Apparently unintimidated, the envoys set out their case. To the feudal crusaders, the failure to pay was a breach of honour; to the bourgeois Venetians it was a broken contract. The words were straightforward. Tellingly they were addressed solely to Alexius: ‘You swore to them, both you and your father, to keep the agreement which you had sworn – and [we] have the documents. But you haven’t kept the terms as well as you should.’ They demanded that the contract be honoured. ‘If you do so it will be most agreeable to them. If not, understand that henceforward they will regard you as neither their lord nor their friend … Now, you have clearly heard what we have said and you must act as you please.’
To the westerners it was just plain speaking, but the Greeks ‘were astonished and outraged at this challenge and said that no one had ever been brazen enough to dare to defy the emperor of Constantinople in his own hall’. There was immediate uproar, expressions of extreme ill-will, hands reaching for sword hilts, shouts and curses. Turning abruptly on their heels the envoys fled to the gate with a rising fury speeding them away. They rode off in palpable relief, lucky to be alive. The breakdown was decisive: if the crusaders wanted the funds to reach the Holy Land, they would have to take them. ‘In this way,’ Villehardouin recorded, ‘the war began.’
But the matter was not quite settled. Dandolo, from the perspective of his ninety years, decided to make one more personal appeal to Alexius’s better nature. He sent a messenger to the palace, requesting a meeting at the harbour. Dandolo had himself rowed across in a galley, with three more galleys packed with armed men to guard him. Alexius rode down to the shore. The doge opened abruptly: ‘Alexius, what are you thinking of? Remember that it is we who dragged you out of misery and then made you lord and crowned you emperor. Will you not honour your commitments and not do anything more about it?’ The emperor’s response was firmly negative. Fury overcame the doge. ‘No? Contemptible boy,’ he spat, ‘we hauled you out of the dung heap and we’ll drop you back in it. And I defy you. Be fully aware that from now on I will pursue you to your utter destruction, with all the power at my disposal.’ With these words the doge left and returned to camp.
Initially, there was skirmishing along the shores of the Golden Horn, without particular advantage to either side, but the Greeks knew where the weakness of the crusaders lay. They continuously eyed the ships. Some time probably in mid-December, they launched a night attack on the Venetian fleet. A number of fireships were prepared, laden with dry timber and oil, and with a stiff breeze blowing across the Horn, they were ignited and cut loose ‘and the wind drove them at great speed towards the fleet’. It was only quick thinking by the Venetians which prevented disaster; rapidly boarding their own vessels they manoeuvred them out of the way of the guttering fireships. On the night of 1 January 1204, with conditions again favourable, the Greeks made a second attempt. The wind was again blowing hard towards the Venetian fleet; seventeen large ships were filled with timber, hemp, barrels and pitch. At the depths of midnight they set fire to the vessels and watched the fiery squadron surge across the harbour in a chained line. At the first call of the trumpets, the Venetians scrambled to their stations, cast off and tackled the approaching vessels. ‘And the flames burned so high’, recorded Villehardouin, ‘that it seemed that the whole world was burning.’ It was now that Venetian seafaring skill was put to the test.
A huge mass of Greeks came down onto the shoreline and hurled abuse at the detested Italians, ‘and their shouts were so loud that it seemed that the earth and sea shook’. Some climbed into rowing boats and shot at the Venetian vessels as they put out from the shore. Undaunted, the Venetians gingerly approached the fiery armada and managed to attach grappling hooks to the line, and ‘by brute force towed them out of the harbour in the face of their enemies’, where they released the fireships and the strong Bosphorus current swept them away flaming into the night. Without Venetian skill, Villehardouin acknowledged that ‘if the fleet had been burned they would have lost everything, because they would have been unable to depart by land or sea’.
Despite these determined assaults Alexius himself was conspicuous by his absence in the front line. The emperor was still trying to manage two counter-pressures, fearful that if the mood inside the city turned ugly, he might need to make yet another appeal to the crusaders. And they needed him alive too: it was Alexius with whom the deals had been struck all the way back in Corfu the previous spring. But Alexius’s equivocation was keenly felt by his own subjects.
The people of the city, who were at least brave, demanded of their emperor that he should be as loyal as they were and use his strength to resist the enemy alongside the army – unless, of course, he was only paying lip service to the Byzantine cause and deep-down favoured the Latins. But his posturings were meaningless, for Alexius shrank from taking up arms against the Latins.
Furthermore, according to Choniates, who watched all this unfold with aristocratic alarm, ‘The disgruntled populace, like a vast sea whipped up by the wind, contemplated revolt.’
Into this power vacuum, the shaggy-browed Murtzuphlus started to insert himself, energetically pressing forward with patriotic fervour in defence of the city, ‘burning with desire to rule and to gain the citizens’ favour’. On 7 January, ‘displaying proof of outstanding courage’, he led an attack on the hated intruders outside the walls. The Greeks were forced back and Murtzuphlus’s horse stumbled and fell; he was only rescued by a company of archers, but this attempt demonstrated his willingness to defend the mother city. Alexius meanwhile seemed happy to sit behind the walls and watch, while the Venetians used their galleys to plunder the shores of the Golden Horn and employed fire, now the most hated form of war, to inflict further damage on the city. When the crusaders embarked on a two-day punitive raid across the surrounding countryside, plundering and despoiling, the exasperation of the mob finally exploded: the boiling kettle began ‘to blow off steam of abuse against the emperors’.
On 25 January a rowdy crowd descended on the mother church of Hagia Sophia; under its domed and mosaicked canopy, they forced the senate and clergy to convene and demanded the appointment of a new emperor. Choniates was one of the city dignitaries present. The nobility were frozen with fear and indecision by this eruption of violent democracy. They refused to appoint any of their number; none wanted to be nominated, ‘for we realised full well that whoever was proposed for the election would be led out the very next day like a sheep to slaughter’. Recent history had thrown up such ephemeral emperors whose reigns, like the gaudy life of dragonflies, had passed before sunset. The mob refused to budge from the church without a candidate. Eventually they seized a hapless young aristocrat, Nicholas Kannavos, led him to the church, placed a crown on his head, proclaimed him emperor and retained him there. It was now 27 January. The city descended into factional chaos. With Kannavos in the church, blind Isaac now dying and Murtzuphlus waiting in the wings, Alexius did what Choniates predicted he would. He played his last card. He called on the crusaders to enter the palace and secure his position. That day Baldwin of Flanders came to discuss this plan.
Murtzuphlus was party to these deeply unpatriotic deliberations. He knew that a moment had come. He secretly called on the palace power brokers, one by one. He won over the chief eunuch with the promise of new positions; he then gathered the Varangian Guard ‘and told them about the emperor’s intention and convinced them to consider taking as the right action that which was desirable and pleasing to the [Byzantines]’. Finally he went to deal with Alexius.
According to Choniates, at the dead of night on 27 January he burst into the emperor’s chamber informing him that the Varangian Guard was massing at the door, ‘ready to tear him apart’ because of his friendship with the hated Latins. Terrified, confused and barely awake, Alexius begged for help. Murtzuphlus threw a robe over the emperor by way of disguise, led him out through a little-used door to ‘safety’ with the emperor gabbling pathetic thanks, and threw him, chained by the legs, into ‘the mos
t awful of prisons’. Murtzuphlus donned the imperial regalia and was proclaimed emperor. In the swirling confusion there were now four emperors in the city: the blind Isaac, Alexius IV Angelus in prison, Alexius V Murtzuphlus in the palace, Kannavos as the plaything of the mob in Hagia Sophia. The elaborate dignity of the great empire had completely collapsed. Murtzuphlus moved fast to clear up the mess. When the Varangian Guard burst into Hagia Sophia, Kannavos’s protectors simply melted away. On 2 February, the innocent young noble, apparently a man of integrity and talent, was taken off and decapitated; on the fifth, Alexius V Murtzuphlus was crowned in Hagia Sophia with the customary splendour. The blind Isaac, when he was told of the palace coup, was seized by terror and conveniently died. Or he may have been strangled.
Outside the walls, the news of the coup was greeted as final proof of Byzantine duplicity: Murtzuphlus was not a legitimate emperor, he was a usurper – and a bloodthirsty one at that. According to the more lurid accounts, when he captured three Venetians he had them hung up by iron hooks and roasted alive, ‘with our men looking on, and they could not be spared from such a horrible death by any prayer or payment’. More prosaically, he cut off the crusaders’ food supply. The change of regime returned the crusaders to a state of chronic need. ‘Once again,’ one of the sources records, ‘there was a time of much scarcity within our ranks and they ate many horses.’ ‘The prices in the camp were so high’, reported Clari, ‘that a sestier of wine was sold there for twelve sous, fourteen sous, even at times fifteen sous, a hen for twenty sous and an egg for two cents.’ The crusaders embarked on another extensive raid to provision the army. They attacked the town of Philia on the Black Sea and were returning on 5 February with booty and cattle when Murtzuphlus, whose support now rested on the pledge rapidly to drive the Latins into the sea, rode out to intercept them. He took with him the imperial banner and a precious miracle-working icon of the Virgin, one of the most revered relics of the city, whose presence ensured victory in battle. In a fierce clash, the Greeks were rebuffed and the icon captured. Murtzuphlus rode back with a report that the battle had been won. Questioned as to the whereabouts of the icon and banner, he became evasive, declaring that they had been put away for safe-keeping. The following day, in an attempt to humiliate the upstart emperor, the Venetians put the imperial and sacred items on a galley and sailed up and down the city walls, taunting him with their trophies. When the Greeks saw this they turned on the new man; Murtzuphlus remained resolute. ‘Don’t be dismayed, for I will make them pay heavily and will fully avenge myself on them.’ He was already being backed into a corner.
A day later, 7 February, Murtzuphlus tried a different tack. He sent messengers to the crusader camp to ask for a parley at a site up the Golden Horn. Dandolo again had himself rowed across in a galley, while a party of horsemen came round the top of the Horn for extra security. Murtzuphlus rode up to meet the doge. The crusaders now felt no hesitation in speaking plainly to one who had, according to Baldwin of Flanders, ‘shut up his lord in prison and had snatched away his throne, after having disregarded the sanctity of an oath, fealty and a covenant – matters that are firmly binding even among infidels’. Dandolo’s requests were blunt: release Alexius from prison, pay five thousand pounds of gold, swear obedience to the pope in Rome. To the new anti-western emperor these conditions were of course ‘punitive and completely unacceptable’. While they were engrossed in these negotiations, ‘putting aside all other thoughts’, the crusader cavalry suddenly bore down on the emperor from the higher ground. Giving free rein to their horses, they closed on the emperor, who wheeled his horse and scarcely managed to escape the danger, while some of his companions were captured.’ This treacherous ruse confirmed what Choniates and the Greeks already felt, that ‘their immense hatred for us and our great quarrel with them prevented there being any reasonable relations between us’.
And it was reciprocated the following day. Murtzuphlus had drawn one conclusion from the meeting with Dandolo: that as long as Alexius was still alive, he provided a cause for the troublesome intruders and a threat to himself. On 8 February, according to Choniates, he went twice to offer Alexius, chained in his dungeon, a cup of poison. It was refused. He then, according to the unreliable Baldwin, strangled him with his own hands, ‘and with unheard-of cruelty, he tore apart the sides and ribs of the dying man with an iron hook that he held in his hand’. The Latins were ever ready to add extra gore to the blood-spattered chronicles of Constantinople. Choniates delivered a measured, if theologically more hair-raising account. Murtzuphlus ‘cut the thread of his life by having him strangled, squeezing out his soul, so to speak, through the strait and narrow way, and sprang the trap leading to hell. He had reigned six months and eight days.’ Within the context of the times, it was to prove quite a long reign.
Murtzuphlus gave out that Alexius had died, and buried him with honour. The crusaders were not deceived. Messages attached to arrows were shot over the walls to their camp proclaiming Murtzuphlus a murderer. To some, his death evoked no more than a shrug of the shoulders: ‘A curse on anyone who regrets that Alexius is dead.’ They merely wanted the resources to go on their crusade. But Alexius’s death provoked a new crisis. Murtzuphlus ordered them to depart and vacate his land, or ‘he would kill them all’. Now the Venetians had no hope of recouping their maritime costs and the Holy Land was receding by the day. The whole venture had been beset by continuous crisis management; the spring of 1204 was just a further astonishing twist. Time was now pressing hard on their heels: in March, the patience of the rank and file would finally expire; they would insist on being taken to Syria. They could not go back to Italy without acquiring undying shame; they did not have resources to attack the Holy Land; food was running out; the only course was to press forward: ‘Perceiving that they were neither able to enter the sea without danger of immediate death nor delay longer on land because of their impending exhaustion of food and supplies, our men reached a decision.’ Constantinople must be stormed.
This required yet another theological U-turn: if the taking of Zara had been a sin, Constantinople was a magnification of it. None of the leaders of the venture were unaware of the pope’s final prohibition: even if the Greeks did not bow to the Catholic Church in Rome, he had placed an absolute ban on using this as justification for attacks on their fellow Christians: ‘Let no one among you rashly convince himself that he may seize or plunder the Greeks’ lands on the pretext that they show little obedience to the Apostolic See.’ They were now going to do just that.
Dandolo, the crusader barons and the bishops met in yet one more crisis session. Moral justification was required for this further perversion of the crusaders’ pledge. Murtzuphlus had given them one and the clergy dutifully endorsed it: such a murderer had no right to possess lands, and all those who had consented to the crime were complicit in it. And, above and beyond all this, the Greeks had withdrawn from obedience to Rome. ‘So this is why we tell you’, said the clergy, ‘that the war is right and just and if you have a strong determination to conquer this land and bring it into obedience to Rome, those of you who die confessed will receive the same indulgence as has been granted by the pope.’ In plain words, taking the city could be counted as fulfilling the crusaders’ vows. Constantinople, by sleight of hand, had become Jerusalem. This was, of course, a lie – but it was swallowed, because it had to be. ‘You should know’, said Villehardouin, ever keen to airbrush the facts, ‘that this was a considerable comfort both to the barons and the pilgrims.’ The crusaders once more prepared to attack the city.
‘The Works of Hell’
APRIL 1204
Both sides had learned from the attack on Constantinople ten months earlier that while the land walls were invulnerable, the sea wall along the Golden Horn was low and fragile, given the Venetians’ naval skill. The hostilities were to be a complete rerun – for the Venetians it must have seemed like running in a dream.
The two opposing armies prepared accordingly. The Venetians read
ied their ships, reconstructed their flying bridges and shipboard catapults. The Franks rolled out their own siege engines and wheeled shelters that would allow their troops to work away at the base of the wall, protected from bombardment from above. This time there were refinements. The Venetians prepared wooden frames over their ships and covered them with nets made from vines ‘so that the stone-throwing catapults could not shatter the ships into pieces or sink them’. They had hides soaked in vinegar draped over the hulls to lessen the risk from flaming arrows and firebombs, and they loaded siphons of Greek fire onto their ships.
Murtzuphlus however had also analysed the problem of the low sea wall and devised an ingenious defence. On top of the regular line of battlements and turrets the Greeks now built grotesque wooden structures of immense height – sometimes seven storeys high, with each storey hanging pendulously further out, like fantastical medieval houses crowding over a street. The overhang was critical. It meant that anyone propping a ladder against the wall from below would be confronted with an insuperable obstacle, and the task was made more daunting by trapdoors in the floors of the towers from which rocks, boiling oil and missiles could be rained down on the enemy. ‘There was never any city so well fortified,’ declared Villehardouin. The new emperor overlooked nothing. The turrets were protected with soaked hides; all the gateways were bricked up and Murtzuphlus erected his command headquarters, a vermilion tent, on a prominent hill in front of the monastery of Christ Pantepoptos – the All-seeing – which afforded him a panoramic strategic overview of the battlefield below.
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