Chasing the Fourth Crusade

(I am uploading three of these in a row because it took me this long to find a place I could do so… )

This summer, Croatia was listed as the hottest new tourist destination by both the New York Times and one of the hip travel guides like Lonely Planet.

They were not talking about the place I came to.

To review the historical path of travel thus far: the Venetians and (mostly French) Crusaders are sailing to Zara, which the Venetians want the French to help them conquer. The French leaders agree because they owe the Venetians a ton of money, but they are severely irked about attacking Catholics.

I’m going to gloss over my favorite part of the story, which is where (in the most Pythonesque of all Monty-Python moments), a splinter group of crusaders, determined to protect Zara from harm no matter what, attempt a good-hearted but brainless stunt that ends up harming Zara far more than if they had just kept well enough alone. As a result, the Crusaders and Venetians DO attack Zara, Zara surrenders, and its people flee into the countryside as winter is coming on. The army and the Venetians move into Zara for the winter. Now that this “diversion” to Zara is over, they all just want the winter to pass uneventfully so they can head to the Holy Land in the spring. However, the winter is not quite uneventful — and the future of the western world will be altered as a result

But we’ll come back to that.

SEPTEMBER 29: I DON’T THINK WE’RE IN VENICE ANYMORE
It took the crusading fleet more than 5 weeks to get to Zara from Venice (they had to stop to get fresh water and do the odd plunder), so I can’t really complain that it takes me 18 hours. First, a train down the Italian coast to Ancona, then an overnight ferry across the Adriatic sea to Croatia, straight into the port at Zadar (the place that used to be Zara), arriving at 6 am.

SEPTEMBER 30:
I join forces with five American college students I met at the ferry terminal; through the tourist office, we rent rooms in a private apartment. Our host is a retired ballet dancer, and his name, improbably, is Robert Wagner. His apartment is the top floor of the tallest apartment building in the old city. The elevator hasn’t worked for years (talk about a work-out), but the panoramic view is AMAZING – Zadar is a tiny peninsula, a tongue of land covered by a semi-walled city teeming with old churches, and forming a natural protected harbor with the mainland; a few miles inland, huge white limestone cliffs jut dramatically toward the sky; in the other direction, out into the Adriatic, islands that look like the tip of submerged mountains erupt from the water.

Later, I sit down with my guidebooks and the section of my novel that takes place here, to put together a research itinerary for tomorrow. It’s not easy, because the thing that put Zara on the map is the same thing that wiped it off the map: the Fourth Crusade. The Venetians tore down the entire city when they left (except the churches). In fact the current “hot” Fourth Crusade historian didn’t even come here for research — there’s simply nothing left. Zadar, like most of Croatia, has far too much recent tragedy to care about anything from 800 years ago.

OCTOBER 1:
I know the Fourth Crusade fleet sailed into the harbor (which must have been awfully cramped). The army set up camp on the mainland, and then various Pythonesque, melodramatic things happened before the army ended up within the city walls for the winter. So I need to scope out the mainland as well as the old city.

The harborside, now commercial wharf, has been built out and fortified, so I can’t even tell if there would have been a sandy or a rocky beach where they landed. I have almost nothing to go on, but I actually love this kind of thing, which isn’t research so much as a combination of trespassing and guesswork – and, in this case, a little nautical archaeology. A tiny swatch of the harborside (about 5 feet) receives the brunt of a passing current, and a mini-beach has built up. I examine the sand (coarse, multi-colored) and organic detritus like seashells; I stare at what else is, or isn’t, in the water; I wander into private apartment grounds and examine the soil. I scope out the relationship of high ground to harbor-access to the city’s one land-gate. A woman wandering around solo already attracts suspicious attention around here, but I’m making it worse for myself by acting like a bad CIA operative. I think I figure out where the army camped, but I’m aware that I’m pretty much just making it up. (Of course, I’m a novelist, so I’m allowed to do that.)

Then I go into the city for an urban version of the same thing. Conclusions are harder here. My main problem is that I must determine where in the city my (fictional) characters passed the winter, but I can’t pick a spot at random; it has to have a certain relationship to real-life historical stuff, which means I have to figure out where that real-life historical stuff took place. If I can guesstimate that, I can then work out where my characters were in relationship to it. This might sound obsessive, but it’s a fun exercise in practical logic and more than that: I’m the characters’ mom, I can’t leave them homeless!

So I wander the streets for an hour, noting where the streets slope a little higher or lower. I figure out the highest point in the city, which is is probably where the leaders stayed. Then, on a street map, I deduce where my characters must have stayed relative to that, and finally, I head toward that spot to see it in real life. I’m tired and cranky, but increasingly excited as I finally approach the passage that, once I exit it, will take me to the spot where my characters would have passed the winter.

I exit the passage, turn the corner…

And find myself in front of my own lodgings.

After all of my tortuous visual engineering, the whimsy of this makes me burst out laughing. I take it as a message from the gods: stop worrying so much, we’re putting you exactly where you’re supposed to be. Take a break!

So I go to look at Saint Donat’s, the oldest church in town, built in the 800’s by a traveling Irish saint. Outside this church, I meet 3 actual (Northern) Irishmen, elderly academics who are sailing around the region just for fun (they had no idea this church was built by a fellow Irishman, but they’re not proud; “Oh, aye, we were always goin’ off and doin’ that sort of thing,” says one casually). We spend the next three hours looking at churches and imbibing various things; one of them is an experienced Adriatic sailor, so is able to give me all sorts of unexpected useful information for the book. I love the Irish!

I part company from them, just in time to watch the sunset from the steps of the Water Organ, a public-art invention that uses the pressure of waves slapping up against the sea wall to force air through pipes, which play music (tourists often go there and hold out their cell phones so the folks back home can hear it). It sounds sort of like hump-back whales singing in a perfect pentatonic scale. It’s a phenomenal accompaniment to a sunset. And not a bad way to end my Zara research. I have one more day here, mopping-up, and then it will take me three days and nights of travel to reach my next stop (but hey, it took the crusaders more than three weeks, so I’m not complaining.)

So: to recap the history stuff, and hint at what’s to come.
The Franks and Venetians are wintering in Zara, and as soon as spring comes they are supposed to head to the Holy Land to smite the infidels. But the French still owe the Venetians a lot of money. A lot of money. More than nine tons of minted silver. Where the hell are they going to get that kind of money?

Funny you should ask. Alexius, deposed heir to the Byzantine Empire, is in Europe, where he propositions the Crusaders: “Hey, I have lots of money but I need a fierce army to get me on my throne. You have a fierce army – and you need lots of money. What a cool coincidence!”

Can you see where this is going? Tune in next week…

Now the traveling-almost-like-they-did-back-then part starts. I move from a small room in the heart of Venice to a camping establishment over on the mainland – turns out to be a sagging cot in a tin garden shed, one of many hundred such garden sheds arranged in uneven, haphazard rows interrupted by occasional flocks of toilets, showers and outdoor sinks. There is also a canteen. It’s safe to say I’m probably the oldest, least adventurous, most conventional person here. (My luggage is hands-down the wimpiest, because you can’t go white-water rafting with it. However, my sofa-shoes earn me some respect.) In the spirit of our sweetly rural surroundings near the most romantic city in Europe, loud techno-pop music blares until 2 am. Then lots of young people wander by laughing with impossible shrillness until about 3. I lie awake feeling like a fuddy-duddy for being grumpy about this, wondering if medieval army camps would be this rowdy – surely Count Baldwin of Flanders (who did not allow any of his men to engage in non-marital fornication) would have put a stop to it at once. It rains hard overnight and when I finally pull myself out of bed, my eyes are so swollen that they can hardly open; there aren’t enough loos for everybody, and they’re skanky; I already know from my supper experience that breakfast will be overpriced and disappointing. This is sort of a writer/researcher’s version of “method acting.”

SEPTEMBER 28:
After pulling myself awake from a whopping 4 hours of sleep, I take the shuttle from the camping-disco village into Venice and head out to the islands of the lagoon. There is really only one I must see, which is the Lido: 700-odd years before it was an exclusive beach resort it was the temporary, icky home to 10,000 crusading soldiers for 5 long, hot months, while their leaders argued with the Doge about money. My novels open on the Lido, in that army camp –at sunset. So I will go to the Lido myself at sunset. Thus, I go to Torcello and Burano first, and would love to tell you all about them, but really you should just come and see them for yourselves before they sink into the lagoon. Finally, as afternoon is wearing thin, and my legs are wearing out, I get to the Lido. The Lido is basically an 8-mile long sandbar, which I had naively thought might have a big sign saying, “Crusader Army Camp – 40 meters (arrow sign).” Nope. So I do what one must in such circumstances: cheerfully filthy from Torcello’s swamps (I’m in black, and the filth is sand-colored, so it really shows up nicely), I wander into 3 consecutive luxury hotels, and ask the startled concierges where the army of the Fourth Crusade bivouacked. They have no idea what I am talking about. Nobody even recognizes the name Enrico Dandolo (the Doge), which would be like Americans not knowing Ulysses S Grant (or William the Conqueror or Henry V, for the Brits among us). I had already noticed that Venice has an intensely uneasy relationship to the Fourth Crusade, but this really takes the cake. Although I am about to fall on my face with exhaustion, I decide to figure out the mystery of the army camp for myself. Ha!

Common sense sends me toward the only building that existed on the island at the time of the army encampment (the church of San Nicolo, still standing). It’s been turned into an international center for peace and good vibes, and is right next to a military installation. Therein follows a ridiculous series of events in which I retrace my steps three or four times, about a mile each time, searching for the elusive medieval army camp, following clues provided by baffled locals who truly don’t know Venice had anything to do with the Crusades at all. I’ll spare you the details, but the rhythm is consistent: “Here’s a clue! Oh, psyche out – Dead end!… Look, new clue! Oh, psyche out…” etc. This goes on for a couple of hours. The light is fading. I always know I’m overtired when my attempts to speak a European foreign language come out as Japanese; now I am so far gone I am even muttering to myself in Japanese, which is alarming because I’ve forgotten most of it, and half the time I don’t even know what I’m saying to myself (something about pineapples).

What I finally establish in my exhausted tromping about is this: the area that was an army camp 803 years ago is now a secret military site, and I can’t get in (it’s not on any maps I could find, but it is surrounded by barbed wire and signs that either mean “Access forbidden – Military!” or “No drinking Cappucino after 11 am, you stupid Americans!”)

The light is fading, my feet are pulsing with pain, and I’ve eaten almost nothing all day. I just want to go back to my moldy garden shed and lie awake listening to techno-pop all night. But this is the Lido – at one time the most famous beach in the world! – and I haven’t actually gotten to the beach yet! (It’s not a beach on the lagoon side, only on the sea-side.) So having given up on the army camp, I head out for the beach. Let me at least accomplish that.

But it’s a repeat of the army camp debacle: wherever I go, no beach. How is that possible? I am a walking anti-compass! I’m about to take a ferry back in to Venice, awed by my own incompetence: I will be the only person alive who, having spent 10 months planning a trip to the Lido, can’t find the beach. That’s amazing. That takes a very special kind of dumb.

Wait… look at that… it’s… the beach! At last! With rows and rows and rows of snug little changing tents (which look suspiciously like a medieval army camp, come to think of it). I’ll go check it out.

Oh. There’s a fence. Well, I’ll just follow it until I find an open gate.

There’s an open gate! Oh. It opens onto another gate, which is closed.

There’s a hole in the fence! I can slip around the whole fenced-in area, and head straight down to the water. As night falls, I can look out over the very channel where the Crusaders and Venetians set out to conquer – sorry, I meant liberate – that place with all the oil — sorry, I meant the sacred real estate.

I’m so close to the beach, the ground has turned from dirt to sand. This is so cool. At the end of this long, fruitless endeavor of a day, I am going to dip my hands into the Adriatic sea, just like my characters did. Neato-keen.

I hear a noise behind me. I glance back. Oh, that’s OK, it’s just a strange man following me through the hole in the fence, carrying a large bottle of alcohol and some club-shaped object in his arms. Nothing to worry about. I’ll just keep heading to the beach, which is now only about 15 feet away. I’ve walked at least 15 miles to day.

Okay, lady, hold on: you know better. You’ve seen the movies — and bought the T-shirt. This is NOT the scene where you go down to the dark, empty beach with this man following you; this is the scene where you turn around, walk straight at him to show him you’re not scared of him, then get the hell back to the populated strip, and live to tell the rest of the story. You only get one take. Go.

So I turn back, without going to the beach, and scowling fearsomely, I walk right up to the strange man in the growing dusk… he is about 17 years old, carrying a bottle of Pepsi and a large salami for his dinner. I am so relieved that I almost giggle. Then I almost turn around to walk with him back to the beach, but I decide that would be far too socially awkward. So I head back toward the ferry landing… having never made it to the beach.

On the bright side, the techno-pop music doesn’t start until 2 am.

SEPTEMBER 29: ARRIVEDERCI VENICE
I wake before dawn the next morning (3 hours sleep) and flee the camping-disco on an early bus into Venice; leaving my bag at the station, I hang out in the alleys of Venice for a good 5 hours before catching my train to Ancona (where I’ll get a boat across the Adriatic.) My Venice time includes a trip to the Accademia, yet another bastion of staggering art, none of which (to my knowledge) is featured in The Da Vinci Code.

Venice was the stop I was least interested in when I planned this trip, believe it or not – “oh, sheesh, just another one of those picturesque European cities with beautiful old stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m over it” – and now I am seriously trying to figure out how to move here at least for a year or so.

But in the meanwhile, the Crusaders have set sail for Croatia, and so must I. Here’s the deal the leaders have worked out with the Venetians: to make up for not paying their bill on time, the (Catholic) Crusaders will help (Catholic) Venice re-conquer one of its former colonies, Zara, which happens to be – wait for it – Catholic. The (Catholic) Pope is furious and threatens to excommunicate the entire crusading army if they attack Zara. They sail from Venice with the intention of doing it anyhow, although most of the soldiers are unhappy about it, and would definitely refuse to attack if they were ever informed that the Pope had forbidden it. They haven’t been informed. Yet. So here’s the $64,000 question: when they get to Zara, will they actually attack? Or not? Tune in next up-load to find out, but here is a hint: Look for Zara on a map. Did you find it? I didn’t think so.

Chasing the Fourth Crusade

This trip isn’t a vacation, and despite the title it definitely isn’t a religious thing (I’m sort of Jewish, anyohw). I’m an historical novelist, and, alarmed by the state of the world, I’m writing a new novel about the Fourth Crusade, which personally I think we’re reliving. That’s the one with the tagline “No infidels were hurt in the making of this crusade.” They just hacked up fellow Christians. So, as part of my research, I am retracing the steps of the campaign: Venice, Croatia, Corfu and finally Constantinople.
The hope here is that I can explain a little bit about the crazy stuff going on at the time, combined a bit with my attempts to follow after. I’m new at blogging and new at internet-cafe-ing, so let’s see how this works…

I. VENICE
The army of the Fourth Crusade assembled at Venice, to sail from there to the Holy Land. Problem: they had a pact with the Venetians to pay Venice a certain large amount, and when push came to shove, they couldn’t (“they” meaning the whole kit and caboodle, knights, lords, footsoldiers… only a few lords actually promised the sum to start with, but then the army as a whole was responsible for ante’ing up). So they sat around on the Lido (not yet a beach resort) for months in the summer heat, with price gouging and plague and generally bad vibes between the army (French/Flemish/some Germans/Piedmont types) and the Venetians. The Venetians weren’t just being greedy, they had sunk everything they had into making the fleet, and they were broke, too! So for a good long while there was some tension between the two teams. Then the Doge, Enrico Dandolo, suggested an ingenious solution: “We won’t forgive you your debt,” he said, “but we’ll take you on this crusade anyhow, as long as you do us a favor: there’s this town called Zara across the Adriatic, on the Dalmatian coast. We conquered them, but they rebelled and they’re not ours right now. We want ’em back. They’re also pirates so we want to whup their butts. It’s on the way… you don’t mind, do you? They’re fellow Catholics, in fact their current ruler is actually a fellow pilgrim, like you guys… that’s not a problem, is it?” It was a problem to the men, but not to the leaders, who wanted to get the army the heck out of Venice. So off they went…

meanwhile, I arrive in Venice.

September 23/24: PLANES, TRAINS, and FERRIES
I leave New York to begin a nearly-24-hour trek to Venice by way of London, and (after some misadventures in the London Underground, during which the natives glance at my struggles with my luggage with annoyance but without helping me – one fellow even said to his girl, “Why doesn’t she get her bloke to help her with that?”) I finally get to Venice at 11 pm the night of September 24, to meet up with my wonderful cousin Stephie Goethals, from Germany, who will be with me for the first couple of days.

September 25: VENICE
I can’t describe Venice; come and see it for yourselves. Parts of it are like the photos but most of it is quieter and cozier. It’s my kind of city, because there are NO CARS. It’s also (for those of you from my homeland) the Martha’s Vineyard of Europe, in this way: it is SO expensive to own a home there, most people live on the mainland and commute to the island every day to work primarily in 2 arenas: first, running businesses aimed at tourists; second, running businesses aimed at the rich people who now own the majority of real estate, for whom Venice is merely a seasonal getaway. The population is 60,000 (about a third of what it was 50 years ago), aging, and declining.

I LOVE this place, although its gawdy, tacky, over-the-top tourist face (the death throes of its late-pre-modern heyday) leaves me cold. I’m really only interested in the behind-the-scenes daily life, which is what we spend most of the day scoping out. We don’t even step onto a boat let alone a (gasp) gondola. You can walk around and see the whole thing by foot in a couple of hours. No cars. No horns. No fumes. It’s the anti-LA. It’s bliss. Yes, there really are places where a cup of coffee costs more than 10 bucks, but it’s only the touristy parts, and we don’t go there. We go to a supermarket, then fruit stand, and buy enough food to feed both of us for three meals, for maybe 20 bucks (nice food, too – various local cheese, capers, olives, etc.). The only thing keeping me from moving here is the price of real estate (on a par with Manhattan). And the fact that it’s literally falling apart – but with my aesthetics, I sorta like that.

In the afternoon we go to the Ghetto – THE ghetto, the original Jewish ghetto, home of Shylock and 5,000 others during the late Renaissance. On the way out we encounter an aristocratic Jewish wedding in one of the synagogues. One of the bridesmaids exits the building, inexplicably makes a bee-line for… me, and hands me her bouquet of white roses. Immediately my fellow gawking tourists start cooing that this is good luck and I will be married by a year from today. I look around at the many nice Jewish men attending the wedding, but I am rather underdressed for the occasion, especially my walking shoes, which my aunt Jen aptly described as “sofas for feet.” So, no matrimonial prospects here.

We meander back to the hotel room, eat our home-made dinner (it’s fab). Then we head toward the piazza of San Marco (St. Mark’s Square), Venice’s most famous site, in the night. A classical trio is playing an Italian waltz for a small audience in the near-empty, enormous square; I twirl around waltzingly in the dark as we enter the piazza, looking down so as not to trip over my foot-sofas… and as the waltz is ending I spin, look up — and find myself face to face with the up-lit Basilica de San Marco. I think I start crying. Come and see it yourselves, before it sinks into the lagoon.

My awe-struck reverie is broken when the classical trio breaks into another Italian gem, “New York, New York.”

SEPTEMBER 26: OUR OWN PRIVATE SAN MARCO
We wake more than an hour before dawn, and head out to the oldest, most commercial part of town, to see the ancient market come to life – the Rialto. Between our hotel and the Rialto bridge is the most famously over-busy part of the city in the daytime, the equivalent of Manhattan’s Times Square… at 5:30 am we encounter exactly three other people in the whole area. The old market itself, a stone plaza alongside a stretch of the curving Grand Canal, is very quiet; we’re here before most of the vendors or their supply boats. So we wander through the dark, cobbly, lamp-lit streets, as I try to figure out where a particular scene in my book takes place (the exact house, the exact sequence of alleys between the back of the house and the lagoon, etc.).

As dawn breaks we wander into San Marco piazza again. It is still barely populated, although now there are about “too many” pigeons (Stephie’s estimate). A door is open in a side chapel, where there is a morning service. We enter. To our immediately right is… all the rest of the basilica of San Marco, with thousands of world-famous, nearly-millennium-old gold-leaf mosaics. Since it’s not yet 7 am, it’s completely empty, and there is an easy passage through the dozen-odd worshippers into the main body of the Cathedral. So of course we just go on in, thinking how nice it is for those who show up early. This is a misunderstanding on our part; after a few mesmerizing moments of just Nicki, Stephie and nothing else but God, we are ushered out because we are NOT, in fact, allowed to have a private showing, no matter what time we show up. That’s okay – we will come back as soon as it is officially open to the public, before the crowds begin. We walk along the quay.
We head back an hour later, just as the place opens officially– and there are already several THOUSAND people in line ahead of us to get in. This is partly because two of the largest cruise ships in the Milky Way came into port in the interim – one of them, is almost as high as the Campanile, the tallest thing in the city. Each of these monstrous ships are larger than a number of the lagoon islands.

Every moment of the 2 hours or so it takes for us to do Venice’s most famous tourist attraction (one of Europe’s finest) is not worth writing home about. It’s a big tourist thing. It’s amazing – come see it! – but it’s all tourism. Not our thing, except what I need to see for research (don’t even get me started about those thieving medieval Venetians). After an afternoon siesta and another tourist-research necessity (the Correr Museum), we wander through the neighborhood called Dusodoro (you can tell it’s beautiful just by the name), spend an hour avoiding the overpriced quay-side café/restaurants until we find what we seek: a teeny hole-in-the-wall, which happens to span a tiny canal, so we have arguably the best view in the quarter, while paying less than half of what everyone else does. Wandering slowly back to the center of town after dinner, we come across a Venetian lutist and an English tenor who have joined forces in a courtyard, performing early English music. We listen for about an hour while I nurse a little Dixie cup of limoncello, a local specialty liquor. The weather is mild, the sky is clear, the music is good, the company delightful, my writer’s block is resolved. Things can’t get much better than this.

SEPTEMBER 27
We sleep in until 6 am! Again we go to the Rialto, then slowly and deliberately wander through the city to the train station, and Stephie leaves. My solo adventuring begins now. As soon as I turn away from Stephie’s departing train, I can hear my main character chuckling in my head: “Ha! You’re all mine now! Let the wild rumpus begin!”
I go to the Doge’s Palace, which frankly I almost skipped because I didn’t think anything there would be of use to me (it’s all post-Fourth-Crusade). Anyone who’s been there know it’s mind-blowing (in an occasionally nauseating way); if you haven’t been, come see it before it sinks into the lagoon! I walk out of there with material for the next 4 novels.
Now I relocate off the island, to a little camping village called Alba D’Oro on the mainland. Settling in here to catch my breath; tomorrow i will go to the Lido, which is where the 10,000 men of the Fourth Crusade army camped out for about 5 months while the Venetians waited for them to pay their bill. Sadly for them, sunbathing was not yet the fashion, and I don’t get the impression they enjoyed themselves much. Hopefully, I will…

This is a test of the Luddites for Technological Progress Movement. Do I have any idea what I am doing?