The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  There remained only Crete, the largest and most important of all the Greek islands, for which Dandolo had had to drive a bargain with Boniface. Once again, however, the problem was Genoa. Even before the Venetians got possession of the island the Genoese had established a trading colony there, and it was plain from the outset that they would not give it up without a fight. Venice accordingly despatched a sizable fleet, which succeeded in temporarily driving out the dashing Genoese corsair commander Enrico Pescatore, Count of Malta; he, however, appealed to Pope Innocent, and the struggle was to continue for another five years until 1212, when he and his compatriots were at last compelled to withdraw. Thenceforth and for the next four and a half centuries the island was ruled by a Venetian governor bearing the title of Doge–a clear indication of the importance attached to it by the Serenissima.

  With the death of Henry of Hainault in 1216 at the age of forty, the Frankish Empire embarked on its long decline. Henry had been a remarkable ruler. The only Latin Emperor to have shown genuine statesmanship, he had inherited what seemed already to be a lost cause and within barely a decade had transformed it into a going concern. Had his successors possessed a fraction of his ability, there might never again have been a Greek ruler on the throne of Constantinople; but once his hand was no longer on the helm, it was plain that the eventual recovery of the Empire’s true capital would be only a matter of time. The Empire of Nicaea, meanwhile, under Lascaris’s son-in-law John Vatatzes, went from strength to strength. By 1246 his dominions extended over most of the Balkan peninsula and much of the Aegean, his rivals were crippled or annihilated, and he stood poised to achieve at last the purpose to which he had dedicated his life.

  It was John Vatatzes who deserved more than anyone else to lead a Byzantine army in triumph into Constantinople. Alas, his health had long been giving cause for concern. He was an epileptic, and as he grew older the fits became increasingly frequent and severe, at times seriously affecting his mental stability–and, in particular, making him insanely jealous of his leading general, Michael Palaeologus. More tragic still, he passed the disease on to his son and successor, Theodore II, in an even more acute form; and when in August 1258 Theodore died at the age of thirty-six after a reign of just four years, leaving only a small child to succeed him, a palace revolution bestowed the throne on Palaeologus. Though still only thirty-four, the young general had already had a somewhat chequered career. He had been obliged, first of all, to cope with a hostile Emperor, who in 1252 had even had him excommunicated and imprisoned; and his problems continued after his accession, when he was called upon to face an alliance comprising the Despotate of Epirus, the Crusader Principality of Achaia in the Peloponnese and young Manfred of Sicily, the bastard son of the Western Emperor Frederick II. Here was a formidable enemy indeed; but when the two armies met at Pelagonia (now Bitolj) in the early summer of 1259, the coalition simply disintegrated.

  Determined to keep up his momentum, early in 1260 Michael marched on Constantinople. At this first attempt he failed. A secret agent inside the city was unable to open a gate as arranged, and an alternative plan to attack Galata on the further side of the Golden Horn proved equally unsuccessful. That winter, however, Michael scored a diplomatic triumph: on 13 March 1261 he signed a treaty with Genoa, by the terms of which, in return for their help in the struggle to come, the Genoese were promised all the concessions in Constantinople hitherto enjoyed by the Venetians, including their own quarter in both the city and the other principal ports of the Empire, and free access to those of the Black Sea. For Genoa this was a historic agreement, laying as it did the foundations for her commercial empire in the east; for Byzantium it was ultimately to prove a disaster, since the two Italian sea republics would gradually usurp all that remained of her naval power and pursue their centuries-old rivalry over her helpless body. But that was in the future. In the spring of 1261, the Genoese alliance must have seemed to Michael Palaeologus and his subjects like a gift from heaven.

  The eventual recovery of Constantinople came about almost by accident. In the high summer of 1261, Michael had sent one of his generals, Alexius Strategopulus, with a small army to Thrace. When he reached Selymbria (the modern Silivri), some forty miles from Constantinople, Alexius learned that the capital’s Latin garrison was absent, having been summoned by the Venetians to attack the Nicaean island of Daphnusia, which controlled the entrance to the Bosphorus from the Black Sea. He was also told of a postern gate in the land walls, through which armed men might easily pass into the city. That night a small detachment put this information to the test. Slipping in unobserved, they took the few Frankish guards by surprise and threw them from the ramparts. Then they quietly opened one of the city gates. At dawn on Monday, 25 July 1261, the rest of the army poured into Constantinople, meeting scarcely any opposition.

  The Emperor Baldwin II, asleep in his palace, was awakened by the tumult and fled for his life, finally chancing upon a Venetian merchantman on which he escaped to Euboea. Meanwhile, Alexius Strategopulus and his men set fire to the entire Venetian quarter of the city so that the sailors on their return from Daphnusia, finding their houses destroyed and their terrified families huddled homeless on the quayside, would have no spirit for a counter-attack and no choice but to sail disconsolately back to their lagoon. Among the remaining Franks there was widespread panic, gleefully described in the Greek chronicles. But they need not have worried; the expected massacre never occurred. Soon they emerged from their various hiding places, gathered up all the possessions that they could carry and staggered down to the harbour, where some thirty Venetian ships were waiting. The moment they were all aboard, this fleet too left for Euboea–not, apparently, even pausing to take on sufficient provisions, since it is recorded that many of the refugees died of hunger before reaching their destination.

  Two hundred miles away in his camp at Meteorum in Asia Minor, the Emperor Michael was also sleeping when the great news arrived. His elder sister Eulogia–who when he was a child had regularly lulled him to sleep by singing of how he would one day become Emperor and enter Constantinople through the Golden Gate–woke him (according to one authority, by tickling his toes) and told him the news. At first he refused to believe it; only when he was handed the crown and sceptre that Baldwin had left behind in the palace was he finally convinced. Three weeks later, on 15 August, he duly passed through the Golden Gate and proceeded on foot the length of the city to St Sophia. There a second coronation ceremony was performed by the Patriarch for both himself and his wife Theodora, their baby son Andronicus being proclaimed heir presumptive.

  From the start, the Latin Empire of Constantinople had been a monstrosity. The miserable offspring of treachery and greed, in the fifty-seven years of its existence it achieved nothing, contributed nothing, enjoyed not a single moment of distinction or glory. After 1204 it made no territorial conquests, and before long had shrunk to the immediate surroundings of the city that had been ruined and ravaged in giving it birth. Of its seven rulers only one, Henry of Hainault, rose above the mediocre; none of them seem to have made the slightest attempt to understand their Greek subjects or to adopt their customs, let alone to learn their language. And the empire’s fall was, if anything, even more ignominious than its beginning–overpowered in a single night by a handful of soldiers on the spur of the moment.

  If this pathetic travesty could only have confined its misdeeds to itself, we might have passed it over with little more than a pitying glance. Alas, it did not. The dark legacy that it left behind affected not only Byzantium but all Christendom. The Greek Empire never recovered from the damage it sustained during those fateful years, damage that was spiritual as well as material. Nor, bereft of much of the territory that had remained to it after the disaster of Manzikert, with many of its loveliest buildings reduced to rubble and its finest works of art destroyed or carried off to the west, did it ever succeed in recovering its former morale. And it had been robbed of something else also. Before the Latin conquest it had b
een one and indivisible, under a single ruler standing halfway to heaven, Equal of the Apostles. Now that unity too was gone. True, the Empire of Nicaea was no more, subsumed–as it had always longed to be–in that of Constantinople. But there were the Emperors of Trebizond, still stubbornly independent in their tiny Byzantine microcosm on the rainswept shore of the Black Sea, and there were the Despots of Epirus, forever struggling to recapture their early years of power, always ready to welcome the enemies of Constantinople and to provide a focus of opposition. How, fragmented as it was, could the Greek Empire continue to perform the function that it had fulfilled for so long–that of the last grand eastern bulwark of Christendom against the Islamic tide?

  But Christendom too had been changed by the Fourth Crusade. Long divided, it was now polarised. For centuries before and after the Great Schism of 1054, relations between the Eastern and Western Churches had fluctuated between the politely distant and the bitterly acrimonious; their differences, however, had been essentially theological. After the sack of Constantinopole by the Western Crusaders, this was no longer true. In the eyes of the Greeks, these barbarians who had desecrated their altars, plundered their homes and violated their women could no longer be considered, in any real sense of the word, Christians at all. How now could they ever agree to the idea of union with Rome? ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat,’ they used to say; and they meant it.

  CHAPTER IX

  Stupor Mundi

  A few days after the Empress Constance had given birth in the village of Jesi on the day after Christmas 1194,83 she and her son continued their journey to the south. It was in Palermo, on the premature death of his father just four years later, that the child–named Frederick Roger, after his two grandfathers–was in his turn crowned King of Sicily.

  There it was that he spent his childhood, receiving an education as far removed from that normally given to German princes as could possibly be imagined. Latin, Greek and Arabic were all official languages of Norman Sicily; to these Frederick was to add German, Italian and French. Ever since the days of his grandfather Roger II, the court had been the most cultivated in Europe, the meeting place of scholars and geographers, scientists and mathematicians, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. His personal tutor was very possibly Michael Scot, translator of Aristotle and Averroes, who is known to have spent several years in Palermo and was to become his close friend. It was impossible to find a subject which did not interest him. He would spend hours not only in study but in long disputations on religion, philosophy or mathematics. Often, too, he would withdraw to one of the parks and palaces that, we are told, ringed the city like a necklace, watching the birds and animals that were to be a constant passion. Many years later he was to write a book on falconry, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus,84 which became a classic, displaying a knowledge and understanding of wildlife rare indeed in the thirteenth century.

  The physical energy fully matched the intellectual. A contemporary, who clearly knew him well, wrote:

  He is never idle, but passes the whole day in some occupation or other, and so that his vigour may increase with practice he strengthens his agile body with every kind of exercise and practice of arms. He either employs his weapons or carries them, drawing his shortsword, in whose use he is expert; he makes play of defending himself from attack. He is a good shot with the bow and often practises archery. He loves fast thoroughbred horses; and I believe that no one knows better than he how to curb them with the bridle and then set them at full gallop. This is how he spends his days from morn to eve, and then begins afresh the following day.

  To this is added a regal majesty and majestic features and mien, to which are united a kindly and gracious air, a serene brow, brilliant eyes and expressive face, a burning spirit and a ready wit. Nevertheless his actions are sometimes odd and vulgar, though this is not due to nature but to contact with rough company…However he has virtue in advance of his age, and though not adult he is well versed in knowledge and has the gift of wisdom, which usually comes only with the passage of years. In him, then, the number of years does not count; nor is there need to await maturity, because as a man he is full of knowledge, and as a ruler of majesty.

  This description was written in 1208, when Frederick was thirteen. He came of age on his fourteenth birthday, 26 December, and nine months later was married to Constance, daughter of Alfonso II of Aragon, ten years older than he and already a widow, her first husband having been King Imre of Hungary. She was the choice of Pope Innocent III, and at least in the early days of the marriage Frederick does not seem to have altogether shared the papal enthusiasm for her; but she brought 500 armed knights in her train, and in view of the continuing unrest throughout the kingdom, he needed all the help he could get. She also introduced, with her knights and ladies and troubadours, an element of worldly sophistication which had hitherto been lacking in Palermo. To Frederick, always alive to every new stimulus, there now opened up a whole new world, the world of courtly love. The marriage itself remained one of political convenience–though Constance duly presented her husband with a son, Henry, a year or two later–but it removed the rough edges; long before he was twenty, Frederick had acquired the social graces and the polished charm for which he would be famous for the rest of his life.

  Early in January 1212 an embassy arrived in Palermo with a message from beyond the Alps. Once again, western Europe had been shown the perils of an elective monarchy; since the death of Henry VI, Germany had been torn apart by a civil war among the various claimants to the imperial title. One of these, Otto the Welf, Duke of Brunswick, had actually been crowned Emperor by Pope Innocent in 1209, and two years later had taken possession of south Italy, the entire mainland part of Frederick’s kingdom. Unfortunately for him, however, he went too far: his invasion of the papal province of Tuscany led to his instant excommunication, and in September 1211 a council of the leading German princes met at Nuremberg and declared him deposed. They it was who had despatched the ambassadors, with an invitation to Frederick to assume the vacant throne.

  This invitation came as a complete surprise, and created a considerable stir in the Sicilian court. Frederick’s principal councillors strongly advised against acceptance; so too did his wife. He had no ties of his own with Germany; indeed he had never set foot on German soil. His hold on his own kingdom was still far from secure; it was scarcely a year since the Duke of Brunswick had been threatening him from across the Straits of Messina. Was this really a moment to absent himself from Sicily for a period of several months at least, for the sake of an honour which, however great, might yet prove illusory? On the other hand a refusal would, he knew, be seen by the German princes as a deliberate snub, and could not fail to strengthen the position of his chief rival. Both in Italy and in Germany, the Duke of Brunswick still had plenty of support. Having renounced none of his long-term ambitions, he was fully capable of launching a new campaign–and he would not make the same mistake next time. Here, on the other hand, was an opportunity to deal him a knockout blow. It was not to be missed.

  Pope Innocent, after some hesitation, gave his approval. Frederick’s election would admittedly tighten the imperial grip to the north and south of the Papal States, and it was in order to emphasise the independence–at least in theory–of the Kingdom of Sicily from the Empire that the Pope insisted on Frederick’s renunciation of the Sicilian throne in favour of his newborn son, with Queen Constance acting as regent. Once these formalities–and a few others of lesser importance–had been settled, Frederick’s way was clear. At the end of February he sailed with a few trusted companions from Messina. His immediate destination, however, was not Germany but Rome; and there, on Easter Sunday, 25 March 1212, he knelt before the Pope and performed the act of feudal homage to him–technically on behalf of his son the King–for the Sicilian Kingdom. From Rome he sailed on to Genoa in a Genoese galley, somehow eluding the fleet which the Pisans (staunch supporters of the Duke of Brunswick) had sent to intercept him. The Genoese, unlike
their Pisan rivals, were enthusiastically Ghibelline,85 none more so than their leading family, the Dorias, who put their principal palace at the disposal of the Emperor-elect until such time as the Alpine passes were once again open to enable him to complete his journey. Meanwhile, an agreement was reached, to the benefit of both sides, by the terms of which Frederick promised–in return for a substantial subsidy–to confirm on his accession as Emperor all the privileges granted to Genoa by his predecessors.

  Even then his path to Germany was not clear. On 28 July he was given a warm welcome in Pavia; but the Lombard plain was being constantly patrolled by bands of pro-Guelf Milanese, and it was one of these bands that surprised the imperial party as they were leaving the town the next morning. Frederick was lucky indeed to be able to leap on to one of the horses and, fording the river Lambro bareback, to make his way to friendly Cremona. By which route he finally crossed the Alps is not recorded; it was certainly not the Brenner, for we know that the Duke of Brunswick and his army were at Trento. By the beginning of autumn Frederick was safely in Germany.

  On 25 July 1215, in the cathedral at Aachen upon the throne of Charlemagne, the Archbishop of Mainz crowned Frederick King of the Romans, the traditional title of the Emperor-elect. He was just twenty-one. All that he now needed for the full imperial title was a further coronation by the Pope in Rome. Almost exactly a year before, on 27 July 1214, the army of Philip Augustus of France had defeated that of Otto of Brunswick and King John of England on the field of Bouvines, near Lille, effectively destroying all Otto’s hopes of opposing him. From that day his supremacy was unquestioned, and it was now–perhaps as a thank-offering to God, perhaps as a way of winning further papal approval–that he announced his intention of taking the Cross.