by Cyril Mango
In April 1071, four months before the Byzantine defeat at Mantzikert, Robert Guiscard completed his conquest of the Byzantine mainland by taking the city of Bari. Byzantium responded by proposing a marriage alliance, which Guiscard finally agreed to in 1074, two years later sending his daughter Olympias to Constantinople to await marriage with Constantine, son of Michael VII Doukas, when the couple came of age. It is a measure of how low the empire had sunk, and how far Guiscard had come from his beginnings as a landless warlord, that he was in a position to refuse the heir to the Byzantine throne as a prospective son-in-law. The Byzantines undoubtedly feared an invasion, but they certainly wanted Guiscard to fight the Turks for them. Here we see a basic and perhaps fatal paradox in the Byzantine relationship with the West: Byzantium insisted on employing the very elements in western society against which it was most powerless. Despite its bad experiences with Guiscard and other Normans, it continued to recruit Norman and other western knights, no doubt assuming that it could control them by its ability to pay. The sources naturally do not highlight the many who gave loyal service, but the publicity given to those who gave trouble suggests that Byzantium seriously overlooked the extent to which westerners did not want to be bought into accepting the Byzantine dream.
Facing: Manuel I Komnenos, surprisingly dark of complexion, with his second wife, Maria of Antioch, whom he married in 1161. Miniature in cod. Vaticanus gr. 1176, which contains the acts of the Council of 1166, summoned by Manuel to elucidate Christ’s saying ‘My Father is greater than I’ (John 14: 28).
Michael VII’s overthrow in 1078 provided Guiscard with a golden excuse to launch an invasion of the Balkans in support of his ally, which he did in 1081 with the blessing of Pope Gregory VII. In the four years of fighting which followed, Alexios I generally had the worst of his encounters with Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, and only the death of Guiscard in an epidemic which struck his invasion fleet relieved Byzantium of a major threat to the Balkan territories that now provided the bulk of the empire’s resources. Even so, Alexios did not hesitate to call upon the knights of western Christendom, including Bohemond and other Normans from southern Italy, to help him reconquer Asia Minor from the Turks. There is now general agreement that Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095–6 in response to an appeal for aid from the Byzantine emperor, and that if the major sources for the event do not mention the appeal, this is because both sides wanted to forget it: the Latins did not want to admit the ‘wretched emperor’ had anything but a negative part in their heroic, godly enterprise, and the Byzantines were keen to portray this enterprise as an unsolicited intrusion on imperial space and a masterpiece of imperial damage limitation. In particular, it is now becoming clear that Bohemond’s appropriation of Antioch in contravention of the oath he had taken to restore all former imperial possessions captured by the crusade, was the result of an understanding which he had had with Alexios, and which Alexios had put under intolerable strain by failing to join the crusader siege of Antioch when deserters, including one of the crusading leaders, persuaded him that the situation there was hopeless.
But whatever the intentions with which the crusade was called, it resulted for Byzantium in an eastward extension of the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the decisive deepening of the schism between the churches, as Latin bishops excluded Greek clergy from Syrian dioceses that had never come under the jurisdiction of Rome. Alexios did find other allies among the crusaders, and he had the resources to put military pressure on Bohemond, but Bohemond took care to identify his cause with that of Latin Christendom as a whole. In 1105 he returned to Europe and, with papal blessing, recruited an army with which he crossed the Adriatic in 1107, intending to subdue Byzantium on his way to Syria. Alexios, avoiding direct confrontation with the invasion force, wore it down and trapped it in the mountains of Albania. The peace agreement which he extracted from Bohemond at the Treaty of Devol (1108) would, if implemented, have restored Antioch to the empire and established the Franks as imperial vassals on the frontier with the Turks. But Bohemond did not return to Syria, and his successors refused to recognize the Treaty.
Facing: Ezekiel’s vision in the Valley of Dry Bones, full-page miniature in cod. Paris. gr. 510 containing the Homilies of St Gregory Nazianzen. With its pink and blue atmospheric background and its elaborate oval frame of cornucopias, this picture betrays a late antique model.
Alexios I presenting to the Fathers of the Church (shown on the opposite page of the manuscript) a refutation of the heresies by the contemporary theologian Euthymios Zigabenos.
Facing: King Roger II of Sicily, attired like a Byzantine emperor, being crowned by Christ. Mosaic, c.1148. Palermo, Martorana.
Alexios and his successors never really gave up on the idea that the expansionist energies of Latin Europe could be recruited to serve the empire’s interests. On the whole, however, twelfth-century imperial policy towards the Latin world was defensive, and concerned with applying the security lessons that had been learned from the trauma of the Norman invasions and the crusade. One was that the Frankish colonies in Syria and Palestine could not be dealt with in detachment from the rest of Latin Europe. Another was the need for pre-emptive diplomacy to prevent the rulers of southern Italy from interfering in Syria or launching another attack on Byzantium. To this end, Alexios I and his successors cultivated good relations with the German emperors, who had their own historic reasons for refusing to recognize the Norman occupation of southern Italy and the legitimacy of the royal title which Guiscard’s nephew, Roger II, received from the papacy in 1140. The Norman invasions also highlighted the need to counteract Norman diplomacy among the empire’s Serbian vassals and at the court of the king of Hungary: Alexios married his son John II to a Hungarian princess in 1105, and this was the beginning of intense, if often hostile, relations between the two dynasties. Finally, the encounters with the Normans and the crusade had shown that the empire could not depend on its own war fleet, and needed to be able to call upon the navy of a dependable ally. Thus, during the war with Robert Guiscard, Alexios I made a momentous treaty with Venice, granting the Venetians unprecedented privileges in return for their aid: among other things, a trading quarter in Constantinople with a section of waterfront, and exemption from payment of the 10 per cent sales tax. The republics of Venice and Amalfi, nominally subject to the empire, had maintained a trading presence in Byzantium for some two centuries. Alexios’ concessions to Venice put this presence on a new basis, which set a precedent for later, somewhat less generous concessions to Pisa and Genoa, and thus greatly increased the numbers of Italians in the empire and the amount of Byzantine trade in Italian hands.
The need for an energetic diplomatic response to the expansion of Latin Christendom was sharpened still further by the events of the Second Crusade, preached in 1145 in reaction to the first major disaster to befall the crusader states, the Muslim capture of Edessa. The crusade was led by kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, who were anything but deferential to the young Manuel I as they led their enormous armies past Constantinople. Roger II of Sicily took advantage of the crisis to seize the island of Corfu, whence his forces systematically ravaged mainland Greece. It did not help Byzantium’s reputation that the crusading armies were decimated by the Turks in Asia Minor. The lesson was that Byzantium could not afford to be isolationist, and had to prevent a general crusade from happening again. The episode also confirmed the strategic significance of Italy, especially the south, for the empire’s security in the Balkans. Manuel’s primary goal was a partition of Italy with the German empire, in which Byzantium would get the Adriatic coast. However, his unilateral pursuit of this goal not only failed after some initial success, but also antagonized the new German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, whose own plans for imperial restoration ruled out any partnership with Byzantium. Manuel was obliged to treat Frederick as his main enemy, and to form a web of relationships with other western powers, including the papacy, his old enemy the Norma
n kingdom, Hungary, several magnates and cities throughout Italy, and, above all, the crusader states, where he married two of his nieces to kings of Jerusalem and took a princess of Antioch as his second wife. His generous subsidies and ransoming of prisoners from the Muslims helped to maintain the defence of the Latin colonies at a time when they were under threat from a determined ‘counter crusade’ led by Nureddin and Saladin. The suppression of the Fatimid caliphate (1170) and the subsequent unification of Egypt with Syria under Saladin made the destruction of the kingdom of Jerusalem only a matter of time; that it did not happen sooner owed something to Manuel’s support.
The internal strength of the Komnenian dynasty, and the energetic diplomacy and campaigning of Alexios, John, and Manuel, stabilized the empire’s retracted frontier and surrounded it with a ring of more or less respectful neighbours, including, even, the sultan of Rum. Byzantium looked impressive when Manuel died in 1180, having just celebrated the betrothal of his son Alexios II to the daughter of the king of France. But the son was a minor, and his unpopular regency government was overthrown in a violent coup d’état (1182); three years later, the usurper, Andronikos I Komnenos, perished in a popular uprising, and his successor, Isaac II Angelos, survived many revolts until the conspiracy which replaced him with his brother Alexios in 1195. This troubled succession weakened the dynastic continuity and solidarity on which the strength of the Byzantine state had now come to rely. Predatory neighbours and ambitious subjects saw their chance. A Sicilian strike at the heart of the empire in 1185 was defeated and the captured cities, Dyrrachion and Thessalonica, were recovered, but at the edges Byzantium began to fall apart. The king of Hungary and the Turkish sultan seized adjoining frontier areas, the Serbian and Armenian princes threw off imperial overlordship, and the ousted imperial governor of Cilicia, Isaac Komnenos, set up as an independent ruler in Cyprus. Worst of all, the Vlachs of the Haemus mountains rose in revolt, led by the brothers Peter and Asan. With support from Cumans north of the Danube, and with the advantage of their impregnable mountain strongholds, the rebels defeated all imperial counter-attacks and extended their operations southwards into Thrace. The hinterland of Constantinople was exposed to the ravages of an enemy who consciously recreated the Bulgarian kingdom of Symeon and Samuel, but with much less concern for recognition from Constantinople. Like his Serbian counterpart Stephen, Kalojan or Johanitza of Bulgaria, brother and successor of Peter and Asan, sought and received his royal crown from Pope Innocent III.
General view of the fortifications of Trebizond, which broke away from the empire in 1204, just before the fall of Constantinople to the Crusades.
Byzantine rulers after Manuel added to their problems by reversing his alignment with the crusader states and the crusading movement. This may have seemed a natural consequence of the rise of Saladin and of the anti-Latin reaction which followed Manuel’s death, culminating in a massacre of the Latins in Constantinople when Andronikos came to power. Both Andronikos I and Isaac II seem to have expected that an alliance with a victorious Saladin would bring substantial gains not only for the Orthodox Church, but also for the empire, in Syria and Palestine. But the expectation proved illusory, and by investing in it, Byzantium gave up the opportunity to prevent, deflect, or influence the course of the Third Crusade which was the inevitable result of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Moreover, by attempting to obstruct the passage of the German crusading army under Frederick Barbarossa (1189–90), Isaac II earned a reputation as an enemy of the crusade which did Byzantium no good. It probably influenced another crusading king, Richard I of England, the Lionheart, in his decision not to return Cyprus to the empire after taking it from the rebel Isaac Komnenos. It also contributed to the antipathy with which Barbarossa’s son, Henry VI, treated Byzantium on succeeding to the western empire after his father’s accidental death on crusade. Henry, who added the kingdom of Sicily to his dominions in central Italy, was the most powerful ruler in the Mediterranean world. Even if he did not intend to carry out his threat to conquer Byzantium, he was certainly determined to make Byzantium pay for the new crusade which he mobilized in order to complete the unfinished business of the Third Crusade. This enterprise was abandoned after his sudden death in 1197, and the Fourth Crusade preached by Pope Innocent III was originally intended to sail from Venice against Egypt without involving the Byzantine empire at all. However, when the crusade got into financial difficulty, the idea that Byzantium was there to pay the bill proved irresistible when an imperial pretender, Alexios, son of the deposed Isaac II Angelos, turned up asking for help against the ruling Alexios III. The result was the diversion that ended in the sack of Constantinople and the election of a Latin emperor by the crusaders.
Land, Sea, and People
Between 780 and 1204, the map of the Byzantine empire changed dramatically. Not only did the empire go through extremes of territorial expansion and contraction, but its territorial centre of gravity shifted decisively from Asia Minor to the Balkans. At the same time, certain basic features did not change. The landscape remained typical of the northern Mediterranean zone, supporting an agricultural economy centred on the production of wheat, wine, and olive oil, but supplemented by extensive pastoralism and the uncultivated riches of forests and wetlands. Byzantium was self-sufficient in everything it needed apart from the spices of the Far East and the furs that came from Russia. Its economy supported a population which may have doubled in the course of the period, but followed a constant settlement pattern, and consisted of the same ethnic mix of Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Jews, Slavs, Arabs, and Turks. Above all, the fluctuation of the empire’s continental frontiers was balanced by the remarkable stability of its coastline, its capital, and the management of its territorial resources in the interests of the state.
Although stretches of coastline came and went with territorial gains and losses, the empire from 780 to 1180 dominated the shores of the northeastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Its coastline was not significantly shorter than those of the Abbasid and Carolingian empires at the height of their power, and relative to its land mass was proportionally much greater than that of any other medieval state. All the most fertile agricultural regions of the empire, and most of its urban centres, lay close to the sea, and its coastal lands corresponded almost exactly to the areas of Greek settlement and colonization in the seventh and sixth centuries BC: shipping was the most efficient and least expensive means of transport and communication. From these facts, it is clear that the sea was of fundamental importance for the wealth, the existence, and the very identity of Byzantium. Perhaps surprisingly, therefore, shipping and maritime communications do not seem to have rated very highly in Byzantine politics, society, and culture. The navy was far from being the ‘senior service’ in the armed forces, only one of the many military leaders who attempted to seize power was the commander of the fleet, and maritime commerce was never obviously an important means to, or source of, great wealth and social status—in marked contrast to the Italian city republics of Venice, Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa, which duly filled the gap in the empire’s naval capability. This apparent disparity between the empire’s dependence on the sea and the low value which was attached to maritime activity was partly a legacy of the ancient world, in particular of imperial Rome, with its large land armies and its landowning senatorial aristocracy. The primacy of the land was also decisively reinforced by the central role that the land army and the interior of Asia Minor had played in the struggle for survival against the Arabs. This is where the theme armies had been stationed; here the great noble families of medieval Byzantium had their estates, their followings, their opportunities for the spoils of war, and their heroic past. It is difficult to generalize about the economy of such a vast area as the Anatolian plateau, parts of which undoubtedly had a high agricultural yield. Yet much of it was best suited for ranching and stock-rearing, especially in the troubled conditions of the Arab invasions, and whatever it produced, the only products which could profitably be
marketed at any distance were those which could move themselves, namely animals. Any other surplus had to be used for supplying the troops which were stationed there or which passed through on their way to the eastern front. Thus Byzantium in the eighth to eleventh centuries may be said to have had two economies, one of inner Asia Minor, the other of the coastal regions. The former, landlocked and geared to eastern defence and the eastern frontier, was completely lost to the empire with the Turkish occupation of the Anatolian plateau. It was not replaced in the West by the imperial recovery of the Balkan interior, where the empire was never again at home in the way it had been in Late Antiquity. Yet the priority which Anatolia had enjoyed for so long hindered the empire’s total identification with, and investment in, the economy of the Aegean and Black Sea hinterland—the economy which financed the empire’s expensive diplomacy and hiring of mercenary troops, paid for the conspicuous consumption of the imperial and ecclesiastical elite, and fed the growing population of Constantinople.
With a population that was probably close to 70,000 in 780 and may have risen to more than 300,000 by 1204, Constantinople was the main consumer of the foodstuffs produced in the Aegean and Black Sea rim, just as the imperial palace, which was effectively a small city within the city, took most of the silk produced in mainland Greece, the main centre of the industry in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe. Commonly referred to as the ‘reigning city’ and the ‘megalopolis’, Constantinople did not merely house the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities and their extensive bureaucracies; it constituted the essential identity of Byzantium. It literally existed at the expense of all other towns on imperial territory. An Arab traveller of the tenth century was struck by the contrast between the rural, thinly inhabited appearance of Byzantine Asia Minor and the greater urban density of all parts of the Islamic world. Twelfth-century writers were more favourably impressed by what they and their informants saw, especially on the European side. However, with the possible exception of Thessalonica, the only provincial city which ever constituted an alternative centre to Constantinople was Antioch, during its reversion to imperial rule between 969 and 1085. And before the twelfth century, when towns in mainland Greece expanded in association with the growth of Italian commercial enterprise, the most prosperous urban centres were to be found in the frontier zone: in Italy (Amalfi, Venice, Bari), along the lower Danube and in the southern Crimea, in Armenia, and at Attaleia and Trebizond in Asia Minor, which were the main entrepôts for trade with the eastern Islamic world.