Politically, too, the damage done was incalculable. Although Frankish rule on the Bosphorus was to last less than sixty years, the Byzantine Empire never recovered its strength, or any considerable part of its lost dominions. It was left economically crippled, territorially truncated, powerless to defend itself against the Ottoman tide. There are few greater ironies in history than the fact that the fate of Europe should have been sealed–and half Christian Europe condemned to some five centuries of Ottoman rule–by men who fought under the banner of the Cross. Those men were transported, inspired, encouraged and ultimately led by Enrico Dandolo in the name of the Venetian Republic; and just as Venice derived the major advantage from the tragedy, so she and her magnificent old Doge must accept the major responsibility for the havoc that they wrought upon the world.
CHAPTER VIII
The Two Diasporas
The Fourth Crusade had not only come near to destroying Constantinople; it had stirred up the entire eastern Mediterranean. The upheaval affected Greeks and Latins alike. Virtually all the noble Byzantines had fled the city–or left it in disgust–rather than submit to Frankish rule, and had gravitated to one or other of the successor states in which the Byzantine spirit and the Orthodox faith were still faithfully preserved. One of these states, the so-called Empire of Trebizond, need not concern us here, confined as it was to a narrow strip of coastline on the Black Sea. The second, the so-called Despotate of Epirus, was founded soon after the Latin conquest by a certain Michael Comnenus Ducas, an illegitimate great-grandson of Alexius I Comnenus. From his capital at Arta, Michael gradually established control over the northwestern coast of Greece and part of Thessaly. The last state to be established–but from our point of view by far the most important–was the Empire of Nicaea, of which Alexius III’s son-in-law Theodore Lascaris was recognised as emperor in 1206, being crowned there two years later. It occupied the northwestern extremity of Anatolia, extending all the way from the Black Sea to the Aegean. To the north lay the Latin Empire of Constantinople; to the south and east, the Seljuk sultanate. Although the official capital was Nicaea (Iznik), Theodore’s successor John III Vatatzes was to establish his chief residence at Nymphaeum (now Kemalpaa, just a few miles from Izmir); for most of the fifty-seven-year period of exile from Constantinople it was from here, as a Mediterranean state, that the Empire of Nicaea was effectively governed.
Even that, however, might have been little more than a footnote to our story had it not been for the Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan, to whom the Greeks of Thrace had promised the imperial crown if he could drive the Latins from Constantinople. On 14 April 1205 Kalojan virtually annihilated the Frankish army. He failed to capture the city, but he succeeded in taking prisoner the Emperor Baldwin himself, who never regained his freedom and died soon afterwards. Just six weeks later, on 1 June, old Doge Dandolo–who, despite his ninety-odd years, had fought determinedly at Baldwin’s side–followed him to the grave. His body, rather surprisingly, was not returned to Venice but was buried in St Sophia. The sarcophagus did not survive the later Turkish conquest but, embedded in the floor of the gallery above the south aisle, his tombstone may still be seen.
Thus, just a year after the capture of the capital, the power of the Latins was broken. They remained in Constantinople; in all Asia Minor, however, only the little town of Pegae (now Karabiga) on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara remained in Frankish hands. Now at last Theodore Lascaris could concentrate on forging his new state–following the old Byzantine pattern in every detail, since he never doubted that his countrymen would be back, sooner or later, where they belonged. Thanks to him, there were now effectively two Emperors in the east and two Patriarchs, the Latin in Constantinople and the Greek in Nicaea. Clearly there was no question of their living in harmony; each party was determined to destroy the other, but neither was sufficiently strong to do so unaided. Thus it was that Baldwin’s successor, Henry of Hainault, introduced into the equation a most unlikely new agent: Kaikosru, the Seljuk Sultan of Konya.
In the long and melancholy history of the Crusades, Christian had all too frequently fought Christian. To recruit a Muslim ally against a Christian enemy, however, was something altogether new. The Seljuk Turks were by now masters of several hundred miles of Mediterranean coastline. They had come a long way since their Central Asian beginnings. In the eleventh century they had spread rapidly through Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia–where they had made themselves masters of Baghdad, ruling in the name of the Abbasid Caliphs–and their conquests had taught them much. After their invasion of Anatolia and their victory in 1071 over the Byzantines at Manzikert,77 they had established their capital at Konya (Iconium), and by their twelfth-century heyday they had created a remarkable state. The Sultanate of Rum, as they proudly called it–for had it not been part of the Roman Empire?–embraced at its fullest extent virtually all Asia Minor, some 250,000 square miles, with a mixed population of Turks, Greeks and Armenians. The Seljuks did not last long–their power was destroyed by the Mongols towards the end of the century–but they left behind them an extraordinary architectural heritage, much of which still survives today: superb mosques, their façades normally flanked by twin minarets and intricately carved, often with superbly ornate calligraphic inscriptions; bridges of soaring grace and elegance; fortifications and a shipyard at their summer capital of Alanya; and magnificent caravanserais–one every twenty miles along the main caravan routes–each with its own mosque, living accommodation, stabling for horses and camels and a resident cobbler who would repair shoes without charge.
It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if the Emperor in Constantinople and the Sultan in Iconium had cemented their alliance with an overwhelming victory, but they failed to do so. There were several hard-fought battles, all but one of them indecisive; during the last, in the spring of 1210 near Antioch on the Meander, Kaikosru was unhorsed and killed–if Greek sources are to be believed, by the Emperor Theodore himself, in single combat. His successor immediately came to terms, leaving Theodore free to concentrate his forces against the Franks; the situation was finally resolved only in late 1214, when the two Emperors concluded a treaty of peace at Nymphaeum. Henry, it was agreed, would keep the northwest coast of Asia Minor; all the rest, as far as the Seljuk frontier, would go to Theodore. This treaty marked the beginning of Nicaean prosperity. At last, the young empire had obtained formal recognition by its Latin rival of its right to exist.
‘I shall not pursue,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘the obscure and various dynasties that rose and fell on the continent or in the isles.’ As a historian of the Roman Empire, there is no particular reason why he should have, but for chroniclers of the Mediterranean such tasks cannot be shuffled off so easily. No one travelling through central Greece and the Peloponnese can fail to be struck by the quantity of medieval castles that crown, it sometimes seems, almost every peak and ridge of that mountainously spectacular land. For those anxious to know more, some explanation is surely required; yet few indeed, even nowadays, are the books that relate their history.
This is largely because that history is so diabolically complicated. The simple fact is that the Greek diaspora which followed the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade was matched by a still more dramatic territorial expansion on the part of the Latins. The Frankish barons who had sailed to the Crusade–together with a good many others who had not, but who had heard tell of the resulting spoils and were determined not to be left out–roamed over Greece, seizing all the land they could, carving out fiefs for themselves much on the lines of those they had known in the west, but doing so in a country where the feudal system as they understood it was virtually unknown. In western lands that system was based on a pyramid of wealth and power, with the king at its head. In the east, the Latin Empire of Constantinople was far too weak to exert any real control, and a picture therefore emerges of countless independent city-states, more often than not at war with one another, constantly intriguing and jockeying for position. In the Aeg
ean, where the influence of Venice was paramount, the sheer quantity of islands rendered the situation more complex still. No wonder that many a would-be historian of the place and period has recoiled with a shudder and turned his attentions elsewhere.
The story of this Latin diaspora begins essentially with the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat. Already furious at having been passed over as Emperor, he had been further enraged by Baldwin’s offer of a large estate in Anatolia; instead, pointing out that his brother, on his marriage to the daughter of Manuel I Comnenus a quarter of a century before, had been given the courtesy title of King of Thessalonica, he laid formal claim to that city. Now it was Baldwin’s turn to object, and it was only thanks to the mediation of Doge Dandolo and several of the Frankish leaders–above all, the young Burgundian nobleman Otho de la Roche–that open warfare was avoided. Eventually the Emperor was forced to give his grudging consent, on the understanding that Boniface did homage to him for his still notional realm and held it as an imperial fief.
The Marquis’s next task was to conquer his new kingdom, and with this object in view he set out in the autumn of 1204 on a prolonged campaign through northern and central Greece. With him went a motley assortment of Crusaders: Frenchmen and Germans, Flemings and Lombards, all determined to carve out fiefs of their own. They included–to name but four–the Frenchman William of Champlitte, grandson of the Count of Champagne; Otho de la Roche, the Burgundian; the Fleming Jacques d’Avesnes; and the young Italian Marquis Guido Pallavicini. Moving south through Thessaly, they advanced to the pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas of Sparta had made his heroic stand nearly seventeen centuries before. On this occasion they were unopposed; but Boniface, realising the immense strategic importance of the place, there and then invested Pallavicini with the marquisate of Boudonitza to cover its southern approaches. This, with the neighbouring barony of Salona, was to last another two hundred years, and to play an important part in the history of Frankish Greece.78
Boeotia surrendered without a struggle, as did Attica–including Athens itself, where Boniface immediately established a garrison on the Acropolis. At that time the Parthenon was serving as the city’s cathedral, but the Frankish soldiers, it need hardly be said, showed the building scant respect. It was the same story, though on a smaller scale, as in St Sophia: the treasury looted, the gold and silver vessels melted down, the library dispersed and destroyed. The two provinces together were bestowed on Otho de la Roche, probably as a reward for his mediation during Boniface’s quarrel with the Emperor Baldwin. At first Otho styled himself, with relative modesty, Sire d’Athènes, a title which his Greek subjects magnified into ‘Great Lord’ or megas kyr. Not until 1260, well after his death, was Athens formally constituted a duchy.
Jacques d’Avesnes, meanwhile, the Flemish soldier of fortune, had left the main body of the army and strayed off to the east, where he had received the submission of the island of Euboea. (This had been allotted to Venice during the partition, but the Venetians had not yet had time to do anything about it.) He stayed there, however, only long enough to build a small fortress in the middle of the Euripos–that mysterious channel79 which separates the island from mainland Greece–and to leave a small garrison. Then, eager to participate in the coming conquest of the Peloponnese–and, presumably, the benefits arising therefrom–he hurried back to Boniface. The Marquis, however, had gone on to besiege Nauplia, so Jacques–with Otho de la Roche, who had joined him en route–launched a concerted attack on Corinth. With some difficulty they managed to take the lower town; the high fortress of Acrocorinth, on the other hand, proved impregnable, and its siege was still in progress when one night the defenders made a sudden sortie and inflicted serious damage on the Frankish camp, d’Avesnes himself being gravely wounded.
But the Peloponnese was doomed; and its effective conqueror was to be neither Boniface of Montferrat–who was anyway soon obliged to return to Thessalonica to face the Bulgar army of Tsar Kalojan–nor Jacques d’Avesnes, nor even Otho de la Roche. It was Geoffrey de Villehardouin, nephew and namesake of the chronicler of the Fourth Crusade. A year or two previously this young man had himself set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine, and having heard while in Syria of the Franks’ capture of Constantinople had immediately re-embarked to join them. Soon after his departure, however, his ship had been driven seriously off course by a violent Mediterranean storm and forced to take shelter in the harbour of Modone (Methoni) in the southwestern Peloponnese; and he was still there when he heard of Boniface’s siege of Nauplia. Less than a week later he was in the latter’s presence. The Morea,80 he told the Marquis, may technically have been Venetian, but it was a fruit ripe for the plucking. Given a few hundred men at most, the whole land could be theirs. Boniface was unimpressed, preferring to stick to his own plan of campaign, but Geoffrey found a new ally in the camp in the shape of his old friend William of Champlitte. William agreed to join him, provided only that Geoffrey recognise him as his liege lord in respect of any conquests that the two might make. As grandson of the Count of Champagne he could hardly have done otherwise, and Geoffrey made no objection. Boniface gave the expedition his blessing, and with 100 knights and perhaps 500 men-at-arms the two friends rode off into the unknown.
From the start they carried all before them. The city and castle of Patras were the first to fall. They then headed south, meeting practically no resistance until they reached the neighbourhood of Kalamata in the province of Messenia. By this time the Greeks had amassed their own army of some four or five thousand, which included a considerable force under Michael Ducas, Despot of Epirus; and in 1205, among the olive groves of Koundoura in the northeastern corner of the province, the two armies stood face to face. The Greeks, fully aware of their overwhelming superiority in numbers, were supremely confident of victory; but they were also disastrously inexperienced, and the Franks went through them like butter. From that day on, the Peloponnese was effectively Frankish territory. Greek folklore is full of stories of local heroism: of the great warrior Doxapatres, for example, whose mace no man could lift and whose cuirass weighed more than 150 pounds; and of his daughter, who hurled herself from the castle tower rather than submit to the lust of the conquerors. And indeed there were several pockets of resistance still remaining, among them Acrocorinth, Nauplia (whose siege Boniface had been forced to abandon), the great rock of Monemvasia, and the dark fortresses of the Taygetus in the Mani. But as early as 19 November 1205 a letter from Pope Innocent III already describes William de Champlitte as ‘Prince of all Achaia’81–and so, to all intents and purposes, he was.
Thus it came about that, within three years of the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Frankish Crusaders had effectively and almost effortlessly mopped up nine-tenths of continental Greece and the Peloponnese. Their success had been due less to their own courage than to the pusillanimity of the local populations, who had seldom put up more than a token show of resistance. In Macedonia, on the other hand, it had been a different story. The Emperor Baldwin, as we have seen, had been captured by the Bulgarian Tsar and disappeared into a prison from which he was never again to emerge. Boniface, on hearing the news, had abandoned the siege of Nauplia to defend his northern dominions, and had been killed in a minor skirmish some weeks later. After his death his head was cut off and sent as a present to the Tsar. Just when firm and confident leadership was needed, his throne passed to his infant son, but the situation was saved when soon afterwards Kalojan was murdered in his turn (at the instigation of his wife) and the power of Bulgaria was effectively broken.
So much for the successes and failures of the Franks. What, it may be asked, about the Venetians? Thanks to the negotiating skills of old Dandolo, they had won the lion’s share of the spoils; they had soon realised, however, that that share was far too large to be easily digested, and were accordingly a good deal slower than their Frankish allies to occupy their new territories–a delay that had already cost them the Peloponnese. There was also a difference in their two philosophies.
The Franks, raised as they had been in the feudal system, saw their new dominions as fiefs, their tenants as vassals. But the feudal system was based on the ownership of land–a commodity which Venice, being a sea republic, had never possessed. The Venetians were merchants and traders, and for them foreign colonies were of use only insofar as they advanced their own commercial interests. It was for this reason that Dandolo had limited his claims, apart from the Peloponnese, to coastal areas and islands; even then, his eyes–such as they were–had been too big for his stomach. He did not lift a finger when Jacques d’Avesnes moved into Euboea, or when Champlitte and Villehardouin forged their Principality of Achaia; all he really cared about were the twin ports of Modone and Corone at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, and in 1206 he sent his son with a small fleet to recover them for the Republic. The job was quickly done, and the two ports were to remain Venetian for several centuries to come.
As for the quantities of Aegean islands–including all the Cyclades–that had fallen to them, the Venetians were once again obliged to admit to themselves that, despite the considerable resources of the Serenissima, the task of administering them all directly was unmanageable. It was therefore agreed that the majority of the islands should be occupied and governed, in the name of Venice, by numbers of her private citizens. As it turned out, the Venetian contingent to the Crusade had included Doge Dandolo’s nephew, a certain Marco Sanudo, and on hearing the news he had lost no time. Equipping eight vessels at his own expense, he had quickly assembled a group of like-minded young Venetians with a taste for adventure and had sailed with them to stake their several claims. There, on Naxos, Andros, Paros and Antiparos, Melos, Ios, Amorgos, Santorini and a dozen other islands, they would carve out their individual domains, holding them in fief to Sanudo as Duke of the Archipelago.82 With Corfu and the other Ionian Islands off the Adriatic coast, similar arrangements were made.
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