A Death in the Venetian Quarter Page 29

  Finally, from the Greek point of view comes our old friend Niketas Choniates, and I once again refer the reader to the marvelous translation by Harry J. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates, from Wayne State University Press. Choniates was as good a historian as ever lived through a cataclysmic event, and his lament for the city unites reporting with poetic grace to produce a work of powerful beauty rivaling that of the Old Testament prophets.

  The events set in motion by the Fourth Crusade are still being played out. Had the Crusaders not defeated Byzantium, there might still have been a strong enough empire to withstand the Turks later on. The thrust of the latter into Europe and the creation of the Ottoman Empire led to the long-term tribal faultlines whose tremors culminated in World War I. The pockets of Muslim-Catholic-Orthodox division deposited by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire are still erupting in civil war and ethnic “cleansing” in the Balkans to this day.

  On May 4, 2001, Pope John Paul II visited Orthodox Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens. In a powerful symbolic gesture, the Pope prayed to God to forgive the Catholics for their history of sins committed against Orthodox Christians, specifically singling out the Fourth Crusade. “How can we fail to see here the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the human heart?” he said. “To God alone belongs judgment and, therefore, we entrust the heavy burden of the past to His endless mercy, imploring Him to heal the wounds that still cause suffering to the spirit of the Greek people. Together we must work for this healing if the Europe now emerging is to be true to its identity, which is inseparable from the Christian humanism shared by East and West.”

  Perhaps we need another Fools’ Guild to help us bring peace back to this troubled world.

  Sections of the city walls still stand. If you chance to travel to Istanbul, go look upon them and think of this passage from Choniates: “As we left the City behind, others returned, thanks to God, and loudly bewailed their misfortunes, but I threw myself, just as I was, on the ground and reproached the walls both because they alone were insensible, neither shedding tears nor lying in ruins upon the earth, and because they still stood upright. If those things for whose protection you were erected no longer exist, being utterly destroyed by fire and war, for what purpose do you still stand? And what will you protect hereafter … ?”

  A DEATH IN THE VENETIAN QUARTER. Copyright © 2002 by Alan Gordon. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466823105

  First eBook Edition : June 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gordon, Alan (Alan R.)

  A death in the Venetian quarter / a medieval mystery / Alan Gordon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36932-3

  ISBN-10: 0-312-36932-8

  1. Istanbul (Turkey)—History—Siege, 1203-1204—Fiction. 2. Crusades—Fourth, 1202-1204—Fiction. 3. Fools and jesters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.0649 D43 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2001048750

  “The Jester and the Thieves” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 49, #10 (October 2004)

  First St. Martin’s Minotaur Paperback Edition: May 2007