Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  He had a lot of help. Fed up with Alexius and his inability to stop the crusaders’ more frequent armed foraging into the countryside, crowds demanded the city’s leaders elect a new emperor. They chose a young noble, Nicholas Kannavos, and appointed him emperor on January 27, 1204. He never wanted the unenviable job.

  Desperate, young Alexius, now sharing the throne with a third emperor, turned to his former friends/current enemies — the crusaders — for help. He proposed yet another deal. If the crusaders drove out Kannavos, he would give them his palace as security that he would honor his second pledge to honor his first pledge to pay them money and raise an army for them. This move to ally with the hated crusaders in­flamed his people even further. Unibrow whipped up the anticrusader forces, and now the only option Alexius had to stay in power was pleading for the crusaders’ help.

  That night it all crashed down on the twenty-two-year-old Alexius. Unibrow secured the treasury and the army, snuck into Alexius’s room, and took him prisoner. The next morn­ing Unibrow was crowned the fifth living emperor of the tot­tering empire and the fourth alive in the city — three of them having recently been in prison. Unibrow then set out to winnow the crowded field of emperors. He sent his minions to Isaac’s house; here they either found the blind man dead or helped him along on his journey. One down. Within days Unibrow seized the unlucky Kannavos and threw him into prison, where he quickly died. Alexius IV was the only com­petitor left. Unibrow then turned his wrath toward the cru­saders and stopped the flow of supplies, and locked them out of the city.

  Unibrow turned up the pressure a notch on the crusaders by leading raiding parties against them. But the Greeks, as had become their habit, turned and fled when confronted by a group of knights. Being new to the emperorship and not having learned yet how to retreat correctly, Unibrow lost the emperor’s standard and one of the leading Christian religious icons he took into battle. The crusaders paraded these pre­cious items before the city to mock Unibrow’s failure. Sens­ing his troops were not equal to the task of facing down the battle-hardened crusaders, Unibrow called a parley with the doge to work out their differences. The doge demanded that Unibrow release Alexius and honor all the young man’s com­mitments. Unibrow found himself pushed into a corner. If he fought the crusaders it would be an uphill struggle with his under­powered, prone-to-flight army. Within the city he ruled over a divided populace with Alexius still retaining some support. If he eliminated Alexius, however, it would only further provoke the crusaders. He had no winning hand. Still, he had to take some sort of stand, so he took a leap into the unknown: on February 8, 1204, he visited his rival in prison and stabbed him to death. Another emperor bites the dust. Having slain Alexius did not stop Unibrow from mourning sorrowfully at the state funeral he organized to bring the city together in grief under his leadership. But Unibrow’s power play had ended all chance of reconciliation with the crusaders. With Alexius alive the crusaders still held out hope he would honor his debts. With his death the money and any hope of finishing the crusade with a happy ending in Jerusalem was gone. Unibrow now had to pay one way or another.

  The frustrated crusaders found themselves once again out­side the city walls, far from home, unable to reach Jerusalem, and faced with the job of attacking the great city for a second time. They were no closer to Jerusalem than when they started two years earlier. They readily preferred death in combat to eternal humiliation. So they prepared for a war.

  As the crusaders spent the next two months preparing their ships and siege machines, they also took the equally important step of splitting in advance the anticipated booty. As might be expected, the triple-deal-making doge walked away with the lion’s share of the loot, three-quarters of every cent until they added up to 200,000 marks. Even at this late date the doge was unwilling to relinquish any of his bar-gained-for money for the good of the crusaders. The invaders also agreed to stay for another year in Constantinople so that the new emperor, to be selected later, would have time to stabilize the security situation in his new prize. Jerusalem would have to wait yet again. They agreed to sack Constan­tinople, the greatest of all Christian cities, but agreed to not touch the women and churches. Unibrow feverishly built the mighty walls even higher and prepared his army.

  On the morning of April 9, 1204, the crusaders launched their assault. They attacked the walls with fury but faced a deadly torrent of rocks from the Greeks. Having made no progress and with casualties mounting, the crusaders turned back. The Greeks celebrated their rare victory over the knights by mooning their enemy.

  Dejected from the defeat, Boniface, the doge, and the other crusading leaders turned to the Church leaders to re­build morale among the shattered troops. They succeeded brilliantly by denouncing the Greeks as worse than Jews. As a final step of purity before God to guarantee victory, the crusaders cast out their prostitutes from the camp. Such self-sacrifice had rarely been endured by crusading armies.

  The crusaders launched their second assault on the morn­ing of April 12, from both land and sea. The battle grew in intensity as both sides poured in more troops. The crusaders catapulted pots of flaming liquid at the Greeks, who coun­tered with rocks, arrows, and fire of their own. Despite their determined fury, the crusaders could not penetrate the city’s massive walls. Then fortune blessed the crusaders. The wind shifted, pushing the doge’s ships flush against the city’s walls. Knights, fighting with the fury of the desperately indebted, leapt from the ship’s attack bridges, nearly one hundred feet above the water, onto the city’s walls. The Greeks slashed to death the first leaping knight. The second one, however, withstood the Greeks’ battering, rose to his feet in full armor, and as had become their trademark, the Greeks turned and fled. Other crusaders quickly followed, and a section of the wall was securely in crusading hands. With the same daring the crusaders soon conquered other sections of the great city’s wall.

  While focused on this threat, the Greeks took their eyes off perhaps their most vulnerable point. Along the water’s edge, the city’s walls had gates, which in peacetime were used for loading and unloading merchant ships. These gates were sealed when the crusaders first approached the city in 1203. But apparently this work was not as sturdy as the regular sections of the wall. Focusing on this vulnerability, groups of Special Forces knights hacked away at one gate with swords and picks while other knights defended them from barrages of stones and boiling pitch. The ferocious knights now punched a small hole in the wall. They peered through and saw swarms of Greeks awaiting them. Which­ever knight dared to go through first was on a sure suicide mission. One of the crusading churchmen, Aleumes, dove through the tiny opening and emerged in the city. He charged at the Greeks, a lone fighter with a sword, not even a knight, and, lo and behold, what surely has become an enshrined custom by this time, the Greeks turned and fled. More knights seeped through the opening, and soon nearly three dozen crusaders were inside the city. Unibrow led a charge to throw them out, but as he approached the knights he stopped, carefully considered the situation and — can it be true? — turned and fled. A handful of crusading knights had scattered the mighty Greek emperor and his troops.

  Knights now flooded into the city. They fanned out and headed to Unibrow’s headquarters. His loyal guard caught one glimpse of the bloodthirsty crusaders… and turned and fled. In fact, with the wholesale flooding of knights into the city, the Greek custom of turning and fleeing reached an im­pressive scale.

  That night, realizing that his position was untenable, Unibrow followed the well-trod path of prior emperors and fled the city. As the city’s elite awoke the next morning, April 13, they heard the news of the emperor’s defection. To organize resistance, they drew lots to select the new emperor because no clearheaded person was even willing to volunteer for the job. The unfortunate winner was Constantine Lascaris. He urged everyone to resist the crusaders. But at the first sight of the knights just limbering up for the day’s fight, the Greeks turned and fled. Their new emperor joined them in
hastily abandoning the city, the second emperor in a day to flee and the third in under a year. As the knights prepared to fight their way through the rest of the city they found themselves confronted with an open city. No one opposed them. A con­tingent of Church leaders approached them and begged for mercy. While Boniface pondered the proposal, his army flowed into Constantinople like a river at high tide. The plunder began.

  To sack a city as large and rich as Constantinople required the efforts of not just untamed soldiers, revengeful knights, or greedy leaders. All three segments of the army needed to unite in the crusader-like cause of killing, raping, stealing, destroying, and violating six or seven other commandments. To pillage a massive city like Constantinople indeed required all hands to participate. And all did.

  Lathered into an uncontrollable and unholy horde, the crusaders descended into one of the bloodiest and most gro­tesque sprees in history. The nobles invaded palaces, headed straight to the treasure room, and ran their bloody hands through the loot. Knights and soldiers raped women, slashed the heads off children, and pillaged artifacts from churches. Many treasures were simply destroyed; others were carefully packed up for shipment back to the West. Even the priests got into the action and stripped religious artifacts to carry home to adorn their churches in France. They viciously as­saulted the holiest place in the Eastern Church, the Hagia Sophia, destroying or stealing virtually any item of value, leaving mounds of animal excrement on the floors. For the crusaders’ amusement a prostitute danced on the great church’s altar.

  LEPER KING OF JERUSALEM

  Of all the crusader kings who ruled over the Holy Land none per­haps was as unusual as the Leper King of Jerusalem. Either as a testament to their egalitarian spirit or sign of their desperation, the crusader leaders in 1174 appointed a thirteen-year-old leper as king.

  Known as Baldwin IV, he was extolled for his bravery, intelligence, and foresight. While his eyes still worked, he led the Christian forces against the legendary Muslim leader Saladin and fought him to a draw.

  As the king’s body parts withered, his battlefield victories piled up, temporarily restoring the power of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At age twenty-four, in 1185, after having summoned his strength to do battle against Saladin’s army, he died of leprosy not long after his final battle. Like his face and body eaten away by the disease, his legend has been lost down through the centuries.

  When the plunder stopped days later, or perhaps when they ran out of targets, the crusader leaders collected their booty and divvied it up. They had hit the jackpot. The triple-deal-making doge got his share plus more. The French got enough to spread a handsome purse to everyone. All that remained was to appoint a new emperor. And now the winner, who would become the seventh emperor of the Greeks in the ten months since the crusaders arrived, was Baldwin of Flanders, who by chance happened to be the doge’s choice. The old man always seemed to get his way. In an elaborate ceremony in the Hagia Sophia, presumably now cleaned of mule dung and dancing prostitutes, Baldwin received the crown, ushering in what became known as the Latin Empire. He had the unenviable job of restoring a city depleted of money and filled with ruined churches and angry people, in addition to half the city having been burned to the ground. To raise money for his new government, Baldwin resorted to pillaging the tombs of long-dead em­perors, ensuring the dead received equal sacking treatment as the living.

  In a series of letters explaining how the crusaders set out to kill Muslims and free the Holy Land and instead ended up deeply in debt, joyriding with a Greek prince, defeating six Greek emperors, and raping and killing defenseless Chris­tians, Baldwin proclaimed that because they had succeeded in conquering Constantinople, their actions must have re­ceived God’s blessing.

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

  While Baldwin wrestled with governing a city he helped de­stroy, three other emperors still roamed the countryside. Two of them, Alexius III — the original emperor when the crusad­ers showed up — and Unibrow — the emperor next to flee — agreed to ex-emperor-to-ex-emperor talks and possibly join forces to fight Baldwin. Alexius III also agreed to set up Unibrow with one of his beautiful daughters. Alexius III tricked Unibrow into meeting with him privately, and at this point some of Alexius’s men grabbed Unibrow and blinded him. That November, Baldwin captured Unibrow, brought him back to Constantinople, and forced the now-blind ex-em­peror to leap to his death from the city’s tallest column. Around the same time Alexius III was also captured. Baldwin spared him for no apparent reason and packed him off to lifetime exile in Italy. And with that, calm descended upon the new Latin Empire. A short-lived calm, but a calm none­theless. By the spring of 1205 the crusader army began to break up. Some went to the Holy Land, most went home. That summer, the pope’s man with the crusaders released them all from their vow to reach the Holy Land. The crusade had ended leaving this less than admirable scorecard:

  Christian cities sacked: two

  Greek emperors defeated during the crusade: six

  Times the Greeks turned and fled: thousands

  Muslims killed: zero

  In the spring of 1205 Baldwin, the adventure-addicted doge, and other leading crusaders, such as Louis of Blois, one of the three founding nobles, took off with a small army to quell a rebellion around the inland city of Adrianople. On April 14, one year after the sack of Constantinople, the cru­saders tangled with a larger force under King Johanitza of Bulgaria. Separated from the bulk of his army, Baldwin and some knights were overrun by vastly superior numbers. Louis was cut down; Baldwin, fighting like a savage, was dragged to Johanitza’s prison in the Balkan Mountains and was never seen again.

  The triple-deal-making doge and the bulk of the army sur­vived and returned to Constantinople. The blind Venetian leader died of old age in June of 1205. He was buried in the Hagia Sophia, never having reached the Holy Land or re­turned to Venice. He magnificently channeled the energies of the crusading spirit into profits for his beloved Venice and the city-state flourished for centuries afterward.

  Pope Innocent III was livid when he heard the crusade had ended without Jerusalem having entered his realm. When he learned of the full extent of the destruction of Constantino­ple he blanched in horror. He cheered up, however, when he realized his Catholics were now in charge of the Greek empire. He issued no further excommunications because of the massive deaths his own army caused.

  The Latin Empire lasted until 1261 when the Greeks retook the city. Constantinople underwent resurgence but never regained its former glory, and it eventually fell to the Turks in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. The Catholics held out in the Holy Land, buttressed by a series of further crusades, until 1291. Europeans didn’t make it back to Jeru­salem until 1917 when the British captured it.

  The Greeks never forgave the crusaders and the pope for unleashing their hellacious army on their city and pillaging their holy places. The break between the Catholics and East­ern Orthodox had become too great to fix. The Great Schism was complete. The two wings of the Christian Church would never reunite.

  In 2001 Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for the odious deeds of the Fourth Crusade.

  THREE.

  THE WHISKEY REBELLION: 1794

  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness make for warm and fuzzy reading in declarations of independence. But when push comes to shove, what really matters is money. The glorious new American republic was no different. Shortly after birth its essential character had already been formed: financial matters took precedence over everything else, including the continued enslavement of an entire race, the slow-motion holocaust of Native Americans, and the disenfranchisement of half of the population based on sex.

  The Whiskey Rebellion was a haphazard, unorganized, poorly armed struggle by frontiersmen in western Pennsylva­nia against what they felt to be unfair taxes, the very philoso­phy upon which the United States of America had been founded in its struggle against the British Crown just a few short decades earlier. Most of the rebels
were newly minted white Americans who depended upon only one handout from the government to sustain themselves on the edge of the new nation: freedom.

  To these hardy souls freedom meant the freedom from taxation; in a nation whose focus was making money, tax-free status was the highest blessing that could be bestowed upon a citizen. But Alexander Hamilton had other ideas. The treasury secretary, super busy building the financial bedrock of the new country, felt that the tax base needed to be diver­sified beyond a dependency on taxing British imports. Thus was born his whiskey tax, an excise tax. It was the country’s first tax on internally made products.

  It drove the frontiersmen to rebellion. It would take three years of unrest before a cautious George Washington suc­cumbed to Hamilton’s pleadings to unleash an army planned, outfitted, and headed by Hamilton himself into western Pennsylvania to crush the resistance to his diversified excise tax-funding scheme.

  THE PLAYERS

  Alexander Hamilton — the quintessential new yorker, an ambitious, foreign-born, mercantile-minded, highly efficient multitasker and pioneer Thomas Jefferson–hater.

  Skinny — Since he was born on St. Croix he could not become president. But he could become king.

  Props — Washington’s chief-of-staff during the Revolution, one of the founders of the Bank of New York, first secretary of the treasury, and key drafter of The Federalist Papers.

  Pros — His far-reaching fiscal genius laid the financial footing of the modern U.S. economy.