3 - Rhetoric, Providence, and Violence in Villehardouin's La conquête de Constantinople

Summary

Quid … sunt Dei mirabilia, nisi quae hominibus sunt impossibilia? [What are God's miracles if not that which is impossible for humans?]

Sermo de Annuntiatione Dominica 3 (attrib. Augustine)

From military commanders to petty knights, ecclesiastical leaders to monastic historians, observers of, and participants in, the Fourth Crusade understood providential rhetoric as an available if contentious strategy for justifying violent conflict. Anyone familiar with the Crusade's trajectory will know that these were events in sore need of justification. The host not only failed to retake Jerusalem from the “enemies of the Cross,” as it pledged to do; it also vanquished two Christian cities, first helping the Venetians assert dominion over Zara and then establishing a Latin Empire in Constantinople. Given how unexpected and morally dubious these actions were, it makes sense that a divine master plan should be invoked to justify them and that claims to know God's actions and intentions should in turn strain belief and elicit further doubts.

We can see the tension between belief and doubt at work in three representative sources. On the day of his coronation as Latin emperor, Baldwin I wrote to Pope Innocent III to proclaim that there had been no “viable human plan” that could have led to this “wondrous turn of events”; there could therefore be “no doubt, even among the unbelievers [infidelibus], but that the hand of the Lord guided all of these events.”