‘Okay, Dad.’
Anna and Alexius
My life has been one long series of storms and revolutions.
– Anna Comnena
IN THE FIFTY YEARS after Basil II’s death, imperial blunders cost the empire the larger part of its army, half its territory and the wealth of its treasury. The hapless Michael VII was pushed aside in 1078 in favour of another Nicephorus. Long past his prime, Nicephorus directed all his feeble energies into fighting off pretenders to his throne and handing out gold to his cronies.
Hopes were raised when an aristocratic young general, Alexius Comnenus, took power in a coup d’état in April 1081. He was twenty-five years old. The brilliant and wily Alexius was the most adroit politician to sit on the throne since Heraclius. He would have to improvise his way out of the disasters he’d inherited.
WE KNOW SO MUCH about Alexius because his daughter Anna chronicled the story of her father’s life and times in a classic work known as the Alexiad. Anna Comnena is the world’s first known female historian, and in the Alexiad, we hear her lively voice, carried across the distance of a thousand years. She’s hardly an impartial observer, but her discerning eye and close proximity to events more than make up for any absence of objectivity.
The Alexiad was conceived as an act of devotion to a father whom she loved and admired, but the real star of the book is Anna herself. She begins by insisting we take her seriously as an historian and an intellectual:
I was not ignorant of letters, for I carried my study of Greek to the highest pitch, and was also not unpractised in rhetoric; I perused the works of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato carefully, and enriched my mind by the ‘quaternion’ of learning. (I must let this out, and it is not bragging to state what nature and my zeal for learning have given me, and the gifts which God apportioned to me at birth and time has contributed.)
ANNA COMNENA WAS BORN in the purple birth chamber of the Great Palace in December 1083. The infant Anna was adored by her father and given a crown, in the expectation she would be enthroned one day as basilissa. The birth of a little brother thwarted those hopes.
With her parents’ support, she received an excellent education in history, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. At fourteen, she married Nicephorus Bryennius the Younger, a capable officer who shared her love of intellectual pursuits. Anna was put in charge of a large hospital and orphanage in Constantinople, where she taught medicine. As her father entered his final illness, Anna plotted for the succession to pass to her husband, and thus to her, but her plans were knocked over by her younger brother John, who visited Alexius on his death bed and stole the emperor’s ring. John flashed the glittering bauble to the court, claiming it as proof that he was the desired successor.
Anna felt cheated of her inheritance, and contrived to have her brother assassinated at Alexius’s funeral, but the conspiracy was exposed and she was forced to retire from court life. After her husband died, Anna was sent to live in a convent, where she put her restless mind to work by writing the Alexiad.
Anna never became empress, but the Alexiad ensured her fame would eclipse her father’s. Through her eyes we see how Alexius Comnenus managed, with a mix of diplomacy and cunning, to keep the empire afloat, and how he accidentally lit the fuse that ignited a holy war.
Alexius Comnenus.
public domain/Wikimedia Commons
EMPEROR ALEXIUS’S first challenge in 1081 was to respond to the Norman attack on Greece, led by the formidable Robert Guiscard. The Roman forces suffered several painful defeats, but Alexius deployed diplomacy and intrigue to pull the rug from under Guiscard: he persuaded Henry IV of Germany to attack the Norman lands in Italy, and simultaneously bribed some discontented Norman barons in the south to revolt. Guiscard, on the cusp of victory in Greece, found his Italian stronghold collapsing behind him, and was forced to go home to sort out the mess. It took Guiscard two years to push back the Germans and quell the revolt. He returned to Greece, ready to pick up where he’d left off, but an outbreak of the plague swept through the Norman camp, and carried him off with it.
Leadership of the demoralised and plague-ravaged Norman army in Greece now passed to Guiscard’s son, Bohemond. The young prince was no match for the shrewd Alexius, who harassed the Normans with hit-and-run attacks. At the same time, Alexius offered Bohemond’s lieutenants large bribes to defect. Eventually, Bohemond threw up his hands and signed a peace treaty, handing back the imperial territories in Greece.
ALEXIUS’S NEXT CHALLENGE was located closer to home, in Thrace, where another steppe people known as the Pechenegs had joined forces with the Seljuks and were preparing an attack on Constantinople. The shrewd Alexius bought the support of a rival tribe, the Cumans, and in 1091 his forces linked up with their 40,000-strong army to attack the Pechenegs at the mouth of the Maritsa River. The night before battle, Alexius called his men together for evening prayer and, according to Anna Comnena, they fixed small candles to the tips of their spears, ‘lighting up the heavens with the gleam of many stars’.
The Pecheneg forces were annihilated the next day, and their families, who had followed them on campaign, were massacred. Alexius won battle after battle this way, re-arranging alliances so that his over-confident enemies would find the ground beneath their feet crumbling away.
With Greece and Thrace secured for the moment, Alexius could look to reversing the empire’s losses in Asia Minor and Syria. Seeing that the Seljuks were convulsed by dynastic infighting, he judged that now would be a good time to strike and he looked around for potential coalition partners. In March 1095, Alexius sent an emissary to Pope Urban II with a letter asking for western help against the Muslim occupiers of the eastern provinces. Pope Urban’s response went far, far beyond anything Alexius had imagined or indeed wanted.
The Sword and the Cross
IN THAT YEAR OF 1095, people across Europe looked to the skies and saw a meteor shower, a comet and a lunar eclipse. The aurora borealis was witnessed as far south as France. It was all very unsettling. The celestial activity portended something, but what?
Alexius’s letter to Pope Urban II was the pebble that caused the landslide. It seems that Urban had been brooding on the Muslim successes in the east for some time. To him it was a sign of a disordered universe and a portent of the end times. Fired with Christian zeal, Urban travelled to Clermont in France where on 27 November he delivered one of the most incendiary speeches in the history of the world, a speech that gathered up the squabbling, discontented masses of western Europe and galvanised them into action.
Urban shocked the Council of Clermont with lurid – and entirely imaginary – stories of atrocities committed by Muslims against innocent Christians in the east. Innocent pilgrims to the Holy Land were being robbed and slaughtered, he said, by the Muslim overlords of Jerusalem. He called for nothing less than a new kind of ‘armed pilgrimage’, a crusade – a war of the cross – to expel the Muslims from the east, and free up the Holy Land for Christian worship. He held out a tantalising promise to his flock: those willing to take up the challenge would receive a remission of sins, and martyrs could look forward to the full reward of heaven.
The pope’s speech unlocked enormous latent energies within the people of western Europe. Princes, knights and commoners alike swore an oath to take up the banner of the cross and carry it all the way to Jerusalem. As their leaders rolled out their maps, they saw they would need to pass through Constantinople on the way.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER, Emperor Alexius was advised that a strange mass of foreigners had appeared at the Theodosian Walls. These were the first of Urban’s Holy Warriors to show up at the gates of Constantinople. As the emperor looked out at the assembled masses from Blachernae Palace, he saw that this was an army like no other.
This was the ‘People’s Crusade’, led by a charismatic French monk named Peter the Hermit, who rode up to the city walls on a donkey, wrapped in a cassock of coarse cloth, bearing a heavy crucifix around his neck. Behind him was a
vast, shuffling army of forty thousand beggars and peasants whose enthusiasm had been inflamed by Peter’s apocalyptic rhetoric to the point of near hysteria. Whole families, including women and children, had followed Peter across Europe, creating mayhem and perpetrating mass murder against Jewish settlements along the way. By the time the People’s Crusade staggered up to the walls of Constantinople they’d been driven half-mad by blood, exhaustion, starvation and disease, sustained only by the dream of the glittering prize of heaven that might await them at the end of a Saracen spear.
The sight of the starving fanatics at the gate shocked Alexius, who had been hoping for units of disciplined mercenaries, not a swarm of hollow-eyed, unarmed paupers. Peter the Hermit was brought into the palace to meet with the emperor. Alexius warned him that leading such an army into battle against the Seljuk Turks would be suicidal, but the monk was undeterred. Alexius probably didn’t argue the point; he was receiving reports of robberies and rapes from the Crusader camps. Alexius and his counsellors agreed that the sooner they were gone the better.
The emperor arranged for Peter and his paupers to be transported across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, from where they kept marching. As Alexius predicted, they were ambushed by the well-trained Seljuk Turks, and the People’s Crusade was completely and utterly destroyed. But there were other, much more formidable Crusaders on the way.
The Massacre of the People’s Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit. Detail from Passages d’outremer (Overseas Voyages), by Sébastien Mamerot, c.1475.
public domain/Bibliothèque nationale de France
THE FOUR MAIN CRUSADER ARMIES had each taken different routes from Europe, and arrived at the walls of Constantinople over a six-month period between November 1096 and April 1097. These armies were no rabble, but disciplined, heavily armed warriors, led by powerful princes from France and Germany. Among the Crusader leaders was Bohemond the Norman prince.
This time, Alexius was ready for them. The emperor had encountered Bohemond before, and he simply did not trust the stated high Christian ideals of the Crusaders, suspecting that if he allowed them to enter the glittering streets of Constantinople in force, they would be tempted to take it for themselves and plunder its wealth. Alexius said he was happy to supply them with food, but he insisted they remain outside the city walls. Only a few unarmed Crusaders would be admitted through the gates at any one time, and they would be closely monitored.
Nothing could have prepared these hard-handed princes of western Europe for the culture shock of Constantinople. They had come from a land of damp and draughty castles, surrounded by crude peasant dwellings, to a metropolis of bright silks, marble statues and monumental architecture, and warm sea breezes spiced with the scent of garum and garlic. Constantinople was built to intimidate such men.
Each of the Crusader princes was brought into the palace, where he was left alone for days, until he was called into the majestic throne room. There he would be met by a sombre Alexius, who would ask him to swear an oath: that if he should conquer, he would return to Constantinople any possessions that had once belonged to the Roman empire. As soon as the prince was sworn, Alexius would smile and shower the prince with expensive gifts and entertain him at lavish banquets.
There was a moment of boorish awkwardness when Baldwin of Boulogne came to the throne room in the company of his knights. As Alexius entered, one of the knights refused to rise; instead he audaciously lounged on the emperor’s throne and boasted that he had never been bested in battle. Baldwin barked at him to get off the throne.
Each of the princes wanted to be named by the emperor as supreme leader of the Crusades. Alexius played them off against each other, and hinted that he, too, might take up the cross and join the fight for the Holy Land.
Alexius kept a close eye on Bohemond in particular, whom he figured for a cynical opportunist. When asked to swear an oath, Bohemond had agreed all too readily, which aroused Alexius’s suspicions. Anna, the Emperor’s daughter, who had a keen eye for the male figure, studied Bohemond’s physical appearance closely:
Bohemond’s appearance was, to put it briefly, unlike any other man seen in the land of the Romans (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying) . . . he was so tall in stature that he towered over the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned . . .
His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears . . . His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the air freely . . . A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible.*
IN MAY 1097, ALEXIUS FAREWELLED the last of the crusaders with a heavy sigh of relief. He was under no illusions that they would keep their oaths to return the Roman lands to him, but he had done what he could.
The experienced, heavily armed Crusaders hammered the Seljuks and put their capital of Nicaea to siege. But in the night, the citizens of Nicaea surrendered not to the Crusaders, but to the Roman units accompanying them. When the Crusaders awoke to see Roman banners fluttering over the city, they felt outraged and betrayed.
They pushed on towards Antioch, once the third most important city in the empire. Despite the harsh conditions, the Crusaders took the city, but they were soon besieged by a much larger Turkish army. The westerners appealed to Constantinople for help, but Alexius figured they were doomed and did nothing. The Crusaders now considered themselves released from their oaths, and prevailed over the Turks anyway. Antioch became the possession of Bohemond, and the capital of the first of the Crusader states in the east.
ALEXIUS’S POPULARITY DECLINED in the last two decades of his life. After another successful campaign in Asia Minor, he began to suffer from gout and severe asthma, an affliction which ‘accompanied the emperor like a noose, and never left off strangling him’. Anna cared for her father in his final illness, even as she conspired to succeed him, but when he died in 1118 the crown was passed to her brother John instead. Anna consoled herself by writing the Alexiad from her lonely convent cell, where she remained until her own death at seventy.
FOR ALEXIUS’S SUCCESSORS, it was galling to see these crude westerners make themselves at home in the Holy Land, in former provinces of the Roman empire. Despite the harsh and unfamiliar conditions, the Crusaders set up little feudal states in the fabled cities they knew from their Bibles: Jerusalem, Antioch and Edessa.
Their victories in the Holy Land had made many of them famous in their homelands, and inspired the creation of several chansons de geste in France, but the westerners could never feel completely at ease in their new homes in the east. The Great Seljuk Empire lay just outside their borders, and the Crusaders knew the day would come when the infidels would return in force.
Prester John
TO THE CHRISTIAN MIND, the distant north-east was the very hinterland of the world, the home of Gog and Magog, a place littered with all the broken and unclean things of God’s creation. These dark lands were sometimes called the Womb of Nations, and every so often it seemed they would labour and bring forth a new horde of terrifying horse archers who would stampede all the way to the Theodosian Walls. The riders came in different guises over the centuries, as Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, Bulgars and Seljuks.
Seen from another perspective, the arrival of Turkic nomads on the empire’s doorstep was a natural product of the geography of the Eurasian steppe, which ran from Mongolia all the way to modern-day Hungary. The nomads of Central Asia saw the steppe not as a wilderness, but as a long, grassy highway running across the Eurasian landmass, with two of the richest cities in the world – Beijing and Constantinople – at either end. I
t’s hardly surprising that these horsemen, arriving at the western terminus of the highway, would be tempted by the riches of the great Roman capital nearby. Constantinople was like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
And so for centuries the Romans were forced to fight them off or pay them tribute to make them go away, only to be confronted by another horde, with different customs, led by a new khan. All too often these Turkic riders would carry the banner of Islam. Was it too much to hope that the east lands might one day bring forth a hitherto unknown tribe of Christians, so they might join forces and crush the Saracens from either side?
HOPE, FEAR AND RUMOUR swirled through the Crusader states of the Holy Land as the Turks regrouped and attacked their Syrian kingdoms. When Edessa was put under siege, Constantinople offered only token support, so in 1144 the Crusaders sent an emissary to the pope to plead for help. Hugh, the bishop of Jabala, was selected to make the long, arduous journey to Italy. Arriving in Rome, Hugh met with Pope Eugenius III and did his best to explain just how dire the situation was in the Holy Land. The pope was eager for gossip, and Hugh couldn’t resist passing on an exciting rumour that was circulating around the Crusader camps, of a mysterious Christian conqueror from the Far East, a stupendously wealthy Priest-King named Prester John who was said to rule the lands beyond Persia.*
The Crusaders had heard a story that this Prester John had crushed a Muslim army in a bloody battle at Ecbatana. He had apparently intended to keep marching to Jerusalem to help the Crusaders, but his army had been unable to cross the Tigris River. In any event, no such rescue ever materialised. Hugh also mentioned the intriguing story of Prester John to the German historian Otto of Freising, who published it in his Chronicon of 1145.
While Hugh gossiped in Rome, the Crusaders continued to struggle against the resurgent Seljuk Turks. Prester John’s armies never appeared, but rumours of this fabulous Priest-King of the east never quite went away either, and tales of his wealth and majesty only got larger in the telling. It was said he was descended from the three Magi who attended the birth of Christ and that he carried a sceptre made of emerald.
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