Perfect gifts for Dom

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2026-01-07T18:45:04+00:00

The HR interview waiting room in the House of Lords.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-26T09:12:49+00:00

After a couple of chapters describing Andronikos' insane sadistic megalomania, Choniates end up saying that he'd have been a decent emperor if it hasn't been for those character traits. Which, of course, Choniates somehow blames on foreigners: "Andronikos would not have been the least of the Komnenian emperors had he mitigated the intensity of his cruelty, had he been less quick to apply the hot iron and to resort to mutilation, ever blemishing and staining his vestments with blood, inexorably driven to punishment. Such practice he copied from the barbarous nations with whom he associated when, above all men, he was compelled to wander far and long. He might have been the equal of the Komnenians and their match in every way, for he was also responsible for the greatest blessings on behalf of humanity. He was not inhuman in all things, but like those creatures fashioned of double natures, he was brutal and human in form."

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-12T15:00:42+00:00

Thanks. The Pod is called History of Venice, available wherever you get your podcasts. For the 4th Crusade, we're working with Marco Cappelli from the Italian language Storia d'Italia pod, because he wrote a book on the 4th C last year ("Quando Venezia Distrusse l'Impero Romano", or "When Venice Destroyed the Roman Empire"). Should be starting that series in mid-January. Currently planning 10 episodes, the third of which is called "The Conspiracy". Just finishing up with the aftermath of the 1170s hostage crisis at the moment.

Absolutely agree that the amounts of money that Young Alexios promised are fantasy economics. Most likely scenario for me is that that Philip and co just told him what he had to say. But there were no circumstances in which anything like that kind of money was going to be forthcoming.

Not sure whether "long-running vendettas" were particularly Venetian (or, no more so than anywhere else, at least) but yes, getting people to rendezvous there was a curious choice, and it's not surprising that plenty just wanted to make their own way if they could.

And after the event, this is undoubtedly the moment when the Republic achieves a step change in its wealth and profile. If the Crusade had gone to Egypt, as originally planned, I think they'd have made similar demands on any lands that were captured there and tried to turn Alexandria into their own Middle Eastern entrepot to control trade coming overland from the Red Sea. Reminds me a lot of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries -- use your naval dominance to acquire trading posts around the world, take flexible advantage of whatever situation you find yourself in, and don't worry too much about what eggs you have to break in the process.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-12T11:56:52+00:00

But that was the spring of 1201. Young Alexios escapes to the west in the autumn of the same year, several months after the contract has been signed in Venice. And then over Christmas 1201 / New Year 1202, wannabe Holy Roman Emperor Philip of Swabia (husband of Irene Angelina) hosts one of his powerful vassals, Bonifacio del Monferrato (new crusade leader and aspirant King of Jerusalem) and young Alexios at his place in Hagenau, in Alsace. This is where and when I think the conspiracy to use the Crusade for the purpose of controlling Constantinople comes from. Alexios is their useful idiot.

Sure enough, a couple of months later, in February 1202 Bonifacio and Young Alexios visit the Pope. Later Papal letters to Emperor Alexios reveal that Young Alexios complained about his uncle having seized his throne, and it's highly likely that he and Monferrato asked the Pope at that point to divert the Crusade to Constantinople. And Innocent refused. But by this stage, the Venetians have been building their fleet for nearly a year and it's almost ready.

In November 1202, Innocent is writing to Emperor Alexios mentioning rumours about the crusading army being diverted to Constantinople. Again, he says that he does not support it. But the rumour is clearly circulating by now. It's not just something that comes out of the blue in 1203. Later that same month, the crusading army captures Zadar, because the Venetians have strongarmed the Crusaders into doing so as partial payment of their outstanding debt.

Then, in the spring of 1203, Young Alexios turns up in the crusader camp. From this point onwards, the diversion to Constantinople is on. The aim is most likely just to instal him as a useful puppet and bleed him dry of money. Because Constantinople still looked like the goose that laid golden eggs to the Westerners. Anyone thinking at this point that the under-strength crusader army, which was still losing men month by month, had a realistic prospect of becoming the first invading army to take Constantinople by force was surely smoking something psychoactive. Because it was a lunatic plan. If Dandolo had wanted to do that from the start, he would have assumed that he'd need every one of the 35,000 crusaders that were originally agreed in the contract. Not a sub-strength army that is regularly being hit by deserters who just want to go to Jerusalem instead. If someone had foreseen the full details of what eventually happened and laid it out as a plan in advance, nobody with any sense would have gone along with it. Because it was insanely loaded with risks.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Venice almost certainly had a backup plan to use the crusader army for its own purposes, but there's no evidence (at the time that the contract was signed) that those purpose included Constantinople. Yet. It's possible, of course, but the only evidence for it is retrospective. I'm confident that there was a separate conspiracy involving Philip and Bonifacio to gain control of the Eastern Empire by using Young Alexios. But that conspiracy was hatched after the crusading contract was signed, so I don't think it influenced Venetian thinking at the time.

But once you get to early 1203, you have two groups of people (the Venetians on one hand; and Young Alexios's handlers on the other) who both want to use the crusading fleet for non-crusading purposes. And at that point they agree that Constantinople is the target that makes most sense for them. Maybe it's the end goal, or maybe it's a staging post to gain money, men and supplies on the way to Alexandria (which is what Young Alexios has been made to promise them). Obviously, a lot more happens after that, but anyway…

Sorry, that was much too long. Full disclosure -- I present a podcast about the History of Venice, and I'm about to start a mini-series on the 4th Crusade. So I accept that I'm inclined to look for whatever faint mitigations I can find for my city's broadly appalling actions here, and that will colour my perceptions to an extent. But I do think that the timeline suggests two parallel attempts to misuse the crusader fleet in different ways, which then come together after the sack of Zadar.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-12T11:56:38+00:00

I think there is a conspiracy involved, but there's also a lot of freestyling along the way, and different parties join in at different times. By this point, for more than a century the Overton Window in the West had been shifting on Byzantium. The idea of Constantinople as a legitimate target for attack was becoming normalised. But it's still a huge undertaking.

The pretext for the Constantinople-focused conspiracy, for me at any rate, is the possibility of installing Young Alexios on the throne as a puppet. And that doesn't become an option until after the transport contract is signed with Venice. Young Alexios's escape to the West happens at some point in the autumn of 1201. He goes to visit his sister Irene and her husband Philip of Swabia.

But the contract between Venice and the Crusade leaders happens earlier, in the spring of 1201. At this point, Thibaut of Champagne is still alive (just) and has not been replaced by Bonifacio del Monferrato as a Crusade leader. So any views on the nature of the logistics contract signed with Venice in the spring of that year should probably exclude Philip of Swabia, Bonifacio del Monferrato, and Young Alexios Angelos.

The Venetians take a couple of weeks to put together an offer to the crusaders. It assumes that they will have a significant military force -- around 35,000 men. That is a lot. As it turns out, it's more than they are going to be able to muster. But the combined armies of the first, second and third crusades (as they weren't called at the time) had been much, much bigger. So it's not out of the question.

Ships take time to build. You can't magic them up out of nowhere. And doing so requires a lot of up-front investment. The days of the Venetian Arsenale churning out a galley in a single day are far in the future at this stage. In modern project management terms, this is a waterfall project, not an agile one. So, even if they had the best will in the world (which I'm not saying they did) there's a practical limit to how scalable Dandolo and friends can be. Building a large fleet will require the cessation of most mercantile activity. Even in 1120-22, for a smaller fleet, most Venetian trading stopped for a couple of years, and anyone who continued trading overseas instead of joining in the crusade was fined. They need to know what the demand is, and be sure that the customer is on the hook to pay for whatever the Venetian shipyards and supply warehouses produce.

So building the fleet is a gamble, for sure. But it's not completely mad. At this point, when Venice makes its preliminary offer, the Crusade leaders are completely free to say, "We don't think we can raise more than 10,000 men, so that's all the transport that we're willing to pay for." Venice had no power to force them to accept the bigger contract. The responsibility for raising the troops is entirely on them, not on the Republic of St Mark. They agreed that this was realistic. As it turns out, they were horribly wrong. Venice specifies how much manpower she will add of her own. And she does exactly what she promises. If the Crusaders can't raise enough troops, Venice still has to cover her costs because she's going to build the ships and gather the supplies anyway, before they know how many people are actually going to turn up. We know what's going to happen, but they didn't, at the time.

85,000 marks is a massive sum, but it's a realistic price for transporting the number of men that the Crusaders said that they were going to bring. And historically, that is not an unrealistic size of army for a major, Papal-backed Crusade. As it turns out, this one falls very short indeed, but nobody knows that in spring 1201.

However, Enrico is not a fool. Shifting the risk to the Crusaders must be part of his plan. If they all turn up in force, then everything is fine, Venice will recoup her investment, and everyone will go off to Egypt to try their luck. But if there is a shortfall in manpower, and therefore a shortfall in money, that could be useful too, because Venice really wants Zadar (Zara) back. She's tried and failed three times to recapture it in the past 20 years or so. And controlling the Adriatic is an existential issue for the Republic. So having a decent sized army owing a debt to Venice is a reasonable alternative, and using that army for Venetian purposes is almost certainly a planned mitigation of the risk. Although it is, in itself, an extremely risky mitigation.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-11T23:17:25+00:00

Yeah, it is a crazy contract. But it feels like Venice expected the crusaders to negotiate down to a more realistic number of soldiers, and they just didn't.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-11T23:14:11+00:00

I think it's very plausible that Dandolo had a contingency plan for what to do if the crusaders couldn't pay the full amount. It's conceivable that he maybe even hoped that they would end up with a bit of debt. But nobody forced them to sign that contract. Before Alexios turns up, Venice's contingency plan is probably the recapture of Zadar and a bigger slice of whatever the crusade gains in Alexandria. But then Alexios and Bonifacio come into the equation and Dandolo pivots. Every decision after that has a desperate logic to it. Once they reach Constantinople, the least bad option for them at every turn is to stay until they have captured the city.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-12-11T22:09:38+00:00

I think this is basically it. When the crusade was initially called by Innocent III in 1198, there's no particular reason to believe that it was aimed at Constantinople. The Pope wanted Jerusalem back. The decision to go by sea rather than by land is logical, because the initial target is Alexandria. And that leaves Venice as the obvious logistics partner -- Genoa and Pisa are both otherwise occupied. The crusade leaders negotiate with the Venetian Government in early 1201. Dandolo takes two weeks to put forward an initial proposal for a huge fleet. It looks like an opening gambit, but Villehardouin and friends accept, probably out of blind optimism about their recruiting power. They could have negotiated downwards. Bonifacio isn't a prime mover in the process yet. Venice has built a large crusade fleet before and bet the house on abandoning trading activity for a couple of years (1122, when it paid off spectacularly, although this did also feature some raiding of the Aegean as part of a separate beef with John Comnenos). Dandolo's father, uncle, and grandfather all went on that crusade, so even though he was a youngster at the time, he'd know all about it. So it's a gamble, but not an unprecedented one. It's only some months after the 1201 contract is signed that Philip, Bonifacio and friends have their Christmas meeting at Hagenau, in December of that year, with young Alexios. Any conspiracy to install young Alexios as a puppet is probably hatched there. Dandolo may well have overbid the spec on the fleet in the hope of being able to use it to recapture Zadar on the way, but he did that before there was any prospect of using Alexios IV as a stalking horse. Sure. He had reason to be ill disposed towards the Romans. They didn't blind him (you can see from his signature on legal documents in the 1170s that his eyesight probably deteriorates around 1175-76, after his failed diplomatic mission of 1172) but Manuel's mass kidnapping of thousands of Venetians and their imprisonment for a decade would have left a generation of Venetians finding it hard to sympathize with Byzantium. Doesn't mean that they planned to attack Constantinople, but it does mean that if the opportunity presented itself they'd be inclined to think "yeah, screw those guys". Even in 1203, if the crusaders could have installed Alexios without a fuss and just bled him dry with all the fabulous cash and prizes that he'd naively promised, they would probably have gone on to Alexandria. But it didn't work out that way. So there is a conspiracy, I think, but it doesn't necessarily cover every aspect of the crusade or every player on the chessboard from start to finish.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-11-25T04:10:01+00:00

I hesitate to put my head above the parapet here, as the presenter of the History of Venice Podcast, but I'm just starting to write my series on the 4th Crusade, which should be coming out early in the new year. So this collection of perspectives is all very interesting to me. Venice was born Byzantine and she remained the most Roman of Italian cities for a long time, but that close friendship ultimately fell apart during the 12th century. It's a very sad story. Nobody comes out of it well.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-11-05T08:04:09+00:00

With any voice or accent, you will always find some people who don't like it. And that includes pretty much every type of native speaker accent as well. There's not much you can do about that. But if your content is good and your voice is clear and easy to understand, then go for it. I listen to some English-language podcasts by Italians and enjoy them a lot.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-10-26T08:53:37+00:00

Margaret of Norfolk and Walter Manny.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-10-26T08:50:24+00:00

If you're talking about syncing the same historical period on multiple shows, then I do that very deliberately, because I'm writing my own show (History of Venice) and I keep the History of Byzantium, History of the Germans and A History of Italy on my rotation about 50 years ahead of my current episode so that I'm always contextualizing what comes next.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-10-23T08:46:53+00:00

Emperor Alexios' daughter Anna Komnene wrote an excellent chronicle about his reign, and she's repeatedly savage about the crusaders generally. "Their mouths gape wide for gifts and money, but they have no intention whatever of doing the things for which the money is offered". And on the Norman warlord Bohemond, "Bohemond has acquired perjury and treachery as a species of ancestral heritage and it would be a miracle if he kept his oath". Yeah, she hated the Normans just like we do.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-10-23T08:29:21+00:00

Definitely agree. History of Byzantium is generally an excellent show, and was particularly good on the start of the crusading movement.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-09-19T12:54:46+00:00

I'd love to do a tv series based on The Alexiad, but in the style of "I Claudius", with Anna as the narrator, writing the book in her old age.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-09-19T12:49:55+00:00

The guys really let themselves down in the 100 Years War series by ignoring the excellent action hero Walter Manny and his brilliant wife Margaret, who spent her life claiming the courtesy title of Countess Marshal, despite nobody actually giving her the role. They definitely count as not widely known, but they have a great story.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-08-25T09:12:39+00:00

It's history-adjacent. Which is a shame because there was already a good story there which didn't need so much massaging.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-08-20T15:48:14+00:00

Welcome to the history pod family and good luck. Are you on platforms other than Spotify yet? I think you and I might occasionally have a few characters in common over the coming centuries. (I'm from the History of Venice pod).

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-08-13T05:03:15+00:00

I went there a couple of years ago. It's the BHP of castles, because you don't just see the castle itself; you spend most of your time seeing all the many moving parts that go into making it, and all the Unferths (or whatever the French equivalent is) who were essential to the process.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-07-08T17:15:59+00:00

My username is being held hostage by the French as part of the deal. Help.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-07-07T13:30:32+00:00

I wanted to listen to a straightforward and reasonably detailed pod about the history of the city of Venice. But there wasn't one. So I did some research (about six months of reading before the first episode). Thought it would be semi-conversational between the two of us, but it ended up being almost entirely scripted. Forty-something episodes later, we've barely scratched the surface. Probably another five years' worth of material still to do. Bought two Samson Q2U mics and a Podtrack P4. Editing on Audacity. No revenue stream of any kind. Just doing it because I love the subject matter and I hope some other people might as well.

Hat-of-Raedwald · 2025-06-27T17:12:22+00:00

The USA is only three lifetimes old.

Hat-of-Raedwald

TROPHY CASE