Contemporaries commented on John’s indolence and seemingly serene assertion that he would take back all the conquered fortresses; some attributed this to witchcraft, or again to his uxoriousness. There is evidence that John had sent an envoy to the pope and expected papal intervention to stop Philip’s attacks, as it was well known that Innocent III strongly favoured peace so that more knights could join the Fourth Crusade. Yet although he argued eloquently for peace on the basis of the ruin and suffering caused to the people of Normandy, Innocent made it clear that he could not arbitrate in matters of feudal law between the two kings, and Philip Augustus, who had feared the consequences of papal ire even if it had not made him change his behaviour, now redoubled his efforts in Normandy.
John attacked Brittany in an attempt to lure Philip away from Normandy, but Philip was not drawn and all John did was antagonize the Duke of Brittany and further damage his reputation. John’s actions seem increasingly aimless, and after futilely touring the remaining border fortresses of Normandy, he finally decided to return to England. Although this was ostensibly to gather money and reinforcements, there seems to have been a feeling in Normandy that John would not return, and essentially this sealed the fate of the duchy. William Marshal, who again was a key player in these events, told his biographer how John’s retreat was accomplished:
The king stayed but a short time at Rouen, and announced his intention of going to England in order to ask aid and counsel of his barons; then, he said, he would return without delay. But he took the queen with him, which made many fear he would stay in England until it was too late. On the first night he slept at Bonneville, not in the town, but in the castle, for he suspected treason … He commanded the Marshal and those in whom he felt most confidence to be ready in the morning before daybreak; and so the king left without taking leave while he was supposed to be still asleep; and when his departure was discovered he was seven leagues away … it was quite clear that they could not look for a speedy return.18
Philip now settled down for the siege of Chateau Gaillard, and although already all seemed lost, if Philip had been delayed too long there might have been a chance for John to recover. More importantly, as modern historians point out, Chateau Gaillard was Richard’s project and Richard’s masterpiece. This siege was Philip’s final battle with Richard, four years after Richard’s death.
Philip’s forces had previously appeared before the castle and begun preparations for the attack, and John had launched an audacious combined land-and-river-based attack to foil the besiegers, but despite the soundness of the plan, it was mistimed: the boats coming up the river arrived too late, giving the French time to defeat first the land forces and then in turn the boats. This failure meant that Philip’s forces had invested Chateau Gaillard when John left Normandy at the end of 1203, so he was turning his back on what must have been the most important siege of the campaign.
John’s claim that he had only returned to England to gather additional men and materials does seem to be true, for early in 1204 he was still organizing the defence of Normandy and sent reinforcements to the castles along a defensive line in western Normandy to protect it against invasions from the south. This did nothing for Chateau Gaillard in the east, but John might have been forgiven for putting his faith in Richard’s engineering skill and believing that the castle could hold out for many months. John was preparing his return when the castle fell on 6 March 1204.19
Given that Chateau Gaillard was considered at the time to be the greatest fortification ever built, incorporating all the military developments pioneered by the Crusader castles in the east, which Richard had had plenty of time to study, its fall was shocking. Modern historians predictably turn this, as everything else, into a judgement on Richard versus John. First, the facts: the castle fell because of a design flaw. Despite its elliptical form, which gave completely open sight lines for the defenders to send missiles against the attackers, it turned out that there was one tiny blind spot that afforded protection to the besiegers and allowed them to force their way in. This has variously been described as a tiny bridge connecting the inner to the outer keep or the privies, though inevitably Gillingham finds a comment from William the Breton saying the flaw was because of additional work done by John when he added a chapel to the castle, thus spoiling Richard’s perfect military design and causing the disaster. There is no clear consensus amongst contemporaries as to why the castle fell. If it had held out longer, John might have gained sufficient time to organize a return to Normandy, but given the scale of disaffection with his rule and John’s loss of such significant portions of his domains, I find it hard to believe that Chateau Gaillard could have saved Normandy.20
Regardless, Chateau Gaillard did fall, and another event that caused equal damage to John occurred a month later: Eleanor of Aquitaine died. Despite her advanced age she had remained a stalwart of Angevin authority, and indeed she had secured Aquitaine for John at his accession when so many other regions were slipping away. Eleanor was quite simply the key figure in the creation of the Angevin Empire. Henry II was only heir to the Anglo-Norman kingdom and the county of Anjou, but Aquitaine provided an enormous, culturally different region that doubled the Angevin possessions. Moreover, Eleanor’s relationship with her sons, especially Richard, shaped the latter part of Henry’s reign and all of Richard’s.
Eleanor’s death caused yet another feudal complication between John and Philip when John could ill afford it, not to mention the emotional impact – which must have been considerable – on John of losing his mother and suffering another disaster on top of Chateau Gaillard. John did not return to Normandy, and in May Philip Augustus swept through the duchy, leaving Rouen behind as an isolated fortress and bypassing the defensive line John had established, in order to take Caen, Argentan and other major cities. Rouen surrendered in June 1204, and Normandy was lost. Philip had already secured Anjou, Maine and Touraine, and the Angevin Empire effectively ended, though not the English king’s continental possessions, since Gascony remained under John’s control.21
The Fourth Crusade
As catastrophic as the end of the Angevin Empire was for John, 1204 saw another conquest with even more profound consequences than the annexation of Normandy by France, and which was certainly more shocking: the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Although the first three Crusades had met with varying fortunes, there were still Crusader States in the Holy Land and a sense that Jerusalem could be recaptured, and the Crusading ideal remained at the heart of both papal policy and the dreams of the European aristocracy.
No one in Western Europe was yet reconciled to the loss of Jerusalem, and throughout the 1190s plans for a new Crusade had been under way. One of the stumbling blocks to a new Crusade was the death struggle between the Angevins and Capetians that prevented two of the most powerful states in Western Europe from participating. Emperor Henry VI had been interested in preparing a new Crusade, partially to expunge the memory of his father Frederick Barbarossa’s ignominious death on the way to the Third Crusade, but also because as King of Sicily he was ideally placed to impose his will on the eastern Mediterranean.
Although Henry did not organize an ‘official’ Crusade with papal approval, a number of German Crusaders did go to Acre. The Germans quickly became embroiled in the complicated politics of the Crusader States and performed poorly on the occasions when they faced Muslim armies. Henry VI’s death late in 1197 removed any impetus behind their involvement and they returned home. Their only lasting accomplishment, and it was an important one, was the foundation of the order of Teutonic Knights in 1198. The Teutonic Knights were a distinctively Germanic order and attracted knights from a region that did not traditionally provide members to the Templars or Hospitallers. Their statutes were modelled on the Hospitallers, and as we will see, long after the Crusader States in the Holy Land were gone, they were a major force in the politics of Germany and Eastern Europe.22
Given the relatively haphazard activity of the
Germans, the feeling that a new Crusade was needed persisted. Of note is that from the outset this Crusade was aimed at Egypt. Richard the Lionheart’s experience had shown clearly that Jerusalem could not be held in isolation, and there was a widespread realization that only by ‘striking at the head of the serpent’, in Egypt, could the Holy Land be regained. Although there was a consensus on this point among political and religious leaders, to ordinary Crusaders the idea that a Crusade could be divorced from the concept of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land would prove difficult to accept, and many who took the cross for the Fourth Crusade insisted on going to Syria, with profound consequences for the mission. With one bizarre exception, there would never again be a Crusade to the Holy Land, and subsequent Crusades were always directed at Egypt, Tunisia or closer to home. As we will see, sufficient numbers of knights were able to overcome this prejudice to allow Crusades within Europe to flourish, but there is no question that Crusades outside the Holy Land never had quite the same glamour as the first three.
We possess one of the best sources in Crusading history for the Fourth Crusade, the account of Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, who was one of six envoys appointed to arrange the logistics of the expedition. Geoffrey’s account is patently a justification of the decisions that led to the Fourth Crusade’s outcome, but it is no less valuable because of this, and takes the form of a classical tragedy where each decision – which seemed inevitable at the time – led inexorably to horrific consequences.
Geoffrey’s first task was to arrange transport for the army. By the beginning of the 13th century there was one obvious place to look for ships, and this was Venice. We have come across Venice from time to time before, but only as one among a number of other maritime powers such as Genoa and Pisa. Yet its power had been growing and it had strong trading relationships with the Byzantine Empire – to which it had once been subject – and more controversially with Egypt. Venice was also beginning to extend its dominion along the Adriatic, but it was the Fourth Crusade that established Venice as a great power.
Geoffrey of Villehardouin and others were sent to Venice to hire sufficient ships to transport the army, and by doing so inadvertently doomed the Crusade. Geoffrey says that the Venetians were quite clear about how much the expedition would cost, and the Crusaders undertook to pay a fixed amount per soldier and per horse if the Venetians provided the ships. Because the Venetians had to build the ships before the Crusade began, Geoffrey and the other envoys guaranteed a fixed number of Crusaders and agreed the final price in advance.23
This is where everything went wrong, because over the course of the year allowed for the Crusaders to assemble in Venice, various groups decided to travel via alternate routes. Many went to Syria in direct opposition to the planned attack on Egypt, showing the resistance to a purely military basis for the Crusade and the desire to include a pilgrimage to the holy places. Geoffrey’s frustration emerges when he decries those who went to Syria, ‘where, as they must have known, they could do nothing worth while’, rather than join the main attack on Egypt. Worse, every Crusader who didn’t turn up in Venice was another person not contributing to the agreed fee, and when the deadline in 1203 arrived there wasn’t anywhere near enough money to pay the Venetians. Geoffrey is scathing about all those who chose alternative means of transport, though it must have been difficult for ordinary Crusaders to comprehend that if they didn’t travel via Venice, the Crusade would fail. Geoffrey also noted that more people sailed directly to Syria from Marseilles than ultimately went to Constantinople, so what is seen as the ‘real’ Fourth Crusade was in fact a minority group. Since all those who went to Syria were slain or returned home without accomplishing anything of note and the smaller party captured Constantinople and founded a Latin Empire in Greece, naturally it is justified to call the Crusade to Constantinople the true Fourth Crusade.
Geoffrey emphasizes at every step that the Venetians were acting in accord with agreements that the Crusaders had formally sworn to uphold, but his contemporaries and many modern historians choose to see Venice as the villain in the piece. This is perhaps best expressed in John Ruskin’s thundering indictment, when he says that the reader seduced by Venice’s ancient power and beauty might be surprised to discover that:
… while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her religion.24
Certainly there was a touch of opportunism in the Venetians’ behaviour. With a large, well-armed force now at their disposal, the Venetians offered to delay full payment of their fee if the Crusaders would help them recapture the city of Zara (modern Zadar, in Croatia, a place we will begin to encounter frequently), which had been seized by the Christian king of Hungary. The terms were that the Venetians would then transport the Crusaders to Egypt without having been paid in full, but the Crusaders would have to make good the deficit from plunder. This raises the question of why the Venetians didn’t simply transport the Crusaders to Egypt in exchange for future plunder, rather than also requiring them to attack another Christian ruler, but Geoffrey didn’t find their request unreasonable. Pope Innocent III took a different view, and made it absolutely clear that a Crusade had no business intervening in an essentially commercial dispute between two Christian powers over a maritime city.
There was considerable disagreement among the Crusaders about how to respond to the Venetian offer, but the Doge Enrico Dandolo, in a masterstroke of public relations, publicly took the cross in St Mark’s and encouraged the rest of the Venetians to do so as well, thus joining their fate to that of the Crusaders after Zara had been taken. We forget the atmosphere of the Crusades at our peril, and despite the undoubted readiness of the Venetians to use the Crusade for their own aims, the Crusading army would genuinely have believed it was doing God’s work, and the willingness of the Venetians to join in impressed the Crusaders. They duly went to Zara and took the city without much difficulty.
At this point came another unexpected development: Alexius, son of the deposed Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelos, approached the Crusaders and offered to give them a huge amount of money and considerable support in men, ships and supplies for the Crusade if they would help him return his father to the throne. He also agreed that the Greek Orthodox church would return to the obedience of Rome, a goal of the papacy for centuries. With hindsight, the idea that a Crusade should be turned against Constantinople to intervene in its internal politics can only seem misguided, if not ridiculous, but at this point the Fourth Crusade was bankrupt and had lost a substantial part of its strength, so we can perhaps understand why its leaders saw accepting Alexius’s offer as the only possible way of succeeding. Anyway, they had already intervened in one petty dispute between Christian powers and captured a Christian city, so why not another?
The Crusader army now attacked Constantinople to overthrow the usurper and restore Alexius and his father to power. Despite the nearly impregnable fortifications of this, the greatest city in the Christian world, and its overwhelming advantage in manpower, something of the situation in Constantinople can be discerned by the fact that after the first attack by the Crusaders – in which the remarkable Doge Enrico Dandolo, although blind and nearly ninety, stood in the prow of a Venetian galley holding the banner of St Mark, and was carried to the shore with the first wave of attackers – the usurper quickly abandoned the city to his rival.
Isaac Angelos was released from prison and restored to the throne, and Villehardouin was part of the delegation that went to him and presented the terms of the agreement with his son. These do seem rather onerous, as recorded by Villehardouin:
The terms are as follows: First of all to place the whole of this empire under the jurisdiction of Rome, from which it has long since broken away; further, to give 200,000 silver marks to the army and a full year’s supply of provisions to me
n of all ranks; to convey 10,000 men, in his own ships to Egypt, and keep them there at his own expense for a year; and, during his lifetime, to maintain, at his own expense, a company of 500 knights in the land oversea, to keep guard over it.25
Isaac commented that he didn’t see how the terms could be met, but accepted that as he owed his empire to the Crusaders he must agree to them, and duly agreed, witnessed ‘by oath and by charters with gold seals affixed’. He and his son were crowned with great splendour and did begin to pay some of the money due, while the Crusaders settled into their camps and acted as tourists until the time came to depart.
Villehardouin’s account vividly gives a sense of the morass into which the Crusade was sinking, and the endless complications that beset them. Alexius now told the leaders of the Crusade that he was still resented by the Byzantines because he had returned to power through the support of the Crusade, and he was also unable to fulfil all the terms of the agreement because things were not yet settled enough for the full revenues of the empire to be collected. He therefore suggested that the Crusaders stay in Constantinople until the following Easter (it was now late August) at his expense, as well as renewing the contract with the Venetian fleet (which would expire in about a month) for another year at his expense, all of which would allow him to consolidate his hold on the throne and bring in enough money to pay his debts to them. They could then continue the Crusade on a sound financial footing and with the Byzantine support that had been promised.
Alexius’s analysis of the situation was almost certainly correct, but it caused great discord among the Crusaders. Many of the ordinary soldiers complained that all this was taking far too long, with the Crusade first capturing Zara, then Constantinople and now being expected to act as a mercenary force for the new emperor for another year. Villehardouin and his party strongly advocated accepting the new agreement, since from an organizational point of view the Crusade had no possibility of success unless it had sound finances and a fleet that could attack Egypt. We see here, in the early 13th century, the sharp divide that had developed between the idealistic, mystical view of the Crusades that advocated simply turning up in the Holy Land and trusting God to take care of the details – which, after all, had worked brilliantly on the First Crusade – and the practical view, founded on the limited success or outright failure of the Second and Third Crusades as well as the loss of Jerusalem, that these were military expeditions that must be adequately funded, supplied and supported.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 23