by Ed Strosser
If it was a trap, it was perfectly laid and sprung on the plodding Valens. He had played into the Goths’ hands. The Goth cavalry, which had been roaming the countryside out of sight from the Roman scouts, appeared seemingly out of nowhere and fell against the Roman cavalry, an elite unit of the imperial guard, on Valens’s left flank. In all probability they had ridden down one of the almost-dry riverbeds to keep down the dust and hide their approach from the Romans. As they crashed into the left wing, the Roman cavalry was pressed back against the infantry in Valens’s center. The Romans were discovering the hard way that the Goth forces comprised probably 30,000 or more fighting men. But the veteran Roman horsemen stabilized themselves and led a thrust forward. The Romans were now winning, with the infantry pushing uphill toward the ring of wagons. But now the cavalry on the left wing was deeply engaged with the more numerous Goth cavalry, and Valens had no cavalry reinforcements to pour into the battle to force the issue. Clearly outmanned by the Goths, the battle soon swung once again to their side as they engulfed the left Roman wing.
The infantry legions were now left unprotected by the decimation of the left cavalry flank. Pressed back in on itself, they collapsed into a protective formation with their wooden shields and battled on. Using their long spears to hold off the enemy cavalry worked as long as the spears lasted, but when they were broken by the cavalry swords of the Goths the Romans were left with only their swords to stave off the swirling mass of Goth horsemen. The Romans were now sitting ducks. The battle continued until the bloodied mass of Roman soldiers finally broke and ran. The rout of the eastern emperor’s army was on.
A regiment of soldiers held in reserve joined the panicked flight instead of manning up and trying to rescue the emperor. Other key commanders who had fought before under Valens deserted him in the growing darkness, abandoning their emperor instead of going down fighting. Two-thirds of Valens’s army was killed, along with many of the generals.
Perhaps the simple, stubborn emperor, even after watching his generals abandon him and his soldiers massacred, refused to flee the field and was left dying on the ground surrounded by enemies. His imperial guard had left him at the mercy of his enemies. But they had been schooled in the Roman way of running an empire better than he. Valens’s body was never found.
THE GOTHS
The Goths — the very name reverberates through history to the present time. Oddly enough, the people themselves vanished shortly after sacking Rome in 410 under the leadership of their king Alaric. The Goths had originally made their name fighting an endless series of border wars against the Romans and had gained the dubious distinction of serving as slaves to many Roman households. Then the Huns overran them in their Black Sea homelands, and a great mass of Gothic refugees were allowed to enter the Roman Empire by crossing the Danube in 376. After crushing the undermanned legions of eastern emperor Valens at Adrianople, the Goths tried to make peace with the Romans in exchange for a slice of the empire to call their own. But after a series of treaties with the relentless Roman emperors they still didn’t have a homeland, and they took out their vengeance by sacking the great imperial capital. After all that they ended up with Visigothic territories in France and Spain as well as a sizable chunk of northern Italy for the Ostrogoths. The Goths who remained in Italy after the sacking of Rome were soon dispersed by more recent Teutonic invaders, and their influence and culture was almost completely washed away. In Spain and southeastern France the Goths soon found themselves at odds with the Roman popes, and the last of the Gothic kingdoms disappeared in the eighth century with the Muslim invasions of Spain.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
No Roman ever imagined this could have happened to one of their emperors. There were conflicting reports about what happened to the body of Valens. Some said he was burned alive. In any event, the body was never found, a humbling end for any man, let alone the leader of a superempire. The Romans found themselves suffering their worst defeat since Cannae at the hands of the Carthaginians seven hundred years earlier. The legacy of sacrificing everything to victory, established over the centuries by Roman leaders such as the general who had died spurring on his legions to victory in the climactic battle of the third Samnite War in 291 BC, which solidified Roman control over central Italy and put the Romans firmly on the path to empire, had vanished. And to the Goths no less.
Valens’s successor, Theodosius, a general appointed by Gratian as the new eastern emperor, gamely attacked the Goths but wasn’t able to defeat them. He was forced to make peace with them on their terms: they had pierced the empire and were there to stay. The Roman Empire was on its last legs — the defeat at Adrianople was overwhelming; the empire was mortally wounded. In 410 Rome was sacked by the Gothic king Alaric, who had been a boy among the refugees crossing the Danube back in 376.
By the end of the fifth century the empire was no more. Valens was committed to the black hole of history, on equal footing with the many others who had succumbed to Roman power. Such are the rewards of mercy when trying to run a superempire.
TWO.
THE FOURTH CRUSADE: 1198
Great debt, like great faith, or heat shimmering on desert sands, can distort reality. Debt can take hold of a person’s mind, twisting logic and converting no into yes, wrong into right.
At the dawn of the thirteenth century, religious fervor once again swept through the Christian population of Europe. Rallied by the pope and French nobles, crusaders set out for the fourth time in a century to capture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Islamic infidels. Off they marched with the purest of intentions, untainted by the necessity of killing Muslims to achieve their holy goal.
This time out, however, the road to eternal salvation de-toured through Venice. The crusaders, eager to avoid the dusty overland route through Constantinople, hired a navy from the Venetians to sail them to the Holy Land. The emerging maritime power was controlled by the doge, a wily, money-loving, deal-making ruler, who had been elected for life by the aristocracy of the city. The doge’s sole mission in life was to enrich his beloved city-state. But the crusader army, lacking in gold-laden recruits from the finest families in Europe, quickly piled up a massive debt that the doge refused to forgive — not even for the greater glory of recapturing Jerusalem. His solution for relieving the crusaders of their unfortunate financial burden was to make a series of deals in which the crusaders first attacked a Christian city and then went on to sack, rape, and pillage the biggest, richest, most Christian city in Europe: Constantinople. The doge received his payment in full, but the holy warriors never set foot in the Holy Land.
THE PLAYERS
Prince Alexius — a footloose, wandering prince, the son of the deposed Byzantine emperor, bounced around Europe looking for a spare army to put him atop the throne of the Byzantines.
Skinny — Young and naïve, he nonetheless managed to get himself in the right place at the right time to convince an entire army of desperate crusaders to do his bidding.
Props — Escaped the dungeon that his uncle threw him into, then traipsed around Europe to plead his case for a return to Constantinople.
Pros — Never reneged on his promises, until he did.
Cons — Described by a contemporary as womanish and witless.
Doge Enrico Dandolo — leader of Venice who wasn’t afraid of sacking and pillaging to recover his debts.
Skinny — To spread his own influence he ordered that Venetian coins bear his face on one side and on the other a likeness of the second most important person in his world, Jesus.
Props — Kept his focus on one thing, a successful crusade. Maybe two things… making money for Venice.
Pros — Was over ninety years old and blind but still rode into battle to lead the Fourth Crusade.
Cons — Led them everywhere but their destination.
THE GENERAL SITUATION
Jerusalem. Oh, Jerusalem! The small city has the fortune — or is it the misfortune — of being situated
at the heart of three major religions. The Jews housed the Temple of Solomon and the Ten Commandments there. Then it became the site of Jesus’s Crucifixion. And a few centuries later it was the place where Muhammad ascended to heaven.
Being wanted by three groups of people has turned the city into a battleground for much of its history. Fueled with religious fervor following Muhammad’s death in AD 632, Arab armies thundered out of the Arabian Peninsula and captured large swaths of the known world, including Jerusalem. Over the next few hundred years they controlled the Holy City while freely allowing European Christians to make pilgrimages to the cherished site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Jews had been scattered by the Romans, and the few left in town apparently posed no threat to anyone or anything.
This peaceful coexistence was shattered in the eleventh century when Turks from Central Asia stormed into the Middle East and grabbed large chunks of territory from the reeling Byzantine Empire (made up of the remnants of the eastern part of the Roman Empire). The Byzantines were based in the glorious city of Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), which served as a barrier between the Arabs in the Middle East and the Western Europeans, thus allowing the Europeans to focus much of their medieval energy on killing one another.
The Turks also conquered Jerusalem from the Arabs in 1071. Instead of continuing the Arab policy of allowing the Christians free passage, the Turks ambushed the travelers, throwing them into slavery. The Christians had lost access to their beloved Jerusalem. The Turks had blundered onto the third rail of the nascent international monotheistic scrum over the city.
Tapping into this anger in 1095, an angry Pope Urban II declared that the Christian world must capture Jerusalem, thus creating the First Crusade. The pope declared the Crusade was not only necessary but actually requested by God. He coined a catchy slogan for the venture, “God Wills It,” and even came up with a logo, a cross sewn onto the shoulders of the crusaders’ clothes. To motivate his troops the pope offered every crusader absolution of their sins, in essence a go-di-rectly-to-heaven ticket upon death. In the Middle Ages, where vast realms of knowledge remained untouched by the geniuses of the age and the average human’s life was a constant dodging of an apparently vengeful God, this was a Big One. Eternal happiness, as in forever, was like money in the bank.
In 1097 the crusaders set out, an army of knights on horseback, soldiers on foot, and a vast train of workers to schlep heavy items for thousands of miles. Despite hunger, thirst, disease, and a six-week siege, it worked. Jerusalem fell on July 15, 1099. To celebrate the conquest of the land of the King of Peace, the conquerors raped and killed everyone left alive in the city. Mission accomplished.
The crusaders divided their conquered territory into four regions, fought like caged animals over who would control them, and waged a never-ending series of wars against the Muslims. The crusaders were bolstered by a steady flow of Christians looking for new opportunities and European royals seeking fortune and adventure away from their already royalty-saturated homelands. A Second Crusade poured in yet more troops. Despite a persistent manpower shortage, the Christians hung on to Jerusalem, the jewel of the Holy Land, ruled over by kings, including some children and even a leper or two. It wasn’t enough. Various Islamic peoples united under a fearless leader, Saladin, a great Christian killer. His victories culminated in 1187 with the capture of Jerusalem. Mission unaccomplished. A Third Crusade led by the king of England, Richard the Lionhearted, tangled with Saladin but came up short. Richard returned home to vent his frustration on the more beatable French.
The next pope to catch the crusader bug was Innocent III, who took his seat in 1198 and immediately turned his eye toward rescuing the Holy Land from the Muslims, again. He knew he would need all the help he could get.
But things out east were a mess everywhere, not just in Muslim-occupied Jerusalem. The Byzantine Empire was headquartered in Constantinople, known to the Greeks as the new Rome. Despite being Christians, the Greeks had significant theological differences with the pope, which resulted in their 1054 mass excommunication, referred to as the Great Schism. Needless to say, that put a damper on the relationship between the Eastern Orthodox Greeks and the Roman Catholics. The Crusades didn’t resolve their differences, even though the Greeks provided some help with the first one.
The Greeks had been content to spend most of their time fighting among themselves since the emperor’s death in 1180. Various noble families fought to seize control of the prestigious and powerful emperor’s crown, considered to be one of the two most powerful of the Christian world. Out of the fighting emerged the Angelos family. Isaac II ruled as emperor from 1185 to 1195 when his older brother, Alexius, perhaps tired of Isaac’s fondness for jocular dwarves, gouged out Isaac’s eyes and threw him into prison. Alexius took the throne and held Isaac and his teenage son, Prince Alexius, in prison.
In 1201 the young Prince Alexius escaped, with the help of some Italian merchants, by hiding in a barrel. He headed to Germany to enlist the help of his brother-in-law, the king of Germany, to retake the contentious Greek throne. As momentum built for a new Crusade, Prince Alexius was touring Europe looking for anyone who would give him a ride back to his throne in Constantinople. Meanwhile, back in Rome, as the thirteenth century was just gearing up, Pope Innocent III was settling into office, looking to get the new century off to a good start with a nice religious war.
As unlikely as it seemed, their two quests would cross paths with devastating and unintended results.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “DEBT BOMB”
Enthusiasm for Pope Innocent’s Crusade lagged until November 1199 at a tournament of knights in the Champagne region of France: two young, popular, and very rich members of the French royal elite took up the cross and joined the Crusade. After Count Thibault of Champagne and his cousin Count Louis of Blois declared their intentions to march onto Jerusalem, others quickly joined up. Some were inspired by the desire to serve Jesus, some by their family’s heritage in leading former Crusades, while others undoubtedly knew that nobody gets the hot babes like a knight back from a Crusade. A third count, Count Baldwin of Flanders, who was Thibault’s brother-in-law, joined the mission early in 1200.
Baldwin’s family had fought in the three previous Crusades, so the twenty-eight-year-old count looked on crusading as a family rite of passage. The three young nobles took the reins to recruit and lead the new, improved Crusade. God was sure to be on their side since the plan featured as many as 35,000 crusaders, the same size army that had successfully conquered Jerusalem in the First Crusade. The pope admonished the army to conquer based solely on their faith in Christ and not have their pure feelings sullied by vanity, greed, or pride. As it turned out, however, most of the crusaders’ decisions for the next five years were guided by vanity, greed, or pride (and sometimes all three).
Throughout the spring of 1200 the three nobles carefully planned the expedition. They met with former crusaders-turned-crusading-consultants to learn the best routes to the Holy Land, rallied other French nobles to the cause, and discussed the critical question of how to pay the enormous costs of supporting thousands of soldiers for years on end.
They decided to sail. The first choice for a fleet was the merchant powerhouse Venice, one of the largest cities in Europe. Its ships were the top dogs of the Mediterranean due to the expertise gained from the large volume of trade with Muslims, which had been conducted with special permission from the pope. Since 1192 the Venetian Enrico Dandolo had held the leadership position of doge; ninety years old and blind, his dedication to the Church was surpassed only by his love of making money and stockpiling power for his beloved city. Dandolo was the man.
After negotiating with the doge, the crusaders reached a deal in April 1201. The doge agreed to build a navy, transport the army, and feed all of them for nine months. All this for the low, low price of 85,000 marks, about twice the annual income of the king of France. As a special deal, for this Crusade
only, the crusaders could pay on the installment plan.
Eager to kill Muslims and recapture Jerusalem, the crusaders signed the deal and headed home to France, unaware that their poor skills in drafting the agreement had planted the seed for their venture’s doom. The price was based on transporting an army of 35,000 men plus 4,500 horses, an army bigger than all but that of the First Crusade. No provision was made, however, if fewer troops showed up for the sailing date. The full price would still have to be paid for the half-empty fleet. This meant a higher cost per crusader.
But such trivial details were not in the minds of the crusaders as they made their way home after making their down payment of 5,000 marks to the doge. The Venetians put aside all their business and turned the city into one vast workshop for making ships to meet the June 1202 sailing date.
The deal, like many blockbuster deals, contained a secret clause. The fleet would first sail not to the Holy Land but to Alexandria in Egypt. While this was a sound strategic move as the attack could knock out Egypt as an enemy, making the conquest and holding of Jerusalem easier, it was somewhat controversial. So controversial in fact that the doge kept this detail hidden from crusading troops. For him, this little secret clause was the key to the whole deal. He would get paid to sail to Alexandria, then use the crusaders to capture the city and turn it over to him, further expanding the Venetian trading power into a huge and megarich metropolis. The doge would get a double shot of victory: Jerusalem for the spirit, and Alexandria for the wallet. His grin probably lasted for days.