The Crusades and the Near East

by Kostick, Conor

  Yet, despite this transformation, the empire still did not assume a central place in the crusading movement in the eastern Mediterranean as a whole, in large part due to the abandonment of the land route for armies travelling to the Holy Land.

  Ironically, the geographical situation which had kept the empire inextricably entangled with the crusade even while it remained peripheral to the crusading agenda, and which had therefore been responsible for much of the resulting friction, lost most of its force just before the Fourth Crusade turned that friction 65

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  into open antagonism and made Byzantium a direct target of crusading. Had such sustained conflict broken out in the twelfth century, Latin states contending for the Byzantine inheritance would have been able to draw on subsequent crusading expeditions for support, as armies going to the Holy Land would have passed through the heart of the combat zone. In the event they bypassed it entirely.

  Thus, rather than being a source of strength for the Latin Empire, the cause of regaining or retaining Jerusalem became a competitor with the struggle to hold or retake Constantinople, and one whose capacity to attract attention and resources was unsurprisingly more powerful. The Latin emperors and the popes on their behalf, like Manuel I before them, sought to channel the crusading energies focused on Jerusalem into serving their own aims by arguing for the benefits of clearing the land route to Syria, but this argument had little impact now that that route had fallen into disuse.54

  The fourteenth century saw a reversion from hostility between Byzantium and the crusade to a new form of the old uneasy and conditional cooperation, in which for the first time crusading goals coincided closely with the empire’s own concerns. As a result of the installation of Latin regimes in what had been the empire’s territorial core by the Fourth Crusade, and of the collapse of the empire’s defences against the Turkish advance which the Latin onslaught facilitated, Byzantium and the Latins came for the first time to share a common front against a common Muslim foe, the Anatolian Turks. The threat from that enemy steadily escalated in the course of the fourteenth century, while the extinction of the Latin states in the Holy Land in 1291 had dramatically reduced that region’s competing draw on crusading energies. The resultant realignment of the crusading movement in the eastern Mediterranean was not the product of major shifts in thinking. As the writings of contemporary crusade theorists show, the recovery of Jerusalem remained central to the crusading imagination, but it became steadily clearer that such an undertaking could not be seriously contemplated without first overcoming the Turkish threat.55 Similarly, the crusade against Byzantium was not so much ideologically discredited as pragmatically recognised as being a frivolous irrelevance, as the empire withered and Turkish power blossomed ever more brightly in its stead. Theorists continued for a time to present plans for the conquest of Constantinople and the subjection of the eastern Christians to the Church of Rome by force, but the priority of opposing the Turks consigned such notions to the same realm of abstraction as the recovery of Jerusalem.56 Serious planning for a restoration of the Latin Empire came to an end with the abortive projects of Charles of Valois, which were effectively abandoned around 1309.57

  The empire’s quiet transformation from enemy to ally was signalled in 1332 by the formation under papal auspices of a Christian league against the Anatolian Turks which included Byzantium.58 In the wake of the final revival of thirteenth-century-style crusading – King Peter of Cyprus’s 1365 invasion of Egypt – Pope Urban V urged Count Amadeo of Savoy, who was too late to join the campaign against the Mamluks, to redeem his vow by assisting his cousin Emperor John V

  against the Turks.59 More than two and a half centuries after Alexios I’s appeal for 66

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  help, for the first time crusaders set out with the defence of Byzantium as their primary goal and as a task considered sufficient in itself for participants to receive a crusade indulgence.

  Even so, the potential scope for crusading for the empire’s sake remained largely unfulfilled. Amadeo’s modest enterprise brought more direct benefit to the empire than any other crusading expedition since the First Crusade, retrieving the key strategic position of Gallipoli from the Ottomans and Sozopolis, Anchialos and Mesembria from the Bulgarians.60 Nevertheless, its small scale precluded any lasting transformation of the empire’s dire situation, and it was to have no successors for thirty years. The intractable obstacle of the schism impeded prospects for crusading in the empire’s defence, with the papacy insisting on religious submission as a quid pro quo for serious military aid.61 In prompting Amadeo to assist John V, Urban had been encouraged by John’s diplomatic approaches regarding Church Union, and he made clear to John the connection between such help and progress towards Union.62 The help Amadeo brought enabled the count to negotiate an agreement from John to travel to Rome and make a personal submission to the pope, a pledge he fulfilled in 1369, with an undertaking to work for the reconciliation of his people to the papal position.63 For decades, however, this remained the furthest that any emperor was willing to go in the face of the baleful precedent of the Union of Lyon.

  Byzantium received the support of another limited crusading expedition under Marshal Boucicault in 1399.64 Yet, despite the strategic importance and imperilled condition of Constantinople, no sizeable crusade was dispatched to save it from the Turks. The disastrous crusade of Nikopolis in 1396 was an enterprise on a large scale which definitively confirmed the establishment of opposition to the Ottomans at the heart of the declining crusading movement, in practice though not in theory taking the place of the conquest of the Holy Land.65 Through the following three centuries, as long as the embers of the crusade continued to glow, turning back the advance of ‘the Turk’ would be the movement’s main preoccupation.66 However, the expedition was prompted largely by the arrival of Ottoman armies at the frontiers of Catholic Hungary, rather than by any acceptance of Byzantium’s full entitlement to Christian solidarity on the part of the Latin West.67 Only when John VIII and his prelates finally submitted to papal demands at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–9 did the papacy preach, for the first and last time, a full-scale crusade whose central goal was the defence of the state whose appeal to the papacy for military support had initiated the crusades.68 Less than a decade after the failure of the ensuing crusade of Varna in 1443–4 the prospect of any further cooperation between Byzantium and the crusade was curtailed by the empire’s extinction.

  By its very existence the crusade constituted a challenge to the traditional view of the world promoted by the Byzantine state, the early effects of which were already discernible in the twelfth century. It is at times difficult to distinguish clearly the contribution of the crusades to these changes from that of other causes, particularly of other aspects of the growing importance of Latin civilisation.

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  However, the emergence in Byzantium of the very idea that such a civilisation existed, and hence the impact of thinking about it, was probably strongly influenced by the early crusades. The late eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a striking transformation of the ethnic categorisation used by Byzantine writers. For the first time it became common to refer to ‘Latins’, a group embracing all western Christians, rather than speaking only of particular peoples, on the one hand, or of undifferentiated barbarians, on the other. Alternative terms used interchangeably for this western Christian bloc by individual writers included ‘Franks’, ‘Italians’

  and ‘Celts’, the first two of which also continued to be used in their more specific senses.69 While this shift had begun before the First Crusade, it is reasonable to suppose that the spread of this new perception was closely connected with the unprecedented passage through the empire of huge hosts of people from a range of different western peoples all in cooperative pursuit of a common goal, at the instigation of a single authority. Thus, if thinking and policy
in the empire’s later centuries were increasingly dominated by a ‘Latin question’, it was probably the crusades, in combination with the ecclesiastical schism, which first led the elite of Byzantium to ask it.

  The idea of the Latins as a coherent bloc represented in itself a significant complication of the Byzantine view of the world. Since imperial ideology associated adherence to Christianity with civilisation and with acknowledgement of the empire as the one legitimate temporal authority established by God, the existence of independent Christian rulers beyond the reach of imperial direct rule or even indirect hegemony would always be problematic. However, as long as they could be looked on and dealt with as individual peoples, their presence did not greatly unsettle the imperial outlook. The empire could still be seen without too much difficulty as the centre of the temporal world, with a profusion of barbarian peoples ranged around it, some more deferential to imperial authority than others.

  The recognition of the Latins as a large and assertive group of self-governing Christian societies united by cultural and religious affinities, which separated them from the empire and its people, made it possible to regard the Christian world as being split down the middle. The scale of the western Christian world, the status of its religious hierarchy, its growing wealth and sophistication and its increasingly pervasive presence in the eastern Mediterranean meant that it could not simply be dismissed or ignored. It would come to be seen as a contrasting counterpart to Byzantium, comparison with which increasingly defined the empire’s rulers’ and subjects’ idea of themselves. Such thinking differed markedly from traditional ideas of the empire which defined it against generic barbarians and heathens. This implicitly compromised its leaders’ conviction of their own central place in the world.

  While the mere existence of the crusade exerted a disquieting effect on the comforting assumptions of conventional Byzantine thought, the disaster inflicted on the empire by the Fourth Crusade exponentially increased this disturbance.

  The conquest of Constantinople deprived the empire for more than half a century of the capital which had enjoyed an exceptionally preponderant place in the 68

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  politics, government, economy, culture and ideology of the state over which it presided. In the regions where Latin rule was not established, it led to the fragmentation of authority between a number of successor states laying claim to the Byzantine inheritance. This stark transformation of material circumstances naturally had its impact on ideas, which is reflected both in the writings of members of the imperial elite and in such evidence as is available for the thinking of the wider population, both in the territories retained or regained by the successor states and those held by the Latins. The Roman state had hitherto played a central part in the identity of its people. Loyalty to the emperor and recognition of his unique status as the earthly reflection of divine monarchy, recognition of the New Rome as the political centre of the world, adherence to Roman law and a sense of superiority over ‘barbarian’ outsiders on account of citizenship of the state which defined civilisation were all qualities associated with the state which played a part in defining the ways in which its people, and the educated elite in particular, saw themselves.70 The credibility of the imperial state and of a sense of identity derived from it was severely impaired by the results of the Fourth Crusade.71 The existence of multiple durable regimes laying claim to the imperial title, none of which possessed the capital, severely undermined the notion of a unique and indivisible empire. The rulers in Nicaea were able in time to induce their rivals at Thessalonike to renounce the imperial title and then to retake Constantinople from the Latins, while convincing the rulers at Trebizond, although still calling themselves emperors, to abstain from claiming the Roman imperium, as such.72

  Yet, even after this, the picture continued to be complicated by the enduring presence of independent states which were just as clearly part of the Roman tradition as the restored Byzantine Empire. The resilience of the successor state in Epiros in the face of the onslaughts of Nicaean and Byzantine emperors bears witness to its rulers’ ability to make a more convincing appeal to the loyalty of those in their own area than the ‘legitimate’ emperor in Constantinople.73

  Even in the highest circles of imperial government, the disaster of the fall of Constantinople severely undermined confidence in the conventional ideological scheme, while the empire’s reduced strength placed increased practical constraints on its ability to assert the grandiose claims of former centuries. This tendency was particularly pronounced during the decades when Constantinople was in the hands of the Latins. The Nicaean emperors gave up elements of the grandiose symbolism of imperial diplomatic, replacing chrysobulls – with their golden seals and ideological preambles – with more modest documents. Such changes were often confined to the period of exile, being reversed by Michael VIII after retaking the capital.74 In some regards, however, the quiet adoption of a more modest approach to customary imperial pretensions endured. For instance, after 1204 the documents granting privileges to Latin commercial communities were no longer presented as unilateral and magnanimous acts of beneficence by the emperor but as reciprocal treaties between independent powers.75 By the fourteenth century imperial writers such as Theodore Metochites had come to doubt the traditional view that the empire had a special place in sacred history and would endure until 69

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  the Last Days, considering instead that it was subject to the same mundane processes of rise and decline as other polities.76

  A loss of confidence and revision of preconceptions are also reflected in Byzantine perceptions of the crusade itself. This transition is reflected in the work of Niketas Choniates, the principal Byzantine historian of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which represents a considerable departure from the approach taken by his predecessors, and particularly so in its treatment of the crusades themselves. Earlier historians had presented the leading crusaders as engaged in a duplicitous enterprise whose real purpose was the conquest of the empire, a goal for which their ostensible aim was merely a disguise. Whether or not these writers actually believed in this portrayal of events, it satisfied the requirements of imperial ideology and self-regard. It placed the empire at the heart of affairs, diverting attention from the marginalisation of the empire and its role as defender of the Christian world which was implicit in the nature of the crusade, with its papal authorisation, largely Latin participation and focus on the Holy Land. It enabled the cautious and calculating response of Alexios and Manuel to the expeditions to be presented as a masterful and successful deflection of Latin intrigues which had preserved the empire from barbarian scheming.77 Thus it directed the reader away from the kind of interpretation which commended itself all too readily to Latin observers, in which the empire was seen as at best a negligent ally and at worst a traitor to the Christian cause.78 The late twelfth century saw open warfare against the crusading army of Frederick I, the conquest of Cyprus by Richard I of England and the extortionate ultimatum of Henry VI. Finally came the crowning catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade. These events might reasonably have been interpreted by Byzantine observers as definitive confirmation of this conspiracy theory of crusading. However, this is not the impression which emerges from Choniates, who wrote his history during the reign of Alexios III (1195–1203) and extensively revised it in the years after 1204.79 In his case the bruising experience of these years would seem rather to have had the countervailing effect of shattering complacency and initiating a more jaundiced assessment of the flattering illusions that had underpinned earlier accounts. Choniates readily attributed the outcome of the Fourth Crusade to a premeditated plot, though he did indicate that the crusaders were actually on their way to Palestine before being recruited into a scheme hatched by the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo.80 When dealing with previous crusading expeditions, however, Choniates diverged sharply from the interpretations of earlier imperia
l writers. The sincerity of the crusaders’

  avowed intentions and the religious character of their motivations was frankly acknowledged in his treatment of the expedition during the Second Crusade of Louis VII, to whom he gave a stirring speech suggesting a sympathetic grasp of crusading ideology.81 He went still further in the case of Frederick I, whose integrity Choniates passionately affirmed:

  He was a man who deserved to enjoy a blessed and perpetual memory

  and justly to be deemed fortunate in his end by prudent men, not only 70

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  because he was wellborn and ruled over many nations as an heir of the third generation but also because his burning passion for Christ was greater than that of any other Christian monarch of his time. Setting aside fatherland, royal luxury and repose, the worldly happiness of

  enjoying the company of his loved ones at home, and his sumptuous way of life, he chose instead to suffer affliction with the Christians of Palestine for the name of Christ and due regard for his life-giving tomb.82

  Writing later in the thirteenth century, George Akropolites took this shift in perspective a step further. He did not even ascribe premeditated ill-intent to the leaders of the Fourth Crusade, instead presenting the coming of the expedition to Constantinople not as its intended course but as a diversion brought about by the blandishments of the young Alexios Angelos. He attributed the subsequent breakdown of relations between the crusaders and Alexios to the latter’s failure to fulfil the commitments he had made, and blamed the final escalation of conflict that brought about the fall of the city on the crusaders’ rage at the murder of their estranged protégé by Alexios Doukas Mourtzouphlos, exacerbated by the ill-judged expulsion of the Latin population of Constantinople by the Byzantines.83