THE ‘GOOD EXCUSE’
The plan to help Alexius Angelus depose his uncle Alexius III presented to the crusaders at Zara in December 1202 came neither out of the blue nor from conspiratorial shadow. By the end of 1202, Alexius’s ambitions were such an open secret as not to have been a secret at all as he hawked his claims around Europe. Alexius had escaped to the west with the help of the Pisans in 1201, making his way to the court of his sister Irene’s husband, Philip of Swabia. At Philip’s Christmas court at Hagenau, Alexius met Boniface of Montferrat, but there is no evidence that any deal was struck; circumstantial evidence suggests the reverse. Early in 1202, perhaps in February, Alexius tried his luck at the papal Curia and was met by Innocent’s absolute refusal to countenance support for his claim. Not least, Innocent was hardly likely to favour a plan or a puppet sponsored by Philip of Swabia. However, these negotiations were conducted quite openly, Alexius’s presentation at the Curia attracting a large crowd of cardinals and other notables. On leaving Rome, Alexius returned to consult Philip of Swabia. The muster of the crusade gave Alexius renewed hope. During his stay at Verona in the summer, according to Villehardouin, he made contact with Boniface of Montferrat again and with the crusade leadership.30
Both the pope and Alexius III were aware of these discussions in November 1202, by which time the crusade ‘principes’ had despatched Peter Capuano to discuss a possible attack on Constantinople. While the pope reiterated his opposition to any such scheme, he made clear to Alexius III his desire for church union and the emperor’s own vulnerability.31 The chronology hinted at in Innocent III’s letter shows that the essentials of the December proposals were in place before the crusade fleet sailed for Zara in October, even if those outside the circle of leadership were unaware of them. Given papal opposition to the Zara campaign and to Philip of Swabia, and the sensitivity of the mass of crusaders to any perceived deviation of purpose, discretion was important. Peter Capuano came to Rome to obtain papal approval for further negotiations. There, he found ambassadors from Alexius III, very worried about precisely the same thing. It was another measure of how detached Innocent had become from the realities of the crusade that he could imagine his strictures would exert any influence. Throughout 1202 to 1204, Innocent was handicapped by poor or delayed information mediated though those who pandered to his wishful thinking. Even after his prohibition on the attack on Zara had been blatantly disregarded, Innocent clung to the hope that the object of the crusade would be achieved in the end.32 Once Peter Capuano and the crusade parted company at Venice, one for Rome, the other for Zara, Innocent’s dilemma was fixed. The only control over the expedition left him was its cancellation.
The prospects for young Alexius improved as the crusaders’ debts rose. Crucially, Boniface of Montferrat was persuaded to back the scheme, perhaps during his absence from the crusade fleet between October and December 1202, confirming that the diversion to Constantinople to some degree represented a revival of Hohenstaufen eastern policy evident in Henry VI’s crusade plan. The Venetians were greatly in favour of the move, officially as it would secure the funding and provisioning of the expedition to Outremer. From their privileged position within Byzantium, the Venetians knew how feeble the Greek naval defences were and how the provinces were splitting away from the centre. Backing a successful coup would enhance Venice’s privileged position in the empire, stealing a march on the Genoese and Pisans, whose links with young Alexius could usefully be severed in the process. The young Alexius’s promised bounty offered full compensation for the Venetian capital expended in building and provisioning the crusade fleet. Armed with a highly dangerous army and equipped with a magnificent fighting fleet, the Venetians saw Alexius’s offer as a unique opportunity. Although there is no reason to suppose the Venetians had planned it, they would have been eccentric not to embrace it.
The crusader high command agreed, effectively settling the crusade’s future course. Alexius was summoned from Philip of Swabia’s court. However, the arguments reflected profound divisions within the army that could not easily be dismissed by the leadership’s force majeur. Hugh of St Pol argued that, without the proposed Greek subsidy, the Jerusalem journey was impossible, with no money for wages for knights and men-at-arms or siege engines.33 The Venice treaty now only had six months to run. While some thought this argued for an immediate dash for the Nile or Holy Land, others, of the leadership’s persuasion, insisted Alexius’s proposal provided funding for an additional year at least. Money talked. In retrospect, Gunther of Pairis identified five reasons for the adoption of Alexius’s scheme: political – the influence of Philip of Swabia; legal – the legitimacy of young Alexius’s claim; pragmatic – the assistance available for the crusade; religious – the end of the schism; and opportunist – the Venetians’ eagerness for Alexius’s money and the chance to assert ‘sovereignty over the entire sea’. As Gunther noted, Venetian opinion mattered; they were providing the transport wherever the crusade went.34
The arguments appeared both simpler and more difficult in the camp at Zara. On news of the proposals and the willingness of the leadership to agree, defections accelerated. Reactions varied. Two separate objections emerged, one of principle, that fighting Christians was wrong; the other more practical, that the crusade should not delay in attacking Egypt. The leadership’s arguments were crafted to refute the former, insisting the diversion was just, and to reassure the latter, by presenting the Greek strategy as supportive and preparatory to the war further east. Not all were convinced. Some simply left, including, damagingly, the cousin of Louis of Blois, Reynald of Montmirail, who went to the Holy Land. Robert of Clari noted the opposition, but seemed more swayed by the stories of Greek atrocities against Alexius and Boniface of Montferrat’s family, and by the religious sanction given by the pliant clergy on the grounds that Alexius, the rightful heir, had been disinherited. Thus the diversion ‘would not be a sin but a righteous deed’ (grans aumosnes, literally ‘a great charitable act’).35 The suggestion that the diversion would constitute a just war, designed to counter the opposition of principle, cut little ice with some rank and file, who apparently swore oaths not to go to Greece.36 Even the leaders who accepted the terms faced the awkward problem of trying to persuade the pope to lift the excommunication placed on them for attacking Zara, even if they could not gain his blessing for the Constantinople venture. The messy scramble for the army’s support and the pope’s approval hardly indicates a carefully laid plot. Nonetheless, the acceptance by the high command of Alexius’s scheme reduced to two the options facing the crusaders at Zara: to stay with the fleet and sail to Byzantium; or to find their own way home or to the east.
The pope bowed to pressure and assurances from the crusade high command of their penitence for the attack on Zara, which they argued was forced on them by necessity.37 However, anxious lest their rights to Zara be undermined, the Venetians remained unrepentant and excommunicated, although Innocent forgave Boniface of Montferrat for suppressing publication of this bull of excommunication in the interests of army unity. The continued excommunication of their carriers reduced the crusaders and the pope to intricate sophistical contortions to allow soldiers of Christ to accept transport from those under the church’s anathema. More generally, the pope had placed himself in an increasingly false position. His refusal in February to condone any further attack ‘on the lands of Christians’, was diluted by his acceptance that a ‘just and necessary cause’ might allow an exception.38 To some observers, Alexius’s offer to submit the Greek church to Roman authority simply followed Innocent’s own stated policy, making his disquiet less easy to understand or even believe. His repeated prohibition of 21 April came as the fleet was leaving Zara for Byzantium. In June, he publicly rejected the justification for the diversion put up by the army’s bishops:
not one of you should rashly flatter himself that he is allowed to occupy or prey upon the land of the Greeks because it might be too little obedient to the Apostolic see and because t
he emperor of Constantinople usurped the empire… it is not your business to judge their crimes.39
Too little: too late. As the letter was being drafted, the crusade fleet was already edging its way into the Sea of Marmora.
By the time the crusade sailed from Zara in April 1203, their ranks had been further depleted by the departure of Simon of Montfort and the abbot of Vaux. At least this removed a vociferous source of dissent. However, even after leaving Zara, the issue of the crusade’s destination was not finally settled. The fleet left Zara in stages, agreeing to muster at Corfu. The young Alexius only arrived at Zara on 23 April 1203, where he was greeted by Boniface of Montferrat and Doge Dandolo. After a propaganda stop at Durazzo to allow Alexius to receive the public, although hardly unforced, approval of a Greek city, the marquis, doge and pretender caught up with the main army camped on Corfu. There the crusade almost fell apart. Faced by the Greek pretender, a large section of the army, as much as half, Villehardouin remembered, balked at the final commitment to restore him. Most of the ideological dissidents may have already left at Zara, but on Corfu many still worried about the propriety of the diversion as well as the practical commitment to the Holy Land. Only strenuous argument, earnest promises, histrionic pleading and emotional blackmail by the small coterie of the high command preserved what was left of the expedition intact. Among the most committed to the Constantinople venture were at least three of the deputation who had negotiated the 1201 treaty of Venice, as well as the count of Flanders and the Hohenstaufen faction, including Marquis Boniface and the bishop of Halberstadt. Once again, money, the control of the paid troops and the support of the Venetians probably swung the day. Even so, Alexius had publicly to swear to abide by the terms of an agreement, which now specified that, after Michaelmas 1203, when the Venetian treaty expired, the leaders were obliged to provide any member of the army with ships to take them to Palestine. While there is no evidence that the leaders dissembled in their acquiescence to this – in August 1203 Hugh of St Pol was still envisaging an attack on Egypt in the spring of 1204–such a bargain, after all the contractual problems the expedition had already experienced, reveals a surprising degree of trust and optimism.40
This optimism was immediately challenged as both the local citizens of the port of Corfu and the Greek ecclesiastical hierarchy made their hostility to Alexius and his western alliance very plain.41 As the fleet pulled away from Corfu on 24 May 1203, its prospects looked far from certain. Since Venice the previous summer, the expedition had lost much of its fighting force, some as casualties, more to disease, but most to desertion, an army now, it was observed not entirely speciously, ‘as insignificant as it was underrated’.42 The pope, from whom the crusaders derived their summons and their privileges, had forbidden them to take the path they were pursuing. Half of ‘the Christian army’,43 the Venetians, were actually excommunicate. Their candidate for the throne, Alexius, was an untested young man of breeding but no experience or proven popularity. Past western involvement in Byzantine dynastic feuding had been less than happy. Over a century of assault from Norman Sicily had failed to secure any permanent territorial gains at Byzantine expense. Constantinople had never been captured by a foreign enemy since its foundation 900 years earlier. Success seemed to rest on believing Alexius’s own questionable estimation of his likely Greek support. This hardly smacked of some deep-seated, long-planned plot to subvert the crusade. As it was, and had been since Venice, expectations were to be repeatedly undone by events.
The Fourth Crusade found itself before the walls of Constantinople after a series of contingent decisions each of which created new unforeseen problems. Neither some fanciful conspiracy nor a general mind-set allegedly susceptible to anti-Greek propaganda adequately explains the course of events. Instead, conflicting ties of solidarity, honour, obligation and advantage exerted the strongest pressures, not least because the expedition was run on remarkably consensual lines. Although a small, possibly unrepresentative group determined the eventual destination of the crusade, their decisions were always subject to debate, scrutiny and dissent among the wider body of crucesignati. Proponents of the diversions were openly unapologetic. Villehardouin saw them as a matter of honour; Hugh of St Pol, in the context of the union of the churches, called the attack on Constantinople in 1203 ‘the business of Jesus Christ’, a clear association with holy war.44 The diversion to Byzantium was no accident, but rather the result of conscious choices painfully, openly and controversially reached. The motives behind them were immediate, contradictory, self-deluding and muddled rather than treacherous or malign.
CONSTANTINOPLE
The Fourth Crusade went to Constantinople to install Alexius Angelus as emperor before continuing their voyage east. In the eleven months after they reached the Bosporus, the crusaders were involved in two sieges, a number of major battles and three changes to the regime, the last producing a new Veneto-Latin order in Byzantium that changed the Greek empire for good. The protracted failure of Alexius Angelus’s scheme drew the crusaders so firmly into Byzantine domestic politics that they were unable to extricate themselves without risking their own destruction. In the end their very success in surmounting successive crises destroyed their capacity to pursue their original intention. What had been meant to secure the crusade ended it.
After a leisurely cruise around the coast of Greece, during which the fleet fanned out in raids and to collect supplies, the crusaders arrived at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic shore opposite Constantinople, on 24 June 1203. Two days later they transferred their camp to Scutari, further north on the east bank of the Bosporus. Two central facts became clear within a few days. Alexius III refused to surrender and his subjects entirely failed to share the crusaders’ enthusiasm for his nephew. When Alexius was paraded on a galley in front of the sea walls of Constantinople, none of the watching inhabitants seemed to know who he was, still less voice any support.45 His entourage of Venetians and western crusaders cannot have enhanced his attraction for the locals. Realization of this sullen indifference, especially so publicly demonstrated, must have been a nasty moment for the crusade leaders. They were too far committed – and too bereft of funds – to withdraw. Their only option was war.
On 5–6 July, a forced landing secured a bridgehead on the European shore at Galata while the Venetian galleys breached the chain across the Golden Horn, Constantinople’s natural deep-water harbour on its northern flank. The fleet transferred to the shelter of the Golden Horn, with the troops establishing a camp outside the Blachernae Gate at the north-west angle of the city walls and close to the imperial palace. On 17 July a concerted amphibious attack was launched, the Venetians managing to establish control of a long section of the walls to the east of the Blachernae Palace, which they sought to defend by starting a fire that soon ran out of control, destroying large areas, perhaps 120 acres, of the central part of the city. As the main army struggled to penetrate the land walls, they also had to contend with an attempted encirclement by Alexius III, who, faced with a robust advance by his outnumbered opponents, lamely retreated without engaging the crusaders. Much of the heaviest resistance, at Blachernae as on 5 July at Galata, was mounted by Italians and the Varangian guard mainly recruited from northern and western Europe. It said much for the plight of Byzantium that its fate was being decided by two western armies.
17. Constantinople at the Time of the Fourth Crusade
Although the assaults of 17 July failed to give the crusaders the city, its political impact achieved their aims. His city in flames, his enemies intact, his reputation disintegrating, the ill-prepared, discomposed and out-manoeuvred Alexius III, never a strong military figure, prudently chose to flee the city. By abandoning his post – ‘driven away by no one’ was Nicetas Choniates’s contemptuous if unfair comment46 – Alexius did more to wrong-foot the crusaders than he managed by his military ploys. Once his departure was known, in an attempt not to have to submit to foreign conquerors, remaining elements in the imperial bureaucracy, many of
whom, like Nicetas Choniates, had served Alexius III’s predecessor, released the blinded Isaac II and reappointed him emperor. This preserved the fiction of Byzantine imperial integrity. It also presented the crusaders with a problem, as Isaac was not party to their agreement with his son Alexius and his presence on the throne ensured the continuance of pro-Hellenic factions proximate to power. Only after a rather tense conference with representatives of the Venetians and crusaders did Isaac accede to the Zara/Corfu compact to reunite the Greek church with Rome and pay for the crusaders’ expenses and projected campaign in the east.47 The guarantee for the westerners’ price for peace was the association in the imperial dignity of young Alexius. On 1 August, the pretender was crowned co-emperor as Alexius IV. Appropriately Alexius IV’s first act, presented by Robert of Clari effectively as the condition for his elevation, was to hand over 50,000 marks to the Venetians, with another 34,000 as the balance of the crusaders’ debt. A further 16,000 went to pay off the debts incurred by crusaders to meet the transport charges in 1202, mainly with Venetian bankers. Thus all, or almost all, of 100,000 marks went to Venice and her citizens.48 Nothing could have more starkly exposed the centrality of the 1201 treaty and the continued Venetian role in the whole enterprise.
Unlike his father, whose support was feeble enough, Alexius IV had no political base within the Greek establishment. Recognizing his survival depended on the crusaders’ continued presence, Alexius IV, a frequent visitor to his patrons in the western army’s camp and knowing how they operated, privately offered to hire them to stay as his protectors in Constantinople until March 1204, when it was thought the expedition to Egypt could begin. In return he would subsidize the crusaders for a full year from the expiry of the Venice treaty, Michaelmas 1203 to Michaelmas 1204, thus underwriting a summer campaign season in the east.49 The leaders’ reaction revealed with startling clarity how the crusade was organized. After being told of Alexius’s scheme, the wider council of barons insisted they could not give their approval without the general consent of the army, ‘le comun de l’ost’. A parlement was summoned, attended by the barons, company commanders (‘li chevetaigne’) and ‘most of the knights’ (‘des chevaliers la graindre parties’).50 Those who at Corfu had only consented to stay with the expedition on condition they would be assisted to travel to Outremer in the autumn passage objected to yet another delay: ‘Give us the ships as you swore to do’.51 After the now familiar wrangling over what would best serve the interests of the Holy Land, to reassure the impatient and doubtful yet another deal was struck with the Venetians. After Alexius IV had ‘paid them enough to make it worth their while’, they promised to keep their fleet on station and at the crusaders’ disposal until Michaelmas 1204. To signal their serious intent, the leadership announced they had sent envoys to Egypt to challenge al-Adil.52 With transport apparently secured and underwritten by Alexius IV, the crusaders agreed to the emperor’s proposition. The immediate benefit to Alexius was realized when he hired Boniface of Montferrat, Hugh of St Pol and Henry of Flanders, among others, to escort him on a tour of Thrace to begin to establish his authority in provincial Byzantium and prevent a counter-coup by Alexius III. Allegedly huge amounts of gold were showered on the crusade leaders who accompanied Alexius IV, and even then some felt underpaid.53
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