She was a maiden city, bright and free,
No guile seduced, no force could violate,
And when she took unto herself a mate
She must espouse the everlasting sea.

And truly it seemed as though the very sea had sworn to honour and obey
her.

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