Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

by Judith Herrin

  These ambiguous feelings also generated suspicions and fears which accumulated as Byzantine requests for western military help against the Turks continued through the twelfth century. During the Second Crusade, in 1147, King Louis VII of France and the German Emperor Conrad came to the capital, where Emperor Manuel laid on extravagant entertainments and made sure the rulers visited the most important monuments and relics of Constantinople. Echoes of this royal visit appear in Icelandic sagas and the epic of Charlemagne’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Western knights were astonished at the wealth of the empire, particularly the churches and markets of the great metropolis of Constantinople, while the Byzantines feared that the crusaders might become covetous. In Frederick Barbarossa they recognized a brilliant and ambitious leader who might well turn his forces against the Queen City.

  Meanwhile, the Turks consolidated their hold on the central plateau of Asia Minor. In 1176 Manuel confronted Sultan Kilij Arslan near Myriokephalon and was soundly defeated. This confirmed a permanent Turkish presence in the Sultanate of Rum, which forced bishops to flee and pressured Christians to convert to Islam.

  In the last two decades of the twelfth century, both western and Byzantine forces had reason to be wary of each other. During the Third Crusade, Emperor Isaac II Angelos (1185–95) was fiercely criticized for negotiating a truce with the Mamluks of Egypt while the crusaders restored Christian control in Acre. It was in order to secure Jerusalem that Pope Innocent III preached the Fourth Crusade in 1198. One year later Alexios III Angelos (1195–1203), who replaced his brother Isaac II as emperor in Constantinople and blinded him, sent an embassy to Rome requesting support for an attack on the Turks. The pope responded that Alexios would have to contribute to the crusade and that the Eastern Church would have to return to the authority of Rome. This threat to the independence of the Church of Constantinople coloured all later negotiations between the crusaders and Byzantium.

  Knights from northern Europe, led by Geoffrey Villehardouin, adopted a novel strategy for the Fourth Crusade: it would attack the Muslims from Egypt. So they requested the help of Venice in transporting their forces across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, and this was agreed at considerable expense. But too few crusaders arrived at Venice to pay for the transport in specially designed ships. The Venetians then proposed to make a slight detour from the planned route to attack Zara, a Christian city on the Dalmatian coast. In order to set sail, the crusaders had to agree, and with the plunder they accumulated at Zara they were able to finance the crusade. But at Zara they also learned about Prince Alexios, son of Isaac II, who had escaped from prison in Byzantium and came to meet the leaders of the crusade. The young pretender, plotting against his uncle Alexios III, offered 200,000 silver marks in support if they would restore him to the imperial throne. He also accepted that the Church of Constantinople should become subject to the pope. After much discussion, it was agreed that the fleet should make another detour, to Constantinople, to install Alexios as rightful emperor, collect the sums promised and then proceed to Alexandria. Many knights, however, left the expedition at this point, disillusioned by the delays in getting to the eastern Mediterranean.

  In the spring of 1203, the fleet duly set sail from Zara, anchored outside the walls of Constantinople, and within a few weeks installed Alexios IV Angelos on the throne. But then he had to fulfil the terms agreed at Zara, which proved much harder. After nearly a year when Alexios failed to pay the crusaders, a delegation went to warn him:

  Our lords have frequently called on you… to carry out the contract made between yourselves and them. If you do this, they will be extremely pleased; but if not, they will no longer regard you as their lord and their friend, but will use every means in their power to obtain their due.

  Geoffrey Villehardouin continued: ‘The Greeks were much amazed and deeply shocked by this openly defiant message… The noise of angry voices filled the hall.’ In his history of the crusade, written later, he reported that he was extremely glad to get out of the Blachernai Palace alive. Once the challenge had been made, hostile action became more likely, and when no payment was forthcoming it became inevitable. In April 1204, the crusaders attacked Constantinople with their most sophisticated siege weapons, which had been destined for Muslim-held Jerusalem. After four days, they forced an entry over the sea walls and subjected the Byzantine capital to a five-day sack. They then elected Count Baldwin of Flanders as emperor and the Venetian, Thomas Morosini, as patriarch, setting up a Latin Empire. The Byzantines were forced into exile.

  In this development, the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, played a decisive role. He had lived in Constantinople in the 1180s and lost an eye in an attack on Venetian property. Now he suggested that the besiegers agree a division of the estimated spoils of war, a Venetian technique which had also been used at Zara. The Partitio terrarum Imperii Romaniae was drawn up in 1204 to justify and consolidate anticipated gains, not only of the city’s wealth but also of the territory of Romania, a western name for the empire. When the city’s impressive fortifications looked secure, it was Dandalo’s expert knowledge of the Golden Horn that proved critical to the success of the final attack. Venice was also the power that gained most from it, in that the conquest of Constantinople gave it rights of occupation over all the trading ports it used. The Venetian commercial empire, established as a result of the Fourth Crusade, was far more successful and permanent than the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which lasted less than sixty years.

  For Byzantium, however, the experience of the sack of April 1204 left indelible wounds. Both Greek and Latin authors preserve vivid eyewitness accounts: Geoffrey Villehardouin, Robert de Clari, Gunter of Pairis (a monastery in Germany) on the western side, and Niketas Choniates, the greatest Byzantine medieval historian, on the eastern. Both sides agree about the extensive looting and devastation, which was increased by fires. Gunter writes:

  so great a wealth of gold and silver, so great a magnificence of gems and clothing, so great a profusion of valuable trade goods, so great a bounty of foodstuffs, homes so exceptional and so filled with commodities of every sort… suddenly transformed [the crusaders] from aliens and paupers into very rich citizens.

  Niketas laments:

  Constantine’s fine city, the common delight and boast of all nations, was laid waste by fire and blackened by soot, taken and emptied of all wealth, public and private, as well as that which was consecrated to God, by the scattered nations of the West… the dashing to earth of the venerable icons and the flinging of the relics of the saints… seizing as plunder the precious chalices and patens… the outcries of men, screams of women, the taking of captives… and raping of bodies.

  After five days, Choniates and his family only escaped from the destruction thanks to a Venetian friend, a wine merchant, who pretended that these Greeks were his booty.

  The Latin occupation of Constantinople had many long-lasting effects, not least the removal of many relics, antiquities and treasures to the West. In 1207, for example, Heinrich von Ülmen offered a magnificent gold and enamel reliquary of the True Cross, made in about 963, to his local bishop. Its presence today in the treasury of the cathedral of Limburg is a reminder of the looting of the greatest Christian city of the medieval world. Four ancient bronze horses that had guarded the Hippodrome and inspired competitors from the fifth century, were taken to Venice to adorn the façade of San Marco, where replicas are now visible (plate 30). The crusaders removed sixth-century carvings from the church of St Polyeuktos, sculptures, icons, silks, manuscripts and precious liturgical objects – all part of the vast booty divided between the crusaders.

  In this way the leaders of the Fourth Crusade subverted the ideals of the First. The spirit of Christian pilgrimage and adventure, inspired by Pope Urban II’s sermon at Clermont, was destroyed by the Latin occupation of Constantinople. Although this did not put an end to crusading, its dark shadow hung over all attempts to re-create Christian unity against Islam.

  25

 
The Towers of Trebizond, Arta, Nicaea and Thessalonike

  A colossus in height and clearing the air, it strives somehow to reach even the sky… the shape of the tower, namely the shape of a delicate honey-comb; a hexagon raises its most beautiful shape to the stars and to the beauties of the firmament. To us God gave a tower of strength… a towered fortification of beauty, a tower of ineffable joy.

  John Geometres, poem on a tower, post 989

  By 12 April 1204, the greatest city in Christendom was full of smouldering ruins; its palaces and the great houses of its leading families had been pillaged, their hangings and glorious wardrobes torched, their roofs gutted by fire. Entire libraries and archives of documents within, if not already burned, were exposed to rain and would become food for insects and rodents. Many of the revealing small objects of daily life, from tools to kitchenware, icon corners and prayer books, accumulated over hundreds of years, were smashed and broken. Some of the booty taken by the conquerors now survives in western treasuries, but many fine Byzantine objects were lost in 1204. How many, we don’t know, and whether even more would have been lost later to other enemies is beside the point – the destruction took place there and then.

  Those days in April 1204 have recently been subjected to intensive re-examination as scholars all over the world noted the 800th anniversary of the sack of Constantinople. Pope John Paul II apologized for the event, which provided an occasion to take stock of the attitudes of modern historians to Byzantium. Despite the obvious presence of Byzantium in the medieval West, there is still a widespread ignorance of the empire’s contribution to European development as the force which checked the expansion of Islam into the Balkans and the protective shield behind which the fragmented western kingdoms developed the notion of Europe. This still influences some western debate about the Fourth Crusade, which relies on a stereotype of Byzantium as a grey, dead zone: a series of emperors and battles for over a thousand years and little more. Byzantinists may be to blame for writing complicated histories which fail to bring to life the inner dynamic of the empire. In turn, specialists of western medieval history cling to this dull picture. It is all too easy to fall back on the initial Enlightenment view of the empire as a moribund state, peculiar unto itself, and not worthy of closer attention.

  One source of this stereotype, although this is very difficult to document, seems to be the very storming and destruction of the Byzantine capital in 1204. In part, the empire brought the attack upon itself. Emperor Alexios IV and his advisers were extraordinarily stupid and complacent to allow a fully equipped siege army to remain camped outside its gates, neither paying off the crusaders as they had been promised, nor attacking and destroying them. The doge’s detailed knowledge of the sea walls contributed to the successful assault, but the Venetians had learnt the skills of diplomacy and the savage combination of trade and force from Byzantium. Venice was partly a product of the empire, as well as its competitor. After the capture of the city, when the crusaders divided up the empire, Venice claimed the largest part. Pope Innocent III sent western clerics to occupy the lands now brought under the authority of the Church of Rome, and forced orthodox bishops and monks into exile.

  But now the Christian West had to explain to itself and to justify the philistine massacre and destruction of the finest city in Christendom. How could the forces dedicated to fighting the Muslim infidel have burned the icons and desecrated the churches of the greatest Christian metropolis? Only because Byzantium deserved it! The Byzantine empire had to be seen as treacherous, doomed, effeminate, somehow repugnant, and disobedient to Rome. The outcome of the Fourth Crusade also confirmed to Pope Innocent and his successors, and to western rulers and monks who had participated in the crusades, that the Greeks were essentially crafty and treacherous. They always used diplomacy to conceal their weakness, and when forced to fight they proved cowardly. The Byzantine system of imperial government was also considered unstable, because it permitted a rebel to become emperor and an unsuccessful ruler to be deposed and blinded. This appeared weak to the nascent monarchies of Europe, where rulers were trying to strengthen their authority. Condemnation of its ancient political system went hand in hand with admiration for its relics, gold and silver objects, icons and silks, which deserved better homes than Byzantium. In this way, the crusaders justified their own pillage and looting. The negative stereotype of the term ‘Byzantine’, as if it characterizes a culture which does not deserve to exist, stretches back to the bad faith of the sack of 1204.

  The devastation was such that Byzantium might never have recovered. Where many states would have succumbed to such a blow to the heart, occupied for fully half a century, Byzantium in fact reemerged in a plurality of new forms in different centres. Thanks to the inner vitality of its civilization, the empire was to last another 250 years.

  This is one of the most surprising things I discovered in writing this book. I fully expected that Constantinople itself would play a central role, as a fabulous and exceptional city with its buildings and its trade. What I had not expected was how often I would be recording the compelling inventiveness and novelty of the broader aspects of Byzantine civilization, from its government and religion to its military and intellectual skills. It had the ability to develop a secret, sea-borne explosive artillery and keep the secret for centuries. It could generate and survive a profoundly divisive argument over the role of icons, identity and religious belief. When Latin Christendom and the Muslim East insisted on keeping the Holy Book in its sacred languages of Latin and Arabic, Byzantium had the audacity to translate the Greek Bible into a written language which its own scholars had invented in order to facilitate the conversion of the Slavs. It had the discipline to mint and maintain a stable coinage for over seven hundred years. It had the ingenuity to develop royal forms of power while maintaining Roman administration. Time and again, the extraordinary combination of Roman, pagan, Christian and Greek inheritances gave it the capacity to recover from adversities rather than to disappear, leaving only a trace of its achievements. The Byzantium that gainsays the generally accepted stereotype is this lively, inventive society, passionately believing in itself.

  The test of this argument, that the greatness of the metropolis was sustained by the profound resources of the civilization of which it was the head, came at the moment when Byzantium was decapitated and the hinterland had to respond to its capture and takeover by foreign forces. What happened after 1204, when westerners set up a Latin empire at its centre and occupied its palace for fifty-seven years, should reveal the essential elements of the rest of Byzantine society. And what happened is that mini-Byzantine empires sprang up and Byzantium re-emerged in a plurality of cities, accompanied by an outpouring of Byzantine artistic activity.

  In Trebizond on the eastern border, two Komnenos brothers established an empire which was far more than a city-state and continued to rule itself from 1204 to 1461. In the far west, 2,000km away in western Greece, Epiros became the centre of another Byzantine power, based on the cities of Arta and Thessalonike, the most active port in the empire, and declared itself to be the true heir of Byzantium. And closer to the walls of Constantinople, across the Sea of Marmara, another empire, based on Nicaea and staffed by refugees from Constantinople, enjoyed a magnificent revival. Even areas which remained permanently under Venetian rule, as Crete did until the Turks captured it in 1669, never lost their Byzantine character, which was indelibly embedded in the Greek language and religion, and is manifested in new frescoes, icons, histories and poems. The strengths and landscapes of different responses to the loss of Constantinople all confirm the depth of the educational, administrative, cultural and military capacities of Byzantium’s traditions and their ability to respond to challenges, The stereotype of a monolithic, bureaucratic, feeble, corrupt, over-complicated and ineffective empire seems completely false.

  During the last two decades of the twelfth century, provincial uprisings had already occurred, reflecting a growing antagonism towards the ruling centr
e of Constantinople. The usurpation of Andronikos Komnenos in 1182 and the murder of his nephew, the young emperor Alexios II, appear to have been the signal for Balkan revolts – in Serbia Stefan Nemanja extended his power, founding an independent dynasty which would rule until 1371, while in Bulgaria two brothers, Asen and Peter, broke away from Byzantium and established a new capital at Trnovo. A sense of frustration in outlying areas at paying heavy taxes to Constantinople and receiving nothing in exchange is evident in the complaints of Michael Choniates, Metropolitan of Athens (1180–1205):

  What do you lack? Not the wheat-bearing plains of Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly, which are farmed by us; nor the wine of Euboea, Ptelion, Chios and Rhodes, pressed by us; nor the fine garments woven by our Theban and Corinthian fingers, nor all our wealth, which flows, as many rivers flow into one sea, to the Queen City.

  This disaffection was mirrored on Cyprus, which rebelled in 1185 and gave Richard I of England (‘the Lionheart’) a pretext for his conquest of the island during the Third Crusade. (Later he sold it to Guy de Lusignan, the ex-king of Jerusalem.) Similarly, within Byzantium independent leaders emerged in control of their own cities: at Philadelphia in western Asia Minor, Theodore Mankaphas minted his own coins. In Greece, Leo Sgouros made the castle of Acrocorinth his centre, and an unidentified ruler took control of Methone, on the southwest coast of the Peloponnese. These local leaders (archons) claimed quasi-imperial authority and disrupted central government from Constantinople.

  The events of 1204 sealed the splintering of imperial authority: the Komnenos brothers in Trebizond, Michael Komnenos Doukas in Arta and Theodore Laskaris in Nicaea strengthened a regional partition of Byzantium. Ignoring all these developments, Alexios III Angelos continued to consider himself emperor in absentia. He allied himself with Leo Sgouros, and died fighting against Laskaris in Asia Minor in 1211/12. Some crusaders who had participated in the sack of April 1204 returned home with their booty, but others set out to lay claim to the territories distributed by the Partitio terrarum Imperii Romaniae. As western knights jostled with local archons to conquer lands for themselves, all the provinces of the empire were affected by political turmoil. From Constantinople, Boniface of Montferrat led a crusader group towards Thessalonike, which the Latin Emperor Baldwin had allotted to him; members of the de la Roche family made their way to Thebes and Athens, and Geoffrey Villehardouin, nephew of the historian, and William of Champlitte continued south to set up their own principality of Achaia in the Peloponnese. They all met resistance organized by the ex-emperor Alexios III, other dissatisfied Byzantine leaders and Bulgars. Meanwhile, the Venetians established their control over numerous ports in the Aegean, to which they added Crete, bought from Boniface, who had no naval means of conquering it. These maritime centres formed the core of their commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean down to the seventeenth century.