Doge Dandolo’s Negotiations in Hell

Note: this comic short story was originally published on 1 October 2023, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.

By Christopher Deliso

Doge Enrico Dandolo had been slumbering peacefully for well over two centuries within the fastness of St. Sofia of Constantinople, since his painless repose in the spring 1205 in the Byzantine capital he’d plotted to conquer. However, for the scheming, blind elder of the Fourth Crusade, continuing the conquest to Bulgaria had proven disastrous, with many Latins dead or kidnapped, and he and some loyal knights lucky to escape back to the capital.

Perhaps it was inevitable, therefore, when Ottoman Sultan Mehmet came along to mimic both the wily bygone Venetian’s sack of the city, in 1453, as well as the barbarian streak of old Tsar Kaloyan who’d ruled in Bulgaria back in the early 13^th century. It is said that upon penetrating the city, Mehmet sent trusted janissaries straight for the church and the Doge’s heretic grave, to secure a sort of trophy of conquest over both the Catholics and the Orthodox enemies.

Yet the Devil has people everywhere, as the old saying goes; in this case, he had Scholarios. In exchange for promising he would be appointed the first Orthodox patriarch under Sultan Mehmet, the whiny academic promised the Devil he would reveal to Mehmet the burial chamber of Dandolo, and whatever else he might like to know, and above all make sure that the Doge’s bones were not secreted away via the little-known underwater escape passages linking the great Church to the friendly sea.

But the Devil would not be the Devil if he didn’t enjoy having a little fun at the expense of his agents. And so, when the Turkish janissaries went up to the tomb, and found the casket was empty, there was great consternation and wrath in the Sultan’s face: the bones of the old Venetian Doge had vanished…. A masterful trick! The new Sultan shuddered at what he assumed to be the Greeks’ unerring respect for their oppressors. But it was not so, for in reality the Doge had merely been transported by boat – a Genoese one, no less – directly to Hell.

It took slightly longer than the Devil had expected to reanimate his new guest, and introduce him to all his old friends.

“Huh?” shouted the cantankerous old Venetian, turning his head, quite blindly indeed. “Where the Hell am I?”

“You said it,” the Devil cracked. “Enrico, you’re finally home, in Hell. You’ll remember the deal you made with me, the Devil”-

“The Devil?” screeched Doge Dandolo, much confused. “I swore on the holy relics of Venice to God.” But then he remembered the deal, and how he had entered into that miserable condition of blindness in which the Devil had put him in during the last and best years of his long mortal life.

“Now you remember,” said the Devil with a wicked laugh. “After you were whacked on the head and blinded, and blamed it on the Greeks- you remember what I offered you?”

“I prayed to God to capture the city!” old Dandolo cried fervently.

“Not my fault if the signals got crossed after the Schism!” retorted the Devil good-naturedly. “Anyway, I did let you conquer Constantinople, in return for your soul and, I might add, that very clever and acute negotiating mind of yours.”

“But I swore on the holy relics of Venice!” protested Doge Dandolo. “Everything I did was for God”-

“No, everything you did was for Venice,” cracked the Devil. “Like hoodwinking the French Crusaders into first handing over all their money, then helping you sack the fellow Catholic city of Zara in Dalmatia- and not even telling your troops they’d been excommunicated by the Pope for this offense against the Catholic world! Ah, November 1202 was a glorious day for me- and then right after, that Byzantine imposter shows up in Zara, right at the moment of most use to you, begging to be instated on the throne in Constantinople… the things I did for you, man! Think of all the logistics involved!”

At that moment a feeble voice rang out from across the ponderous hall.

“It’s true, it’s all true,” said the figure, an aged man in pontiff’s garb.

“Pope Innocent!” said Doge Dandolo in astonishment, for he recognized the voice. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, we did make a good business out of crusading, didn’t we? Oh well. Eh, you don’t look so bad, Enrico.”

The Doge fumbled around and felt that he was wearing his usual Ducal silk shirt. This comforted him; it was like everything had been restored. “I wish I could see you, Innocent.”

“Funny you should say that,” the Devil quipped. “I can restore your vision, if you can help me with your negotiating skills, with the current Venetian authorities.”

“Certainly!” said the Doge, without thinking. There was no one more adept or knowledgeable than he about the inner workings of the Venetian Republic, the greatest maritime power since ancient Rome.

With a sudden sparkle that he had not felt since the age of 67, Doge Dandolo’s old eyes were filled with color. Peering around curiously, he saw Pope Innocent, just as he had always known him, before the accident, and the Devil, just as he had always seen him depicted in Church frescoes, with great ungainly horns and a hideous, mottled countenance.

There were all sorts of fires, tar-pits, strange contraptions that must be used for branded torture regimes… the business-minded Doge somehow approved. At least he was not being lied to. This was certainly not any Heaven he’d heard of, whether in the Catholic or Orthodox descriptions…

Then Doge Dandolo, still struck by his vivid surroundings, heard a familiar voice.

“Enrico!” the ghost said.

“My brother!” replied the Doge. “What did you ever do to get here?”

“Long story- hey, I’m sorry for hitting you in the back of the head and making you blind, a few years after father died,” the Doge’s brother said. “I was hoping to get you out of the way so I could take over the family business. But the Devil lied to me. I would be careful of any promise he makes you.”

As the Doge gasped in violent indignation and disbelief, there was a loud, rough laugh that filled the halls of Hell. It came from the Devil himself.

“Indeed! Why, Enrico, having lived to the fullness of a man’s age, 70 years, by which age Solomon himself said a man should naturally die- you thought it would be possible – even normal – to take over the great state of Venice and wage foreign wars; and this you did, somehow, with the energy and determination of a man half your age. Don’t you know all the historians were saying your year of birth must have been wrong, that it was impossible for a man in his nineties to accomplish your deeds? That was all my doing!”

Doge Dandolo looked embarrassed but tried to preserve his dignified bearing. And then he heard another familiar voice, but this time he could not locate from where it was coming. For a headless man dressed in knightly attire was bounding across the room, hitting himself on pillars and falling into tar pits, pulling himself out again and swearing- Doge Dandolo had never seen such a man but the thickly accented voice was oddly familiar.

“Enrico, Enrico, it is me!” he said. “Baldwin of Flanders, First Latin Emperor of Constantinople, your fearless companion in the Crusade!”

Doge Dandolo gaped at the tortured, headless figure clanking along in chain mail, and tried to deduce from where the voice was coming, but it was obscured by the wicked mixed laughter of the denizens of Hell.

Turning left, Doge Dandolo finally saw a barbarian king holding an upturned skull, the teeth of which chattered as if in speech. Every time the king’s courtesans filled up the skull with water, it would leak out of the eye sockets immediately.

“Baldwin hardly makes as good a cup as he did in 1205, eh, Kaloyan?” roared the Devil, inciting a great volley of jeers.

Doge Dandolo quickly deduced the horrific truth of what must have happened to his friend Baldwin when they were besieging the Bulgarians at Adrianople, and the Count of Blois had been killed; Baldwin had been captured, and no word of his fate was known. It had only been with great difficult that the surviving knights returned to Constantinople, where the 97-year-old Doge Dandolo died in the spring.

“Baldwin? Is that… you talking?” cried the frightened Doge. “What did that barbarian do to you?”

“Last thing I remember, I was in Veliko Tarnovo, in the tower of the Bulgars, and they were about to behead me,” chattered the skull, as the agitated headless knight-emperor kept bumping into things in his useless search for his missing cranium. “And Kaloyan has been drinking out of my head ever since.”

“This place is miserable!” shouted the Bulgarian king, as yet another bucketful of water passed uselessly through the skull’s empty places. “This skull-cup lost all its silver patching ince I got here!”

“Of course it is miserable!” cracked the Devil. “This is Hell!”

Doge Dandolo had been known for his cunning and patience, but this Devil-character was starting to wear on him.

“Please, I’ve seen quite enough of your Hell,” he said. “You can take my vision back. I won’t help you, with whatever it was you wanted.”

“Oh come on,” said the Devil. “It won’t be so bad. The problem is simply, like Baldwin’s skull here, is that there seem to be some… leaks in the ceiling of Hell. Which is located, in this section where we are now at least, right beneath your home city of Venice.”

“What?” said the Doge. “Venice is leaking water into Hell? I must save my people, les they too”-

“That’s the spirit!” said the Devil, grinning. “You are a good man, but a simple one. A day in Hell is more than a century on the Earth! And many things have happened. If you understood geology, you would know that the subduction of the Adriatic and Appenine plates have been shifting your city around, hence causing it to sink, and these stupid leaks in my ceiling. It is very annoying, especially when as one of our major destination branding features is constant Hell-fires!”

As if on cue, a splatter of rain-drops spurted down from the curving ceiling of Hell, sizzling in the lava-like substrate all around. This uncanny happening got Doge Dandolo’s attention.

“Well, why don’t you just make a deal with the new Doge, for his soul?” said Dandolo bravely. “Maybe he can fix the leak from above.”

There was a long silence and embarrassed cough from some Hell-dweller. Dandolo glared in confusion.

“Ha!” laughed the Devil. “You really don’t know your geology. Or your future… my friend, I hate to break it to you. Venice has no more Doges… it is a minor tourist attraction in the unified state of Italy. It has no mercantile or naval power. It’s only boats are canal gondolas, unless you count the cruise ships of foreigners who come to gawk at the architecture and eat pasta and use the toilet and leave.”

“What?” cried Dandolo, his Venetian pride hurt. “And to think, for all of my efforts”-

“Hey, have I ever lied to you?” said the Devil sympathetically. “But the story is even worse, in these future times… even if there was a political leader capable of negotiating with, few on earth even believe in God any longer. Hence, there’s no special attraction in transgressing and selling one’s soul… I tell you, times have never been harder to be the Devil.”

“He’s right about all that,” sighed Pope Innocent.

And, to show what a good sport he could be, the Devil pulled off one of his horns, exposing a hoary ear, and handed it to the Bulgar Kaloyan, who appreciatively poured water into it and took a drink. The barbarian king handed the chattering skull over to Doge Dandolo, who put it respectfully on the shoulders of Emperor Baldwin.

“Ah, lovely,” the latter said. “That’s just the thing. I feel much better already.”

“You see?” said the Devil. “There are still some reasonable souls to work with. Now, if I could just get this damn leak fixed… Enrico, what would you do if you were in my position? How would you get the Venetian mayor to stop this damn leak on my roof?”

Doge Dandolo put his finger to his chin craftily and thought. He’d dealt with much more acute challenges than this in his day of administering the La Serenissima. A simple matter of faulty plumbing should not be beyond his grasp, knowledge of earth science or not. Out of instinct, he turned round and clasped his knuckles together in prayer. Pope Innocent, suddenly interested, came to provide succor to his old friend. The Devil scowled in disapproval.

“Whatever you’re trying, it won’t work,” the Lord of Hell said. “There’s no signal out of here. This is a secure compartmentalized facility, you know.”

But Doge Dandolo had no trouble in getting a message to his Lord, the Catholic God in the higher realm; yet even he was astonished when the reply came back so soon.

“Well… it turns out that God’s a big fan of some new shadow-puppet theater the modern people call the Internet,” said Doge Dandolo breezily. “And from it, God has acquired a strong belief in something they call the hollow-earth theory…. Whole underground seas! Who knew? Venice, it appears, is not the source of your leaking problems. You’ll have to take it up with Him.”

The Devil, infuriated, prevailed on Pope Innocent to set right his former friend’s theology, and put him back on the straight true path.

“Knock some sense into him, Innocent!” the Devil implored. “That’s right! Use your right hand, with the heavy ruby ring on it!”

The Pope, powerless to refuse – for he was playing according to House Rules – complied, whacking Enrico Dandolo on the back of his head, in precisely the spot where his jealous brother had done so eight and more centuries before. And, since Hell goes round and round, the result was the same; for Doge Dandolo’s blindness was instantly restored, and he was still in Hell, from what he could hear…

“Thanks for nothing!” he muttered at both the former Pontiff and the cackling Devil on his throne.

“It just goes to show,” the Devil said, one horn of his head still gripped by the grinning Bulgar tsar, “anyone seeking to double-cross me isgoing to get it, good and hard. Yes, I’ve still got it!”