Debt and a Vow: The Crusaders' Council at Zara

Vows, Fiefs and a Fleet

1In the 1100s and 1200s, much of western Europe was held together by feudal bonds. A great lord granted land, called a fief, to a vassal, who swore loyalty and owed him military service. Most people were peasants on manors. Many were serfs, who could not leave without the lord's permission and who worked the lord's fields and paid him dues in crops, labor and money. In the end, wars and long journeys were paid for largely by what the manors produced.

2Crusades were wars that popes called to win or defend Jerusalem and other lands in the eastern Mediterranean, which were holy to Christians, Muslims and Jews. A crusader took a vow, a solemn religious promise, and sewed a cloth cross onto his clothes. Christians of the time believed that a crusader who kept his vow would be forgiven his sins. Going was costly. Many knights pawned or sold land, often to monasteries, and in 1188 the kings of England and France collected the “Saladin tithe,” a tax of one-tenth of people's income and goods, to pay for the Third Crusade. Muslims saw the crusaders as invaders, and the sultan Saladin had retaken Jerusalem in 1187.

3In 1198 Pope Innocent III called for a new crusade, now known as the Fourth Crusade. Many of its leaders were French and Flemish nobles, such as the counts of Champagne and Flanders, who brought their own vassals with them. They planned to attack Egypt, the base of the sultans who ruled Jerusalem. They had no fleet, so in 1201 they agreed to pay the city of Venice a huge sum for ships to carry the army and its horses.

4In the summer of 1202, far fewer crusaders came to Venice than planned; many had sailed from other ports or stayed home. Those who came could not pay the full price. Venice's leader, the doge Enrico Dandolo, offered a deal: payment could wait if the crusaders helped Venice take Zara, a Christian city on the Adriatic coast that had rebelled against Venice. Zara was under the protection of the king of Hungary, who had himself taken the crusader's vow. The pope forbade an attack on Christians, but in November 1202 the crusaders and Venetians captured Zara. The pope excommunicated them, cutting them off from the Church. He later lifted this for the crusaders who asked forgiveness, but not for the Venetians.