City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  What they did not know was that the city was crumbling from within. The humiliating spectacle of the retreating Byzantine army, played out before a watching audience below the city walls; the burnt houses; the muttering of the people; the slippery allegiances in the whispering galleries of the imperial palace – the emperor returned from the field of battle uneasily aware that his hold on power was precarious. He himself had come to power by blinding his brother Isaac II; Isaac, in his turn, after the mob had strung the emperor Andronicus upside down in the street, in an execution of repulsive fury. Opinion was turning against the emperor; ‘It was as if he had actually worked to ruin the city,’ was Choniates’s scathing judgement. It was time to get out. Overnight, Alexius gathered up a large quantity of gold and precious imperial ornaments and slipped away. The imperial throne was suddenly vacant, the palace factions thrown into confusion. Stunned, they hauled the blinded Isaac back out of his monastery, reinstalled him on the throne and prepared to negotiate with the crusaders. Word was sent to their camp across the Golden Horn that Isaac wanted to make contact with his son, Alexius Angelus.

  The crusaders were equally amazed when messengers reached their camp with the news. It seemed to Villehardouin like a vindication from God as to the justness of their cause: ‘Now hear how mighty are the miracles of our Lord when it pleases him!’ At a stroke it appeared that their troubles were over. The next day, 18 July, they sent four envoys, two Venetians and two Frenchmen, one of whom was Villehardouin, to the imperial palace to discuss terms with the new emperor. Angelus they kept safely back in their own camp, still wary of Byzantine tricks. The envoys made their way up to the Blachernae Palace along a route flanked by the Varangian Guard. Inside they beheld a scene of extraordinary wealth. The blind emperor, richly attired, seated on his throne; around him so many noble lords and ladies, all ‘as magnificently dressed as could be’. The envoys, intimidated, or at least wary of this assemblage of people, asked to speak with Isaac in private. Here, before a select few, they outlined the terms that his son had agreed at Zara the previous December. It is clear from Villehardouin’s account that the deal the ‘foolish youth, ignorant of the affairs of state’ had struck with these insistent westerners made Isaac’s jaw drop open. The financial promises were outrageous: the two hundred thousand marks of silver, the year’s supply of provisions for the Holy Land crusade, a year’s campaigning by ten thousand Byzantine troops, a lifetime’s maintenance of five hundred knights in the Holy Land. Worst of all was his commitment to place the Orthodox Church under the authority of Rome. The populace would instantly riot at such news. Isaac told them quite bluntly, ‘I don’t see how it can be honoured.’ The envoys were insistent. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Isaac eventually conceded. Oaths were sworn and charters signed. The envoys returned triumphantly to their camp; Alexius Angelus was reunited joyfully with his father; on 1 August in a service of solemn pomp he was crowned co-emperor with his father in Hagia Sophia as Alexius IV.

  *

  It seemed as if an end was in sight for all the crusade’s problems. The army withdrew, at the emperor’s request, back over the Golden Horn, where it was supplied plentifully with food. Its candidate was now astride the Byzantine throne. The crusaders had been promised the resources to complete their pilgrimage to the Holy Land; they could now write confidently back home in the hope that the pope might forgive all their manifold sins. ‘We carried out the work of Jesus Christ with his help,’ wrote the self-justifying count of Saint-Pol, ‘so that the Eastern Church … acknowledges herself to be the daughter of the Roman Church.’ This was wishful thinking.

  Saint-Pol spoke up particularly for the part played by Enrico Dandolo: ‘For the Venetian doge, prudent in character and wise in making difficult decisions, we have a great deal of praise.’ Without Dandolo, the whole venture might have perished outside the city’s massive walls. And the Venetians were now in sight of reimbursement for their maritime efforts. They received eighty-six thousand marks from Alexius, the full amount of their debt; the other crusaders were similarly repaid. It seems that the new co-emperor would fulfil all his obligations to the expedition. The crusaders were free to tour the city which they had attempted to sack. They marvelled at its wealth, its statues, precious ornaments, its holy relics – objects of veneration for the pious pilgrims. Their admiration was both sacred and profane. Here was a city vastly richer than any they had seen in Europe. The westerners were astonished – and covetous.

  Yet in this moment of holiday after the fight to survive, there were deep tensions. Constantinople remained taut, unappeased, volatile. Away from the broad thoroughfares and magnificent buildings, the Greek proletariat inhabited pitiful shanty towns; they were unpredictable and fiercely resentful of the imposition of the crusaders. Had they known of their new emperor’s promise of submission to the Roman pope they would have exploded. Choniates likened this mood to a kettle coming to the boil. Their animosity was centuries deep, and it was reciprocated by the westerners’ view of ‘Greek treachery’. ‘Their inordinate hatred for us and our excessive disagreement with them allowed for no humane feeling between us,’ Choniates later said. The French demanded that a section of wall should be demolished as security for their visitors against hostage-taking. And they were deeply suspicious of the blind Isaac, who had attempted an anti-crusader alliance with Saladin twenty years earlier. From their camp three hundred yards across the Golden Horn, they could even see a mosque, built at that time just outside the sea walls for the use of a small colony of Muslims. It was a provocation.

  And time continued to tick away. Despite the upfront payments, Alexius and Isaac were in growing trouble. The contract with Venice was due to expire on 29 September. It was now vital that the crusaders depart imminently. Alexius had no powerbase; he was dependent on the unpopular crusaders for support; he understood enough about the short and violent reigns of emperors to realise what their departure would mean. ‘You must know’, he frankly told the Venetian and crusader lords, ‘that the Greeks hate me because of you, and if you abandon me I will lose this land again and they will kill me.’ At the same time he was in financial straits; to keep up the payments he began on a course of action destined to double his unpopularity. ‘He profaned sacred things,’ howled Choniates, ‘he plundered the temples, the hallowed vessels were seized from churches without the slightest qualm, melted down and given to the enemy as common gold and silver.’ To the Byzantines, with their long experience of the Italian maritime republics, the westerners’ lust for money seemed like a dreadful dipsomania: ‘They yearned to drink again and again from a river of gold as if bitten by snakes that make men rabid with a thirst that can never be quenched.’

  Confronted with the precariousness of the situation and the shortage of cash, Alexius, like a gambler doubling his stake whilst lengthening the odds, made the crusaders a new offer. If they would stay another six months, until 29 March 1204, this would give him time to establish his authority and meet his financial obligations; it was already late in the season to sail anyway, better to overwinter in Constantinople; he would pay all the provisioning expenses during that time, bear the costs of the Venetian fleet until September 2004 – another whole year – and provide his own fleet and army to accompany the crusade. If it was a desperate gamble by Alexius, it was also a hard proposal for the crusader lords to sell to the put-upon army, which was also still blissfully unaware that it was under excommunication.

  Predictably there was uproar. ‘Provide us with ships as you swore you would as we want to go to Syria!’ they cried. It took considerable cajoling and persuasive argument to talk the bulk of the army round. There would be a further postponement until the spring, and ‘the Venetians swore that they would provide the fleet for another year from the feast of St Michael [the end of September]’. Dandolo charged a further hundred thousand marks for the privilege. Alexius continued to melt down church gold ‘to appease the ravenous hunger of the Latins’. The doge, meanwhile, wrote a smooth letter to
the pope trying to explain the sack of Zara in the hope of getting the excommunication lifted.

  The temperature in the kettle was steadily rising. And while Alexius went on a progress of his domains to cement his powerbase beyond the city with the protection of a section of the crusader army – who had to be paid handsomely – it boiled over.

  Four Emperors

  AUGUST 1203–APRIL 1204

  Throughout the first assault on Constantinople, a substantial population of Italian merchants had remained within the city. The citizens of Amalfi and Pisa had loyally fought alongside their Greek neighbours when Dandolo attacked the sea walls. The Venetian merchants probably barred their doors and stayed inside. But as the Greek population surveyed the aftermath of this attack – hundreds of homes gutted by fire, an unpopular new emperor installed, a section of their walls demolished to emphasise the humiliation of their proud city – they erupted in fury. The merchants’ quarters were down by the Golden Horn, where they had wharves and warehouses. On 18 August a Greek mob descended on the hated Italians. Their rage centred on Venice but the rampage quickly became indiscriminate. They ransacked all the merchant dwellings, driving out loyal foreigners as well as the treacherous Venetians. ‘Not only were the Amalfitans … disgusted by this wickedness and recklessness but also the Pisans who had chosen to make Constantinople their home,’ reported Choniates in dismay. The Pisans and Venetians disliked each other intensely but mob violence had given them a common cause. Now gathered in the crusader camp they had a shared motive for revenge.

  The following day a freelance force of Venetian and Pisan merchants and Flemish crusaders commandeered some fishing boats and sailed back across the Horn. The two groups probably had different goals. The crusaders were tempted by the chance to plunder the taunting mosque on the waterfront. The ousted merchants were bent on revenge. When the Muslims called for help, the Greek population ran out to repulse the intruders. Some of the Venetians and Pisans made it through the open gates and set upon the properties of their former Greek neighbours, ‘then they fanned out into various places and fired the houses’. It was the height of a long dry summer; an impatient wind was blowing steadily from the north. The close-packed wooden houses on the lower slopes started to crackle and burn. The fire, propelled by the wind, picked up speed and began advancing up the hills into the heart of the city.

  Fires were a common hazard in Constantinople, but this, according to Choniates, ‘proved all the others to be but sparks’. A wall of flame ‘whooshed up unbelievably high’; it leaped gaps across the streets, tacking with the shifting course of the wind, advancing across a front hundreds of yards wide, veering unpredictably to leave areas untouched, then whipping back on itself. As night fell, cyclones of sparks were sucked skywards on the thermal updraft, and ‘balls of fire were hurled up from the inferno high into the sky so that remarkably they consumed buildings a good distance away’. The lines of flames divided and came together again ‘meandering like a river of fire … advancing gradually and leaping over walls to ravage the buildings beyond’.

  In the dark, the crusaders looked on in horror from across the water at the long humped silhouette of city hills outlined in fire. Villehardouin watched ‘those great churches and rich palaces melt and collapse, and the wide merchant streets consumed by flames’. The noise was deafening. Buildings went up ‘like candle wicks’ and exploded; marble shattered, iron bubbled and melted like water hissing on fire. Choniates, who himself lost considerable property, witnessed the destruction as the flames tore through some of the ancient and magnificent public spaces of the city.

  Porticoes collapsed, the most beautiful buildings in the squares were toppled, the tallest columns consumed like brushwood. There was nothing that could withstand the fury of the fire … and the buildings towards the arch of the Milion … crashed to the ground … the porticoes of Domninos were reduced to ashes … and the Forum of Constantine and everything lying between the northern and southern limits of the city was destroyed.

  The fire licked the porch of Hagia Sophia but miraculously turned aside.

  The city was divided by ‘an enormous abyss, like a river of fire’. Driven by the flames, people struggled to move their valuables to safe ground, only to find that the fire ‘taking a winding course and moving in zigzag paths and branching off in many directions and returning to its starting point, destroyed the goods that had been moved … The majority of the city’s inhabitants were stripped then of their possessions.’ Flying embers sucked out over the sea torched a passing ship. In the space of three days the fire cut a dark gash through the heart of urban Constantinople. Sporadic outbursts continued for days, the deep pits of smouldering embers whipped unpredictably back into ignition. From sea to sea, the inhabitants of the city, of whom probably only a small number actually died, found it cut in two by a blackened and smouldering strip of devastation. Choniates summed up the mood of the people with an anguished cry. ‘Alas! The most splendid and beautiful palaces filled with beautiful things and the greatest riches, which astonished everyone – all gone.’ Four hundred acres of the city had been atomised, and a hundred thousand people lost their homes, including Choniates himself.

  Watching from their camp, the crusaders were struck dumb. ‘No one knew who started the fire,’ Villehardouin disingenuously proclaimed, figuratively staring at his shoes. Others were more honest; Baldwin of Flanders’s court poet was later to say quite openly that ‘he and we alike bear guilt for the burning of churches and palaces’. And the citizens of Constantinople knew exactly whom to hold responsible. Almost every westerner still residing in the city fled to the crusader camp. More than the treachery, the double-dealing, the mistaken intentions across the cultural divide, the events of 19–21 August marked a firebreak that could henceforth not be crossed. The crusading venture like a zigzagging fire was destroying everything in its ambient path. For the Venetians their long maritime adventure seemed to have no end in sight. They prepared to overwinter, drew their ships out of the water onto the banks of the Golden Horn and waited to see what would happen next.

  *

  In early November Alexius IV returned from his progress to the lands of Thrace. The expedition had been a relative success. He had subdued some cities previously loyal to his predecessor and mulcted them for cash. On his return he was accorded the welcome befitting a legitimate emperor; the populace and the crusader lords rode out to welcome him as he approached the gates. The Latins noticed a change in his manner; he was more self-confident, or as Villehardouin put it, ‘The emperor began to show disdain towards the barons and those who had helped him so much.’ The payments to the crusaders slowed down. At the same time his father, Isaac, as co-emperor, was pushed into the background. It was now Alexius’s name that was mentioned first in proclamations. Embittered, the older man began to defame his son, claiming, amongst other things, ‘that he kept company with depraved men whom he smote on the buttocks and was struck by them in return’. The blind old man fell prey to superstition and the toadying prophecies of monks. He was increasingly fearful of the mob; on the advice of his soothsayers he had one of the great totemic statues of the city – a monumental bronze image of a wild boar with raised bristles – removed from the Hippodrome and set up outside the palace in the belief that ‘it could restrain the mad fury of the populace’.

  Such presentiments were not misplaced, even if Isaac’s mystical defences were unlikely to prove adequate. Constantinople was descending into chaos. ‘The wine-bibbing portion of the vulgar masses’, as the aristocratic Choniates haughtily dubbed them, marched on the Forum of Constantine in an equally superstitious fury, and smashed to pieces a beautiful bronze statue of Athena, ‘because the foolish rabble believed that she was turned towards the western armies’. Alexius meanwhile continued to melt down the valuables of the Church and taxed the nobles increasingly heavily to pay the crusaders. The proceeds were ‘simply thrown to the dogs’, according to Choniates.

  It was not enough. By midwinter, f
unds were drying up. And in the shadows of the imperial court there waited another player in the game: Alexius Ducas, known colloquially as Murtzuphlus, meaning ‘gloomy’, because ‘his eyebrows were joined together and seemed to hang down over his eyes’. He was a nobleman with a long history of court intrigue. He was ambitious, fearless and totally opposed to pandering to the westerners. Alexius had freed him from prison for plotting against his predecessor; it was to prove a bad mistake. As the winter drew on and the crusaders became more importunate, Murtzuplus emerged as the leader of the increasingly popular anti-western faction. When Boniface of Montferrat made a direct appeal to Alexius to pay what was due, Murtzuphlus’s counter-counsel was blunt: ‘Ah, sir, you have paid them too much. Don’t pay them any more! You have paid so much you have mortgaged everything. Make them go away and then expel them from your land.’ Eventually the payments stopped altogether, yet Alexius kept playing for time. He continued to support the crusader camp with food. He was walking a delicate tightrope but events began to spiral beyond his control. On 1 December, there was a further outbreak of mob violence against westerners close to the city walls and an attack on the Venetian ships. To the Greeks it was now clear that the ships were the key to everything; destroy the fleet and the crusaders would be trapped and vulnerable.

  *

  Across the Golden Horn the want of money was starting to tell. Dandolo and the crusader lords held a summit; they resolved on an ultimatum. Six leading notables, three crusader lords and three Venetians, were despatched to the palace to deliver a blunt message to the emperor. ‘And so the envoys mounted their horses, buckled on their swords and rode together as far as the palace of Blachernae.’ This was not a desirable assignment. At the palace gate they dismounted and made their way between the customary lines of Varangian guards into the hall, where they found the twin emperors, father and son, seated on beautiful thrones, surrounded by ‘a large number of important lords, and it seemed to be the court of a rich prince’.