God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  Throughout December, strained, often heated diplomatic exchanges were accompanied by increasingly open violence. An anti-western faction began to challenge Alexius’s appeasement, led by Alexius III’s son-in-law Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Murzuphlus because of his large eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead. The emperors were rapidly losing contact with events. On 1 January 1204, the Venetian fleet, the crusaders’ lifeline, narrowly avoided destruction by Greek fireships. A week later, the army had to beat off a land attack led by Murzuphlus, who was increasingly conducting a belligerent policy of his own. Alexius IV quickly lost control. On 27 January, a rival emperor, Nicholas Kannovos, was set up by the Greek ecclesiastical establishment. Alexius tried to call in the crusaders to protect him by offering them access to the Blachernae Palace. This precipitated a coup led by Murzuphlus with the backing of the military, clergy and civil service. Alexius IV was arrested and imprisoned on the night of 27–8 January; Isaac was incarcerated, soon to die. A few days later, after assuming the imperial regalia himself as Alexius V, Murzuphlus removed Nicholas Kannavos, thereby in a few days efficiently disposing of all three rivals. In February, war began against the westerners. After his initial forays proved unsuccessful, Murzuphlus’s attempts to negotiate were met by the crusaders’ politically unrealistic insistence on his abiding by their agreement with his deposed predecessor Alexius IV. The final collapse of relations between the westerners and the Byzantine authorities came with the murder of Alexius IV, probably on 8 February, if western propaganda is to be believed by Murzuphlus in person.57

  The removal of Alexius IV swept away the intrigues, contradictions and confusions of the previous year. Any hope that the crusaders’ treaties with Alexius would be honoured died with him. With their ships requiring overhaul and refitting, their supplies under serious threat as Murzuphlus closed the capital’s markets to them, and the anti-western militancy of the new Byzantine government, the crusaders held limited options. Murzuphlus no longer wished to bargain, beginning to reinforce the city walls and prepare for battle. Unlike Louis VII in 1147 or Frederick Barbarossa in 1189–90, the crusaders at Galata in 1204 controlled no fertile Greek provinces for easy forage. Extended raids to find provisions risked exposing the camp to Greek attack while provoking hostile intervention from Joannitza, king of Bulgaria, who saw great opportunities in the chaos at Constantinople to embellish his power. Bulgaria had only recently re-established its independence from Byzantium; it now sought any pickings from the imperial carcase. Crusader inaction would ensure famine and likely destruction. To survive, let alone have any chance of fulfilling their vows to journey to Jerusalem, the crusaders’ path led through the city. Only there lay the necessary supplies and funds. Only by defeating Murzuphlus and seizing the city could they guarantee they would get them. ‘Perceiving that they were neither able to enter the sea without danger of immediate death nor delay longer on land because of their impending exhaustion of food and supplies, our men reached a decision.’58 Step by step, the crusade had marched, stumbled and been driven to contemplate conquering Byzantium for themselves. While complicit in their own fate, neither the crusaders nor the Venetians had intended this frightening, dangerous and bloody denouement.

  With conquest the only choice, Doge Dandolo, Boniface, Baldwin, Louis of Blois and Hugh of St Pol sensibly prepared for an orderly occupation of the city, government and empire. The so-called March Pact decreed that all booty – gold, silver, expensive textiles – was to be collected centrally and divided according to a formula that ensured that the Venetians would receive full and final reimbursement for the various obligations to them outstanding, to the value of 200,000 marks. Once this had been satisfied, the crusaders and the Venetians were to split the profits equally, as under the 1201 treaty. During the pillaging, women and clergy were to be respected, and rape and despoiling churches were banned, on pain of death. The future ruler of Constantinople and Byzantium was to be chosen by a committee of twelve – six crusaders, six Venetians – and was to receive a quarter of the capital as well as the two imperial palaces. He was forbidden to do business with any enemies of the Venetians, a canny if naked piece of self-interest on Dandolo’s part, yet no more blatant than the whole treaty was for all parties involved. If the lot as emperor fell on a crusader, the new Latin patriarch would be a Venetian, a secular intervention in the process of clerical election that insouciantly contradicted 150 years of fundamental papal policy. The rest of the empire would be granted out by another committee, of twelve Venetians and twelve crusaders, as fiefs to be held of the emperor. To secure the new political settlement, it was agreed that the army would stay together in Byzantium for another year, to March 1205, deferring the invasion of Eygpt for the fourth time since 1202. Anyone breaking the terms of the pact was threatened with excommunication.59

  Yet even on the brink of war, which all could see by looking across the Golden Horn at Murzuphlus’s energetic preparations had become unavoidable, doubts remained. The Fourth Crusade has been damned as unholy, a betrayal of the original inspiration of the war of the cross. Yet the constant self-appraisal within its ranks and repeated insistence by the leadership and their clerical stooges that they were engaged on a just cause belies any such verdict. The consciences of many crusaders remained as tender as the day they took the cross. According to Villehardouin, even in the desperate plight of the army in February and March, the leadership staged a public presentation of the case for war to reassure their followers of the legitimacy and justice of what they were doing. The clergy declared ‘that this war is just and lawful’ on the grounds that the Greeks were schismatics, their emperor a regicide and a usurper, crimes in which his subjects were accomplices. This inspirational invective followed the line pursued at Corfu. It acknowledged the increasing penetration of academic ideas of just war in the conceptualizing of holy war. However, faced with imminent military action, the clerics at Galata added spiritual incentives to emphasize the holiness of the cause and boost morale: ‘if you fight to conquer this land with the right intention of bringing it under the authority of Rome, all those of you who die after making confession shall benefit from the indulgence granted by the pope’. If this was the actual formula employed, it copied Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran Council in offering full remission of sins, but only to those who died fighting.60 Whether or not the army’s bishops, with the legate still cooling his heels in Acre, actually possessed the claimed delegated papal authority to make such grants, they fell short of designating Constantinople a target of the crusade. The battle would be just and earn spiritual rewards for the genuinely penitent casualties, in common with much religiously approved warfare since the ninth century, but it cannot be regarded as an extension of the crusade. That would require the attack on Byzantium to have been equated exactly with the Jerusalem war and for participation in it to fulfil the crusader’s vow. These, the bishops were apparently not offering. Villehardouin’s version may have been flavoured by special pleading and a retrospective desire to justify what happened, but Robert of Clari recorded an identical set of arguments preached to the troops on 11 April, the day before the final assault. He also remembered that on this occasion the bishops promised absolution to all, not just the fallen, because the Greeks ‘were worse than the Jews’, ‘enemies of God’.61 While these accounts were designed to present the events of April 1204 as unequivocally righteous to later audiences, they suggest that the crusaders needed convincing reassurance. It was not assumed that attacking Constantinople, while undoubtedly necessary, was self-evidently just. Faith and obedience in the middle ages were neither blind nor simple, relying on reason not credulity.

  On 9 April, the crusader attacks began along the northern shore of the city between the Blachernae Palace and the monastery of Christ Evergetes. Highly sophisticated techniques of amphibious warfare were involved, with the Venetian ships acting both as troop carriers and aggressive siege engines. After the initial assault failed, fighting reached a climax on 12 April when, amid
scenes of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, the walls were breached and the invaders established a secure bridgehead on a substantial front within the walls, slaughtering indiscriminately. As part of their tactics, the westerners determinedly killed and plundered their way into the city, making no distinction between soldiers and civilians. Once again, fearing counter-attack, they started a fire, which quickly spread from the north to the south of the city, consuming much of what had been left or rebuilt after the two earlier conflagrations. Even though the Varangian guard was prepared to fight on, Murzuphlus saw the game was up and fled during the night. By 13 April, the crusaders found no serious resistance was left. The city had been won, a startling tribute to the naval skill of the Venetians, the engineering ingenuity that converted their ships into fighting castles and the military training, perhaps even the military culture, of the western troops.

  The sack of Constantinople proceeded in two stages.62 The first, the indiscriminate violence and pillage of the assault, was reined in the day after the crusaders’ entry. With substantial Greek forces still in the city, a descent into disorganized mayhem could have put the victory at risk. The second stage, perhaps more chilling than the first, saw the systematic plundering of the capital, the customary penalty suffered by cities taken by storm. For three days the crusader captains allowed their troops to vent their anger, relief and greed in an orgy of looting the thoroughness and lack of finesse of which appalled most of those who heard of it. The main savagery was reserved for the pursuit of treasure and property, including houses, palaces and churches, rather than people. Two of the most hysterical Greek eyewitnesses, Nicetas Choniates and Nicholas Mesarites, while lamenting in lurid terms the drunken rapine and sexual violence, both record individual instances where Greeks were treated with respect and afforded protection by the invaders. Much of the Greek shock was stimulated by the wholesale desecration of holy places, an aspect of the sack that western observers, proud of their purloined relics, rather admired. The worst excesses against citizens appeared concentrated only on the first day while the victims, according to one account, amounted to a couple of thousand, about half of one per cent of the city’s pre-1204 population.63 Sufficient control was exerted on the looters to ensure the collection of much of the looted treasure in the three churches chosen as central depositories. When the looting was called off on 15 April, the official treasury had deposits worth 300,000 marks, along with 10,000 horses. This constituted perhaps less than half the total value of the goods plundered, the rest being kept by the looters, possibly as much as 500,000 marks, enough to fund a European state for a decade. The figures also exclude the boat-loads of relics stolen by ‘holy robbers’ like Bishop Nivelo of Soissons and Abbot Martin of Pairis.64 During the sack and for the difficult days immediately afterwards, anecdotal evidence suggests a measure of discipline and order in the plundering, including some respect for the lives at least of the Greek upper classes.65 The sack of Constantinople was an atrocity, but in the terms of the day not a war crime. The fire of August 1203 may have caused as much physical damage, not to mention those of July 1203 and April 1204 or the riots of the winter of 1203–4. Alexius IV’s own rapacity in stripping churches and icons for gold and silver to pay the crusaders’ tribute exactly matched the behaviour of the western conquerors. The loss of classical and Byzantine art, architecture and libraries is incalculable, although possibly not on a par with the cultural devastation wrought by the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. The intensity of human butchery pales beside the bloodlust in Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. If the victors had proceeded to the Holy Land the following spring, the fall of Constantinople may have never acquired its reputation for unique barbarism.

  ROMANIA AND BYZANTIUM

  The immediate distribution of Byzantium’s spoils caused some disappointment that so much had been diverted into private streams. Among the rank and file it provoked fury as they accused the leaders themselves of being the worst hoarders, denying the ordinary crusaders (‘the commons of the host’), the poor knights and the sergeants ‘who had helped to win the treasure’ their due.66 The ratio of payment to knights, twenty marks, clerics and mounted sergeants, ten marks, and infantry, five marks concealed the injustice, as Robert of Clari saw it, of the common soldiers being fobbed off with plain silver while the choice gold, jewels and precious fabrics found their way into the coffers of the great. Some hoarders were convicted and hanged.67 Nonetheless, the sense of achievement rang through the memories of the conquerors. The greatest city in the Christian world had fallen to an army of 20,000.68 God’s will seemed clear.

  It soon became less pellucid. By mid-May, Baldwin of Flanders had been elected the new Latin emperor. The Venetian Thomas Morosini became patriarch. Baldwin grandly proclaimed on his election his intention to proceed to the Holy Land once his new realm, so providentially granted him by God’s manifest will, had been pacified and secured.69 Although Murzuphlus was soon apprehended and executed, pacification of the area around the capital, let alone exerting control over the rest of the empire, proved much harder. Many of the crusade leaders were eager to receive and secure new lands, notably Boniface of Montferrat, who had been given Thessalonica as consolation for not gaining the imperial diadem. Relations between Baldwin and Boniface, perhaps understandably, deteriorated to the point of outright hostility. Others struck out on their own, such as Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s nephew and namesake in the Peloponnese. From the start, the Latin emperor in Constantinople lacked adequate manpower. In the provinces, where the same was true, the new Latin lords sought accommodation with local vested interests, religious and secular, of a sort denied the Latin emperor. The pope’s initial enthusiasm for the union of the churches turned to disillusion and anger when he learnt of the carnage and destruction of the sack and the cancellation of the crusade in 1205. He was soon opening diplomatic channels to the Byzantine successor regime in Asia Minor.70 For Innocent, the Fourth Crusade had proved a disappointment and a lesson. He proved an adept pupil.

  The fissiparous nature of Byzantium did not suddenly end. While the Latins achieved some success in policing mainland Greece, Alexius III’s son-in-law, Theodore Lascaris, established a self-proclaimed legitimist Greek empire in Asia Minor around Smyrna and Nicaea, its ecclesiastical capital. Epirus in western Greece and Trebizond on the distant southeastern shore of the Black Sea emerged as other centres of Greek resistance and particularism. More immediate danger was presented by Joannitza of Bulgaria, whose overtures to the crusaders in 1203–4 for an alliance against the Greeks had been rebuffed.71 It was not in his interests to have any powerful ruler on the Bosporus, Latin or Greek.

  Emperor Baldwin inherited the weaknesses as well as the palaces of his predecessors. Tentative moves to embrace the Greek tradition achieved little, wrecked by the issue of church union and the bitter memory of 1204. Continuity was limited. At Acre, on the news of Baldwin’s election, Bohemund IV of Antioch hurried to do homage to the new empress, Countess Maria of Flanders, who had arrived there expecting to meet her husband.72 She died before embarking for Greece. The new regime lacked money, as its tax revenues remained proportionate to its limited territorial grip. Much of Constantinople remained in ruins, its public buildings dilapidated. The Venetians, especially after Dandolo’s death in Constantinople in 1205, concentrated on securing their hold on their portion of the empire, the strategic islands of Euboea, Crete and the Aegean and trading posts such as Methone and Coron. They were, in any case, of limited use in helping Baldwin defend and extend his holdings on land.

  More worrying for the future of the new Latin realm, the fall of Constantinople created no great rush of excitement and enthusiasm, still less colonization to compare with the impact of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. As the Fourth Crusade showed, the pull of the Holy Land cast other destinations into the shade even if, as in the case of those thousands who reached Palestine in 1202–4, little could be achieved there. Except for Venice, a few French families, especially from Champagne,
the papacy and later the Angevin rulers of Sicily, no consistent help or material commitment came from the west. Indifference or a sense of a burden characterized reactions. Successive popes pleaded for aid for ‘Romania’, as the western conquests were known, and began proclaiming crusades for its aid, but, by the 1230s, the response of western knights was to swear oaths to prevent their crusade vows being deflected to Greece. No significant expedition, crusade or garrison ever came to aid or maintain Romania.

  The Latin empire was a failure, politically, financially, culturally and dynastically. Exactly a year after the triumph of Constantinople, on 14 April 1205 Emperor Baldwin was captured and Louis of Blois killed in battle at Adrianople, where a Greek rebellion had been joined by Joannitza of Bulgaria. It was in the precarious aftermath of this defeat that Peter Capuano ended any fanciful lingering hopes for a campaign to the Holy Land by absolving from their Jerusalem vows those fighting for the Latins in Greece. The succession of disasters after 1205, including the death in battle of Boniface of Montferrat in 1207, severely limited the extent of Latin rule. Boniface’s so-called kingdom of Thessalonica was annexed by the Greeks of Epirus in 1224. The apparent unravelling of the achievement of 1204 provided a context and possibly a spur to the works of veterans such as Villehardouin (writing before 1212/13) and Robert of Clari (c.1216) in praise of deeds of the Fourth Crusade. While western rule in Athens, the southern Peloponnese and the Venetian maritime colonies persisted, and in places flourished, into the fourteenth century and beyond – Crete only fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1669–the imperial centre soon degenerated into a bankrupt husk, having to pawn relics such as the Crown of Thorns (in 1237) and, from the 1220s, sell the lead from the roofs of churches and palaces to survive.73 Emperor Baldwin II cut a pathetic, forlorn figure when he toured the west in the 1240s trying to drum up support for his failing cause. The succession of regents, minors and guardians who held the imperial title (Henry of Flanders; Peter of Courtenay; Robert of Courtenay; Baldwin II; John of Brienne), after surviving the crisis of 1205–6, when the existence of the empire seemed in doubt, played an increasingly minor local role in the politics of the region, increasingly insignificant in comparison with the Greeks of Nicaea and, briefly, Epirus, and the Bulgarian empire. In 1261, Constantinople was recaptured almost without a murmur by a Nicaean reconnaissance force taking advantage of the absence of the Latin garrison on a raid up the Bosporus. The suddenness of its fall even caught the new emperor Michael VIII Palealogus of Nicaea totally by surprise. Yet the end could not have long been delayed. In contrast to parts of the Peleponnese, the Latin emperors’ attempts to reach accommodation with the Greeks failed. No attempts were seriously pursued to create a new imperial cultural identity. Latin Constantinople appeared a shabby outpost, increasingly irrelevant as well as impotent, neglected by the nobility and people of the west, to whom its original conquest had been represented as being such a vindicating triumph.