Local Needs, Local Narratives: Venetian Contextualization of the Crusades

In the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, one finds two narrative cycles depicting important moments in Venetian history. Both are crusades. Both reflect local memorialization. The first offers the Venetian account of the Fourth Crusade, a distorted version of events that places the crusading host at the service of Innocent III and his desire to rescue Constantinople. The second portrays the story of the “Peace of Venice,” a sequence of events in which Venice defends Pope Alexander III from the clutches of Emperor Barbarossa via a great naval battle, a battle that in fact never took place. I argue that this episode can be read as a fictional political crusade as reflected by the fourteenth century realities of crusading in Italy. Thus, two crusading narratives, each altered for local purposes, flanked the nexus of Venetian power. Of course, by the fifteenth century, even the Great Council’s power had been much diminished, thanks to the rise of smaller oligarchies that competed with the greater one. Thus we find invented memories of a crusading past in the hall of the invented, but increasingly less relevant, republican government. The Great Hall is but one site in which crusading, real and imagined, functioned as a fulcrum on which Venetian mythographers and politicians attempted to shift and shape cultural meaning. This paper explores the context of the crusades within Venetian culture and makes some comparative observations with other northern Italian cities. I argue that Venice’s ongoing but malleable relationships across the Mediterranean and with Rome positioned crusading as central to Venetian culture even as the specifics shifted over time.