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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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