Chapter 146: The Latin Empire

The sea behaved itself for the whole voyage.

For twenty-four days there was no storm and not a corsair in sight. The fleet sailed from the Lido past Ragusa, rounded Cape Malea, threaded its way through Andros, and passed Tenedos with every hold full and not a wooden horse aboard.

No one challenged them in the Hellespont, and beyond it the interior sea lay open.

Everything Vito knew about the city was a year out of date, and every evening he stood at the stern, thinking over what he knew and trying to find what no longer fit.

Baldwin of Flanders had been crowned in Constantinople and captured at Adrianople. The histories put him in a Bulgarian cell under Kaloyan and left him there, but those same histories had buried a blind old man in Thrace, and that old man was now sitting in the ducal chair in Venezia, coughing into a cloth.

Baldwin’s brother Henry held the regency and commanded an army in Thrace. Boniface, the Marquess who had sold Venezia an island, sat in Thessalonica and answered to the regency whenever he felt like it, while Nicaea under Laskaris, Epirus, and Trebizond all claimed to be the true Empire.

It was an empire with its ruler in a cage and its treasury emptier than the straits.

And yet there was also another empire inside the first one. Venezia owned three-eighths of Constantinople, including a long stretch of the Golden Horn, and the citizens there had elected one of their own to govern them.

Marino Zeno was the podestà, and he kept his own courts, councilors, issued his edicts, and sealed them all himself.

The histories promised that a new Doge would put a leash on him, but the old Doge was still in his chair, no one had elected a replacement, and as far as Vito knew, no one had managed to get that leash around Zeno’s neck.

The Latin Patriarch, Thomas Morosini, was Venetian too. With the power to run his courts came a say in what happened to any merchant who displeased him, and Vito could already picture the wharves in the light, a seal on every bale.

All this mattered to eleven ships loaded to the gunwales. A city that needed goods would pay the first ship to tie up, then twice as much for the second, offering whatever it had left, while buyers waited across the piers for iron and cloth.

The trouble would come with a seal on it. The podestà might demand a say in the cargo, a toll, or the right to buy first, or a regent short of ships might look at three galleys with ambitious lust, and a treasury with little money to spare might offer plate and relics when the colleganza wanted silver.

The Latins were about to meet a podestà who expected to be consulted about every crumb, while Pisan and Genoese eyes would be watching every needle.

Behind La Contessa, the eight naves rode low in the fading light, fat as geese.

A boy’s voice cracked down from the bow, half shout and half prayer. “Tèra, Messer! Tèra! Vara, the walls! And Santa Sofia, Madonna, she’s got the sun sitting on her head like a crown!”

Bepi leaned on the steering oars and bellowed. “Ciò, I have eyes, you blind baccalà! I see her! Twenty-four days, twenty-four, and she comes up this very morning, on the very hour the brass promised me! Mare de Dio, where is the justice in a thing that is never wrong? Not one storm to curse, not one! Now stop gaping like gutted fish and pull those oars, you drowned herrings, or I sell the lot of you to the first Genoese who asks!”

Down in the stern cabin, Vito had the mantle around them as Caterina’s eyes properly opened. The ladder was built for one sailor at a time, but they climbed it together, her hair half out of its coil and her bare feet hissing across the wet planks.

On deck, the fleet stretched out behind La Contessa through the gray morning.

The walls came first, a gray line across the water.

Behind them, the Boukoleon descended to the sea with its windows dark, while above it Santa Sofia rose into the first sunlight.

Black stripes marked the hills where fires had burned all the way to the ridge. Some roofs were nothing but bare rafters, while some had been patched with whatever their owners could find. The smoke rose thin, as it did over a city whose walls had been built to hold twice its present population.

Farther along, the land stretched into a long point, and Vito looked beyond it for the far end of the Golden Horn, where the walls had faced a Venetian fleet and a cadet had taken an arrow. Haze covered the place, thick as milk, and he could see nothing.

Caterina slid beneath his arm as if the space had been cut for her, wove her fingers through his, and let the ring throw the first sun straight at the haze.

Then she aimed one finger down the water. “Là, marito. Somewhere in that milk, past the Venetian church, behind a green door. The last time I saw this water, I was twenty-three, no? A list of investors in my hand and not one soldo of dowry in my purse, and my cousins, they looked at me like a loan with no security. So polite, so sweet, so many little smiles with the sums already done behind them, but now I come back with a ring, a fleet, and a husband on my arm, and their answer about the dowry is still sitting on the wrong side of a closed sea. Mamma mia, let them explain that one over supper.”

She tightened her fingers around his. “Dio mio, Vitale, I’m nervous. Un poco, a little, only a little, don’t look at me like that… so I will count their faces, every one, and charge them for each expression. Surprise, one grosso, envy, two, and if anyone dares to look at me with pity, that one pays double.”

Vito’s grin came up slowly. He lifted his chin toward the hill, where the great dome sat in the light like a lid on the whole city. “Then they will weigh me like a bale of wool, moglie. Pinch me, sniff me, hold me to the window and hunt for moths. So, strategy! Do I go in front, so they can chew on me first and be too full to bite you? Or behind, where I stand and look charming while you do the biting? And look at her, will you? Look at that dome! Nearly seven hundred years standing! They say Justinian walked in the day it opened, looked up, and told Solomon, ‘I have beaten you!’ It says in the…”

The sentence had started with a book, and never got its chance to end.

Caterina stepped over, one finger raised. “Marito, marito, no. You leave the bear at home, eh? In the lagoon, yes, yes, a bell rope on top of Santa Sofia, a dead Emperor, a bear who ate the apple, so beautiful, they weep into their wine over it.”

“Ma va’, the bear was the best part.”

The grin disappeared from his voice. “The last time I came to this city, I came surrounded by dead men. Dawn to night, cara, one by one, and now it is you under this cloak, and I do not know what I did to deserve it. I am glad, mia cara. So glad.”

Caterina rested her head on his shoulder and squeezed his hand until the ring bit into his finger. They stood there together while the light changed from gray to gold.

The box appeared at the edge of his sight, right where the haze had been.

?? [TERRITORY OVERVIEW — CONSTANTINOPLE]

Sovereignty : Latin Empire

Governance : Regency

Population : Approximately 150,000 (Declining)

Civil Order : Unstable 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Harbor : Golden Horn

Military : Latin Garrison, Baronial Retinues, Venetian Militia

Major Districts : Augusteion, Venetian Quarter, Mese, Blachernae, Perama, Kontoskalion, Psamathia, Petrion

Barozzini Presence : No Holdings (Contarini Kin in the Venetian Quarter)

Vito read it once.

“Bepi!”

His eyes remained on the Horn. “Banners! The Lion of San Marco on top, highest, where God and the Genoese can both see him, and the black lion beneath! If a whole city is going to stare at us this morning, ostrega, let us give them what’s worth the staring!”

Bepi’s bellow rolled down the steering oars, across the water, and into the rigging of ten other ships, loud enough to make a gull change its mind. “Ciò! Banners, banners, you sleeping herrings! Lion up top, the big golden one! The black cat underneath, and don’t you tangle him, or I hang you by your own halyards! Dai, dai, fioi, let them look at us like we own the sea!”

The Golden Lions climbed eleven mastheads, and the waters began to open onto the harbor, a large entrance crowded with masts.