Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  On the shoreline a group of men from Amiens hacked and battered away at a small, bricked-up door.66 As stones and debris thudded down onto their protective mats and shelters they managed to breach the makeshift barrier. Aleaumes of Clari, a belligerent priest, volunteered to be the first to enter. He had to struggle through a hole about the size of a small fireplace, beat off the waiting Greeks, and then resist long enough to allow his colleagues to follow. As he crawled through the gap, blows rained down on top of him but, incredibly, he survived and then, much to the defenders’ horror, he stood up, stepped forward, and began to fight. Such was their fear of this seemingly indestructible man that the Greeks fled, leaving Aleaumes to call back for his friends to join him. Once into the streets this small group of crusaders soon found a gate and forced this open to allow mounted knights to pour into Constantinople and seal the city’s fate. By nightfall the districts close to the Golden Horn had fallen and the crusaders paused to rest. Overnight Murtzuphlus decided to emulate Alexius III by fleeing; once news of this spread, the senior figures who remained decided to surrender. The Greeks hoped that their submission would prevent any further violence, but to the crusaders the removal of any active opposition meant they could begin the sack of Constantinople in earnest.

  As the mob fanned out across the city, the senior nobility hurried to secure the imperial palaces. Boniface of Montferrat took the Bucoleon, where he found “such a store of precious things that it is impossible to describe the treasures that were in that palace, for there were so many they were endless and innumerable.”67 While the takeover of the palaces was relatively orderly, the rank and file ignored their earlier vows to behave with restraint. Infuriated at their dismal treatment by the Byzantines, fortified by a belief in divine favor, and inspired by pure and simple greed, they despoiled churches and houses and killed and savaged without distinction. “So those who denied us small things have relinquished everything to us by divine judgement,” was the sanctimonious observation of Baldwin of Flanders.68 The crusaders ransacked the Hagia Sophia, the spiritual heart of Byzantium. Drunken westerners cavorted beneath its magnificent mosaic ceiling, a prostitute danced on the altar and then straddled the patriarch’s chair; meanwhile pack animals were brought in to carry away the spoils of war. Elsewhere, even Latin churchmen joined this orgy of acquisitiveness. Abbot Martin of Pairis found the treasury at the imperial foundation of the Church of the Christ Pantocrator. He grabbed the feeble old Orthodox monk who guarded the precious objects stored there and bellowed at him: “Come, faithless old man, show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.”69 The quivering monk handed over what he had and the abbot departed, his robes bulging with booty like an incompetent shoplifter. Such an image, regardless of explanations of divine favor, is hard for us—and indeed for some contemporaries as well—to see in anything other than an overwhelmingly cynical light. Immense numbers of relics made their way back to the churches of western Europe. While the four horses and the objects in the treasury of Saint Mark’s in Venice are the most famous of these, many other crusaders gave precious objects to their local churches when they returned home.70

  It was not just the fabric of Constantinople that was shattered; its people were brutalized too—even nuns were violated. Nicholas Mesarites, a contemporary Byzantine author, wrote of “westerners tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men.”71 To the Greeks, such behavior was inexcusable. Choniates argued passionately that the crusaders were exposed as greedy fraudsters, sinners against Christ. He compared Saladin’s humane treatment of his captives at Jerusalem in 1187 with the brutality of the westerners against their fellow Christians; the implication was clear: even a Muslim was superior to the barbaric crusaders.72

  Even though many of the crusaders had taken loot for themselves the conquerors gathered mountains of spoils to share out. The Venetians were finally paid off and individuals given specific amounts according to their rank. The next major decision was to elect an emperor.73 On May 9 the committee assembled and after a long debate it voted for Count Baldwin of Flanders. To Boniface of Montferrat, the nominal leader of the crusade, this was something of a blow, but he conceded with some grace; in any case, Baldwin was recognized as a good choice. A week later, dressed in the magnificent imperial robes, the Fleming was anointed and crowned the emperor of Constantinople, one of the greatest titles in the known world. The fate of Doge Dandolo is worth mentioning too. Given his extreme age he wrote to the pope and asked to be released from his pilgrimage vow to go to Jerusalem. Innocent remained furious with the doge for his behavior at Zara and his lack of any subsequent remorse. Thus, one imagines, the pope took grim pleasure in rejecting the request. Innocent assured Dandolo that because the doge was so important to the leadership of the crusade it would be dangerous to agree to his petition because it might endanger the expedition. Politely checkmated, the doge could argue no further, although the issue soon became irrelevant when he died in June 1205.74

  In the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople the Latins fought hard to extend their power. Boniface of Montferrat took control of Thessalonica, the Venetians seized Crete and Corfu to form essential parts of their trading empire, and the Villehardouin clan established themselves in the Peloponnese.75 There was, of course, opposition. Murtzuphlus was soon captured and executed, but other Greek nobles became a focus for anti-Latin feelings and the hostility of the Christian king of Bulgaria was a further distraction. It was fighting the latter’s armies at Adrianople in April 1205 that Louis of Blois was killed and Emperor Baldwin seized and never seen again. This disastrous defeat led to the first of a series of appeals for help from western Europe. In the same way that many men had returned home after the First Crusade, so the Latin Empire of Constantinople (as it is known) suffered from a lack of manpower too. In part this was a consequence of its unforeseen creation. While it possessed ties with certain regions, such as Flanders, Montferrat, and Venice, the thirteenth century saw a multiplicity of different draws on crusading enthusiasm. Some proved much closer to home than the Latin Empire and because it could never possess the allure of the holy city of Jerusalem, it was doomed to be something of a poor relation to the Holy Land.

  One of the most intriguing reactions to the Fourth Crusade was that of Innocent III.76 He had, as we saw, tried to prevent the expedition from attacking Christian lands, although the caveats within these directives proved easy to circumvent or to ignore. The pope’s early reaction to the news of the capture was very positive. He wrote in November 1204 that God had transformed the Byzantine Empire from “the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the obedient, from schismatic to Catholic.”77 He was prepared to award full crusading privileges for the defense of the Latin Empire and continued to speak of “the miracle that has come to pass in these days” into 1205.78 By midsummer of that year, however, his tone had changed. First, the legate on the crusade released the men from their vows to go to the Levant—a realistic move given the vulnerability of the empire, but one that ended Innocent’s hopes of the crusade ever reaching the Holy Land. More seriously, visitors to Rome began to detail the full atrocities of the sack—matters passed over by the crusaders’ reports of the event—and the pope learned of the terrible violation of women and the destruction of churches. He was appalled at the sordid, grasping behavior of the crusaders and noted that the Orthodox Church would have no wish to acknowledge papal primacy if it saw in the Latins “nothing except an example of affliction and the works of hell, so that now it rightly detests them more than dogs.”79 To Boniface of Montferrat he railed, “you turned away from the purity of your vow when you took up arms not against Saracens but Christians . . . preferring earthly wealth to celestial treasures.”80 Most dramatically of all, we sense a spiritual crisis in the head of the Catholic Church, baffled by the ways of the Lor
d and wondering how his God could let such a thing happen. “Who can know the mind of the Lord?” was his troubled and unsettled conclusion.81

  The Fourth Crusade remains one of the most controversial of all crusading expeditions. While conspiracy theories have accused the pope, the Venetians, and various of the crusade leaders of plotting the diversion to Constantinople, none of these can be sustained. Originally, the campaign planned to attack Egypt but it was the disastrous terms of the Treaty of Venice that drew the crusaders to Zara and then laid them open to the offer of Prince Alexius. Ironically, therefore, it was a Greek who steered the campaign toward Constantinople; otherwise, there is no hint that this was a realistic desire on the part of anyone. The chronic instability of the Byzantine Empire during the early thirteenth century, combined with the desperation and the determination of the crusaders—men whose military expertise had become so honed and reinforced in the course of their experiences—gave them the opportunity to pull off an improbable and tragic victory, and an event still remembered in the Orthodox world today.

  FROM “LITTLE FOXES IN THE VINES”AND THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE TO THE GREATEST CHURCH COUNCIL OF THE AGE

  The closing decades of the twelfth century saw the emergence of several powerful new forms of spirituality across western Europe.1 A thriving economy brought widespread urban expansion and considerable personal gain, but this financial boom clashed with a growing interest in a pure and simple existence, modeled on a life of apostolic poverty. In tandem with this, increasing numbers of lay people openly questioned both the wealth of the Church and the moral qualities of some of its clerics. Men such as Waldes of Lyons gave up a comfortable lifestyle to follow a more spiritual approach and his calls for austerity attracted numerous followers. Notwithstanding his overt criticism of the Church, Waldes was, at heart, still fairly close to orthodox Catholicism, although his demands to be allowed to preach in public were rejected by the papacy, jealous to preserve proprietorship of what it regarded as the true interpretation of the Gospels.2 Around the middle of the century, however, another strand of religious belief began to surface: Catharism (from the Greek kathare meaning “pure”), a radical set of ideas that posed a profound challenge to the power of the Catholic Church. To fight this threat Pope Innocent launched the Albigensian Crusade, a conflict that brought the horrors of holy war to the heart of Christendom and engendered levels of atrocity unseen in Europe since the barbarian invasions. As one contemporary lamented, the launch of the crusade was “the decision that led to so much sorrow, that left so many men dead with their guts spilled out and so many great ladies and pretty girls naked and cold, stripped of gown and cloak. From beyond Montpellier as far as Bordeaux, any that rebelled were to be utterly destroyed.”3

  THE RISE OF CATHARISM

  Two of the prime reasons why Catharism posed such a danger to the Church lay in the broad appeal of its beliefs and the fact that it did not rely on a single charismatic leader but had a well-established hierarchy. At the heart of the faith was dualism, the belief that a Good God had created all spiritual matter, including men’s souls, and an Evil God (Satan) had created all material and corporeal things.4 Christ had come to earth, but only took on a human appearance to avoid entering a physical body. He told the Cathars how to achieve salvation through the baptism of the spirit, an act known as the consolamentum, a process that could be administered only by a spiritual elite, the perfecti. These men and—crucially—women renounced all property, vowed never to kill any human or warm-blooded beast, to consume no products of sexual intercourse such as meat, cheese, eggs, or milk, to tell no lies, and abstain completely from sex, which was the means of physical procreation and intrinsically evil. Most Cathars found these rules an impractical way to exist and followed as modest a life as possible. They rejected the Old Testament, the Eucharist, baptism, and only took the consolamentum—thus obtaining salvation—as they neared death. The concept of a female priest was unheard of in the Catholic Church, but given the restricted outlets for women’s spirituality anyway it represented another powerful attraction of this new faith. The simple tenets of Catharism were easy to understand; the perfecti seemed to lead genuinely pure lives—especially compared to the venality of the existing hierarchy. Local lords did little to shift the newcomers and some welcomed the spiritual rigor they seemed to bring.

  Catharism originated in southeastern Europe and it first appeared in the West, probably carried by traders and returning crusaders, during the 1140s in Cologne and southern France. Another group surfaced in Oxford in 1166, but King Henry II swiftly ordered the detention of the thirty individuals involved. Punishment was swift and harsh: their brows were branded, they were stripped to the waist, flogged, and driven out of the city to perish in the bitter winter cold: the sect was never again seen on English shores. Other Cathar communities, however, thrived and the papacy felt compelled to pass formal legislation to outlaw the heretics at the Third Lateran Council in 1179: “since the loathsome heresy of those who some call the Cathars . . . has grown so strong that they no longer practise their wickedness in secret, as others do, but proclaim their error publicly and draw the simple and the weak to join them, we declare that they and their defenders and those who receive them are under anathema . . . [therefore, they will not receive Mass] or burial amongst Christians. We also grant that to faithful Christians who take up arms against them . . . a remission of two years’ penance.”5

  Catharism flourished most strongly in southern France. Culturally and linguistically, the Languedoc was entirely distinct from northern France (the langue d’oc—oc means “yes”). It was the home of the troubadour poets, of remote rural villages; a rugged land of castles clinging to rocky spurs, of fertile valleys and the broad floodplain of the River Rhône easing out into the Mediterranean. Based far to the north, the Capetian kings had no worthwhile influence in the Languedoc and while the counts of Toulouse were figures of considerable standing, most local power structures were highly fragmented. The Catholic Church was poorly developed in comparison to the well-established hierarchies of northern France; many urban clerics were perceived as greedy and indolent, while the rural clergy were often ill-educated men who lived openly with their mistresses and children. Such conditions were ripe for Catharism to enter communities and, with the support of the local nobility, it put down the most tenacious roots. The Church sent special delegations of Cistercian monks to try and bring the heretics and their supporters back into the fold. Cathar perfecti and Catholic clergy held numerous debates, but unsurprisingly neither conceded their beliefs were wrong. When Innocent III became pope, these efforts intensified; given his determination to guard the Christian faith, he saw that Catharism needed to be utterly eradicated.

  Even before Innocent’s pontificate, churchmen had described the region around Toulouse as “a great cesspit of evil, with all the scum of heresy flowing into it,” and “the mother of heresy and the fountainhead of error. . . . When heretics spoke, everyone applauded.” The city itself was “so diseased that, from the soles of its feet to the top of its head, there was not a healthy piece in it;” the solution offered was simple—to stun, sever, and raise up the head on a sword.6 This highly emotive language of pollution and contamination formed the basic register in the fight against the Cathars; the body of the Mother Church itself was said to be threatened from within, as if by a cancer, and only a sword could cut it out. In 1204 Innocent tried to persuade King Philip of France to eradicate the wild beasts who planned to destroy the Church. The pope offered him the same remission of all sins as a crusader to the Holy Land if he would go to Toulouse and crush the man seen as the Cathars’ principal protector, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Philip declined the invitation, as he would repeatedly do in the future.7 It was another four years before the confrontation with the Cathars escalated into outright conflict. The situation became tinder-dry with the repeated failure of preachers to convince the heretics to recant; indeed, according to the near-contemporary William of Tudela, their a
ttempts met with derision: “People in this region think more of a rotten apple than sermons.”8 The conflagration itself was largely precipitated by the murder of a papal legate, Peter of Castelnau, in January 1208. Peter had spent months trying to bring the heretics to heel and in the course of his travels, as he waited for a ferry to cross the River Rhône, he was fatally stabbed in the back by one of Count Raymond’s vassals. When the news reached Rome, Pope Innocent was furious; he lit a candle and, in the name of Saint Peter, he dashed it to the floor and cursed the murder.9