Dandolo remembered well his previous visit to Constantinople, the gleaming imperial city on the Bosporus with its wealth of ancient and beautiful monuments, as well as its fantastic natural port, known as the Golden Horn. The skyline was dominated by Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. Originally commissioned by Constantine in the fourth century, the building had been destroyed in a riot in 532 AD and then completely rebuilt by Justinian. The emperor had imported rich materials from all over his realm and employed a military engineer to design a gigantic dome soaring over the open central space, appearing to defy the laws of physics.
Dandolo had been in Constantinople in 1172 as a diplomatic representative of his native Venice. Relations between the maritime republic and the Byzantine Empire were severely strained at that time – a year earlier, the emperor Manuel I Comnenus had ordered that all Venetians in Constantinople be arrested and their property confiscated. Some ten thousand people would remain in prison for a decade. The Venetian military response was a disaster, and Dandolo was sent to try to arrange a settlement.
The Horses of St. Mark’s.
It was a hopeless cause. The Byzantines had no reason to negotiate with the Venetians and treated them with a truly imperial scorn. The visit went so badly, in fact, that there was a rumor that Manuel had the Venetian envoy blinded. This was not the case; Dandolo was already beginning to lose his sight to cortical blindness. His mission to Constantinople was nonetheless a grim experience, leaving him with the unshakable impression that the Byzantines were arrogant and vicious, and that their Orthodox Christianity had the tinge of heresy.
Three decades later, the situation was dramatically different. Constantinople burned after a brutal sack at the hands of crusaders under Dandolo’s command. He had been the elected doge of Venice for twelve years, and now he was also the master of Constantinople. In his nineties and stone blind, he remained a man of tremendous energy. Dandolo quickly exerted control over the city and surrounding territories, but found time to inquire after the four horses that caught his notice so long ago. Countless other precious artworks were ruined in the mayhem. The great Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates lamented how “barbarians, haters of the beautiful” had destroyed “marvelous works of art” and converted them into “worthless copper coins.”11 The bronze horses, however, were kept safe on the doge’s orders.
O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. Harry J. Magoulias (Wayne State University, 1984), 358.
No one knew exactly when the horses had been made, or even where, but there was a long tradition that they had been part of a massive importation of artworks when Constantine turned the city known as Byzantium into the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Even in this “Queen of Cities,” renowned for the beauty of her art and her women, the horses were among the choicest of treasures.
Spirited yet poised, natural yet more perfect than any earthly animal, they embodied the ideal of a horse. They also seemed interconnected, as if conversing with each other. They were covered not with the heavy gilding typical of statues from late antiquity, but with a translucent gold wash that gave their bronze surface the reflective quality of a well-groomed horse.
Dandolo rested his hand on the neck of one statue. “Morosini!” he shouted, although the man was standing right beside him.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Crate them, and get them out of this hellhole as quickly as possible. Take them safely back to Venice.”
“Of course.” Domenico Morosini welcomed the task. Himself the descendant of a doge, he had ambitions of his own, and carrying out Dandolo’s orders was a good place to start. “If I may ask, where do you want them to go?”
“To the church of Saint Mark, of course.”22
Charles Freeman, The Horses of St. Mark’s: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice (Overlook Press, 2010), 90–95.
The Northern Adriatic: Late Antiquity
The imperial system that had spread Roman rule across the Mediterranean region was failing. Beset by economic and political dysfunction within and by aggressive Germanic tribes outside its borders, the empire could no longer defend its Italian heartland, let alone hold on to its farflung provinces.
At first, the threat had seemed manageable; after all, the Romans had been battling Germans for centuries. (A popular Augustan-era general was called “Germanicus” in honor of his victories over them.) The dynamic began to shift around 251 AD when the emperor was killed by Goths, a branch of the Germanic peoples. Isolated victories turned into a sustained campaign. By the end of the third century, the Romans were abandoning territory to Goths who were settling in large numbers within the empire’s boundaries.
Facing both external and internal pressures, the Romans tried an administrative division of the empire into four parts – two eastern and two western. After Constantine gained control over the whole empire, he moved his capital east in 323 to the ancient city of Byzantium, which he rebuilt and renamed after himself. He showered treasures onto Constantinople, including artworks from all over the empire and relics of all twelve of Jesus’ disciples, in keeping with his conversion to Christianity. Rome was hardly abandoned, for Constantine pursued ambitious building projects there also. He commissioned a triumphal arch beside the Colosseum, and an enormous legislative building in the Forum that housed a forty-foot statue of himself. He initiated an extensive program of church building including the original St. Peter’s Basilica. But power was shifting to Constantinople, which would be the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire when the division resumed after Constantine’s death and then became permanent, well before the last Western Roman emperor was deposed in 476 AD.
Twenty-four years earlier, Attila the Hun had left a trail of devastation through Italy, sacking and razing many towns. Pope Leo the Great famously led a delegation to meet with Attila and plead or negotiate for an agreement to spare Rome.33 There had been no such reprieve for Aquileia, a once-prosperous city in what is now the Veneto region at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea.
Raphael would commemorate this event in a fresco. Various reasons have been given for why Attila withdrew and left Rome untouched, but the reprieve was temporary—the city was sacked by the Vandals a few years later.
Survivors from the destruction of Aquileia sheltered miserably on an archipelago of small islands in a nearby lagoon. Eventually they began returning to the mainland, until a new scourge would send them fleeing back to the lagoon. City gates could not hold back barbarians, but the expanse of water separating the islands from the coast proved an effective defense. The island dwellers appear to have cultivated a distinctive kind of society. In 523, the historian Cassiodorus wrote of them that “rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other’s hearths and so they are free from the vices that rule the world.”44
Cassiodorus, “Senator, Praetorian Praefect, to the Tribunes of the Maritime Population,” The Letters of Cassiodorus, trans. Thomas Hodgkin (1886), 517, quoted in Frederick C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Johns Hopkins, 1973), 3–4.
The worst of the serial threats to the Veneto region came in 568, when the Lombards crossed the Alps and began conquering northern Italy (including the territory around Milan that is still known as Lombardy). Unlike the nomadic Huns, the Lombards were there to stay, and they made a name for themselves by brutalizing landowners who resisted them. To those taking refuge on the islands, it must have seemed prudent to stay there for good. They remained nominally subject to the Eastern Roman Empire until the Lombards finished off the vestiges of Byzantine power in that region in 751.
By then, the island dwellers were forming their own government. On the mainland, Lombard dukes gathered vassals around themselves and sired traditional dynasties, but something different happened out on the lagoon. The settlement that was becoming Venice had a duke, who was called the doge, but he appears to have been an elected