God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  This haemorrhaging of troops exposed two central flaws in the planning. The lack of generally accepted authority, not uncommon on crusade, was compounded by the leadership’s decision to keep their strategy a secret, at least from many recruits outside the orbit of the inner circle. If the expedition had been bound for Acre, the Fourth Crusade could have followed the Third and anticipated the Fifth in seeing waves of autonomous armies reaching the Holy Land over a number of sailing seasons or passages. However, many crusaders not only felt no obligation to honour the Venice treaty but, perhaps like the Flemish fleet that embarked in the summer of 1202, had little idea that the target was Egypt, still less what the timing and tactics were to be. They followed precedent and expectation in heading for Palestine. Despite Villehardouin’s blaming them for the subsequent problems encountered by the main crusade army, it is hard to see they were in any way at fault. Responsibility for the prospect of the terms of the Treaty of Venice coming unstuck, and with it the whole elaborate and possibly over-prescriptive crusade plan, lay squarely with those who had agreed to it in the first place. They now had to cope with the consequences.

  16. Europe and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

  17

  The Fourth Crusade: Diversion

  In the early summer of 1205 the papal legate Peter Capuano arrived in Constantinople from the Holy Land. A year earlier, the Byzantine capital had been captured by the army of westerners and much of southern Greece occupied in a campaign portrayed at the time as preliminary to the long-anticipated attack on Egypt. The diversion of the crusade in the autumn of 1202 to the Christian city of Zara in Dalmatia then, the following spring, to Constantinople had flouted papal prohibitions and aroused loud dissent within the crusaders’ own ranks. Many deserted. Only a rump of the great crusade host that had left western Europe in 1202 achieved the remarkable feat of storming the walls of Constantinople and taking the city in April 1204. Those who promoted these attacks consistently argued that they were necessary to keep the crusade intact and ensure the ultimate goal of the recovery of Jerusalem. Their success provided its own justification. However, a year on, the task of preserving the Greek conquests continued to absorb all the effort and attention of the crusaders. The legate had a history of doing what the crusade’s leaders wanted. Ostensibly on his own initiative and with his legatine authority he absolved the crucesignati in Greece from their vows to complete their journey to Jerusalem, thus ending the Fourth Crusade. The objective of Egypt and the recovery of the Holy Places remained as remote as on the day Innocent III launched the enterprise in August 1198. The pope, furious at his legate’s presumption and humiliated that the compromises of the previous three years had been for nothing, voiced a common view that the crusaders had ‘pursued temporal wages’ not the way of Christ.1 Instead of preparing the road to Jerusalem, the campaigns of 1202–4 had, in retrospect, not been diversions at all, but the sum of the crusade’s ambition. How this had happened, whether through malign conspiracy, organized hypocrisy or accidental concatenations of events, became and remains a subject of fierce debate, not least because the outcome was, on any standard, remarkable.

  VENICE

  As the crusaders gathered at Venice in the summer of 1202 they were quartered on the island of the Lido on the eastern edge of the lagoon.2 The growing anxiety over fulfilling the terms of the 1201 treaty soon turned to alarm. Despite the large numbers gathering in Venice during the summer of 1202, it became clear that they would fall far short of the estimated complement. Villehardouin implied only a third of the 33,500 arrived; Robert of Clari thought only a quarter of the knights and half of the infantry.3 An army of perhaps 12,000 represented a huge logistic and human undertaking, especially when the Venetian crews and galley companies are added. But, as the rows of empty ships, galleys and horse transports in the lagoon mutely demonstrated, it fell far short of what was required to fulfil the contract, exposing a measure of confusion as to who would pay what proportion of the costs. Was each man to find his own costs or to contribute to the central fund that would be subsidized by the leaders? If each were to pay his own costs, why should he be obliged to follow the formula agreed in 1201 of two marks per person and four per horse? The calculations were complicated by the networks of support provided by lords for their followers and by the probable attendance of larger numbers of hired troops. The papal legate, Peter Capuano, who arrived on 22 July, compounded the funding crisis when he absolved the destitute, sick, women and non-combatants from their vows, enhancing military efficiency while reducing the numbers available to pay. One Rhineland witness, perhaps talking of those he consorted with, remembered that ‘a minority remained in Venice’.4

  The delay caused by the lack of money was matched by the slowness of the muster. Although Baldwin of Flanders had been in Venice since early summer, Boniface of Montferrat only arrived in mid-August. The conditions in the crowded crusader camp on the Lido varied from the comfortable to the desperate, depending on status, wealth and association with the entourages of the great. The Venetian control of access to the island, to the city and to markets could be used to put pressure on the crusaders to honour their contract. The political cohesion of the expedition proved stubbornly elusive. The high command’s attempts to negotiate with the Venetians were always subject to the approval not just of the other baronial chiefs but the wider body of crucesignati, a three-tiered structure reminiscent of both the First Crusade and the Third in Palestine. As the doge began to press for payment, the responses of these different groups became crucial to the survival of the expedition.

  The first expedient was to insist that every crusader paid his own passage. According to Robert of Clari, unlike the treaty of 1201, where payment had been calculated per capita, the leaders fixed rates according to function and perhaps ability to pay: a knight paid four marks, mounted sergeants two and infantry one, with horses, as before, costing another four marks each. As even this proved too much for many, ‘each man paid what he could’.5 The burden of collecting what amounted to a tax on movables fell on the barons, who were nonetheless faced with the problem that the sums raised were less than half the agreed price. A proposed further discretionary levy on those still with cash was refused by many, who not unreasonably objected that they had already paid for their passages; if the Venetians would not take them then they would go elsewhere or abandon the enterprise altogether. Embarrassed but determined not to allow the disintegration of the expedition, the high command was forced to hand over great quantities of their own gold plate and silverware. Baldwin of Flanders and perhaps others supplemented their contributions with borrowed money, adding to the debt. Many crusaders were left unmoved by such commitment. Some regarded the Venetians as simply rapacious.6 Only a minority seemed to have shared Villehardouin’s sense of impugned honour at the prospect of breaking the oath he had sworn to the 1201 contract. More than any previous large-scale crusade to the east, the Fourth Crusade had become the victim of confused and contradictory expectations.

  After all efforts, the crusaders remained 34,000 marks – 40 per cent – short.7 Many crusaders on the Lido had barely enough left to survive as winter approached. However, what appeared a disaster for the crusaders also placed the Venetians, especially Dandolo, in a very awkward position. The doge had invested much political as well as financial, industrial and commercial capital in the project, his own and the city’s. By presenting the plan as a corporate enterprise, he had pinned Venice’s civic pride to the expedition. The option of keeping the money and allowing the crusaders to go home, while possibly legally sustainable, would incur a great loss in prestige as well as finance. If Dandolo wanted a return on the venture, it was in his interest to devise a way to keep the contract alive and acceptable to the crusaders and to his citizens. In any scheme to rearrange the crusaders’ debt, Dandolo knew how eager the high command – if no one else – was to save face and advance the objectives of the crusade. The ingredients of any solution were the existence of a huge bespoke arm
ada; the crusaders’ guilt, debt and physical vulnerability; the presence of one of the largest and potentially most effective fighting forces seen in the Adriatic since classical times; the sustained commitment of Venice to the ultimate goal of the crusade; and immediate Venetian political interests. Dandolo’s scheme to break the deadlock relied on all of these.

  Some time in September 1202, the doge proposed a temporary moratorium on the crusaders’ debt, which would now be held on account to be paid off by the proceeds of future conquests. In return, the crusaders were to embark in the already prepared fleet to assist the Venetians capture the Dalmatian port of Zara, with their share of any booty, it was hoped, satisfying the debt. This move was portrayed as the first step towards Egypt which, given the time of year, was out of reach until the spring. To sweeten the pill, and allay doubts as to Venetian sincerity, in a carefully theatrical performance, the aged Dandolo himself took the cross and promised to accompany the expedition.8 Despite the agreement of the crusade high command, who presumably saw little alternative, the plan to attack Zara was highly controversial. Zara was a semi-independent Christian maritime city that had spent much of the twelfth century under the control of Venice. However, from the 1180s, despite numerous Venetian attacks, Zara enjoyed the protection of the king of Hungary, and in 1202 King Emeric was a crusader. Any campaign against Zara would attract the condemnation of the pope on the grounds that Zara was Christian and its overlord, as a crusader, entitled to the protection of the church. The leaders of the crusade who struck the deal were well aware of its sensitivity. Although they were told the good news of the freezing of the debt, according to Robert of Clari, who was there, ‘the host as a whole did not know anything of this plan, save only the highest men’.9 The leadership clung to the line that the end justified the means, a dominant theme of Villehardouin’s account: anything rather than ‘the army broken up and our enterprise a failure’. When challenged by the bishop of Halberstadt, Peter Capuano, the papal legate, acknowledged the problem, insisting that the pope ‘would prefer to overlook whatever was unbefitting of them rather than have this pilgrimage campaign disintegrate’. The legate was entirely wrong. As soon as he heard of it Innocent III sent letters prohibiting the attack and threatening all those involved with excommunication.10

  ZARA

  Whatever the murmurings and dissent, temporarily, the leadership’s obfuscation worked. Early in October, the great fleet set sail. Strangely, it left without its supposed leader, Boniface of Montferrat. Nervous, perhaps, at such a controversial operation, he may have been more concerned to explore the wider diplomatic possibilities for the crusade army opened up by the presence in Italy for most of 1202 of the Byzantine claimant, Alexius Angelus. Boniface was hardly missed. The size and quality of the fleet impressed not just those it carried. The citizens of the coastal cities of the northern Adriatic in its path quickly submitted to Venice. Zara would have followed suit if the unity of its opponents had not suddenly collapsed. Confronted with the prospect of dispossessing co-religionists, the consciences of many rebelled, ironically provoking not just a serious crisis for the crusade but the very thing they most opposed, a violent attack on the Christian city. The day after the fleet arrived on 11 November 1202, the Zaran authorities sought a negotiated surrender that would give the Venetians the city and its possessions in return for sparing the lives of its inhabitants. With the approval of most of the crusader leadership, Dandolo was prepared to accept the terms. But the Zarans withdrew their offer after contact with a group of crusader dissidents led by Simon of Montfort and Robert of Boves. They told the Zarans that the crusaders would never help the Venetians fight for Zara, so the city had nothing to gain by surrender, as there would be no attack. Unfortunately for them, the Zarans believed this, thus passing up a chance of a peaceful settlement.11 Whatever else, the crusader force knew how to invest a city. Scores of siege engines, presumably carried with the fleet in pre-fabricated sections as on the Third Crusade, were erected. When direct assault achieved nothing, mining was begun. The odds were clear. On 24 November Zara surrendered. The lives of the surviving citizens were in theory spared, although some killing occurred. The city and its contents were divided between the crusaders and the Venetians, who settled for the winter as uneasy neighbours in the conquered port.

  The failure of the initial peace negotiations exposed the divisions of opinion within the crusader army and its peculiar political dynamics. Having scuppered the discussions with the Zarans, the faction hostile to the diversion provoked uproar when Abbot Guy of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, an associate of Simon of Montfort, produced a letter from Innocent III expressly forbidding an attack on Zara on pain of excommunication and cancellation of the crusade indulgences. The Venetians, incandescent with rage and unmoved in purpose, insisted that the crusaders honour their agreement to help capture Zara, Dandolo declaring: ‘I will not in any degree give over being avenged on them [the Zarans], no, not even for the pope’.12 Abbot Guy only narrowly avoided being beaten up. Once again the crusade leaders found themselves in a moral trap, to keep faith with their allies or to obey the pope (and canon law). Either way incurred dishonour. There seems to have been a view among those most committed to the Venetian alliance that the conundrum could be solved satisfactorily and honour saved by fulfilling their obligations, even the distasteful ones, in sequence. Once all intervening agreements with the Venetians had been concluded, then the original oath to recover Jerusalem would fall into place. This perception of the crusade as a series of contracts was shared by participants on opposite sides of the arguments over the diversions. Those wishing to preserve the Venetian alliance – and transport – could claim that the best interests of the crusade were served by keeping the expedition and abiding by accords freely negotiated, a sort of moral pragmatism. Their opponents countered with a far simpler slogan. Simon of Montfort was recorded as saying, ‘I have not come here to destroy Christians’.13 Yet, as in Venice, the pragmatists prevailed. Simon withdrew from the crusader camp, taking no part in the siege. The following spring, he left the army altogether with a large group of sympathizers. After some help from the king of Hungary, ‘our enemy’ Villehardouin called him, they reached Italy and sailed to the Holy Land.14

  The crisis at Zara revealed just how secular the direction of the crusade had become. A striking feature of the whole campaign was the lack of ecclesiastical lead, partly the result of the absence of a papal legate. Peter Capuano, after his mealy-mouthed approval of the Zara plan, had not accompanied the fleet from Venice but had gone to Rome, whence he departed for the Holy Land to await events and, he presumably hoped, the arrival of the crusade. Without the authority of even a pusillanimous legate, the churchmen with the crusade army alternately squabbled among themselves on partisan lines mirroring those within the soldiery or followed the wishes of the commanders. At Zara, the majority – how large is impossible to guess – of the barons persisted in supporting the Venetians. Their actions were later justified to the pope as driven by necessity rather than choice. Yet to maintain the approval of the rank and file, they deliberately suppressed the papal letter. It would be facile to argue that the less exalted crusaders possessed greater religious commitment than their more sophisticated leaders. However, away from the baronial council, the issues appeared clearer, the ambition to recover Jerusalem more direct, attitudes reflected in a number of surviving accounts from sources not privy to the pressures on the high command. The profile of popular opinion in the army of the Fourth Crusade matches those found during the First and Third. The ‘commons’, their own term, were far from simple or ignorant.15 They appeared well informed, articulate and capable of exerting organized, precise, effective political influence, reminiscent of the early weeks of 1099 or the Palestine war of 1191–2. Leaders could not ignore the led; hence the repeated concealment during the Fourth Crusade. A number of eyewitnesses away from the baronial council were highly critical of the Venetians, if not their own leadership, and recorded extensive discontent with so
me of the decisions reached. After Zara fell there was serious rioting between crusaders and Venetians; little love appeared lost. A sense of exploitation was, perhaps, inevitable. In the winter of 1202–3, defection became endemic, some giving up altogether, but most apparently intent on travelling directly to the Holy Land. This raises the two related questions of how the leadership was able to push through their decisions and why they chose to do so.