Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade

by David M. Perry

In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice’s civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.

Genres: History, Medieval

248 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2015

Reviews

[Pedro Pascoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dry chew of a read about the medieval Venetian spin doctors and their attempts to turn the PR disaster that was the fourth crusade into holy justification and local glorification.
Must admit, not quite what I signed on for, but that's what I get for jumping on with specific aims in mind. I stumbled across this book after starting to design a board game, and found, initially to my dismay, that the ideas I'd had bore not as much historical accuracy as I would have liked.
What I found instead was that the fine art of pulling the wool over people's eyes via constructed narrative is a long and venerated tradition.
Perry dives right into 'translatio narratives', texts of the period, which amount to imaginitive writing exercises using various excuses for justifying theft of relics from Constantinople in the wake of the fourth crusade. Specifically those that benefitted Venice the most. The blood and guts of medieval crusading stories is absent here, as we are dealing with the Church and its attempts to come to terms with itself in the aftermath of a war it kind of never meant to fight, let alone win, and the soul-wrangling that follows simultaneously berating itself over its actions while benefitting enormously over the spiritual spoils that ensued. The texts in question are analyzed for variances in degrees, which makes for quite a specialized area of interest.
Only in the Epilogue does Perry ask relevant and revealing questions as to why tranlatio texts were relevant to Venice, rather than elsewhere, and what that meant for Venetian culture at the time.
Fortunately for myself, the subject was of interest. I would recommend this book for people with a similar focused interest, or an interest in how counter-narratives gain traction in an historical period. Failing that, this book could just be a chew too far.
I would love to have a chat with the author, after all this, to find out how I could make my board game idea work within a reasonable historically accurate framework, as I appear to be back at square one. Not regretting having read this book, but I did find that after the initial rush into the book, I did find myself reading bite-size extracts. I now have a hankering for some first-hand accounts of the fourth crusade. Luckily one of the texts credited in this book happens to be sitting on my shelf. Lovely.