The Glory of the Crusades

by Steve Weidenkopf

  So, that evening, with “his city in flames, his enemies intact, his reputation disintegrating, the ill-prepared, discomposed and out-maneuvered Alexius III … prudently chose to flee the city.”404

  The Reign of Alexius IV

  But the people of Constantinople did not want to immediately install his victorious rival Alexius Angelus due to his close association with the Crusader army outside the walls. Instead, they clamored for the restoral of the blind and aged Isaac II. The old emperor, newly re-installed, sent word to the Crusaders asking for his son Alexius Angelus to join him in the city.

  The Crusaders were hesitant to release Alexius Angelus without assurances from Isaac that he would honor Alexius’ agreements

  with them. Although he demurred at first, the old emperor finally agreed. The Crusaders were allowed into the city, and most of them spent time visiting the numerous churches and venerating the many relics.

  A few weeks after his father’s restoration to the throne, Alexius Angelus was crowned co-emperor, taking the name Alexius IV. Now that he was on the throne, it was time for Alexius IV to deliver on his promises to the Crusaders. A joint letter of obedience from Alexius and Patriarch John X Camaterus was sent to Pope Innocent III reuniting the two Churches. Although this official declaration of reunion was sent per his promise, Alexius IV and the patriarch made no effort to impose Roman doctrine on the Byzantine people. The promise was fulfilled, but it was hollow.

  On top of that, Alexius paid the Crusaders only half the amount he had pledged to them—he still owed them the enormous sum of 100,000 silver marks. The Crusaders were able to remunerate their debt to the Venetians, but they needed the remaining amount to finance the Crusade to Outrémer. Pressured by the Crusaders to pay his remaining debt, Alexius sought ways to raise the necessary cash. He first turned to the nobility, taxing the wealthy families of Constantinople, but when even that proved unable to meet the remaining amount Alexius showed no shame in despoiling the sacred. He ordered the tombs of past emperors opened in order to strip the corpses of their rich vestments and precious jewels. When even that amount proved wanting, Alexius commanded the confiscation of sacred icons and vessels whose rich ornamentation was handed over in payment to the Crusaders.

  The murmuring and complaining from the citizens of Constantinople over the presence and influence of the Crusaders grew through the summer of 1203, reaching a zenith on August 18, when a riot erupted in the city against Western expatriates in the city. Many were attacked and harassed, including the very Pisans who only a month earlier had fought and died to protect the city against the Crusaders.

  The riot caused many Westerners to leave the city and join the Crusaders in their camp. In retaliation for it, a group of Crusaders (Flemings, Pisans, and Venetians) decided the next day to venture into the city to set fire to a mosque built by Isaac II as a sign of friendship with Saladin.405 The fire consumed the mosque but then searched for more fuel, beginning a rampage that lasted three days and consumed 440 acres of the densely populated central section of the city, stopping just short of the famed Hagia Sophia. The devastation in lives and property was enormous: 150 people were killed and 100,000 left homeless.406

  The fires had burned not only the city but also any chance of an amicable relationship between the citizens and Crusaders. The situation in Constantinople was now combustible and neither Isaac II nor Alexius IV were capable of suppressing the inevitable fireworks.

  The End of Alexius IV

  At the beginning of 1204 Alexius IV was caught in a vicious cycle of trying to appease the anti-Crusader mob while not harming his former friends to whom he owed his reign. Alexius’s inability to act decisively either way led to the mob taking matters into its own hands.

  On January 25, 1204 the Byzantines descended on Hagia Sophia and compelled the senate and clergy to meet and elect a new emperor. It took three days to find someone willing, but eventually Nicholas Kannovos was selected. The patriarch, however, refused to crown him, so the people performed the ceremony.

  Kannovos’s reign lasted a mere six days before his death in the chaotic and violent early days of 1204. The news of a mob-elected emperor was a major shock to Alexius IV, who turned once again to his former Crusader friends for help. He offered them possession of the Blachernae imperial palace in exchange for their armed protection. He entrusted this proposal to Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Mourtzouphlus because of his large bushy eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead.407

  Unknown to Alexius IV was that Mourtzouphlus hated the Crusaders and was the leader of one of the many anti-Latin groups in the city. This duplicitous imperial bureaucrat would bring about the end of Alexius IV and Isaac II, leading to the Crusader sack of the city. History is not kind to Mourtzouphlus—“few men since Pilate have received such uniformly bad press.” In his case, the assessment of history is correct.408

  The Reign of Alexius V

  Mourtzouphlus used his access to Alexius IV and Isaac II to stage a coup with the backing of the military, clergy, and civil service on the night and early morning of January 27–28, 1204. Alexius IV was imprisoned and the popularly elected Nicholas Kannovos was arrested and killed. The aged Isaac II died soon after the takeover. Taking the name Alexius V, Mourtzouphlus was crowned emperor on February 5.

  Once installed, he initiated a series of actions designed to force the untenable situation with the Crusaders to a head. Believing the Crusaders would leave if their ally Alexius IV were dead, Mourtzouphlus ordered the imprisoned former emperor strangled. The rank-and-file Crusaders were happy when they heard the news, since they believed the nobles would now leave the city and go to the Holy Land. They were wrong. The Crusade leaders were furious to learn of Alexius IV’s death. He still owed them money, and they were determined to receive their promised payment from the Byzantines. The nobles knew they needed food, supplies, and money for a successful expedition to the Holy Land. A second siege of the city was in order.

  In an effort to persuade the rank and file, the Crusading bishops presented the case that Mourtzouphlus was guilty of regicide, a usurper, and could be justly deposed. Although the Byzantines saw Mourtzouphlus as just one successful usurper in a long line of such politicians, the Crusaders saw him as a disloyal murderer.

  The Second Siege

  On April 10, 1204 the second siege of Constantinople began. The Crusaders concentrated their forces on five towers at the northeastern wall near the Blachernae Palace, but the attack was repulsed, with heavy Crusader causalities.409 The Crusaders were not only defeated in this initial assault but they suffered the taunts of the Byzantine defenders, who “began to hoot and to shout right lustily, and they went up on the walls and let down their breeches and showed them their buttocks.”410

  The siege resumed on April 12. The Crusaders changed tactics in order to successfully capture the towers on the walls. By lashing two ships together, the Venetians could bring superior numbers against a single tower. The ships were then firmly lashed to the tower, and from there troops climbed onto the wall, shouting their battle cry of “Holy Sepulchre!”

  As the battle raged, a small group of ten knights and sixty infantry (including the chronicler Robert of Clari) found an undefended walled-up postern gate. Using their hands and swords, the Crusaders began to tear down the wall. Their activity drew the attention of the defenders, who rained down arrows, crossbow bolts, and boiling oil to deter their progress. Finally, the Crusaders succeeded in removing a small section of the wall, which allowed them to see inside the city. The number of soldiers within stunned them. Robert of Clari described the scene and the reaction of the Crusaders: “[I]t seemed as if half the world were there, and they [the Crusaders] did not dare risk entering in.”411 One bold Crusader, Aleaume of Clari (Robert’s brother), abandoned caution and began wiggling through the hole, even as his fellow Crusaders tried to stop him by grabbing his feet. Aleaume pushed his way through and found himself on the other side of the wall, cut off from his fellow warriors and facing
the Byzantine host. He truly was “one man against a multitude.”412

  Stunned by Aleaume’s audacity, the Byzantine troops did the unexpected. Instead of attacking Aleaume and sealing the breach, the Greeks “fled like cattle.”413 The Crusaders had been fortunate in that they had broken through a section of the wall that was guarded by regular imperial troops. These Byzantine troops were “poorly trained and martially inept … [and] had shown themselves again and again willing to fight only when the danger to themselves was minuscule.”414 Aleaume leaned back through the wall and yelled to his fellow Crusaders, “Sirs, enter boldly! For I see that they are utterly confounded and are fleeing away.”415

  The remaining Crusaders poured through. They threw open one of the major city gates, and the rest of the army rushed into the city in a wild rampage.

  By nightfall the Crusader host was in Constantinople but its hold on the city was precarious. They only occupied a very small area and were still massively outnumbered. In order to solidify their position they lit a defensive fire, which soon raged uncontrollably through the city, destroying homes and businesses. In total, the three Crusader fires destroyed one-sixth of the city and prompted Villehardouin to remark, “More houses had been burned in the city than there are houses in any three of the greatest cities in the kingdom of France.”416

  The next day, April 13, Alexius V fled the city. The Crusaders were victorious. They had conquered “the greatest, most powerful, and most strongly fortified city in the world.”417

  The Sack

  Once their position was secure, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople. Their actions over those three days in 1204 set in motion centuries of acrimony and recriminations between East and West.

  It is easy to play “armchair historian” and fault the Crusaders for the sack of Constantinople. But to do so projects modern sensibilities onto a past governed by different behaviors and laws. In one sense, the Crusaders cannot be blamed for their actions in 1204. They “found themselves in a treasure-trove of unmitigated proportions.”418 Expecting the Crusaders to ignore the wealth of the city after almost two years of arduous campaigning with frequent diversions, distractions, and disappointments seems unrealistic. But the people of Constantinople were left relatively alone, for the Crusaders were more interested in the riches of the city. There was no wholesale massacre or slaughter, although some people were killed and some Byzantine women, including nuns, were raped. Lamentably, soldiers have done such things in every age, and even in an army largely motivated by laudable religious zeal there was not a total absence of such soldiers.

  The economic toll of the sack was more significant, as the Crusaders sought to remove as much wealth as they could carry and transport. Bronze statues throughout the city were melted down or shipped to the West, including the famous four bronze horses that had been placed over the starting gate of the Hippodrome. The horses were shipped to Venice where they were installed over the entryway to St. Mark’s Basilica.419

  The Crusaders plundered and pillaged sacred items as well, including the vast numbers of relics in the city. Altars were stripped of ornamentation and even destroyed. Icons were smashed to get the precious jewels embedded in them. Patens used by priests to hold the host during the celebration of Mass were used as ordinary bread plates and chalices normally reserved for containing the sacred blood were used as common drinking cups.420

  The amount of plunder was devastating to the citizens of Constantinople. Villehardouin as an eyewitness to the sack remarked that “so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world.”421 The estimate of spoils, declared and undeclared, was staggering: 800,000 marks.422 “The sack of Constantinople ranks as one of the most profitable and shameful in history.”423

  Pope Innocent III was shocked, saddened, and angered by the actions of the Crusaders. He had conceived the Crusade six years earlier as an expedition to liberate Jerusalem. He did not envision—indeed, he actively worked against—the many diversions undertaken by the nobles. In a letter to Boniface of Montferrat, Innocent condemned the Crusaders’ actions and chastised them for their poor choices:

  You rashly violated the purity of your vows; and turning your arms not against the Saracens but against Christians, you applied yourselves not to the recovery of Jerusalem, but to seize Constantinople, preferring earthly to heavenly riches … These “soldiers of Christ” who should have turned their swords against the infidel have steeped them in Christian blood, sparing neither religion, nor age, nor sex … They stripped the altars of silver, violated the sanctuaries, robbed icons and crosses and relics … The Latins have given example only of perversity and works of darkness. No wonder the Greeks call them dogs!424

  The Memory and Legacy of the Fourth Crusade

  Whatever explanation may be provided for the sack of Constantinople, there is no doubt it has tainted East-West relations through the centuries. Historians who describe the sack and the events of 1204 with great exaggeration have not helped this difficult and complex relationship. Sir Steven Runciman believed “there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade.”425 Amazingly, he wrote that in 1951, only six years after the Second World War and the worldwide discovery of the full Nazi program of the Final Solution to eradicate the Jewish people. Although indeed devastating in terms of the amount of wealth and relics purloined by the Western warriors, to write, in the wake of the Shoah, that the sack of Constantinople was the greatest crime against humanity is the epitome of hyperbole.

  In reality the destruction done to the city and the death of its inhabitants was minimal. Far from committing widespread slaughter, the Crusaders killed only half of one percent of the city’s citizens. A three-day sack of cities that initially refused to surrender was the convention in the medieval world. Although “the sack of Constantinople was an atrocity … in the terms of the day, [it was] not a war crime.”426 It is true that the sack remains one of the enduring memories of the Crusades. Most people remember the event—or at least remember the anti-Catholic narrative about the event—and it continues to be used to further the falsehood that the Crusades were primarily “land-grabs” or motivated by greed and desire for booty. Yet not even the Fourth Crusade was motivated by greed. The Crusaders desired to campaign in Egypt and then the Holy Land with the ultimate goal of liberating Jerusalem. Due to a series of bad decisions, overzealous calculations, and the need to fulfill treaty obligations, the Crusade veered off course and—ignoring admonitions from the pope—pursued a course that led them to the sack of Constantinople. Although the Eastern world continues to fault the West and the Church for the fiasco of the Fourth Crusade, the simple fact remains that the Crusaders only diverted their expedition to Constantinople at the request of an Easterner. Absent Alexius Angelus’s pleading for Crusader help to place him on the throne, his actions while emperor and those of his people, who ultimately overthrew and killed him, there would have been no attack on and sack of Constantinople.427

  Despite Innocent’s unambiguous protestations at the time, blame today is still placed inappropriately on the Catholic Church for the events of the Fourth Crusade. When Pope John Paul II visited Athens in 2001, he was greeted along his route with Greek Orthodox monks protesting his visit while holding signs with “1204” printed on them. Indeed, “the Byzantines’ deep sense of betrayal and bitter anger toward the Latins became the legacies of 1204 that would not die with the generation that experienced the events. They would animate centuries of tragic history and, for many, still live today.”428

  Modern critics never tire of pointing out that Pope John Paul II apologized for the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. Unfortunately for those who use this “fact” to discredit the Crusade, the pope actually never apologized at all. In brief remarks during the visit of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to Rome on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, 2004, 800 years after the Crusade, John Paul II recalled the events of the spring of 1204 and remembered the prohibitions of Pope
Innocent III against the Crusade’s diversion to Constantinople:

  On this occasion we cannot forget what happened during the month of April 1204. An army that had set out to recover the Holy Land for Christendom marched on Constantinople, took it and sacked it, pouring out the blood of our own brothers and sisters in the faith. Eight centuries later, how can we fail to share the same indignation and sorrow that Pope Innocent III expressed as soon as he heard the news of what had happened?429

  The pope-saint also recognized the complexity of historical events and the inherent problems associated with relying on simple pronouncements of past events from a modern worldview, which leads to false narratives when he added, “After so much time has elapsed, we can analyze the events of that time with greater objectivity, yet with an awareness of how difficult it is to investigate the whole truth of history.”430 In calling on East and West to approach the events of 1204 with greater objectivity, the pope quoted St. Paul: “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”431 Urging the reconciliation of the two halves of the Church, John Paul II offered a prayer appropriate not only for East-West relations but also for the restoral of the proper understanding and memory of the Crusades: “Let us pray together, therefore, that the Lord of history will purify our memory of all prejudice and resentment and obtain for us that we may advance in freedom on the path to unity.”432