Enrico Dandolo

Enrico Dandolo was born in Venice in 1107 into one of the lagoon city's established patrician families ^[1]. The Dandolo clan had already produced churchmen and officeholders, and its members moved comfortably in the commercial and political circles that ran the republic. His father, Vitale Dandolo, served the doges as a trusted counselor and diplomat well into his own old age, and an uncle, also named Enrico, held the office of Patriarch of Grado, the senior ecclesiastical post in the Venetian church ^[2].

Almost nothing survives about Dandolo's childhood or education, a silence typical for Venetians of his generation. What can be said is that he grew up in a city whose wealth depended on seaborne trade with the Byzantine Empire, the Levant, and the Adriatic coast. Merchant families like his own learned navigation, contract law, and negotiation as a matter of survival ^[1]. That commercial schooling, rather than any formal training in arms or letters, shaped the man who would later bargain with crusader barons as an equal.

For decades Dandolo remained in his father's shadow. Vitale lived to a remarkable age and continued to represent Venice abroad, which meant his son took on major public duties only in middle age. Historians who study the family's documents note that Enrico appears in Venetian records as a witness and businessman long before he appears as a statesman ^[2].

Dandolo's public career accelerated during the crisis between Venice and Byzantium in the 1170s. In 1171 the emperor Manuel I Komnenos ordered the arrest of thousands of Venetian merchants across his empire and the seizure of their goods, a blow that pushed the two states to the edge of war ^[3]. Doge Vitale II Michiel led a retaliatory fleet into the Aegean, and Dandolo sailed with the expedition. The campaign collapsed when disease swept the fleet, and the doge was murdered by an angry crowd on his return to Venice ^[3].

In the years that followed, Dandolo served the republic as an envoy. He traveled to Constantinople to negotiate the release of prisoners and the restoration of Venetian property, and he undertook missions to the Norman court in Sicily and to King Bela III of Hungary ^[2]. A persistent later legend claimed that the Byzantines blinded him during one of these embassies. Modern scholars, led by Thomas Madden, reject the story: contemporary evidence suggests his sight failed gradually, possibly after a head injury, and he could still see as late as the 1170s ^[1].

By the time Doge Orio Mastropiero abdicated in 1192, Dandolo had built a reputation for shrewdness, experience abroad, and loyalty to Venetian interests. The electors chose him as the forty first doge in June of that year ^[4]. Chroniclers agree he was already very old and completely blind when he took office. Anyone asking who was Enrico Dandolo at that moment would have received a simple answer: a seasoned diplomat expected to provide a short, steady caretaker reign. Events proved otherwise.

Dandolo governed with unusual energy for a man in his ninth decade. Early in his reign he reformed the Venetian coinage, introducing the large silver grosso, a high purity coin that became a standard medium of Mediterranean trade ^[1]. He also oversaw revisions to Venetian civil law and issued regulations that strengthened the state's control over its currency and commerce ^[4].

Foreign policy demanded constant attention. Venice faced rivalry with Pisa and Genoa, unrest along the Dalmatian coast, and unresolved grievances against Byzantium dating from the confiscations of 1171. The city of Zara, a Dalmatian port that had renounced Venetian overlordship and placed itself under the protection of the Hungarian crown, remained a particular sore point ^[3]. Dandolo pursued Venetian claims there with patience, waiting for an opportunity that arrived from an unexpected direction.

In 1201 envoys of the French and Flemish nobles who had taken crusading vows arrived in Venice seeking transport to the eastern Mediterranean. Dandolo negotiated the Treaty of Venice, under which the republic agreed to build and man a fleet for 33,500 crusaders and their horses in exchange for 85,000 marks of silver, with Venice joining the enterprise as a full partner entitled to half of any conquests ^[5]. The contract was the largest commercial undertaking in the city's history, and Venice suspended much of its ordinary trade for a year to fulfill it ^[1].

The crusading army that assembled at Venice in the summer of 1202 was far smaller than promised, and its leaders could not pay the agreed sum. Rather than cancel the contract and ruin Venice, Dandolo proposed a deferral: the crusaders could discharge part of their debt by helping Venice recover Zara ^[5]. In a scene recorded by the chronicler Geoffrey of Villehardouin, the elderly doge knelt in the church of San Marco and took the cross himself, weeping, before the assembled crowd ^[6]. He then sailed with the fleet despite his age and blindness.

Zara fell in November 1202, an attack on a Christian city that provoked a papal excommunication of the expedition ^[5]. That winter the exiled Byzantine prince Alexios Angelos offered the crusaders money, soldiers, and church union if they would restore his deposed father to the imperial throne. Dandolo and the crusade's leaders accepted, and the fleet turned toward Constantinople. The city's outer defenses were breached in July 1203, and Alexios was crowned co-emperor, but he could not pay what he had promised. Relations between Greeks and Latins deteriorated, Alexios was overthrown and killed, and in April 1204 the crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople itself ^[3].

Venetian sources and Latin chroniclers alike credit Dandolo with a striking personal role in the fighting. Villehardouin describes the doge, standing armed in the prow of his galley beneath the banner of Saint Mark, ordering his crew to drive the ship ashore beneath the sea walls during the assault of 1203, an act that shamed hesitating crews into following ^[6]. Whatever allowance is made for flattery, the leaders of the crusade clearly treated him as an indispensable commander and negotiator throughout the campaign ^[1].

Dandolo married twice. Later Venetian tradition names his second wife as Contessa, sometimes identified with the Minotto family, though the documentation is thin ^[2]. His son Ranieri acted as vice doge in Venice while his father was away on crusade, and his descendants remained prominent for generations: three later doges, Giovanni, Francesco, and Andrea Dandolo, came from the same house ^[2].

His blindness defined his public image. Contemporaries marveled that a sightless man in his nineties could command fleets and out negotiate kings, and the sources return to the detail repeatedly ^[6]. The fourteenth century doge and chronicler Andrea Dandolo, his descendant, preserved family traditions about the cause of the affliction, which is one reason the blinding legend proved so durable despite its weak foundation ^[1].

As a private man he remains almost invisible. He left no letters of a personal character, and Venetian record keeping of the period concerned itself with contracts and treaties rather than feelings. The portrait that survives is entirely a public one: a merchant aristocrat who identified his own honor with the interests of his city ^[2].

After the fall of Constantinople the victors partitioned the Byzantine Empire under an agreement drafted in March 1204. Venice received three eighths of the city and empire, including key harbors and islands stretching from the Adriatic to the Aegean, among them a claim to Crete that the republic soon made good ^[3]. Dandolo declined any suggestion that he himself take the imperial crown and instead helped engineer the election of Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin emperor, while securing for Venice the right to name the new Latin patriarch of Constantinople ^[5].

He never returned home. In 1205 he accompanied Latin forces against the Bulgarians and shared in the disastrous defeat at Adrianople, where Emperor Baldwin was captured. Dandolo helped lead the shattered army's retreat, and he died at Constantinople in June 1205, nearly a century old by the traditional reckoning of his birth in 1107 ^[4]. He was buried in Hagia Sophia, the only person known to have received a tomb inside the great church ^[1].

His grave did not survive intact. After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the building became a mosque and the tomb disappeared, though a nineteenth century marker bearing his name was later set into the gallery floor where the burial is thought to have been ^[1].

Judgments of Dandolo have always divided sharply. Greek writers, beginning with the contemporary historian Niketas Choniates, blamed him for steering an army of pilgrims against the greatest Christian city in the world, and Byzantinists such as Steven Runciman echoed that verdict, treating the sack of 1204 as a catastrophe for Christendom ^[7]. Defenders answer that Dandolo improvised at every stage, responding to the crusaders' insolvency and to Byzantine politics rather than executing a long premeditated plot, a case argued in detail by Thomas Madden and by Donald Queller and Madden's joint history of the crusade ^[5].

For Venice the results were transformative. The republic emerged from his reign with naval bases, colonial territory, and commercial supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean, foundations of an empire that lasted until the seventeenth century ^[3]. The four bronze horses that long stood over the facade of San Marco were among the spoils shipped home from Constantinople, a permanent reminder of the crusade in the heart of the city ^[1]. Any list of Enrico Dandolo achievements has to weigh those gains against the wound the crusade dealt to Byzantium, which never fully recovered before its final fall.

The basic Enrico Dandolo facts, a doge elected at an advanced age, blind, who died on campaign at Constantinople in 1205, would sound like invention if the sources did not agree on them. That combination of extreme age, disability, and decisive action explains why historians keep returning to him, and why his name still provokes argument eight centuries after his death ^[7].