Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Two decades later, Liudprand was beyond being cowed by such tricks. Now he was bishop of Cremona, representing a rival emperor of the Romans. Romanus was gone, and the Byzantine ruler was Nicephorus II, upon whom the disenchanted Liudprand heaps the most delicious invective. “A monstrosity of a man, a dwarf, fat-headed and with tiny mole's eyes,” he begins, going on from there in a similar vein. In fact, Nicephorus was one of Byzantium's most impressive warrior-emperors, the veteran of numerous campaigns against the Arabs and Slavs. But he had refused to acknowledge Otto as “emperor of the Romans,” which stuck in Liud-prand's craw.

  So did everything else on this visit, including (literally) the food, which “smelt strongly of garlic and onions and was filthy with oil and fish sauce.” Byzantine customs had become very un-Roman, as Liudprand pointedly observes. With their long-sleeved robes, flowing hair, and jewelry, the Byzantines themselves were wily and effeminate, “idle liars of neither gender.” The Byzantine emperor drank bathwater; Otto was manly and honest, and he didn't eat smelly food.

  The growing cultural divide found religious expression in the eleventh century, when, in a fit of pique, a supremely arrogant papal envoy named Humbert took it upon himself to excommunicate the patriarch of Constantinople. Humbert's temper tantrum, which happened in the year 1054, would later harden into final schism between the two churches, revealing that deeper things were at work than one inflated ego. One of them was Rome's addition of the fil-ioque∗ to the Latin creed earlier in the century: Catholics now professed that the Holy Spirit proceeded “from the Son” as well as from the Father. The Orthodox, meanwhile, clung to the original formulation that it proceeded only from the Father. Since 1054 the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople have not been in communion.

  Strategically, too, the eleventh century proved, like the sixth, to be a fulcrum. When it began, Byzantium was at the height of its medieval prosperity and the West played second fiddle. When it ended, Byzantium was in disarray and the West had embarked on a period of explosive growth.

  The most visible sign was the launching of the First Crusade at the end ofthat century, to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks. These raucous expeditions brought Frangoi and Byzantines into close contact, because the route to the Muslim lands went through Byzantium. The Byzantines assumed that the conquered territory would be returned to Byzantine rule. The Crusaders had other ideas. Conquering Jerusalem, Antioch, and other former Byzantine cities, they set up Crusader kingdoms that didn't answer to the emperor in Constantinople.

  Over the next century, through three Crusades, the increasingly desperate Byzantines (theoretically the hosts) managed to keep the disruptive Frangoi (theoretically the guests) under a semblance of control. But the gap between East and West had grown too wide. The façade of a Christian alliance would soon self-destruct in the most dramatic way imaginable.

  The Fourth Crusade

  On a fine spring morning in the year 1203, a vast invasion force assembled itself in and around the island port of Corfu, off the Adriatic coast of northern Greece. Unfurling their sails to a mild, favorable breeze, the ships began moving off southward. Those watching found it exhilarating. The fleet spread out on the glinting water as far as they could see. Leading the way were the ponderous but deadly warships, followed by transports laden with men and horses, then swift galleys rowed by slaves and prisoners of war. Scores of merchantmen with provisions and other goods kept pace with the fleet. It was Saturday, May 24, the eve of Pentecost, and the fleet's objective, the fabled city of Constantinople, lay some five hundred miles to the east.

  The ships belonged to the wealthy maritime republic of Venice, formerly a Byzantine province but now a rival. They carried about ten thousand Christian Crusaders from Western Europe, French and Norman knights mostly, who had hired the Venetian ships at an exorbitant sum. Constantinople was to be a supply stop for the pious knights of this Fourth Crusade, whose stated purpose was to overthrow the Muslim rulers of Egypt.

  Leaving Venice late the previous summer, the Crusaders had proceeded south along the Dalmatian coast. That autumn they had conquered the Dalmatian port of Zara, a Christian city, but one controlled by Venice's rival, Hungary. The Venetians had demanded its capture in exchange for letting the Crusaders postpone paying off the huge fee the Venetians were charging for transportation. This cynical deal was struck by Venice's elderly, ambitious, and utterly unscrupulous doge, Enrico Dandolo. Crusaders, of course, weren't supposed to attack fellow Christians, and Pope Innocent III was duly outraged. He had already warned against such impious behavior, suspecting correctly that Dandolo coveted a much greater prize than Zara. The Crusaders had wintered in Zara before sailing southward to Corfu, picking up stragglers along the way.

  The journey from Corfu to Constantinople took a month. In late June 1203, the Crusaders anchored for the first time within view of the Byzantine capital.

  The sight of the city left them stunned. Nothing in Western Europe could have prepared them for Constantinople's size and magnificence. The largest city in the West at this time was probably Venice, whose population most likely stood at around one hundred thousand. London and Paris, even Rome itself, were backwaters by comparison, with populations of perhaps twenty thousand to forty thousand. Going on figures he got from from Byzantine officials, the French knight Geoffroy de Villehardouin later estimated Constantinople's population at four hundred thousand. It was therefore something on the order of ten to twenty times larger than Paris.

  “All those who had never seen Constantinople,” Geoffroy tells us in his chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, “gazed very intently at the city, never having imagined there could be so fine a place in all the world.” During the approach through the Sea of Marmara, as the Crusaders’ ships drew closer, the long, high, gray stone seawalls—which still crouch right at the edge of the rocky shoreline—had slowly grown from a dark smudge on the horizon to fill their sight. The walls continued as the ships rounded the promontory, and now on the hillside behind the walls the graceful porticoes and columns of the Great Palace complex came into view. Farther along were more sea walls and then the mighty, humped presence of Hagia Sophia, crowning the city's high ground, plainly visible from the Bosporus. “There was indeed,” Geoffroy continues, “no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight.”

  Despite its staggering opulence and the continued prosperity of its trade—trade on which the Venetians’ own wealth depended, and which they longed to control— Constantinople and its empire had suffered decades of political instability and turmoil. Byzantium's sacred throne had been seized by one usurper after another, and internal dissension wracked the governing class and the imperial administration. The Crusaders rapidly found out the soft spot in the city's defenses. Westerners had traditionally been quartered across the Golden Horn, in the Galata district. It was there, from the heights of the Galata Tower, that the great chain was winched up to seal off the harbor. By storming the tower, the Crusaders—led by the Venetians—were able to lower the chain and attack where the walls were weakest, deep inside the Golden Horn.∗ Within weeks of arriving, they had occupied the city and installed their own puppet on the throne, Alexius IV, the son of a former emperor who had been overthrown some years earlier.

  For the rest of that summer and fall, the Crusaders waited in Constantinople with their Venetian escorts as Alexius IV failed to meet his obligations to them—in particular, the payment of the huge fortune he'd agreed to fork over in return for the throne, money the Crusaders owed in turn to the Venetians. During this time, Alexius IV grew increasingly unpopular with his Byzantine subjects, who resented the Crusaders’ rough and imposing presence. Skirmishes broke out between rowdy Western knights and sullen Byzantine soldiers stationed in the city.

  At length the popular resentment bubbled over, and in January 1204, Alexius IV was overthrown and executed by a leader of the Byzantine resistance, an elderly but energetic aristocrat named Alexius Ducas. Also known as Murtzuphlus or
Bushybrow, he assumed the throne as Alexius V.

  The Crusaders stepped up their demands for payment, but the new emperor refused them flatly. He would have been unable to cooperate even had he wished to do so, since (as his predecessor had discovered) the imperial treasury was empty. But the Crusaders needed to pay off the implacable Venetians, who threatened to simply sail away. The obvious solution, as the wily Dandolo had foreseen, was for the Crusaders to capture and plunder the city for themselves.

  They launched their offensive in early April. Though the desperate and demoralized Byzantines managed to drive back the first attack, psychologically the Frangoi had already made the conquest. Byzantine defenses crumbled a few days later, on April 13, when the Crusaders again breached the seawalls at their weakest point, near the inner tip of the Golden Horn. They set fire to the city. Alexius V gave up and fled with most of the Byzantine aristocracy on his heels. The Crusaders poured in.

  The mayhem that followed is unique in history. For three days and nights, the Crusaders murdered, raped, looted, or destroyed everyone and everything they could get their hands on. Untold thousands perished; many more were brutalized, maimed, left homeless. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates witnessed it all before escaping the city two days after the pillage ended. The streets were filled with the screams and moans of the dying and wounded, he wrote later, as men were slain, women and girls raped, the elderly beaten, and the wealthy robbed. “Thus it was in the squares, thus it was in the temples, thus it was in the hiding places; for there was no place that could escape detection or that could offer asylum to those who came streaming in.”

  Tragic as the human cost was, this isn't what makes the sack of Constantinople unique. The city had stood inviolate as the capital of Christendom for nearly nine centuries, since its founding as the New Rome in the early fourth century. A peerless collection of fine art, religious relics, and irreplaceable manuscripts filled its churches, monasteries, libraries, and palatial homes. Mosaics, icons, frescoes, ancient bronze and marble statues, precious metalwork, jeweled artifacts, silken wall hangings, painstakingly copied works of ancient and medieval Greek literature—the scale of what the world lost in those three days can only be guessed, never known.

  The mercilessly acquisitive Venetians specialized in removal. The most famous examples of their booty are the four bronze horses that adorn the Basilica di San Marco, but countless other art treasures were carried off to grace the churches, palazzos, and piazzas of the Serenissima. The less sophisticated French went in more for wholesale drunken demolition, though gold, silver, and jewels were easy enough to spot and grab. In the great church of Hagia Sophia, Nicetas Choniates tells us, looters stripped the silken wall hangings, smashed the icons, tore apart the gold and silver furnishings, and then brought mules inside to load with booty. Some of the mules slipped and fell, unable to regain their footing on the blood-slicked marble floor. Their guts were slashed with knives so that shit oozing from their wounds mixed with the blood on the marble. A drunken whore sat on the patriarch's throne and sang obscene songs before kicking up her heels in a burlesque dance.

  Even the Muslim infidels, Choniates continues, treated Christian captives better. The Westerners’ atrocities against both humanity and God revealed their depraved and demonic natures for all to see. As for Constantinople itself, Choniates laments, the city's majesty has been forever despoiled: “O City, formerly enthroned on high, striding far and wide, magnificent in comeliness and more becoming in stature; now thy luxurious garments and elegant royal veils are rent and torn; thy flashing eye has grown dark.”

  The Crusaders didn't make it to Egypt. Instead, they set up a “Latin Empire of Constantinople” complete with a Western “emperor.” But they had overextended themselves. The Byzantines proved resilient enough to regroup, first into several rival governments in exile, then into a single Byzantine rump state. Led by the emperor Michael VIII Paleologos, who styled himself the “New Constantine,” they recaptured Constantinople in 1261.

  The emotional chasm between East and West was now fixed in place, deep and wide. Byzantium never forgave or forgot the outrage of Fourth Crusade, nursing a hatred of the West that it would take to the grave. And though the empire lasted a further two centuries, it never recovered its former strength and political influence.

  Yet, it was during this final stage that Byzantine civilization shone most brilliantly. Nicetas Choniates could never have known it, but far from growing dark, Byzantium's flashing eye would light the world as never before.

  *Scholasticism was the major intellectual movement in Europe before the rise of humanism, and it, too, was stimulated by the discovery of ancient literature—in this case, the partial recovery of Aristotle's thought in the twelfth century It is closely associated with the rise of universities or “schools.” The greatest scholastic was St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thought was incorporated into Catholic doctrine after his death. Scholasticism stressed the use of reason and dialectical disputation in the formulation of theology.

  *Quattrocentro, Italian for “four hundreds,” refers to the fifteenth century and its cultural innovations in Italy.

  *Arians followed the teachings of Arius (c. 256–336), an Egyptian monk who denied Christ's divinity and emphasized his humanity

  *Monophysites emphasized Christ's divinity at the expense of his humanity roughly the reverse of the Arian position. Monophysite views were especially popular in Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria, all Byzantine provinces at this time.

  *Already in ruins by 1453, the Church of the Holy Apostles was torn down to make way for the mosque complex of Mehmet the Conqueror, Fatih Camii in Turkish. The church probably looked very much like the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, which was modeled on it.

  *Few Byzantines would have openly shared such doubts with the empress herself, a formidable ruler who had just deposed her son and reigning co-emperor by having him blinded, rendering him ineligible to rule. The procedure was badly executed, and he died of the wounds.

  *In the twentieth century, these images inspired William Butler Yeats, whose poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” use them as metaphors for incorruptible intellect and timeless beauty.

  *Latin for “and from the Son.” The word was added to the Nicene Creed by the Western church at the insistence of the Franks. Eventually, the procession of the Holy Spirit became the major point of doctrinal difference between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

  *Crucially, the Byzantines had recently disbanded their navy, which had sheltered in the Golden Horn during previous sieges and prevented earlier attackers from using the tactic here employed by the Crusaders.

  Chapter Two

  Between Athens and Jerusalem

  hat has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked the second-century Christian writer Tertullian. Hostile to the secular wisdom of the ancients, Tertullian meant to evoke the answer “Nothing at all,” but others asked the question with sincere curiosity. Boethius asked it, essentially, in his quest to join faith and reason. After him, the West forgot to ask it with any seriousness.

  In Byzantium, things were different. Tertullian's question didn't ever go away entirely, and it serves as a prism through which we may glimpse the outlines of Byzantine civilization. Somehow, through all the centuries, Byzantium kept a tight grip on the literature of ancient Greece, yet held it firmly at arm's length. Their ancient pagan literature was at once too barbed with secular reason and other dangers for the Christian Byzantines to embrace too closely, yet too imposing, too downright gorgeous to dismiss altogether. Athens sparkled at one pole of the Byzantine consciousness, Jerusalem glowed softly at the other.

  Ever adept at compartmentalizing, the Byzantines drew a clear and crucially revealing line between ancient Greek literature, which they called the Outside Wisdom, and Christian literature, which they called the Inside Wisdom. The distinction was codified in the fourth century by an Eastern Church Father, St. Basil of Caesaria, in his famous essay To Young Men, On H
ow They Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature, which remained one of the most widely read works in Byzantium. This short book would do much to keep the peace between Athens and Jerusalem in the coming millennium.

  When Basil was writing, controversy raged throughout the Greco-Roman world over Tertullian's question. Attempting to still the waters, Basil affirmed for Christians the moral utility of “the wisdom drawn from the outside,” at least insofar as its precepts could be shown to be in agreement with Christianity's. Ancient poets, historians, and especially philosophers all praised virtue, he wrote, so their works properly deserve a place in the education of Christians. True, they also depict patricide, fratricide, incest, lust, cruelty, gluttony, and other sinful goings-on, not to mention the bickering and multiple gods of the pagan pantheon. Readers must therefore exercise due diligence in weeding out the bad passages from the good, storing up the moral lessons as they go, just as bees make honey through judicious visits to fragrant and colorful—but otherwise useless—flowers.

  Over time, Basil's approach was adopted as the mainstream attitude in the Byzantine East. As such, it remained in force for more than a millennium: a thousand years later Theodore Metochites would explicitly echo it in his letter to the monks of the Chora. Even in Basil's day, however, there were those who took a harder line toward Greece's secular, rationalistic pagan heritage, including his friend, the only slightly less esteemed theologian St. Gregory of Nazianzus. The hostility and suspicion of these Christian hard-liners— almost always they were monks—toward the classics would never go away. At times it would simmer quietly, while at other times it would boil over into open controversy.