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Winner of the Haskins Medal

With great pleasure we award the Haskins Medal for 2007 to Thomas F. Madden, Professor of History, Saint Louis University, for his book entitled Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2003. In this work Madden meticulously and lucidly analyzes the much-debated role of Venice and Venetians in the Fourth Crusade, particularly that of Enrico Dandolo, a man about whom until now much has been said, pro and con, but very little actually known. Madden constructs his analysis by means of an extensive, archivally based narrative account of precisely how Dandolo, his and other leading families, and their fellow Venetians had become Venetians and crusaders well before the events of 1204. "To challenge the myth of Dandolo," Madden writes, "was to do the same for that of medieval Venice." Madden's challenge has produced a clear, persuasive, and eloquent account of Venetian history from the eleventh to the thirteenth century that is solidly founded on a unique archival database of Madden's own construction, on all published documents, on all relevant scholarship in several languages, and on an extremely judicious use of contemporary and later narrative accounts.

Any account of this Venetian history requires mastery of yet other difficult histories, and even of a few other disciplines: the internal history of the Byzantine Empire and its complex relations with Venice, that of much-disparaged Venetian Christianity, that of all of the aspects of crusade history, that of technical military, especially maritime, costs, engineering, and logistics, and that of the intricate and often obscure mechanics of Venetian self-government. It also requires the responsible use of paleography, topography, art and architectural history, and iconography, even the clinical physiology of Dandolo's blindness. And Madden deploys all of these with great skill in a lively, engaging, and smoothly flowing narrative that is a delight to read. By the time Madden gets to the Fourth Crusade he offers the reader a major reinterpretation of the motives, not only of the Venetians, but also of everyone else on that monstrously underfunded, ill-fated, contingency-plagued, and grossly mischaracterized enterprise.

The remarkable depth and breadth of Madden's work have grown out of his early collaboration with the late Donald Queller on the second edition of The Fourth Crusade (1997) and with Louise Buenger Robbert, the time and thought well spent on his own later work on broader crusade and Venetian history between 1999 and 2005, and his extraordinary personal familiarity with early and modern Venice and its distinctive and complex archival resources.

The Fourth Crusade and its immediate aftermath occupy only the last four chapters and epilogue of the book. And Madden compels us to read it through the lens of the first six chapters: the emergence of the Dandolo and families like them in the twelfth century; a highly innovative and revisionist account of Venetian Christianity, focusing on the reform-mindedness of Enrico Dandolo, our Enrico's uncle, the extremely long-lived patriarch of Grado from 1134 to 1188, and earlier Venetian piety and crusade participation; the sometimes violent but uniquely self-correcting political reforms and diplomatic policies of Venice, focusing on our Enrico's father, Vitale Dandolo; and the long life and career as doge of Enrico Dandolo himself. When Dandolo assumed the title "Lord of Three-Eighths of the Roman Empire" on the occasion of the formal division of the empire in October 1204, that division marked the end of one part of a very different Fourth Crusade from that in the accounts full of what one historian has called "overheated moralizing and partisan outrage" that have long dominated and mightily confused the historiography of the subject.

At Dandolo's death in Constantinople and his burial in Hagia Sophia in May 1205, Venice stood at the beginning of a new age, adopting even during his lifetime that unenviable role as a powerhouse of wealth and empire, myth and countermyth that so colored and distorted later interpretations of the Fourth Crusade, the Venetians who participated in it, including Dandolo, and much later Venetian history. The early archipelago of independent family enclaves in a landscape of open fields and orchards, a proto-city of wood, stone, water, dirt, and mud, the grimy merchant republic, stood in 1205 on the verge of becoming a maritime empire, La Serenissima indeed, the result, in large part at least, of the lives and work of Enrico Dandolo, his immediate predecessors, and his contemporaries. From this perspective the Fourth Crusade becomes an extraordinary footnote to the dynamic of late-twelfth-century Venice. Madden's wonderful book is an immensely readable and utterly reliable account of just how that happened.

Respectfully submitted,
JOAN M. FERRANTE
WILLIAM MAHRT
EDWARD PETERS, Chair

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