The preaching campaign followed previous patterns with local clerics and the Cistercians featuring prominently. Centred on Flanders, Champagne, the Ile de France and the Loire valley, recruitment extended from the British Isles to Italy, from Saxony to Provence. Fulk of Neuilly’s preaching became notorious, both for its powerful effect and its ignominious end when he was accused of embezzlement of the alms he had collected.13 The geographic breadth and moral force of the preaching campaign cut across political divisions. On the death of Theobald of Champagne in 1201, the French leaders chose as their nominal commander the well-connected northern Italian Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, from a family with extensive previous associations with Byzantium and the Holy Land as well as Germany, where Boniface’s cousin, Duke Philip of Swabia, was a claimant to the throne.
76. Venice.
Perhaps between 12,000 and 15,000 troops arrived at Venice during the summer of 1202. Although comparable with the largest crusader hosts, this fell far short of the numbers envisaged in the 1201 treaty, leaving the crusade leaders scrabbling to fulfil the financial terms. Despite a levy on every crusader at Venice, the leaders’ personal funds and heavy borrowing, 34,000 marks remained outstanding, 40 per cent of the agreed price, presenting the crusaders and Venetians with the mutually unpalatable prospect of abandoning the expedition and the waste of an extremely powerful armed and mobile fighting force. To save a return on their great investment, the Venetians proposed a moratorium on the debt. This would now be repaid from profits on future conquests, beginning with the Dalmatian port of Zara (Zadar), despite it being a Christian city under the protection of the king of Hungary, who in 1202 happened to be a crucesignatus. The attack on Egypt was postponed to 1203. In return, the doge committed himself and the city more firmly to the crusade as active allies and participants, not just shippers. Although acknowledged as inappropriate, the Zara plan was accepted by the leadership, including the papal legate Peter of Capuano, as the only way of continuing the crusade. The high command showed their queasiness at the whole business by keeping most crusaders in the dark even after the fleet left Venice in early October 1202. The pope was less easily deflected; he sent letters prohibiting the attack and threatening all who took part with excommunication.
The goal of Egypt remained. The intensity with which the high command faced down papal objections and dissidents within their own ranks uneasy at fighting fellow Christians rested on the understanding that only such a large force had any chance of making an impact on Ayyubid power and so needed to be kept in being by agreeing to Venetian terms. This appreciation of the costs of the military requirements explains the attraction of the offer made by Alexius Angelus, nephew of Alexius III, son of the deposed Isaac II Angelus and claimant to the Greek throne. Backed by his brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia, and Boniface of Montferrat, Alexius attached himself to the crusade army at Zara in December 1202, promising, in return for being placed on the Byzantine throne, to assist the crusade with 10,000 Greek troops and 200,000 marks for the invasion of Egypt.14 Despite offering a reunion of the Greek Church with Rome, Alexius had failed to secure the support of Innocent III, who still hoped for a rapprochement with Alexius III. Yet through the good offices of Boniface and later Doge Dandolo, Alexius presented the crusaders with an apparently alluring opportunity to gain Byzantine support and re-endow the crusade.
A SPRING DAY IN BASEL, 1201
During the spring of 1201 news of the fresh expedition to recover Jerusalem and rescue the Holy Land continued to circulate in the valley of the Upper Rhine in south-western Germany. In the city of Basel (now in north-west Switzerland) the year before, in May 1200, the city’s bishop had taken the cross with a number of local abbots and monks, a gesture of ecclesiastical solidarity that appeared to lead to no immediate concerted general effort of promotion. By contrast, a year later, advance notice had prepared an expectant crowd of clergy and laity to gather in the cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin Mary but known locally as the Münster, then probably still a building site as the church was being restored after a devastating fire in 1185. The physical renewal and restoration provided an appropriate image and setting for what they had come to hear: the cross being preached by Abbot Martin of the Cistercian abbey of Pairis in Alsace, one of the local clerics authorised by Pope Innocent III to preach the cross in the diocese of Basel. The sermon had evidently been well publicised, the monk of Pairis who recorded the event a few years later noting that the large crowd, ‘prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp, were hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort’. When Abbot Martin stood up in Basel cathedral that spring day he was preaching to the choir. As with modern evangelism, crusade promotion was carefully planned with advance publicity ensuring good attendance at its functions.
Martin’s sermon operated as a focus in a series of ritualised responses. Rumours of the crusade and Martin’s arrival created a fraught atmosphere of expectation and aspiration, tensions released during and after the sermon through emotional gestures: weeping, groaning, sighing and sobbing, emotionalism encouraged by the preacher who led the lachrymose histrionics. The sermon itself, recorded as a literary performance evoking the Cistercian tradition of crusade evangelism and clearly modelled on Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching, crystallised the papal appeal to Christians to acknowledge the transcendent redemptive importance of the Holy Land and their warriors’ duty to ‘hasten to help Christ’, encouraged by the glorious crusading past, the prospect of future reconquest, and the bargain of spiritual and temporal gain, the latter quite explicit: ‘in the matter if the kingdom of heaven, there is an unconditional pledge; in the matter of temporal prosperity, a better than average hope’. The whole show was completed by the abbot giving out crosses and promising to join the crusade. The account of Martin’s sermon that spring day in Basel introduces a laudatory narrative of the abbot recruiting a regional contingent in which he takes a leading role on campaign, the story culminating in justifying his act of grand larceny during the sack of Constantinople when he and his chaplain filled their habits with over fifty looted relics from those of the Passion, Christ’s life, body parts of John the Baptist and the Apostles, to pieces of lesser saints such as the seventh-century Merovingian abbess Adelgonde or Agricius, the fourth-century first bishop of Trier. The relics were carried back by Martin to adorn his monastery of Pairis. His day in Basel formed just one act in this drama, but, in formal literary remembrance at least, it incorporated elements familiar across western Christendom at the opening of the thirteenth century: papal authority and influence over the promotional process; the central recruiting themes of Christian obligation, the urgent plight of the Holy Land, the importance of past glories, the unambiguous offer of spiritual and material profit. The crowds assembled in Basel Münster knew what they were there for and expected the performance Abbot Martin delivered, all concerned playing their choreographed parts in the cause of the cross. In fact, Martin may not have been at all remarkable; even fellow Cistercians who wrote of the Fourth Crusade never mention him.16
77. The Münster, Basel, site of Abbot Martin’s sermon.
The seizure of Zara in November 1202 fitted a pattern of plundering familiar from both the First and Third Crusades, the latter’s predation on Sicily and Cyprus showing that violence against Christians in pursuit of funds and provisions was not the novel prerogative of the Fourth Crusade. As Count Hugh of St Pol later explained, without more funds to pay for soldiers and materiel, the goal of Jerusalem was impossible.15 Nonetheless, the capture of Zara threatened to end the campaign, exciting vocal opposition within the army – ‘I have not come here to destroy Christians,’ said one dissenter17 – and a papal letter excommunicating any who took part. The letter was suppressed by the leadership in deft information management. Subsequently, faced with disbanding the crusade or tolerating its insubordination, Pope Innocent tacitly acceded to allowing the crusaders to avoid excommunication while travelling on the ships of the still-excommunicated Venetians. Even I
nnocent’s prohibition on further attacks on Christians was qualified in cases of obstruction or necessity.18 Disquiet over Alexius’s plan persisted over the winter of 1202–3 at Zara and the following April when the fleet moved on to Corfu. While many deserted, the need for re-endowing carried the day. The Venetian-crusader fleet sailed on to Constantinople, which was reached, without any effective local resistance, on 24 June 1203.
The Greek failure to contest the crusaders’ passage through the Hellespont provided a mixed augury. Weak Byzantine defences – apparently the Greek emperor had only twenty ‘rotting and worm-eaten small skiffs’ at his disposal19 – suggested a decayed fiscal and administrative regime, hardly a solid basis for the promised lavish aid. However, Greek land forces, chiefly paid foreign troops, provided consistently stiff opposition in a series of encounters in and around Constantinople between June 1203 and April 1204. It is tempting to see the events of 1203–4 as a dual culmination: of long-standing hostility to devious, aloof and schismatic Byzantium; and of prolonged decline in Greek imperial power. Neither is fully justified. Each large crusade army that passed through Byzantium had encountered supply difficulties and diplomatic tensions, yet suggestions for conquest had repeatedly been rejected. By contrast, the 1203 crusaders’ initial intervention was framed as a restoration of a legitimate heir who would then support the crusade and reunite the Greek Church with Rome. This differed from the sustained territorial ambitions of the Norman Sicilian rulers in the Balkans and Greece such as had led to the brief capture of Thessalonika in 1185. For many interested powers in the west, including the papacy, Byzantium was still seen as a potential, if awkwardly inscrutable, ally, enmity revolving around shifting political advantage not fundamental alienation. Religion and commerce bound as much as they divided. Even the often fraught Byzantine–Venetian relationship had been eased with Greek payment of reparations for attacks in 1182 on the Venetian community in Constantinople and the restoration of Venetian trading privileges. Byzantine imperial power had appeared impressive until dynastic feuding in the 1180s loosened central grip, so that by 1203 islands and provinces had begun to assume increased autonomy, a process the crusaders’ conquest of the capital in 1204 did nothing to reverse.
78. Constantinople in the fifteenth century.
The diversion to Constantinople was regarded by the crusaders as a means of keeping alive prospects of campaigning in the Levant. For the Venetians it offered an opportunity to further recoup their massive capital outlay; consolidate existing trading rights; and sustain the hope of breaking into the even more lucrative Egyptian market. However, immediately on arrival at Constantinople, westerners’ expectations were confounded. Far from being welcomed as a liberator or returning hero, young Alexius was greeted with armed resistance. Even after his assumption of power following the crusaders’ assault on the city in July 1203 and the flight of Alexius III, Alexius, now Alexius IV, attracted sullen Greek acceptance at best, a political situation further complicated by the unscheduled emergence from prison and restoration of the blinded Isaac II, who then ruled dysfunctionally with his son. To sustain his position, Alexius IV agreed new contracts with the crusaders securing their help for another year in return for more guarantees of assistance for a future Levant campaign. To pay for the deal, Alexius stripped Constantinople of treasure, consolidating Greek hostility to the foreigners and further isolating himself. The presence of the crusaders, camped at Galata across the Golden Horn from the city, with their demands on food supplies, added to the febrile atmosphere as winter closed in. With the Venetian fleet and crusaders’ camp coming under attack from Greek dissidents, a confused series of palace coups ended in February 1204 with Alexius IV and his father dead and a new emperor, an anti-westerner, Alexius V, committed to destroy the crusaders.
Their deteriorating position left the crusaders few options. As one account recalled, ‘they were neither able to enter the sea without danger of imminent death nor delay longer on land because of their impending exhaustion of food and supplies’.20 Without supplies, money or seaworthy ships, their only escape lay through the city. Lingering doubts over attacking fellow Christians were allayed by clergy insisting that combating schismatics, regicides and oath-breakers who were impeding the cause of the Holy Land was both legitimate and meritorious, earning indulgences for those who died in the fighting.21 The crusaders would take by force what the Byzantines had failed or refused to provide under treaty or alliance. In March 1204 the crusaders and Venetians agreed a new contract that settled the distribution of booty from the city, including the final settlement of the original crusader debt, and set the arrangements for carving up power within the Byzantine Empire once the city had fallen. The crusaders agreed to delay their departure east for yet another year, to March 1205, deferring the Egyptian campaign for the fourth time since 1202. The plan was a desperate throw; no foreign army had captured Constantinople since its foundation nine centuries before.
The final attack began on 9 April 1204. In the ensuing capture and sack of the city between 12 and 15 April the crusaders killed thousands of civilians, desecrated churches, destroyed buildings, and looted the city of the moveable wealth that had survived the fiscal predations of Alexius IV and a devastating fire the previous August. The sack of Constantinople was calculated and controlled after the first day of mayhem, the plundering systematic. It was not in the conquerors’ interests to allow unbridled destruction of what was to become their new capital. It has been estimated that the total value of the plunder, in addition to 10,000 horses, may have been around 800,000 marks, enough to fund a substantial western European state for over a decade.22 On top of this were boatloads of relics stolen not exclusively but chiefly by clerics – ‘holy robbers’23 – for whom such sacred loot constituted investment in their home churches’ future prosperity (see ‘Sacred Booty’, p. 250). The gluttonous sack of Constantinople, while not outside the brutal military conventions of the time, struck contemporaries from ibn al-Athir in Mosul to Innocent III in Rome, no less than Byzantines and later observers, as an atrocity in its scale of rapine, slaughter and wanton destruction of centuries of classical and Christian civilisation.24
The capture of Constantinople did not end the Fourth Crusade. Baldwin of Flanders, chosen by the conquerors as the new emperor, insisted at his coronation that the relief of the Holy Land remained the objective for the following year. Only after defeats in 1205 at the hands of Bulgarians and Greeks did the papal legate unilaterally absolve the crusaders in Greece of their Holy Land vows, to the unrestrained but impotent fury of Innocent III. However, not all crusaders had joined the Constantinople excursion or travelled east via Venice. Substantial contingents, including the large Flemish fleet with Countess Marie of Flanders on board, sailed directly to Acre, perhaps up to a fifth of those nobles who took the cross in 1199–1200, with as many as 300 knights reaching the Holy Land, in comparison with the 500 to 700 knights at the Byzantine capital.25 These Holy Land crusaders joined King Aimery of Jerusalem in raids into Galilee and to the Jordan, as well as a naval sortie in May 1204 to the Nile Delta port of Fuwa, which they briefly occupied and ransacked. This aggression encouraged al-Adil to reach a six-year truce favourable to the Franks.
While meagre in its impact on the Levant, the Fourth Crusade exerted a profound influence on future crusading. The schism with the Greek Church was rendered unbridgeable except as a paper diplomatic convenience. Consequent rule over parts of the Balkans, Greece and the Greek islands accelerated direct western investment and exploitation of the region that lasted into the early modern period. Yet western immigration remained a minority concern, initially largely confined to networks of northern French noble houses and the Venetians. The occupation of Latin Greece – or Romania as it was known in the west – hardly deflected support for the remaining outposts of Outremer. Attempts to harness crusades to defend Latin Greece met lukewarm responses from the 1230s and did not materially deprive the Holy Land of aid. More widely, the scale of planning and resources
needed for any Egyptian enterprise had been clearly demonstrated.
Invasions: The Fifth Crusade, 1217–21
The World of the Crusades Page 27