Villehardouin’s party prevailed, and a new contract was agreed. Alexius undertook a successful tour of the empire with Crusader support to receive the submission of all his subjects. Although things remained tense in Constantinople between the Greeks and Latins – and a huge fire that destroyed much of the city, and for which the Latins were blamed, didn’t help – the situation seemed stable.
However, Alexius’s payments to the Crusaders dwindled and gradually stopped. Villehardouin attributed this to pride and ingratitude, though it could just as easily have been from lack of resources. Of course, the Crusaders could not daily look at the richest city in Christendom and believe that its emperor lacked funds, so they duly sent another delegation that informed Isaac and Alexius that if they did not honour their agreement the Crusaders would attack the city. Naturally the Byzantines were furious at this insult, and a new conflict began. This dragged on for months without either side gaining the advantage, causing discontent in the city. Any student of Byzantine history will be prepared for what followed, because Isaac and Alexius were overthrown by yet another usurper; Isaac died and Alexius was murdered. Now Constantinople was in complete turmoil and the Crusaders felt justified in attacking to force compliance with the terms of their agreement.
After bitter fighting the Crusaders broke into the city once again and caused great slaughter among the inhabitants, as well as another huge fire that according to Villehardouin destroyed more houses than in any three of the greatest cities in France. They sacked the two main palaces and ‘Geoffrey de Villehardouin here declares that, to his knowledge, so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world.’26
Villehardouin is unapologetic about the business arrangements that underpinned the attack. It was agreed that once the city was conquered one of the Crusaders would be chosen as Emperor, and he would take one quarter of the Empire. The remaining three-quarters would be divided between the Crusaders and the Venetians. This division would have considerable resonance for the Venetians, who forever after called themselves the rulers of ‘one quarter and one half of the Roman Empire’. This seems a little too neat, and again many modern historians argue that the Venetians must have planned the attack on Constantinople all along. However, we must remember we are in an age before secularization, and there was no distinction between the religious goals of the Crusade and the prosaic mechanisms that were used to fund it. The Crusaders saw no inconsistency in being materially rewarded for their participation in a Crusade and the Venetians saw no hypocrisy in being paid for their services.
And handsomely paid they were. The Crusaders plundered Constantinople comprehensively, and Venice gained huge wealth from the conquest and considerably enhanced its trading position in the eastern Mediterranean, providing the basis for its virtually unchecked expansion until the late 15th century. Even today, the eastern wall of the great council chamber in the Doge’s Palace in Venice shows the story of the Fourth Crusade in a series of 16th-century paintings, since later Venetians were never in doubt about the origins of their city’s success.
From a religious point of view, Constantinople was best known for its unmatched collection of relics. Villehardouin said there were as many relics in Constantinople as in all the rest of the world, and most of these were seized by the Crusaders. Christ’s Crown of Thorns eventually made its way to Paris after being sold to Louis IX in 1239 (Louis built the Sainte Chapelle, perhaps the most beautiful medieval church still in existence, to house it), and the treasury of St Mark’s in Venice is stuffed with the relics seized on the Fourth Crusade.
Even more impressively, the Venetians took secular memorials of the Roman Empire, most notably the four horses that stood for centuries above the entrance to St Mark’s (they have been replaced by replicas, but the original horses still inspire awe in the museum). Other items such as the four porphyry Tetrarchs on the corner of St Mark’s next to the entrance of the Doge’s palace and the classical columns said to be from Acre are dotted around the basilica. JG Links, author of arguably the best travel book written about Venice, Venice for Pleasure, put it perfectly when he said that the Venetians treated St Mark’s as their mantelpiece where they put the souvenirs of their conquests around the Mediterranean.
It had been agreed before the attack that the choice of Emperor should be between Baldwin Count of Flanders and Boniface Marquis of Montferrat, and Baldwin now became the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople.27 Contemporaries were in no doubt that the Fourth Crusade had been worthwhile and celebrated the scale of the victory. The troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras wrote:
… Never did Alexander or Charlemagne or King Louis lead such a glorious expedition, nor could the valiant lord Aimeri or Roland with his warriors win by might, in such noble fashion, such a powerful empire as we have won, whereby our Faith is in the ascendant; for we have created emperors and dukes and kings, and have manned strongholds near the Turks and Arabs and opened up the roads and ports from Brindisi to St George’s Straits [the Bosphorus].
By us will Damascus be assaulted, and Jerusalem conquered, and the kingdom of Syria liberated for the Turks find this in their prophecies.28
The emphasis is on Constantinople as a stepping stone for retaking the Holy Land, not an end in its own right, which the Crusaders do genuinely seem to have believed.
However, the new empire did not flourish, and within a year the Emperor Baldwin had been captured by the Bulgarians and died in prison, and Boniface of Montferrat was killed in battle in 1207. The Latin settlers did reach an equilibrium with the other powers in the region, resulting in (roughly) a Latin Emperor controlling only Constantinople, the Duke of Athens controlling northern Greece and the Prince of Achaea controlling southern Greece. The Latins had only taken Constantinople and the Peloponnese, and the Greeks crowned their own Emperor based in Nicaea who controlled lands along the coast of Asia Minor, and a Greek despot of Epiros controlled northwestern Greece and Macedonia. Finally, the Venetians held key Greek ports such as Negroponte, Modon and Corfu and would extend their hold over various ports and islands over the course of the next two centuries.
These new Crusader States in Greece and the Aegean proved something of a distraction and an embarrassment. As with the original Crusader States, they were desperately short of manpower and needed new Crusaders to replenish their numbers. Papal attempts to interest the largest source of Crusaders, France, by calling the Greek territories ‘New France’ in 1224 failed to attract much support. In fact, the Latins called Greece ‘Morea’, derived from the word for ‘mulberry’, said to be because of the shape of the Peloponnese. The new territories quickly devolved into petty principalities squabbling with each other and their neighbours, and there we will leave them for fifty years until they were drawn into the Angevin orbit.
The Battle of Bouvines, Magna Carta and the Fall of King John
While the new Emperor and other Latin rulers were trying to establish themselves in Greece, King John was trying to come to terms with the loss of his own empire. Perhaps owing to the ease with which Philip had conquered Normandy and Anjou, and the wave of disloyalty that had guaranteed this, John initially most feared that Philip would invade England. He began what we can first properly call an English ‘navy’, organizing the Cinque Ports and his own ships into the first coherent fleet, supervised by a dedicated official, William of Wrotham. When the invasion didn’t materialize – and of course Philip had absolutely no feudal right to attack John in England, though in ten years a French invasion would become a reality – John simply shifted his preparations into his own invasion to retake Poitou, again demonstrating that he had by no means accepted the loss of his continental possessions.
The consequences of this policy were even harsher financial exactions on his kingdom and a further increase in centralization that began to seem like tyranny. John was forced to limit his activity to England and Ireland, which made him the first king since 1066 to be so confined. Though Gascony still belonged to him, the lack o
f contiguity made it a much less significant factor in English politics than Normandy had ever been. This creates the false impression that John was more active in administration than his predecessors, because the better organized English records survive in greater number and we have a higher percentage of material remaining for his reign. Yet there can be no doubt that John’s administration had to be more focused on England. Had he succeeded all might have been forgiven, but his military failure – the fact that his rapacity resulted in no gain – tipped the kingdom into rebellion.
Because if John had not given up, the situation among the barons was markedly different. Years of continuous warfare had taken a toll and the barons were fed up. When John gathered the feudal host at Portsmouth in May 1205 to invade Poitou, an acrimonious council of barons ultimately refused to go, and the expedition was cancelled (although a small force under John’s bastard son and brother did go to Poitou to conduct desultory operations).29 As we have seen, all medieval kings, though perhaps especially the Angevins, had realized that the old feudal host based on individual knights serving for a set number of days with limits on where they would travel was hopelessly outmoded in a new era of international warfare. John began formalizing a system whereby out of every ten knights who owed service, nine would commute their obligation into money to support the tenth who would serve for as long as and wherever the king needed him. These were the first tentative steps towards standing professional armies.
In 1206 John was able to launch a successful expedition across the Channel, securing Gascony and invading Anjou and ultimately taking Angers. This symbolic retaking of the Angevin homeland should have been significant, but Philip Augustus sent a force towards Anjou and John was unable to maintain his position, largely due to the fact that his Poitevin subjects were reluctant to take the field against Philip Augustus, who was their ultimate overlord and given recent events in Normandy and Anjou might well become their actual master quite soon. Although John was unable to maintain his position in Anjou, 1206 stabilized the situation considerably after the disasters of 1204 and 1205. This confirmed to John that regaining his empire was a possibility and he began preparing for an attack on a scale that had not been seen since Richard’s force for the Third Crusade, and it is this that defined his legacy.30
From the beginning John planned a pincer movement on Philip that would involve an English invasion of Poitou and a simultaneous northern invasion from an allied Flemish and German force. John patiently built a series of alliances with the count of Flanders and the count of Boulogne, amongst others, in the Low Countries, but the key to the plan was John’s relationship with his nephew Otto of Brunswick, a contender to be Holy Roman Emperor. This compares well with – and can be seen as a direct extension of – the coalition Richard constructed to immobilize Philip, and reminds us that John was not without diplomatic skill, at least with people who did not live under his rule.
As an aside, Otto of Brunswick was also known as Otto of Welf, and the Hohenstaufen line of Emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa, Henry of Swabia and later Frederick II were from southwestern Germany and had an important centre at the castle of Waiblingen. As Giovanni Villani documents in his Florentine chronicle of the 14th century, the enormously destructive conflict between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen in Italy that ripped the peninsula apart for the next 600 years began with the struggle between these two factions, and they became known as ‘Guelfs’ (Welf) and ‘Ghibellines’ (Waiblingen).31
As with most political parties the two factions quickly evolved and became identified with many other issues in each community, but this is their origin. Throughout the 13th and into the 14th century the Guelfs and Ghibellines endlessly fought within Italian cities, and for our purposes the most important point is that the Guelfs were generally aligned with the papacy and the later Angevin kingdom of Sicily and Naples, whereas the Ghibellines supported the imperial party, particularly the Hohenstaufen.
It had taken more than seven years for John to prepare his forces, and even then their mood was precarious as the barons were no more reconciled to long service abroad than they had been in 1205. Philip Augustus then made a bold decision: he decided the time was finally right for his invasion of England, and he marched into Flanders to seize appropriate seaports. This galvanized John’s Flemish allies to fight against the French, and John’s meticulous preparations for his own navy demonstrated their value. In 1213 John and his allies sent a fleet of 500 ships that caught the French ships unawares at Damme (the port for Bruges) and destroyed virtually the entire French fleet. This was the first in a series of critical English naval victories in the Middle Ages that would also shape the course of the Hundred Years War. Philip’s invasion of England was stillborn and John now had the initiative for his own invasion.
As was frequently to become the case with grand military plans launched by Angevins (notably Charles of Anjou), John’s strategy was hindered by a Crusade. This was the Albigensian Crusade against the heretics of southern France, particularly those in the lands of the count of Toulouse. Raymond VI of Toulouse was actually an Angevin kinsman, because he had married John’s sister. John supported Raymond and had undertaken to send military support to him in 1213, but as we know John faced difficulties raising troops to fight his own battles, never mind those of an in-law who was the target of a Crusade. Raymond and his ally the king of Aragon were defeated by the Crusaders at the battle of Muret in 1213, and so in turn were unable to provide any support to John, which might have tipped the balance in his favour in 1214.32
John landed at La Rochelle in 1214 to launch the reconquest. Proof that this was part of a larger strategy for reconstituting the Angevin Empire came when John immediately went south on a tour of Aquitaine that allowed him to demonstrate his authority to potentially wavering vassals and judge the degree of support available to him. This public display of power was meant to impress Philip but also to draw him southward and leave him exposed to the attack from the north being prepared by Otto of Brunswick. John then threatened Philip’s southern border by capturing Nantes in a victory resounding enough to drive William des Roches from Angers, and John occupied the Angevin capital again in June 1214. John’s strategy proved sound and Philip had advanced southward to meet him, but realising the danger from Flanders he returned north and left his son Louis to meet John. John had superiority in numbers and was desperate to fight at the castle of La Roche aux Moines, but once again the chroniclers report that John’s Poitevin vassals were unwilling to fight the son and heir of their liege lord, and John was forced to retreat. In the summer of 1214 this left him sitting impotently in La Rochelle trying to construct a more reliable army for a final showdown with Philip.
Of course that showdown did occur, but John was not involved. Philip’s correct assessment of the situation allowed him time to return to Flanders to meet Otto’s invading force at the bridge of Bouvines, and on Sunday 27 July Philip won an overwhelming victory that secured his augmented kingdom and broke John’s power for good. It made Philip a French national hero, and despite all the previous reports of timidity and the stain on Philip’s reputation for leaving the Third Crusade early, it also made him a more successful military commander than Richard the Lionheart.33
We know the consequences of Philip’s victory for John. The English barons had been restive since the loss of Normandy and Anjou in 1204 and defied John on several occasions since. Philip marched south after Bouvines and John agreed a truce with him in September, returning to England in October. The barons were now openly in revolt. This was not only the result of John’s military defeats but also a direct result of the Angevin Empire. England’s position as a literal island of stability in the turbulent Angevin Empire made it by default the source of funding for royal projects, and by 1214 the situation was intolerable, most immediately because of John’s repeated failures, but ultimately also because of the behaviour of Henry II and Richard.
Indeed, one of the rallying cries of the rebel barons was a retur
n to the ‘good old law’ of the time of Henry I. Although there would certainly have been an element of nostalgia in harking back to a time before any of the current barons had been alive, there was definitely a sense that Henry II had instituted new policies, new laws and a new direction for the monarchy. There was also a solid basis to this nostalgia, because the huge increase in the availability of written documents in the 12th century gave barons access to collections of the laws of Edward the Confessor and Henry I and the coronation charter of Henry I, which had now been translated into French, the language of the nobility.34
Despite attempts by John to send the dispute for arbitration to the pope, which was probably just a delaying tactic, the barons renounced their fealty to John on 5 May 1215 and appointed Robert fitz Walter their leader.35 Although John had been preparing for the revolt and his castles were well defended, the rebels managed to seize London, which instantly gave them a notable success and a kind of legitimacy. Within a month it was clear to John that he had to sue for peace, and the accommodation he reached with the barons was sealed by Magna Carta, issued between 19 and 24 June 1215. Copies were made to be circulated around the kingdom, of which four survive.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 24