Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

by Judith Herrin

  The merchants’ booths facing each other [were] set up in parallel rows… and at various points at an angle to the rows, other booths were set up… I couldn’t help but compare it to the centipede with a very long body showing innumerable little feet under its belly… There were all kinds of men’s and women’s clothes, everything that comes from Boeotia and the Peloponnese, from Italy and Greece, Phoenicia, Egypt, Spain and the Pillars of Hercules, where the finest altar cloths are made.

  In this way he expresses his amazement at ‘the most important fair held in Macedonia’, on 8 October, the saint’s feast-day.

  Such fairs stimulated the local economy and clearly attracted merchants from far and near, reflecting a constant commercial activity, even when the provinces were bereft of imperial coinage and the names of traders are not recorded. By the twelfth century, the export of olive oil and local silk products, which depended on mulberry plantations, is documented in Italian sources. Venetian merchants frequented numerous ports in the Peloponnese and central Greece and clearly made profits on their trade, but Constantinople itself remained the outstanding venue for trade. Its prosperity was also dependent upon the presence of foreign merchants, some established permanently in their own quarters, others more transient. In the mid-twelfth century, the Arab geographer Idrisi noted: ‘Constantinople is prosperous, having markets and merchants, and its people are affluent.’ The imperial capital could still impress and retained the cosmopolitan character which had attracted so many earlier travellers across the centuries. Even after 1261, Abdullah, a Muslim merchant, found the city most striking:

  It is a great city on the seashore, comparable to Alexandria, and it takes one morning to cross it from end to end. There is a place as large as two-thirds of Damascus, surrounded by walls with a gate, which is reserved exclusively for the occupation of the Muslims. There is equally a similar place for the Jews… There are one hundred thousand churches, less one… He [the emperor] completed the number by building the Great Church… it is one of the most considerable and marvellous buildings that can be seen.

  From its greatest extent in the sixth century, when it covered the entire eastern Mediterranean, to its smallest, when it became a tiny cluster of city-states in the fourteenth, Byzantium was always an empire, not a nation. Its resident peoples, whether Greek, Latin, Armenian, Jewish or from another community, understood themselves to be its citizens, paying its taxes and benefiting from its protection and its laws. The language of authority and command was Greek, although this language itself evolved from its classical roots into a demotic which was easier to learn and could be shared by those with other native tongues. At the same time, Byzantium never lost its Homeric world-view of migration and hospitality to strangers, which newcomers continued to enjoy.

  As with many empires, the court imported outsiders as mercenaries and functionaries, free from loyalty to any other interest in the capital or beyond. Byzantium’s cosmopolitan mixture, drawn across astounding distances by commercial opportunities or just curiosity, was not limited to Constantinople, as we have seen from the fair at Ephesos (see chapter 14). However visitors travelled, sailing from port to port or following the overland routes, the entire empire was organized for trade and open to pilgrims, its hospices, taverns and guesthouses ensuring that however proud and self-regarding the empire was, it was never parochial or closed.

  IV

  Varieties of Byzantium

  24

  The Fulcrum of the Crusades

  Consider, therefore, that the Almighty has provided you, perhaps for this purpose, that through you He may restore Jerusalem from such debasement… With God’s assistance we think this can be done through you.

  Guibert of Nogent reporting Pope Urban II’s preaching of the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095

  In 1087, the balance of power in the Middle East shifted decisively when the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem. Following their victory at Mantzikert (1071), the Turks had been moving steadily south towards their goal, Muslim Egypt. Their capture of Jerusalem cut pilgrim routes to the Holy Land and prompted Christians throughout the known world to action. Inspired by Pope Urban II’s gruesome accounts of ‘the base and bastard Turks… an accursed race’ and the ‘pollution of paganism’, knights, soldiers and even poor pilgrims ‘took the cross’ (painted the sign of the cross on their clothes) in the West and set out in the spring of 1096 on their own campaign to win back the Holy Land. The ensuing crusades against the infidels in the Near East brought West and East into much closer and often hostile contact during the twelfth century, with Byzantium at the centre.

  After a decade of civil war between 1071 and 1081, Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) found Byzantine fighting forces in disarray and realized the impossibility of campaigning both in the East against the Turks and in the West against the Normans. He was forced to concentrate on driving the Normans out of Epiros (1081–5), while one group of Seljuk Turks established themselves at Nicaea in western Asia Minor. In 1088, Alexios requested and obtained the use of a company of five hundred knights attached to the Count of Flanders, which provided excellent mercenary service. So in 1095, when he sent an appeal for western help to Pope Urban II, he anticipated the arrival of additional military forces of the same kind to assist in his battles against the Turks in Asia Minor. He may have thought that his needs could be made to coincide with the aims of the Latin Christians. Together they would drive the Turks out of Asia Minor and go on to reconquer Jerusalem.

  Despite the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, for centuries Christians continued to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Once the Hungarians had been converted to Christianity, the overland route to Jerusalem via the Balkans and Constantinople was reopened, and western travellers became more familiar with the wealth of Byzantium and its amazing collection of relics. Their visits also made the Byzantines aware of the military strengths of Latin knights. While the emperor may not have appreciated the vitality of the papacy, reformed by Gregory VII (1073–85), and the growing influence of the Benedictine monastic order in the West, he had cultivated good relations with individual bishops of Rome and wished to promote Christian unity. Similarly, even if Pope Urban II saw the crusade as an opportunity to bring the Church of Constantinople under Rome’s control, in all the accounts of his speech at Clermont an appeal was made to the western knights, ‘who are accustomed to wage private wars even against Believers’, to redirect their strength against the Infidel. Fulcher of Chartres reports that he urged them ‘to help your brothers living in the Orient, who need your aid for which they have already cried out many times’, which clearly reflects the idea of a common Christian front against the resurgence of Islam. Robert of Rheims adds that Urban II encouraged them in a material fashion as well:

  Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says ‘floweth with milk and honey’, was given by God into the possession of the Children of Israel.

  But as the pope preached the need for Christians to take the cross, and offered a pardon (indulgence) for their sins if they did so, large numbers of pilgrims, often poor and unarmed, including women and children, decided to set off for the East, led by charismatic preachers like Peter the Hermit, Walter the Penniless and Gottschalk, a priest from the Rhineland. Most followed a route from northern France and Germany across central Europe to Constantinople, inspired by Urban II’s instructions to ‘rush as quickly as you can to the defence of the Eastern Church’. Their presence fundamentally altered the idea of a combined Christian military campaign against the forces of Islam.

  Some western knights had already fought the Muslims in Spain, and many pilgrims were familiar with the routes to the relics of St James at Santiago de Compostela. But the massed pilgrimage to Jerusalem of 1096 brought together for the first time thousands of largely unarmed civilians. The idea of participating in a holy war against the infidel may have increased their consciousness of the ‘other’ in medieval soci
ety, which was then turned against the Jews. According to an account attributed to Solomon ben Simpson of Speyer, which forms part of a longer twelfth-century Jewish chronicle, the Christian pilgrims said to each other:

  Behold we journey a long way… to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews living amongst us, whose ancestors killed him [Christ] and sacrificed him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them.

  As well as seeking out and killing as many Jews as they could find in Cologne, Mainz, Speyer and Worms, those who had taken the cross also destroyed synagogues and burned the Torah. Similar violence occurred in Hungary, where pilgrims quarrelled with local Christians. Albert of Aachen, who wrote his history fifty years after the crusade, records that they behaved badly towards the Hungarians: ‘Like a rough people, rude in manners, undisciplined and haughty, they committed very many other crimes.’ Such disorders in the passage of the pilgrims created difficulties for those who followed. They also established a negative pattern in western attitudes to the unfamiliar inhabitants of eastern Europe, including the Byzantines.

  Although Anna Komnene may exaggerate when she claims that 100,000 knights and 80,000 foot soldiers participated in the great pilgrimage, modern historians reckon upwards of 30,000 knights and many more pilgrims descended on the Byzantine capital. The movement therefore took on a very different form from that requested by the Byzantine emperor of a compact body of disciplined soldiers. Although it is now known as the First Crusade, at the time its participants identified themselves as pilgrims, travelling to Jerusalem in the company of armed and mounted contingents, who would fight to regain the Holy Places. Those led by Peter the Hermit arrived at Constantinople first, intent on completing the pilgrimage on foot but seriously in need of rest before they undertook the most dangerous part of the route across Asia Minor. Markets were set up so that they could purchase food and they were ferried across the Bosphoros. When the fighting forces eventually arrived, the emperor insisted that the leaders should swear an oath to return to his rule any previously Byzantine territory they conquered from the Seljuks, which some were loath to perform. Despite many difficulties in their cooperation, the combined Christian forces followed the pilgrims into Asia Minor and succeeded in recapturing Nicaea (June 1097). The city was returned to Byzantine control and the crusading forces then set out across the Anatolian plateau in the extreme heat of summer.

  Numerous accounts of the progress of the First Crusade, by western, Byzantine and Arab authors reflect dissensions between the crusaders and Alexios I, among the crusaders and within the different Muslim authorities. These came to a head outside the walls of Antioch, which was strongly defended by local Muslims. After a siege of seven months, the crusaders finally broke in and occupied the city (June 1098). But they were immediately confronted by a powerful Turkish army, raised by emirs and smaller tribes, which came to the city’s relief. Some westerners who fled the city dissuaded Alexios I from sending Byzantine forces to assist the crusaders, claiming that Antioch was bound to fall to the Turks. His decision was later denounced as treachery. The final Christian victory, attributed in part to the miraculous discovery of the Holy Lance (a relic of the Passion of Christ), established Bohemond, son of the Norman ruler Robert Guiscard, as ruler of Antioch, in clear opposition to his oath to the Byzantine emperor.

  The chequered history of Antioch during the crusades illustrates the contradictory aims of the participants. In Byzantine eyes, although the city had passed under Arab control in 636/7, it remained the target of Byzantine campaigns and had been regained in 969. But just over a century later, the Seljuks occupied it on their march south to Jerusalem. This symbolic loss was to be rectified by a Christian holy war, which would return Antioch to Byzantine rule. But to Bohemond and many of the leading knights on the campaign, who were actively seeking to found their own principalities in the East, the capture of Antioch was the first occasion to combine pilgrimage with territorial occupation. The Normans had already demonstrated their ambitions in this regard with Guiscard’s occupation of the Byzantine provinces of southern Italy and the conquest of England by Duke William in 1066. Bohemond himself only managed to avoid Byzantine reprisals against his claim to Antioch by declaring himself dead and leaving the region in a smelly coffin, as Anna Komnene recounted.

  By 1098, when the crusaders set out from Antioch to capture Jerusalem, they learned that the city had been retaken by the Fatimids. Since the Seljuk and other Turkish tribes had adopted the Sunni definition of Islam, and thus opposed the Shi’ite dynasty ruling in Egypt, Muslim forces in the Near East were divided. Thanks in part to this disunity, the First Crusade proved amazingly successful. After a six-week siege of Jerusalem (June–July 1099), the Latins overcame the defenders and slaughtered the entire population. The western knights then elected Godfrey of Bouillon, one of their leaders, as king and thus established a Christian enclave in the Holy Land. The triumph provoked a deep sense of loss among Muslims and Jews, to whom Jerusalem was a particularly holy city. Their exclusion from the city that had been under Islamic rule since 638 was particularly resented.

  Jerusalem remained the central focus of rival claims throughout the twelfth century. As Muslim forces renewed their efforts to regain the city, the Latin kingdom required additional support from western knights. The Second Crusade failed to capture Damascus, and never reached Jerusalem, but additional forces got through by sea. Despite considerable success in establishing an efficient colony, with an exuberant artistic production patronized by Queen Melisende, who ruled Jerusalem from 1131 to 1153, the Christian enclave was constantly threatened. Crusader castles such as Krak des Chevaliers were constructed to guard the kingdom, while the church of the Holy Sepulchre, dedicated in 1149, symbolized the mixture of early Christian, Arab, Romanesque and Byzantine elements in crusader architecture. Eventually, in 1187 Saladin, a Kurdish general who had made himself Sultan of Egypt, recaptured the holy city for Islam, and his merciful treatment of its non-Muslim population was widely praised. Nonetheless, the shift back to Islamic control triggered a reaction in the West, where Church leaders again called for further crusades. The Third, from 1189 to 1192, and Fourth, from 1202 to 1204, were the result.

  In all these meetings of East and West, language was a basic problem: few Greeks knew Latin, and even fewer westerners knew Greek. During the twelfth century, Emperor Manuel I (1143–80) increased the number of westerners employed at the imperial court, where they served as translators and ambassadors. Growing western influence in Byzantium was also clear from the emperor’s delight in the sport of jousting, wearing trousers and selecting western princesses to marry into the imperial family. While this policy was sometimes denounced, there was a grudging appreciation of the Latins’ fighting capacity and bravery. Whether mounted or on foot, these ‘Franks’ – as all westerners were called – were admired for their strength. Anna Komnene concedes that Bohemond, her father’s Norman enemy, was a tall handsome man, and Niketas Choniates, the late twelfth-century historian appreciated Conrad of Montferrat, ally and son-in-law of Manuel I. Choniates even makes an unflattering comparison between the effeminate, cowardly Byzantines and their broad-shouldered, brave and daring Latin counterparts.

  In addition to linguistic difficulties, Italian merchants generated a certain amount of tension within the empire. As we have seen (chapter 19), in Constantinople the Venetians controlled an entire quarter with its own church and warehouses along the Golden Horn, while Genoese and Pisan traders also maintained a presence in ports along the Adriatic, Mediterranean and Aegean coastlands. Despite the importance of international trade for Byzantium, political relations were not always good and local merchants resented the Italians’ advantageous trading terms. Tensions became inflamed in 1171 and again in 1182, when Manuel I and his successor Andronikos I (1182–5) ordered attacks on Venetian merchants, their property and ships. The losses sustained were so great that the republic made a claim for compensation: this long list of houses, ships and goods destroyed was
still not settled in 1203, which probably exacerbated antagonism.

  Linguistic, social and economic grounds for mutual hostility between Christians were augmented by liturgical differences. The filioque clause, ‘and from the Son’ (see chapter 4), recited in the Latin creed might have passed unnoticed by local Greeks until 1054, but thereafter it became a major divider, while differences over leavened or unleavened bread, the number of genuflections and the days and degrees of fasting were obvious and visible to all. The Byzantines were shocked that western bishops and clergy fought on horseback like knights, and the Latins thought it improper for orthodox priests and lower clergy to marry. For the Patriarch of Constantinople and his staff, the claim of papal primacy was particularly threatening as it gave Rome, the see founded by St Peter, superior power over all the churches.

  Another serious misunderstanding arose from the Byzantine policy of maintaining diplomatic relations with the Muslim caliphs, other Arab leaders and Turkish emirs. The western knights did not appreciate the long tradition of exchanging embassies with the enemies of the empire, which had established a web of diplomatic contacts and intelligence. On this basis, the Byzantines were often able to avoid war, to exchange prisoners and maintain peace. This was condemned in the West as treachery. The charge resurfaced in a more pointed fashion during the 1180s, when Andronikos I was reported as being in league with Saladin and the Turks. Magnus of Reichersberg, a German monk, simply denounced the Greeks as treacherous and hostile to western forces. The accusation contains a degree of propaganda and may be a forgery. But clearly the Latins were surprised that Byzantine emperors traditionally engaged in diplomatic contacts with Muslim leaders of the Near East and did not appreciate their behaviour.