Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  In May 1201, the first disaster hit the crusaders. Thibault died. Of the three leaders he had been the most dynamic and well liked. Recruitment dropped like a rock. To make up for the loss the crusaders picked up Boniface, the marquis of Montferrat, a city in Northern Italy, as their new leader. Boniface was fifty years old and hailed from a long line of crusaders. He accepted the offer with great enthusiasm.

  In early 1202 the crusaders set out for Venice. Upon their arrival they were warmly welcomed by the Venetians, handed their bill, and shown their new home, Lido Beach, a barren sandbar miles from the city. The doge wanted them close, but not close enough to cause trouble. Now the second bit of bad news hit the crusaders. Thousands of crusaders were no-shows. The leaders waited and waited, but as the spring turned to summer on Lido Beach, like a third-rate resort, the crowds simply never materialized.

  The doge, Boniface, and the other leaders did a head count, and fingered their worry beads. Only about 12,000 soldiers had shown up, about one-third of the estimated number. This meant that the price per crusader would now be three times as originally planned. Everyone coughed up more coin, but it was not enough to cover the doge’s huge tab. The doge refused to lower his price. First, because a deal is a deal, but more important, having spent an entire year building this massive fleet, he needed every promised penny to pay off his bills. To help focus the minds of his crusading brethren he stopped supplying them with food and water until his bill was paid.

  As the army slowly wasted away, and desertions started to chip away at their already meager ranks, Boniface and the others dug even deeper and handed over virtually all their valuables to the doge. He counted his booty and told them they were still 35,000 marks short. The army teetered on total dissolution. They didn’t even have the food to make the humiliating return home to France where the sum total of their experience would be the equivalent of a cheap beach-side T-shirt proclaiming, “I went on a Crusade and only got as far as Venice.”

  The doge then proposed a way out from under their crush­ing debt. He asked them to run an errand for him: sail down and recapture the city of Zara (now known as Zadar in Croatia), which had slipped out of Venice’s control in 1181. The crusaders would conveniently overlook the fact that Zara was a Catholic city and part of Hungary, a firm sup­porter of the Crusades. The attack meant postponing the Crusade to Jerusalem in order to fight a war against Christians so that the Venetians could expand their little merchant empire. The move was pure doge.

  The crusaders at first resisted but the doge knew that sometimes you have to join them to beat them. He took the crusader’s oath in St. Mark’s church and the impressionable crusaders were swayed. He was no longer just some money-hungry contractor but a part of the team, on board for the big win. That October the huge fleet sailed down the coast with the deal-making doge in the lead. It was the blind lead­ing the desperate.

  Word of the Zara gambit soon filtered back to the pope. He wasn’t happy. Coastal raids on Christian cities clearly vi­olated the spirit of “crusading” as the papal world had come to define it. But the pope’s emissary, embedded with the army, sensing that the only two realistic options were to crush Zara or go home in failure, gave the crusaders the thumbs-up. The pope had the last word, however, and played the big hand. He wrote a scathing letter declaring that those who attacked Zara would get excommunicated from the church, meaning eternal damnation. As in forever. At this point the crusaders were destined for the fires of hell along with the Greek Christians, the Muslims, and all the other in­fidels crawling the earth in wretched existence.

  On November 11, 1202, the crusader fleet reached Zara just as the pope’s letter reached the leaders ordering them not to attack. The leaders split on what to do next. Some — led by the deal-making doge — favored attacking the city; others recoiled from assaulting fellow Christians in flagrant defi­ance of the pope and the fires of hell. The doge argued that the pope’s order was important, but not as important as the crusaders’ contract with him. The road to Jerusalem, they convinced themselves, ran through Zara, especially since the alternative was to go home in shame. The pope’s letter was slipped into a drawer, never revealed to the soon-to-be-excommunicated army. The crusaders attacked. It was now the doge’s army.

  Two weeks later Zara fell, and the army surged into the city to reap its booty. But the vaults were empty. After count­ing up every loose coin, the crusaders still did not have enough money to cover the rest of their trip. The only thing the attack earned them was a one-way ticket to the blistering shores of Hades.

  As the crusaders sat in Zara, having committed a massively unholy act that called down the heavy wrath of the pope and still lacking the money to reach Jerusalem, the ambassadors of Prince Alexius showed up. The wandering prince, still cruising the backroads of Europe looking to pick up a ride home, suddenly displayed a level of acuity that had previously escaped him: he presented them with a tantalizing solution to their debt problem and the now-bigger situation of the pope reserving the crusaders a suite in the ninth circle of hell, befit­ting betrayers of the faith.

  Prince Alexius offered to finance the rest of the Crusade and provide additional troops. To top it off, he promised to end the schism between the Romans and the Greeks by rec­ognizing the pope as top man in the Christian world. All the crusaders had to do was escort him to Constantinople and install him, Prince Alexius, as emperor. Then they would be able to easily skip down to Jerusalem and fulfill their crusad­ing destiny. And the pope would achieve one of his top career goals. Prince Alexius had made them an offer they could not refuse.

  Still, Byzantine politics being Byzantine politics, the lead­ers debated. The doge, to no one’s surprise, was enthusiastic for the novel Greek caper. The doubting Thomases reminded everyone their job as crusaders was to kill Muslims in Jerusa­lem on Christ’s behalf, not fellow Christians in Constantino­ple. They could have stayed home and done that. The doge, however, won the debate as usual with a twist of logic that would have made a theologian proud: he convinced the cru­saders that restoring a Christian emperor to the throne — through what was surely promised to be a short and easy war — was in fact a very Christlike act.

  Some of the troops, however, failed to go along with the doge’s impressive reasoning. Killing Christians just was not as fulfilling as killing Muslims. Many soldiers fled. On the bright side, Pope Innocent III had now retreated from his earlier po­sition. He washed away all the crusading sins committed from the Zara gambit but made the crusaders swear they would never again attack a Christian city. The leaders, striving for new heights of duplicity, agreed, knowing that their secret plan to restore Prince Alexius would probably require attack­ing Constantinople.

  In April 1203 the fleet sailed out of Zara after leaving it a smoky wreck. The churches, in the spirit of devotion of men on a high cause such as a Crusade, were spared.

  The next month, halfway to their destination, the army stopped on the island of Corfu. Here a chunk of the army, perhaps distracted by the wonderful views, developed second thoughts and refused to sail to Constantinople. They marched to the other side of the island, a sort of self-imposed crusading time-out. Alexius and the crusading leaders con­fronted the defectors, knowing the loss would cripple their limping army. They begged, groveled, cried, and drooled. The defectors agreed to stay, but in the true spirit of the Fourth Crusade, they wanted to make another deal. They would stay only until Christmas, and then they would be free to advance on Jerusalem. The crusading leaders agreed. Alexius was pleased to report to the doge that the debt-relief plan was still in place.

  Jubilant at surviving yet another near-death experience, the army set sail and reached the outskirts of Constantinople by late June 1203. They had never seen anything like it, as they stared in awe at the monstrous walls of the great city before them. With its population of 400,000 people, Con­stantinople dwarfed anything in Europe. The defending walls were tall and thick, and seemed to go on forever. The crusad­ers looked at their small f
orce of about 20,000 men and wondered what they had gotten themselves into. Besides its enormous size and wealth attained by being the trading center of the world, the city boasted a powerful military tra­dition.

  The political infighting that ravaged the empire in the pre­vious decades, however, had eaten away at the city’s military strength and the fighting spirit of its citizens. Despite know­ing for months that the crusaders were coming, the emperor, Alexius III, took few steps to defend the city. The once-mighty Greek fleet was rotting and incapable of any serious naval action; the city’s protective walls were actually in need of repair. But perhaps most important, the army lacked any fighting spirit. Its core consisted of thousands of mercenaries, primarily the Star Trek-oid Varangians, who were hard-fight­ing Scandinavians. The weaknesses of the Greek army were temporarily obscured by its sheer size.

  Constantinople sits on the western — European — side of the Bosporus, a narrow channel of water separating Europe from Asia. The crusaders set up camp on the eastern — Asian — side of the Bosporus, where the emperor had allowed huge supplies of food to accumulate, apparently unaware that this might somehow help his enemy. The emperor ar­rayed his army along the European bank to repel a beach in­vasion.

  To spark a coup against the emperor and avoid a fight, the double-deal-making doge took his young prince Alexius and paraded him on the prow of a ship sailing before the walls of Constantinople. Surely, the doge thought, the people of the city would identify their true leader and quickly rally to him and depose Alexius III, the false emperor. Wrong! No one in the city even recognized the prince. The little expedition re­turned to camp on the other side of the Bosporus completely deflated. The crusaders gulped hard as this latest stratagem from the doge failed, knowing their only option now was to conquer the massive city. The emperor’s army filled the beach below the massive city walls.

  On the morning of July 5, 1203, the crusaders, with the blind doge in front, landed on the beach within sword’s length of the emperor’s massive army. The crusading knights galloped off their state-of-the-art, specially designed ships outfitted with landing ramps. The shocked and awed Greeks turned and fled. The emperor took flight so quickly he was forced to abandon his tent full of personal possessions. Building on this success, the crusaders soon crashed through the chain that protected Constantinople’s inner harbor, the Golden Horn, and penetrated the city’s weak spot.

  Despite some successes at scavenging for supplies, the cru­saders were running out of food. Now camped just outside of the city’s north wall, they knew they had to act quickly and either capture Constantinople or retreat. On July 17 the crusaders made their move. They split into two groups, with the more numerous French attacking from the land, and the Venetian knights assaulting the city walls from their ships. Time after time the Greeks threw back the attackers on both fronts. Sensing his army’s fading chances, the doge ordered his ship to charge toward the city. His reckless charge rallied the crusaders. No one wants to be outbraved by a blind old man. They rushed onto shore, and the Greeks turned and fled into the city through the gates, followed closely on their heels by the Venetians. Emperor Alexius III threw his army against the Venetians inside Constantinople. As the crusaders withdrew toward the gate, they set a fire to protect themselves; it quickly grew to engulf a large swath of the city, shielding the Venetians and allowing them to cling to a sec­tion of the city wall.

  Finally, the shaky emperor Alexius III suddenly developed some moxie. He poured his army out of the city to crush the French crusader camp. Their numbers dwarfed the small band of crusaders who realized their slim chances to survive; they were running out of food, far from home, and facing ri­diculous odds. The two armies closed and waited. A group of the crusading knights, breaking ranks, having endured humiliation, the pope’s anger, the fires of hell, and that per­sistent debt, dashed, forward to attack with desperate élan. There were no more than 500 of them, shining in their armor, including Baldwin of Flanders, one of their founding leaders. On they dashed, almost reaching the Greek lines. They stopped at a small river. Everyone waited. Surely, the Greeks would surge forward and overwhelm the small group of knights, sending the rest of the crusaders in retreat. As the tension mounted and the crusaders pondered their next move, Alexius III turned gutless once again and ordered the Greeks to do what they did best: turn and flee. The crusaders watched in awe as their huge enemy filed back into the city, the knights shadowing close by to drive home the humilia­tion. Emperor Alexius had blown it.

  That night the emperor grabbed some gold, abandoned his wife, and with a coterie of associates fled the city. The Byz­antine emperor, one of the two most powerful leaders in the Western world, ran away in disgrace with his army still un­defeated and largely untested in battle.

  As July 18 dawned, Constantinople found itself emperor free. Fearing the total destruction of the open city, the Greek leaders pulled the former, now blind, emperor Isaac, the father of Prince Alexius (and brother of Alexius III), from his basement prison and installed him as the new emperor, perhaps the quickest promotion from prisoner to emperor in history. At the crusader camp they clucked at their great for­tune. They could now simply install the young prince to the throne with his father, collect their money, and put their murderous skills to better use capturing Jerusalem and kill­ing Muslims.

  A delegation of crusaders quickly trooped in to visit Isaac in his splendid palace, privately informing him of his son’s agreement — the one that brought them to Constantinople. Although shocked by the debt now owed by his young son, the new emperor, like fathers forever, had no choice but to bail out his free-spending son. Refusal would have unleashed another crusader assault, and with the emperor’s political base so weak, he was unsure how the army would respond. The Greeks threw open the city’s gates, and Alexius strode in. He was crowned Alexius IV, co-emperor with his father. The Greeks lavishly supplied food to the crusading army, which now graciously retired across the Golden Horn. Mis­sion accomplished!

  While the crusading nobles wandered the city gawking at the treasure trove of amazing religious artifacts, the Vene­tians sized up its profit-making potential. The father-son rulers started the usual work of a new regime, such as emp­tying the jails of enemies of the former rulers. This crowd, unfortunately for them both, included one Alexius Ducas, known as “Unibrow.”

  To honor his agreement, the freshly crowned Alexius IV paid a large chunk of money to the crusaders, and they started mapping out the last leg of their circuitous trip to the Holy Land. A subprime borrower with debt management problems, Alexius could not pay the rest of his debt to the crusaders. To raise money he desperately ordered sacred reli­gious objects, the envy of the Christian world, stripped from churches and melted down, a sacrilegious act in the eyes of the Greeks. Also, he was having problems quickly mustering the army he had promised to the crusaders. And, because the Greeks viewed him as a crusader puppet, he realized that without their army his days in power would be numbered. He needed time and was willing to plunge into a deeper debt hole to buy some.

  He made the crusader leaders another offer they couldn’t refuse. He would pay the rest of what he owed, plus finance the fleet until September 1204, a year longer than the Vene­tians had agreed to hang around, and supply the crusader army. All they had to do was hang around until the following spring. By then, the co-emperor reasoned, he would have a firm grip on his empire. His Byzantine mind failed to register that it was perhaps unwise to have the crusaders stay longer when they were the cause of the resentment his people felt toward him.

  Like the first deal, this one caused a rift among the cru­sader leaders. The deal-loving doge — surprise, surprise — said take the deal. The usual dissenters made the picayune point that Alexius still had not paid fully on his first promise. The doge and his crowd thought of the free supplies and the extra money the emperor would pay them. And he pointed out if they sailed right away they would reach the Holy Land at the start of winter, an acknowledged poo
r time to start killing Muslims. The doge then closed the deal by agreeing to keep his fleet teamed with the French until Christmas 1204. The crusaders doubled-down their investment on the young em­peror.

  Now fully invested in Alexius IV, the crusaders worked hard to ensure his success, but it was turning into a tough slog. A huge fire torched chunks of the city that hadn’t al­ready been burned and which the devastated Greeks blamed on the crusaders. To add to the mix, father and son emperors started fighting among themselves. The aging Isaac, never known for his sharp mind, became even more irrational, in­spiring ridicule and hatred from his people. He and Alexius squabbled as each tried to gain the political upper hand. The people, humiliated by defeat, debt, destruction of many of their religious icons, fire, and failed leaders, grew to hate the both of them, nearly as much as they hated the crusaders.

  Exploiting this anger was Unibrow, leading the throw-out-the-crusader wing of the Greeks. Bowing to this growing pressure, Alexius stopped payments to the crusaders. In De­cember the crusaders met with Alexius in his palace. Before the city’s nobles they harshly demanded he pay his debt or they would attack again. Insulted, Alexius had no choice but to reject the deal. To bow to the crusaders in front of the city’s nobles would have meant political suicide and probably assassination. The hostility was so great the crusader delega­tion fled the city in fear.

  Hoping to avoid conflict and restore the flow of funds into his pocket, the now-triple-deal-making doge secretly met with Alexius. For a year the old man had nourished Alexius, carried him to the throne on his own ships, and honored every commitment he made. He simply wanted Alexius to honor his debts in return. But he could not, Alexius told the doge. Angry at the betrayal, and perhaps shamed that he had put so much faith in Alexius, the doge now turned on his protégé and vowed to destroy him.