The merchants of Venice
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…
Tags: Travel
Nicki