The tales of the horses of Saint Mark are, unfortunately, naught but tales of theft and robbery.
The Saint
A local cobbler, Anianus, was sitting as usual by the sea when Mark approached, for his sandal straps had come loose. While Anianus was mending the sandals, the awl slipped and pierced his palm. As he felt him hurt he cried on high: “One God!” Then Mark took a little clay and spittle and meddled them together and laid it on the wound, and the cobbler was whole. Thus Christianity came upon the shore of Alexandria. The Greek historian Eusebius placed Mark’s arrival at Alexandria between 41 and 44 AC. A 13th-century Italian Mosaic depicts Mark on a small boat approaching the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
As Christianity spread in the city, Mark left and returned to Alexandria in his 60’s. According to the 4th-century Alexandrian text The Acts of St. Mark, a church was built in the suburb of Baucalis next to the sea, allegedly upon the site of an earlier shrine to Serapis, the Egyptian deity derived from the god Osiris and the sacred bull Apis. In 68 AC, when the feast of Serapis fell on the very same day as Easter, it was said an angry mob seized Mark from his church in Baucalis and dragged him through the streets of Alexandria until he was dead. His followers managed to retrieve the body and arranged a secret burial under the altar of the Baucalis church.
Then in the 9th century, as the Venetians expanded their city, the Republic of Venice needed an impressive patron saint to match their wealth and to show up their rivals. Regular commerce with Alexandria meant they knew their way around the city, thus they devised a heist to steal St. Mark’s body from Alexandria. The job was given to Buono da Malamocco, a sea captain who had been escorting Venetian merchants to Alexandria and Constantinople.
In December 827, Buono da Malamocco and his first officer Rustico da Torcello set sail from Venice among a fleet of ten ships. Once inside the Christian sanctuary in Alexandria, they began to dig for the body. The Venetian painter Tintoretto depicted this event in his 1562 Finding the body of Saint Mark. Once Mark’s body was found, they swapped it for the body of St. Claudia, a virgin martyred in the early 4th century during Roman persecution. They hid the body inside a wicker basket and covered it with cabbage and pickled pork, anticipating it would allow for escaping the Muslim border guards’s attention, and it worked.
In January 828, at the Port of Olivolo in Venice, the bishop Doge Giustiniano awaited Mark’s body’s arrival. As the ship docked, the patron saint of Alexandria swiftly became the patron saint of Venice. Buono and Rustico told of how as they departed Alexandria, a wild storm began. They had all but drowned, until suddenly, the ghost of St. Mark appeared to calm the storm and save the ship, thus depicted in Tintoretto’s Saint Mark Saving a Saracen from Shipwreck. Having seen his apparition and witnessed a miracle, they were swiftly rewarded with 100 pieces of silver each. Tintoretto’s Saint Mark’s Body Brought to Venice portrayed the Evangelist’s disciples carrying his body as they arrived in Venice. The painting recounted the moment when the Evangelist’s disciples saved his body from being burned, amidst a miraculous hailstorm which sent his persecutors fleeing.
The bishop kept the body in his palace. Following his will after his death, a church was built to house Mark’s body. By order of Napoleon at the turn of the 19th century, the church was designated as the city’s cathedral, the Basilica di San Marco.
The Horses
The horses of Saint Mark, along with the quadriga with which they were depicted, had long been displayed at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, an early 8th-century chronicle of the monuments of Constantinople, mentioned “four gilt horses that stand above the Hippodrome” brought from the island of Chios by the Roman Emperor Theodosius II who reigned between 408 and 450 AD. Others believe the horses were commissioned by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus between 193 and 211 AD due to their composition of almost pure copper, as opposed to bronze. Although copper has a higher melting point than bronze, the metal can be gilded, which must have been the intention when the horses originally were cast. Additionally, their long legs and short backs suggest that they were to be viewed from below, from a triumphal arch.
Then came the Sack of Constantinople, also known as the Fourth Crusade, called by Pope Innocent III in the 13th century, when crusaders destroyed most of Constantinople. They looted, pillaged, and vandalized the city for three days, during which ancient and medieval Roman and Greek works were either seized or destroyed. Church altars were smashed for gold and marble, statues were melted for minting money. Along with other religious relics and artworks, the famous horses from the Hippodrome were taken back to Venice. The collars on the four horses were added in the same year to obscure where the animals’ heads had been severed to facilitate their transportation by sea from Constantinople to Venice. They were installed on the terrace of the façade of St Mark’s Basilica in 1254.
It was said the total amount looted from Constantinople was about 900,000 silver marks, of which the Venetians received 200,000 silver marks. 500,000 silver marks were purportedly stolen by Crusader knights. The Fourth Crusade is considered to have solidified the East–West Schism, the break of communion between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. 800 years after the Fourth Crusade, Pope John Paul II wrote to Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens, “It is tragic that the assailants, who set out to secure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their brothers in the faith. The fact that they were Latin Christians fills Catholics with deep regret.”
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