Andronicus, the beneficiary of all the violence, did nothing to stop it. Those who had smiled on the tall, handsome aristocrat or dismissed him as a charming rogue had missed the cruel streak in his character. The man who now controlled Constantinople, and the Roman empire, was a psychopath.
EMPRESS MARIA AND HER SON were arrested and brought before Andronicus. The boy emperor was still invested with supreme legal authority, and was forced to sign his mother’s death warrant. Maria was then strangled by two members of the imperial guard. When this was done, Andronicus compelled Alexius to accompany him to the Chalke Gate, and to recognise him as his co-emperor in front of a cheering crowd. Alexius was then taken away and strangled with a bow-string. His body was thrown into the Bosphorus.
Alexius had been betrothed to Agnes, daughter of King Louis of France. Andronicus now took her as his wife, disregarding the vast age difference between them: he was sixty-four and she was a child of eleven. His son John Comnenus – conceived that night outside the prison of the Great Palace – was appointed his junior emperor.
MANUEL HAD BEEN widely resented for his tolerance of corruption. Andronicus now instituted a crackdown on corruption and wasteful spending, and his punishments became crueller and more frequent. Attendants who failed to please were blinded or burnt alive in the Hippodrome. The chill of official terror descended on the capital. Unburdened by any moral constraint, Andronicus ‘let down the fine and delicate plumb line of his cruelty to the very bottom of his soul’.
AS EMPEROR, ANDRONICUS was free to give rein to his gargantuan sexual appetites. Court historian Nicetas Choniates describes him setting out from the city, ‘followed by his ladyloves, like a cock by barnyard hens . . . opening wide every passageway to flute girls and courtesans, with whom he indulged himself at all times in the pleasure of intercourse’. The emperor was said at this time to apply ointments to his genitals to improve his sexual prowess, and to eat crocodile meat, which he believed to be an aphrodisiac.
As he sank deeper into paranoia, Andronicus attempted to divine the future through hydromancy, by looking for signs of the unknown by peering into a basin of water. When the question was asked, ‘Who will rule after Emperor Andronicus?’ the waters indicated the first two letters of the name ‘Isaac’. Andronicus’s suspicions now fell upon his cousin Isaac Angelus.
The Death of Stephen Hagiochristophorites. Detail from Passages d’outremer (Overseas Voyages), by Sébastien Mamerot, c.1475.
public domain/Bibliothèque nationale de France
The emperor sent his chief enforcer, a man named Stephen Hagiochristophorites, to arrest Isaac. Hagiochristophorites was widely feared and hated in the city. Accompanied by two attendants, he confronted Isaac in the courtyard of his home. Seeing he was cornered, Isaac leapt on to his horse, drew his sword and charged towards the men. Hagiochristophorites panicked and turned his mule around to make his escape. He got as far as the courtyard archway when Isaac brought his sword down onto his skull, cracking it in half. The other two attendants fled.
Isaac Angelus, exulting in his escape from death, now rode his horse to the Hagia Sophia, holding aloft his bloody sword, shouting he had just killed the hated Hagiochristophorites. Isaac dashed into the Great Church with hundreds of people streaming in behind him. He ascended to the pulpit and asked for sanctuary, and forgiveness for the crime of murder. Soon there were more than a thousand people in the church. By dawn the next morning, there were more people outside the Hagia Sophia, but no one came to attack or arrest them. Another crowd formed at the watch house and set all the prisoners free. Isaac was acclaimed as emperor by the crowd and the atmosphere in the city turned mutinous and murderous.
ANDRONICUS WAS STAYING at his country estate when he was told of the insurrection in the city. He returned to the Great Palace and ordered the guards to fire arrows at the angry crowd. The soldiers were reluctant to obey, so Andronicus picked up a bow and began firing arrows himself. Then, realising he was alone, he decided to make a run for it. He tore off his imperial insignia, covered his head with a bonnet, and climbed into a waiting boat, bringing with him his child bride and his mistress. The mob then overran the Great Palace, looting it of every scrap of treasure they could find. The palace complex would never recover.
Andronicus’s little boat was intercepted in the Bosphorus. He was arrested and thrown into another boat, along with his wife and mistress, to be brought back to Constantinople. Andronicus was a veteran of many dazzling escapes, but there was no getting away this time. As he sat in the boat, bound hand and foot, he began to sing. It was a lament of self-pity for his unfortunate life. His voice swelled and cracked with emotion. Both his young wife and mistress began to sing with him, but his captors were unmoved.
Andronicus was shackled and paraded in front of the new Emperor Isaac Angelus. He was slapped across the face and kicked on the buttocks. His beard was torn and his teeth pulled out. Women stepped forward to pummel him with their fists. His right hand was cut off with an axe, and then he was thrown back into his cell.
Two days later, one of his eyes was gouged out, and then he was handed over to the mob. Andronicus was placed on a camel and paraded through the streets, ‘looking like a leafless and withered old stump’. People struck him with clubs and poured shit on his head. All the cruelty he had inflicted upon the lives of his people was now revisited upon his body.
Somehow still alive, Andronicus was brought into the Hippodrome, seated on the hump of the camel, in a gruesome parody of a triumphal procession. He was pulled off the camel and suspended by his feet between two pillars. As he suffered these terrible ordeals, he turned to his tormentors and whimpered, ‘Lord have mercy’, and ‘Why do you further bruise the broken reed?’
Two Latin soldiers with swords stepped forward and cleaved him apart. As they did so, he raised his handless right arm to his mouth, and then he died. He was sixty-seven years old, and he was the last emperor of the Comneni, the dynasty founded by Alexius I. His son John was killed by his own troops in Thrace.
TODAY, IN THE PLEASANT PARKLANDS of the Hippodrome, it’s difficult to re-create in our minds the dark passions of the crowd that day, which exploded just a hundred metres from the church of Holy Wisdom.
Spiritually, the Romans of Constantinople were reaching for theosis, or union with the divine. The underlying principle that would generate theosis was something they called taxis, a divinely ordained sense of order that would infuse the world with light, harmony and holiness. A good and wise imperial government was expected to uphold this principle of taxis.
The opposite of taxis was ataxia, turbulence and randomness. Ataxia was supposed to belong to the lands beyond the empire’s frontiers, a formless world of meaningless violence.
Andronicus’s reign had inverted that proposition: what did it mean when the emperor himself was the source of so much ataxia? Constantinople was shaken, unsure of itself and completely unprepared for the cataclysm that was to come and wreck it beyond repair.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Fourth Crusade
The empire in 1200, at the outset of the Fourth Crusade.
The Blind Old Duke
‘There can be no doubt that the hand of God guided all of these events.’
– Geoffrey de Villehardouin
UPSTAIRS IN THE HAGIA SOPHIA, in a corner of the gallery, I spot the oddest, most unlikely thing. I call Joe over to look at it. Embedded into the stone floor is a modest tombstone, inscribed with the name ‘Henricus Dandolo’.
I tell Joe that Henricus Dandolo is better remembered to the world as Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice and the perpetrator-in-chief of one of the worst crimes of the late Middle Ages. Dandolo successfully connived to wreck Constantinople beyond repair and he personally led an attack on the city walls. There was no end to the mayhem he unleashed upon the world for the narrow advantage of Venice.
‘And when he did all this, he was an old man of ninety, and utterly blind.’
‘So why’ Joe asks ‘is he buried in the
Hagia Sophia?’
Stone memorial to Enrico Dandolo, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
Richard Fidler
ENRICO DANDOLO was eighty-five when he was elected the forty-second Doge (or Duke) of the Most Serene Republic of Venice in 1192. His mind worked as well as it ever had, but his eyesight was gone. Dandolo was cagey about his blindness, and tried to conceal it with little tricks, like surreptitiously dropping a single hair into his soup and then complaining about it to anyone present.
There was a time when the young Republic of Venice had pleaded for the empire’s favour and protection. That time had passed. Trade had made Venice rich and confident. Its merchant ships cruised the Mediterranean, protected by its formidable navy, the strongest in Europe. The aristocrats of Constantinople were inclined to disdain the Venetian upstarts as nouveau-riche shopkeepers and sailors. The Venetians, in turn, saw the Byzantines as effete, impractical snobs living off the fading prestige of their once-glorious name.
Dandolo knew Constantinople well. He had travelled there decades earlier as a special envoy, charged with repairing Venetian relations with the empire. But Emperor Manuel Comnenus, irritated by Venice’s growing clout, decided to withdraw the republic’s trading privileges and to lock up some of its merchants. Dandolo returned to Venice humiliated. Later there would be rumours that Dandolo had been blinded during this unhappy time in Constantinople, on orders from the emperor. Another rumour had it that his eyesight was lost in a street brawl in the city. These stories were put forward to explain Dandolo’s apparent hatred of Constantinople, but both were untrue; his eyesight was actually destroyed years later in Venice, by a blow to the head.
Power in the Venetian Republic was concentrated within a tightly knit upper class of merchants and property owners. The Doge was the chief executive, elected for life. Venice’s leadership was drawn from a pool of shrewd and experienced men, while in Constantinople they all too often had to take potluck with a hereditary prince or a brutal general.
The Venetians were Catholics, and took spiritual guidance from the pope in Rome. In church they hoped and prayed for salvation, but in the marketplace they put aside wishful thinking in favour of hard data. The merchants of Venice were the first to properly use a new method of mapping the cash and goods flowing in and out of their businesses, a process we now call double-entry bookkeeping. It was an unsentimental exercise that burned away unrealistic hopes and grandiosity.
The financial power of Venice was reinforced by its great navy. Its ships were constructed with the most advanced maritime technology of the era and operated by the most seasoned sailors in the Mediterranean. Venetian trading galleys were well equipped to repel attacks from pirates, and from their rivals, the merchants of Genoa.
DANDOLO HAD SERVED six years as Doge when an emissary came to his office with a report: His Holiness Pope Innocent III had issued a plea for a fresh armed struggle to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims.
Control of the Holy Land had turned over several times since the first Crusader knights had passed through Constantinople. Jerusalem had been won, and then lost to Saladin. The Third Crusade had concluded eight years earlier, unsatisfyingly; while Acre and Jaffa had been captured, the Crusader kings had failed to retake Jerusalem, the emotional and spiritual heartland of the Crusade.
For Pope Innocent, it was simply intolerable that the banners of Muhammad should continue to flutter over the holiest city in Christendom. The thought pinched and pricked at him like a stone in his shoe. But enthusiasm for a new crusade among the kings and princes of western Europe was tepid at best. So Innocent looked to the next layer down, to the ambitious lords and younger brothers, who were eager to prove their mettle and willing to carve out new estates of their own in the Holy Land.
Richard the Lionheart had walked away from the Third Crusade telling anyone who would listen that any future attempt to take the Holy Land should consider advancing to Jerusalem via Egypt, the soft underbelly of the Saracen world. If a Fourth Crusade were to be launched, it would need a great many ships to ferry the armies of Christ across the Mediterranean. Since Venice was the leading maritime power in Europe, Pope Innocent’s call to arms made it inevitable that someone would show up sooner or later to ask for Venice’s help.
IN THE SPRING OF 1201 a galley entered the Venetian lagoon bearing six French knights, led by the Marshal of Champagne, Geoffrey de Villehardouin. The knights were brought ashore into the Piazza San Marco and taken to the Doge’s palace. Dandolo received them warmly and inquired as to the reason for their visit. The knights confessed they were envoys of certain French noblemen. Their lords, they said, wanted an alliance with Venice, to aid them on their Crusade against the Saracen infidel.
Geoffrey de Villehardouin, French postage stamp.
public domain
The old Doge invited the six men to speak of their plan and the Crusaders got down to business. They proposed to follow Richard’s recommendation to enter the Holy Land via Egypt, but they would need Venetian ships to carry their soldiers and horses. Dandolo asked how many soldiers they could rally to the cause. Villehardouin thought for a moment. He’d heard stories of a charismatic evangelist called Fulk of Neuilly, who’d recently boasted of signing up 200,000 men for the struggle.* That number was obviously fanciful, so the knights landed on a much more conservative 33,500 men, admittedly still a huge figure. The expectation was that each one of these men would bring funds to pay for their passage.
Dandolo called a special meeting of the Great Council of Venice and a deal was struck: Venice agreed to supply transport vessels for 4500 knights and horses, nine thousand squires and twenty thousand foot soldiers, along with provisions of water, wheat, flour and wine. In return, the Crusaders would pay Venice the towering sum of 84,000 silver marks. As a show of good faith, the Venetians would throw in, at their own expense, fifty additional fully equipped galleys. In return, Venice would be entitled to receive a half share of the conquered territories.
The Great Council had given its consent, but before Dandolo could fully commit Venice to such a gigantic enterprise, he needed to win over the greater mass of the Venetian people. And so the six Crusaders were invited to attend a people’s assembly at the Church of St Mark. The congregation was hushed as Villehardouin rose to his feet and delivered an electrifying appeal to the people of Venice:
The barons of France, most high and powerful, have sent us to you!
They cry to you for mercy, that you take pity on Jerusalem, which is in bondage to the Turks, and that, for God’s sake, you should help to avenge the shame of Jesus Christ . . . They have come to you, because they know full well that no other people has so great a power on the seas, as you and your people. Our lords have commanded us to fall at your feet, and not to rise until you consent to take pity on the Holy Land which is beyond the seas.
Then all six of these proud Frankish knights fell to their knees before the crowd. The sight of these good men, humbly prostrating themselves, invoked a kind of compassionate ecstasy from the crowd. The sightless Doge was himself moved to tears and the congregation cried out: We consent! We consent!
IT WAS ALL A RUSE – on Dandolo’s part at least – because at that moment, his commissioners in Cairo were negotiating a trade contract with Egypt that stipulated Venice would not take part in any invasion of Egyptian territory. Unless he had his wires badly crossed, Dandolo, it seems, had no intention of accompanying the Crusaders into Egypt. His true destination would emerge later.
The French knights were unaware of the negotiations, and it was solemnly agreed that the Crusader armies would assemble in Venice in a year’s time, on St John’s Day, 1202. In the meantime, Venetian shipbuilders would put aside all other business to begin constructing the Crusaders’ new fleet. Venice committed a year’s worth of labour, almost all its wealth and its sea power to the cause. The Crusaders and the Venetians would proceed on this great adventure together, hand in hand, for better or worse.
The Sign of the Cross
&nbs
p; THE NEXT SUMMER Crusader armies began to arrive in Venice in dribs and drabs, and set up camp on the Lido. The Crusade was spearheaded by a small group of wealthy noblemen from northern France and Italy. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the richest men in France, arrived early with his entourage of knights, archers and crossbowmen. Hugh of St Pol also brought knights and infantry. Louis of Blois, who had fought in the Third Crusade as a teenager, had received a thousand marks for the campaign from King John of England. Villehardouin, a veteran of earlier battles in the Holy Land, was also among the leadership group.
Baldwin, Hugh and Louis were a close-knit group of young, ambitious Frenchmen who had known each other all their lives, but they chose an outsider, Boniface of Montferrat, to lead them. Boniface was an immensely wealthy, middle-aged nobleman from northern Italy, his family connected by marriage to many of the royal houses of Europe. Boniface’s father had fought in the Second Crusade and his older brother, William of the Long Sword, had married an heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem. His court in Montferrat was famous for its chivalry and for the songs of its troubadours.
Boniface showed up in Venice in mid-August and found the camp on the Lido in a state of disarray. The call to take up the Cross had failed to rally anything like the numbers the French knights had rashly promised a year ago. The army that had showed up was less than a third of the size they were counting on to win back the Holy Land.*
The embarrassed Crusader leaders met with Doge Dandolo, who asked them how they would now pay for the new armada of ships his people had constructed in good faith. The Crusaders emptied their war chests but were still 34,000 silver marks short. Dandolo told them not one ship would leave Venice until every last one of them was paid for.
Now everyone was stuck. Calling off the Crusade was unthinkable, a terrible humiliation and a financial disaster. The pope had granted them remission of their sins for agreeing to take up the Cross. What would he say now? What would their people think?
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