The Crusades and the Near East
Page 14
There is no assertion here of the kind of nefarious intent diagnosed by twelfth-century Byzantine historians in their assessment of earlier crusades, despite the seemingly far stronger foundation for such suspicions in the overall course of events. Thus, the evidence of historiography suggests that far from conventional distrust of proclaimed crusading motives being entrenched by the Fourth Crusade, the blow to imperial confidence and conceit inflicted by the disaster encouraged the open espousal of interpretations which took the crusaders at their word, acknowledging the possibility that Byzantium might have only a tangential importance in Latin thinking. The demise of the insistence that such a grand military undertaking among the ‘barbarians’ must be directed at seizing the empire of the Romans, the supreme earthly prize, is expressive of a marked retreat from traditional convictions about the empire’s centrality in the affairs of the world.
The work of Byzantine writers from the period after the Fourth Crusade also reveals wider adjustments in the way in which outsiders were perceived, and thus in ideas of the empire and its people themselves in contradistinction to foreigners.
From the thirteenth century the characterisation of outsiders as barbarians, hitherto a commonplace in Byzantine writing, became rarer. This terminology and the rehearsal of the associated stereotypes remained in frequent use only to denote the Turks and other non-Christian peoples. Strikingly, in so far as it was still used to describe Christian peoples, it was usually the Bulgarians and other Orthodox Slavic neighbours of the empire who were so labelled, not the Latins.84
The bitterness generated by the sack of Constantinople might reasonably have been expected to deepen the association of the Latins with the wanton destruc-tiveness of the barbarian. Yet the Fourth Crusade seems to have been followed by a widespread shift in perceptions removing the Latins from the barbarian category.
71
C H R I S W R I G H T
This was presumably a further ramification of the shattering of reassuring assumptions. The category of barbarian ceased to be a generalised designation for foreign peoples, whose disorderly and brutish life was set in contrast to the steadiness and refinement of a civilisation definitively linked to the imperial state, perhaps because Byzantine writers could no longer sustain the complacent conviction of superiority, sincere or affected, that had allowed the perpetuation of this traditional image. Barbarism became a largely religious category, while non-Roman Christian peoples were implicitly allowed within the civilised pale, although reservations remained with regard to the empire’s long-standing northern neighbours, on whom Byzantine writers had piled a thick layering of scorn in more confident times. Thus the process of undermining the image of a unique, civilised empire surrounded by a scatter of barbarian peoples which had begun with the identification of the Latins as one group was extended.
As the efficacy and credibility of the state and of conventional perceptions of it were undermined, other sources of authority and bases for identity became increasingly important. The status of the Church hierarchy, and of the Patriarch of Constantinople in particular, as an object of loyalty and a source of authority was increased. Unlike the empire, the patriarchate did not see its adherents lastingly divided among rival lines of claimants to the throne. As the strength and status of the empire dwindled, the reach of Church and patriarchate remained relatively intact, so that emperors increasingly leaned on the authority of the clergy to bolster their own legitimacy and standing. This is found, for example, in the ceremonial of imperial accession. The imperial acclamation of Theodore Komnenos Doukas in Thessalonike in 1224–5 substituted the clergy for the people as acclaiming the emperor alongside the senate and army, while his rivals in Nicaea were anointed by the patriarch, an apparent novelty in Byzantine ceremonial.85 By the fourteenth century clerics were taking part in the ceremony of raising the new emperor on a shield for acclamation, traditionally performed by soldiers.86 The famous letter of Patriarch Antonios IV to the Grand Duke of Moscow, in which he condemned the latter’s decision to cease ceremonial acknowledgement of the emperor and restated the traditional ideology of imperial authority, eloquently symbolises the role of the Church in bolstering the battered credibility of the empire.87 While the Church willingly provided its support in this regard, the need for such help shows the diminished efficacy of the empire’s ideological arsenal, and its increased dependence on clerical endorsement reflects the extent to which the Church had filled the void opened by the empire’s fading lustre. This shift in the balance of power gave rise to more assertive and grandiose expressions of the standing of the ecclesiastical establishment in relation to imperial authority.88
The period after the Fourth Crusade also saw an increased emphasis being placed, at least among the educated elite, on the cultural inheritance of ancient Greece as a focus of self-identification. In a trend that had its beginnings in the eleventh century but was greatly intensified from the thirteenth, Byzantine writers began to identify themselves and their people as ‘Hellenes’ and to develop notions 72
I M P A C T O F T H E C R U S A D E S O N B Y Z A N T I U M
of a Hellenic identity derived from the ancient world.89 This in part reflected a decline in the adequacy of Roman identity to express the self-image and self-esteem of the imperial elite. As a source of definition and pride, an ancient cultural and intellectual tradition was less susceptible to the political vicissitudes of the present than a beleaguered state. This shift may also reflect the scope for terminological confusion between the Roman state and people, on one hand, and the Church of Rome, on the other. With the adherents of the papacy now a pervasive presence in the Byzantine world and in places a politically dominant one, and with the increased bitterness surrounding the schism following the Fourth Crusade and the intrusion of a Latin hierarchy, this ambiguity was more problematic than in former periods.90
A more marked realignment of identity appears to have taken place in some of the lands under Latin rule. Allegiance to the empire and adherence to the imperial ideal seem to have faded from the thinking of a significant number of its former subjects who had passed under the sway of Latin regimes as a result of the Fourth Crusade. In their stead, regional loyalties which could embrace the new rulers as well as the native population rose to prominence. This pattern is discernible particularly in the Peloponnese, where members of the indigenous landowning classes retained some of their wealth and power and joined the lower echelons of an ethnically mixed aristocracy together with the conquerors. Many of these indigenous leaders were willing to serve Latin rulers loyally in the face of efforts to restore Byzantine control.91 This shifting political loyalty is manifested in the Greek versions of the Chronicle of the Morea, presumably produced for a native audience, in which the empire appears as a hostile and decried outside force while solidarity between the native inhabitants of the peninsula and their Latin rulers is espoused.92 In marked contrast to the process under way in Turkish Anatolia, such populations were not simply being assimilated by the conquerors. They retained the linguistic, religious and cultural elements which had characterised their identity, and continued to regard themselves as Romans, but this was an identity in which the Roman state ceased to be a defining reference point.93
The final challenge which the crusade posed to the empire’s sense of self was the pressure that it exerted on successive imperial governments to accept the claims of papal monarchy, giving up its traditional notions of the government of the Church and the emperor’s position in the Christian world. This pressure was exerted in negative terms in the thirteenth century and in positive ones in the fourteenth and fifteenth, encapsulating the ambivalence of the empire’s relationship with crusading. The Union of Lyon arose out of the central role of the schism in promoting crusading hostility to Byzantium, that of Florence out of the obstacle the schism posed to crusading assistance against the Turks. Yet, while the crusades were the driving force behind imperial promotion of Church Union, they also helped to ensure that that policy would remain a
futile undertaking. The bitterness they had instilled against the Latins had entrenched the schism, while their reduction of imperial power and prestige and the corresponding increase in ecclesiastical authority undermined the capacity of emperors to cajole or coerce 73
C H R I S W R I G H T
their Church and people to comply with their wishes. The controversy also represents the fullest expression of the process by which the crusades diminished the centrality of the Byzantine state in its own society. It repeatedly set that state directly at odds with a very widely supported view of the Orthodox religious adherence which was central to its subjects’ sense of identity. This complicated feelings to the extent that Loukas Notaras, the most influential official of the Emperor Constantine XI, could make his famous assertion that the empire’s impending subjection to infidel rule was preferable to the subjection to the Latin religious order which recent imperial policy had promoted.94
The shifts in self-perception that characterised the last centuries of Byzantium cannot be seen as purely a product of the crusades. In so far as they arose from the acute decline of the empire’s power and prestige, they were a product of all the forces contributing to that deterioration, including internal conflicts and structural changes, the secession and subsequent military pressure of the peoples of the northern Balkans and the expansion of the Turks, as well as the Latin challenge. Even in so far as the more forceful presence and pressure of the Latins contributed to them, developments separate from the crusading movement, such as the commercial expansion of the Italian republics and the growing intellectual prestige of the West, were also at work. Nevertheless, the crusades were of decisive importance in driving such changes forward. The First Crusade had opened a new era for Latin enterprise in the eastern Mediterranean, notably in its effect on the activities of Latin maritime communities into the region. The harm done by the Fourth Crusade was probably the most important single contributing factor to the empire’s subsequent decline, while the passage of crusading armies in the twelfth century and the establishment of Latin territories around the Aegean in the thirteenth were fundamental to the growth and transformation of the Latin role in the Byzantine world. Thus, besides their direct contribution to these changes, the crusades catalysed other forces working in the same direction.
The changes in Byzantine thought brought about by the crusades represented incremental shifts in emphasis rather than a revolutionary transformation. While some of the shifts in symbolism that emerged in the empire of Nicaea proved lasting, the reversion to former practice in other respects after 1261 reflects the persistent quality of traditional perceptions of the empire’s special status. The vast majority both of the empire’s remaining subjects and of its former subjects under Latin rule continued to see themselves as Romans. Even among those educated sections of the population where the notion of Hellenic identity became influential, it was an adjunct rather than a replacement for Roman identity.95 Nor did this identity become generally divorced from its connection with the Roman state.
The refusal of George Akropolites to acknowledge the Epirot rivals of the empire of Nicaea as being Roman reflects the continuing assertion of a tight equation between Roman identity and allegiance to the state ruled by the legitimate Roman emperor.96 It was only after the empire’s destruction that the Athenian historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles would go so far as to apply the term ‘Roman’ not to Byzantium and its people but to the Latins, while describing the Byzantines 74
I M P A C T O F T H E C R U S A D E S O N B Y Z A N T I U M
exclusively as ‘Hellenes’.97 Thus the impact of the crusades significantly weakened but did not fundamentally overturn Byzantine views of the empire’s place in the world and in the loyalties and identity of its people.
This limited marginalisation of Byzantium by the crusade had begun as a trend in ideas about the empire’s place within the goals of a military enterprise, shifting from being the focal point of the early schemes of Gregory VII and the Latin intervention sought by Alexios I to being a peripheral consideration in the movement called forth by Urban II, but remaining firmly entangled with the movement and the thinking of its participants throughout the remainder of Byzantine history. Soon this development grew into an alteration of more general Latin thinking about Byzantium’s position in the world, with the spread of perceptions of the empire as negligent or treacherous with regard to a common Christian cause, although this never entirely displaced the notion that it should still be extended Christian solidarity. Finally the repercussions of the movement culminated in a shift in the ideological perceptions and sense of identity of the empire’s own rulers and people, who leaned increasingly on other sources of self-definition and espoused less confidently the uniqueness and superiority of the Roman state.
Notes
1 E. Caspar (ed.), Das Register Gregors VII, 2, Berlin: Weidman, 1920–3, I.69–71, 75–6, 126–8, 165–8, 172–3, 188–9 (nos. I 46, 49, II 3, 31, 37, 49); H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘Pope Gregory VII’s “crusading” plans of 1074’, Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem Presented to Joshua Prawer, B.Z. Kedar, H.E. Mayer and R.C. Smail (eds), Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982, pp. 27–40; H.E.J.
Cowdrey, ‘The Gregorian papacy, Byzantium and the First Crusade’, Byzantium and the West, c850–c1200: Proceedings of the XVIII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford 30 March–1 April 1984, James Howard-Johnston (ed.), Amsterdam: Adolf Hakkert, 1988, pp. 145–69 at pp. 154–5; Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 164–9.
2 Caspar, Register, pp. 165–8 (no. II 31); Cowdrey, ‘Gregory’, pp. 34–5.
3 Peter Charanis, ‘A Greek source on the origins of the First Crusade’, Speculum 24, 1949, 93–4; Peter Charanis, ‘Byzantium, the West and the origin of the First Crusade’, Byzantion 9, 1949, 17–36 at 30–6; Jonathan Shepard, ‘Aspects of Byzantine attitudes and policy towards the West in the tenth and eleventh centuries’, Byzantinische Forschungen 13, 1988, 67–118 at 111–12.
4 FC 130–8. For a discussion of whether Fulcher was present at Clermont, see pp. 177–8.
5 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, London: Athlone, 1986, pp. 13–25; Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, pp. 319–34, 365–71; Norman Housley, ‘Jerusalem and the development of the crusade idea, 1099–1128’, in B.Z. Kedar (ed.), The Horns of Hattin: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1992, pp. 27–40, reprinted in Norman Housley, Crusading and Warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate 2001, pp. 28–36.
6 Anna Komnene, Alexias (règne de l’empereur Alexis I Comnène, 1081–1118), Bernard Leib (ed. and tr.), 4 (Paris 1943–76), I.136–8; 2, 63, 67–74, 79–81, 109–10, 151, 205–6; 3, 7–19, 23–7; Jonathan Shepard, ‘“Father” or “scorpion”? Style and substance 75
C H R I S W R I G H T
in Alexios’s diplomacy’, Alexios I Komnenos, Margaret Mullett and Dion Smythe (eds), Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1996, pp. 68–132 at 86–9.
7 Anna Komnene, Alexias, III.40–1, 49, 57–9; NC 52; JK 133–4; WT 662–3; Ralph-Johannes Lilie, Byzantium and the Crusader States, 1096–1204, J.C. Morris and J.E. Ridings (trs), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 64, 70–2, 83–4, 105–10, 176–80.
8 GF 25–6; AA 596–7.
9 FC 178–9: ‘Erat enim omnibus hoc necesse, ut sic cum imperatore amicitiam consolidarent, sine cuius consilio et auxilio nostrum iter nequivimus expedire, neque illi qui nos erant subsecuturi eodem tramite.’ Translation from The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials, Edward Peters (tr.), Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania Press, 1998 [1971], p. 62.
10 RA 40–1: ‘Boamundus et dux Lotaringie, et Flandrensis comes, et alii principes hoc precabantur ut properaret comes convenire imperatorem de itinere Iherosolimitano, ut assumpta cruce dux et impe
rator in exercitu Dei fieret.’ Translation from Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem, J.H. Hill and L.L. Hill (trs), Philadelpia: The American Philosophical Society, 1968, p. 22.
11 GF 72; RA 105–6; WT I.343; Lilie, Crusader States, pp. 39–43.
12 JK 67–83; NC 60–8; OD 66–99; Lilie, Crusader States, pp. 145–63; Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 46–53.
13 JK 16–24, 33–4, 178–90, 278–80, 300; NC 27–31, 39, 108–10, 159–68; WT 662–3, 670–1, 674–81, 700–4, 781–5, 844–8, 915–17, 926–34, 940–6, 981–6; Lilie, Crusader States, pp. 109–41, 176–83, 198–202, 204–9, 215–19; Magdalino, Manuel, pp. 66–76; J.L. La Monte, ‘To what extent was the Byzantine empire the suzerain of the crusader states?’, Byzantion 7, 1932, 253–64.
14 Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 (1738–1904), 15, Michel-Jean-Joseph Brial (ed.), pp. 952–3 (no. 385); Lilie, Crusader States, pp. 211–14; Magdalino, Manuel, pp. 95–7.
15 NC 176–91; Magdalino, Manuel, p. 98; Lilie, Crusader States, pp. 211–15.
16 Robert of Clari, La conquête de Constantinople, Peter Noble (ed. and tr.), Edinburgh: Société Rencevals British Branch, 2005, p. 203; see also Magdalino, Manuel, pp.