Then came the Crusades, when Europe forgot its differences and threw itself upon the paynim who held the holy places of its faith, when men from all lands marched behind the banner of the Cross and the towers of Jerusalem were more real than the Tower of Babel.  Now, at last, Venice saw her dream within her hand.  It was Venice who provided galleys and Venice who provided convoys and commissariat and soldiers, at a good round sum; and when time came for the division of the spoil, Venice demanded in every captured town of Palestine and Syria a church, a counting-house and the right to trade without tolls.  Her great chance came in the Fourth Crusade, when her old blind Doge Enrico Dandolo (whose blindness had the Nelson touch) upon the pretext that the Crusaders could not pay the transport fees agreed upon, turned the whole Crusade to the use of Venice, and conquered first Zara, which had dared to revolt from her, and then her ancient—­her only—­rival, the immortal Byzantium itself.  It is true that the Pope excommunicated the Venetians when they first turned the armies against Zara, but what matter?  They looted Constantinople and brought back the four great gilded horses to St Mark’s—­St Mark’s, which has been compared to a robbers’ cave crowded with the booty of the Levant, and which held the sacred body of the saint, stolen from Alexandria by the Venetians, nearly four centuries before, concealed in a tub of pickled pork, in order to elude the Moslems.  A Venetian patriarch now said Mass in St Sophia.  Venice received the proud title of ’Ruler of a half and a quarter of the Roman Empire,’ (’quartae partis et dimidiae totius imperii Romaniae’—­the words have a ring of trumpets), and the Doge, buskined in scarlet like the ancient Roman emperors, now ruled supreme over four seas—­the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Sea of Marmora, and the Black Sea.  Venetian factories studded all the Levantine coasts, in Tripoli and Tyre, Salonica, Adrianople, and Constantinople, in Trebizond on the Black Sea, even at Caffa in the far Crimea, whence ran the mysterious road into Russia.  Crete and Rhodes and Cyprus were hers; her galleys swept the pirates from the seas and brooked no rivals; all trade with the East must pass through Venice, and Venice only.  The other trading cities of Italy struggled against her, and Genoa came near to rivalling her, but in 1258, and again in 1284, she utterly defeated the Genoese fleet.  Not for the city of ’sea without fish, mountains without woods, men without faith, and women without shame’ was it to bit the horses on St Mark’s.[5] In 1268 Venice seemed supreme.  Byzantium was her washpot and over the Levant she had cast her shoe.  Truly her chronicler might write of her: 

Dalmatia, Albania, Rumania, Greece, Trebizond, Syria, Armenia, Egypt, Cyprus, Candia, Apulia, Sicily, and other countries, kingdoms and islands were the fruitful gardens, the proud castles of our people, where they found again pleasure, profit, and security....  The Venetians went about the sea, here and there and across the sea, and in all places wheresoever water runs, and bought merchandise and brought it to Venice from every side.  Then there came to Venice Germans and Bavarians, French and Lombards, Tuscans and Hungarians, and every people that lives by merchandise and they took it to their countries.