, because a deal is a deal, but more important, having spent an entire year building this massive fleet, he needed every promised penny to pay off his bills. To help focus the minds of his crusading brethren he stopped supplying them with food and water until his bill was paid.
As the army slowly wasted away, and desertions started to chip away at their already meager ranks, Boniface and the others dug even deeper and handed over virtually all their valuables to the doge. He counted his booty and told them they were still 35,000 marks short. The army teetered on total dissolution. They didn’t even have the food to make the humiliating return home to France where the sum total of their experience would be the equivalent of a cheap beach-side T-shirt proclaiming, “I went on a Crusade and only got as far as Venice.”
The doge then proposed a way out from under their crushing debt. He asked them to run an errand for him: sail down and recapture the city of Zara (now known as Zadar in Croatia), which had slipped out of Venice’s control in 1181. The crusaders would conveniently overlook the fact that Zara was a Catholic city and part of Hungary, a firm supporter of the Crusades. The attack meant postponing the Crusade to Jerusalem in order to fight a war against Christians so that the Venetians could expand their little merchant empire. The move was pure doge.
The crusaders at first resisted but the doge knew that sometimes you have to join them to beat them. He took the crusader’s oath in St. Mark’s church and the impressionable crusaders were swayed. He was no longer just some money-hungry contractor but a part of the team, on board for the big win. That October the huge fleet sailed down the coast with the deal-making doge in the lead. It was the blind leading the desperate.
Word of the Zara gambit soon filtered back to the pope. He wasn’t happy. Coastal raids on Christian cities clearly violated the spirit of “crusading” as the papal world had come to define it. But the pope’s emissary, embedded with the army, sensing that the only two realistic options were to crush Zara or go home in failure, gave the crusaders the thumbs-up. The pope had the last word, however, and played the big hand. He wrote a scathing letter declaring that those who attacked Zara would get excommunicated from the church, meaning eternal damnation. As in forever. At this point the crusaders were destined for the fires of hell along with the Greek Christians, the Muslims, and all the other infidels crawling the earth in wretched existence.
On November 11, 1202, the crusader fleet reached Zara just as the pope’s letter reached the leaders ordering them not to attack. The leaders split on what to do next. Some — led by the deal-making doge — favored attacking the city; others recoiled from assaulting fellow Christians in flagrant defiance of the pope and the fires of hell. The doge argued that the pope’s order was important, but not as important as the crusaders’ contract with him. The road to Jerusalem, they convinced themselves, ran through Zara, especially since the alternative was to go home in shame. The pope’s letter was slipped into a drawer, never revealed to the soon-to-be-excommunicated army. The crusaders attacked. It was now the doge’s army.
Two weeks later Zara fell, and the army surged into the city to reap its booty. But the vaults were empty. After counting up every loose coin, the crusaders still did not have enough money to cover the rest of their trip. The only thing the attack earned them was a one-way ticket to the blistering shores of Hades.
As the crusaders sat in Zara, having committed a massively unholy act that called down the heavy wrath of the pope and still lacking the money to reach Jerusalem, the ambassadors of Prince Alexius showed up. The wandering prince, still cruising the backroads of Europe looking to pick up a ride home, suddenly displayed a level of acuity that had previously escaped him: he presented them with a tantalizing solution to their debt problem and the now-bigger situation of the pope reserving the crusaders a suite in the ninth circle of hell, befitting betrayers of the faith.
Prince Alexius offered to finance the rest of the Crusade and provide additional troops. To top it off, he promised to end the schism between the Romans and the Greeks by recognizing the pope as top man in the Christian world. All the crusaders had to do was escort him to Constantinople and install him, Prince Alexius, as emperor. Then they would be able to easily skip down to Jerusalem and fulfill their crusading destiny. And the pope would achieve one of his top career goals. Prince Alexius had made them an offer they could not refuse.
Still, Byzantine politics being Byzantine politics, the leaders debated. The doge, to no one’s surprise, was enthusiastic for the novel Greek caper. The doubting Thomases reminded everyone their job as crusaders was to kill Muslims in Jerusalem on Christ’s behalf, not fellow Christians in Constantinople. They could have stayed home and done that. The doge, however, won the debate as usual with a twist of logic that would have made a theologian proud: he convinced the crusaders that restoring a Christian emperor to the throne — through what was surely promised to be a short and easy war — was in fact a very Christlike act.
Some of the troops, however, failed to go along with the doge’s impressive reasoning. Killing Christians just was not as fulfilling as killing Muslims. Many soldiers fled. On the bright side, Pope Innocent III had now retreated from his earlier position. He washed away all the crusading sins committed from the Zara gambit but made the crusaders swear they would never again attack a Christian city. The leaders, striving for new heights of duplicity, agreed, knowing that their secret plan to restore Prince Alexius would probably require attacking Constantinople.
In April 1203 the fleet sailed out of Zara after leaving it a smoky wreck. The churches, in the spirit of devotion of men on a high cause such as a Crusade, were spared.
The next month, halfway to their destination, the army stopped on the island of Corfu. Here a chunk of the army, perhaps distracted by the wonderful views, developed second thoughts and refused to sail to Constantinople. They marched to the other side of the island, a sort of self-imposed crusading time-out. Alexius and the crusading leaders confronted the defectors, knowing the loss would cripple their limping army. They begged, groveled, cried, and drooled. The defectors agreed to stay, but in the true spirit of the Fourth Crusade, they wanted to make another deal. They would stay only until Christmas, and then they would be free to advance on Jerusalem. The crusading leaders agreed. Alexius was pleased to report to the doge that the debt-relief plan was still in place.
Jubilant at surviving yet another near-death experience, the army set sail and reached the outskirts of Constantinople by late June 1203. They had never seen anything like it, as they stared in awe at the monstrous walls of the great city before them. With its population of 400,000 people, Constantinople dwarfed anything in Europe. The defending walls were tall and thick, and seemed to go on forever. The crusaders looked at their small force of about 20,000 men and wondered what they had gotten themselves into. Besides its enormous size and wealth attained by being the trading center of the world, the city boasted a powerful military tradition.
The political infighting that ravaged the empire in the previous decades, however, had eaten away at the city’s military strength and the fighting spirit of its citizens. Despite knowing for months that the crusaders were coming, the emperor, Alexius III, took few steps to defend the city. The once-mighty Greek fleet was rotting and incapable of any serious naval action; the city’s protective walls were actually in need of repair. But perhaps most important, the army lacked any fighting spirit. Its core consisted of thousands of mercenaries, primarily the Star Trek-oid Varangians, who were hard-fighting Scandinavians. The weaknesses of the Greek army were temporarily obscured by its sheer size.