God's War: A New History of the Crusades
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The new agreement with the western invaders hardly endeared them to the locals. Relations were further damaged when a raid by pious louts from the crusader camp at Galata on a mosque situated outside the walls on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn provoked a general affray when Greek residents came to assist their Muslim neighbours.54 To protect themselves, the westerners set fire to the mosque and surrounding properties, deliberately intending to create as much destruction as possible. With a northerly wind fanning the flames, the fire burned for three days, cutting a devastating swathe through the centre of the city from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmora, consuming 440 densely built-up and populated acres. Unsurprisingly, Constantinopolitans turned against members of the western communities living within the walls, thousands of whom fled across the Golden Horn for the protection of the crusader camp, a mixed blessing for the invaders, at once providing more manpower and skilled labour while further testing the supply of provisions.
The deteriorating relations between the westerners and the Greeks was compounded by growing disenchantment with the new regime from both sides. The Greeks complained no action had been taken to restrict the fire or assist the destitute survivors. Despite the ravaged city, the new government continued to ransack churches for bullion to pay the their western protectors. On their side, the westerners feared that they would be sold short, with Alexius and Isaac unable to honour their commitments. Tensions grew between the co-emperors as Isaac failed to conceal his resentment at the growing prominence of his son, slandering Alexius with unguarded talk of his weak character and the louche company who joined him in sessions of homoerotic sado-masochism.55 After Alexius’s return to the capital in November, the political situation deteriorated. Payments to the crusaders dried up as the Greek resentment at the co-emperors’ exactions turned to violence in a series of riots directed rather randomly at both the government and their western allies. One drunken mob destroyed Phidias’s great statue of Athena Promachos that had once stood in the open air on the Acropolis of Athens. Within the palace Isaac and Alexius drifted further apart, the father retreating into astrology, the son to drinking bouts and undignified horse-play with his western allies in their camp at Galata.56 Neither appeared much concerned to retain the public dignity demanded by Byzantine imperial protocol. Rumour and astrologically inspired scare stories heightened a sense of impending crisis. By December, the westerners’ camp increasingly resembled a beleaguered fortress in hostile territory. Their ally Alexius faced an intractable conundrum. To maintain power, he needed to retain the support of his western protectors in the short term while not alienating the Greek populace for his long-term prospects of survival. Yet to pay his western allies to keep their favour incited the hostility of the Greeks, while appeasing his subjects by ending payments risked provoking a western attack. For the westerners, now seemingly stranded at Galata, the issue increasingly became one of survival, while for the Greeks, reeling from defeat, fire and rapacious taxation, the continuation of the current regime seemed to risk further ruin and loss of political independence and integrity. Once more, the lack of money and the consequences of misplaced optimism had cornered the crusade.
Throughout December, strained, often heated diplomatic exchanges were accompanied by increasingly open violence. An anti-western faction began to challenge Alexius’s appeasement, led by Alexius III’s son-in-law Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Murzuphlus because of his large eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead. The emperors were rapidly losing contact with events. On 1 January 1204, the Venetian fleet, the crusaders’ lifeline, narrowly avoided destruction by Greek fireships. A week later, the army had to beat off a land attack led by Murzuphlus, who was increasingly conducting a belligerent policy of his own. Alexius IV quickly lost control. On 27 January, a rival emperor, Nicholas Kannovos, was set up by the Greek ecclesiastical establishment. Alexius tried to call in the crusaders to protect him by offering them access to the Blachernae Palace. This precipitated a coup led by Murzuphlus with the backing of the military, clergy and civil service. Alexius IV was arrested and imprisoned on the night of 27–8 January; Isaac was incarcerated, soon to die. A few days later, after assuming the imperial regalia himself as Alexius V, Murzuphlus removed Nicholas Kannavos, thereby in a few days efficiently disposing of all three rivals. In February, war began against the westerners. After his initial forays proved unsuccessful, Murzuphlus’s attempts to negotiate were met by the crusaders’ politically unrealistic insistence on his abiding by their agreement with his deposed predecessor Alexius IV. The final collapse of relations between the westerners and the Byzantine authorities came with the murder of Alexius IV, probably on 8 February, if western propaganda is to be believed by Murzuphlus in person.57
The removal of Alexius IV swept away the intrigues, contradictions and confusions of the previous year. Any hope that the crusaders’ treaties with Alexius would be honoured died with him. With their ships requiring overhaul and refitting, their supplies under serious threat as Murzuphlus closed the capital’s markets to them, and the anti-western militancy of the new Byzantine government, the crusaders held limited options. Murzuphlus no longer wished to bargain, beginning to reinforce the city walls and prepare for battle. Unlike Louis VII in 1147 or Frederick Barbarossa in 1189–90, the crusaders at Galata in 1204 controlled no fertile Greek provinces for easy forage. Extended raids to find provisions risked exposing the camp to Greek attack while provoking hostile intervention from Joannitza, king of Bulgaria, who saw great opportunities in the chaos at Constantinople to embellish his power. Bulgaria had only recently re-established its independence from Byzantium; it now sought any pickings from the imperial carcase. Crusader inaction would ensure famine and likely destruction. To survive, let alone have any chance of fulfilling their vows to journey to Jerusalem, the crusaders’ path led through the city. Only there lay the necessary supplies and funds. Only by defeating Murzuphlus and seizing the city could they guarantee they would get them. ‘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.’58 Step by step, the crusade had marched, stumbled and been driven to contemplate conquering Byzantium for themselves. While complicit in their own fate, neither the crusaders nor the Venetians had intended this frightening, dangerous and bloody denouement.
With conquest the only choice, Doge Dandolo, Boniface, Baldwin, Louis of Blois and Hugh of St Pol sensibly prepared for an orderly occupation of the city, government and empire. The so-called March Pact decreed that all booty – gold, silver, expensive textiles – was to be collected centrally and divided according to a formula that ensured that the Venetians would receive full and final reimbursement for the various obligations to them outstanding, to the value of 200,000 marks. Once this had been satisfied, the crusaders and the Venetians were to split the profits equally, as under the 1201 treaty. During the pillaging, women and clergy were to be respected, and rape and despoiling churches were banned, on pain of death. The future ruler of Constantinople and Byzantium was to be chosen by a committee of twelve – six crusaders, six Venetians – and was to receive a quarter of the capital as well as the two imperial palaces. He was forbidden to do business with any enemies of the Venetians, a canny if naked piece of self-interest on Dandolo’s part, yet no more blatant than the whole treaty was for all parties involved. If the lot as emperor fell on a crusader, the new Latin patriarch would be a Venetian, a secular intervention in the process of clerical election that insouciantly contradicted 150 years of fundamental papal policy. The rest of the empire would be granted out by another committee, of twelve Venetians and twelve crusaders, as fiefs to be held of the emperor. To secure the new political settlement, it was agreed that the army would stay together in Byzantium for another year, to March 1205, deferring the invasion of Eygpt for the fourth time since 1202. Anyone breaking the terms of the pact was threatened with excommunication.59
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bsp; Yet even on the brink of war, which all could see by looking across the Golden Horn at Murzuphlus’s energetic preparations had become unavoidable, doubts remained. The Fourth Crusade has been damned as unholy, a betrayal of the original inspiration of the war of the cross. Yet the constant self-appraisal within its ranks and repeated insistence by the leadership and their clerical stooges that they were engaged on a just cause belies any such verdict. The consciences of many crusaders remained as tender as the day they took the cross. According to Villehardouin, even in the desperate plight of the army in February and March, the leadership staged a public presentation of the case for war to reassure their followers of the legitimacy and justice of what they were doing. The clergy declared ‘that this war is just and lawful’ on the grounds that the Greeks were schismatics, their emperor a regicide and a usurper, crimes in which his subjects were accomplices. This inspirational invective followed the line pursued at Corfu. It acknowledged the increasing penetration of academic ideas of just war in the conceptualizing of holy war. However, faced with imminent military action, the clerics at Galata added spiritual incentives to emphasize the holiness of the cause and boost morale: ‘if you fight to conquer this land with the right intention of bringing it under the authority of Rome, all those of you who die after making confession shall benefit from the indulgence granted by the pope’. If this was the actual formula employed, it copied Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran Council in offering full remission of sins, but only to those who died fighting.60 Whether or not the army’s bishops, with the legate still cooling his heels in Acre, actually possessed the claimed delegated papal authority to make such grants, they fell short of designating Constantinople a target of the crusade. The battle would be just and earn spiritual rewards for the genuinely penitent casualties, in common with much religiously approved warfare since the ninth century, but it cannot be regarded as an extension of the crusade. That would require the attack on Byzantium to have been equated exactly with the Jerusalem war and for participation in it to fulfil the crusader’s vow. These, the bishops were apparently not offering. Villehardouin’s version may have been flavoured by special pleading and a retrospective desire to justify what happened, but Robert of Clari recorded an identical set of arguments preached to the troops on 11 April, the day before the final assault. He also remembered that on this occasion the bishops promised absolution to all, not just the fallen, because the Greeks ‘were worse than the Jews’, ‘enemies of God’.61 While these accounts were designed to present the events of April 1204 as unequivocally righteous to later audiences, they suggest that the crusaders needed convincing reassurance. It was not assumed that attacking Constantinople, while undoubtedly necessary, was self-evidently just. Faith and obedience in the middle ages were neither blind nor simple, relying on reason not credulity.
On 9 April, the crusader attacks began along the northern shore of the city between the Blachernae Palace and the monastery of Christ Evergetes. Highly sophisticated techniques of amphibious warfare were involved, with the Venetian ships acting both as troop carriers and aggressive siege engines. After the initial assault failed, fighting reached a climax on 12 April when, amid scenes of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, the walls were breached and the invaders established a secure bridgehead on a substantial front within the walls, slaughtering indiscriminately. As part of their tactics, the westerners determinedly killed and plundered their way into the city, making no distinction between soldiers and civilians. Once again, fearing counter-attack, they started a fire, which quickly spread from the north to the south of the city, consuming much of what had been left or rebuilt after the two earlier conflagrations. Even though the Varangian guard was prepared to fight on, Murzuphlus saw the game was up and fled during the night. By 13 April, the crusaders found no serious resistance was left. The city had been won, a startling tribute to the naval skill of the Venetians, the engineering ingenuity that converted their ships into fighting castles and the military training, perhaps even the military culture, of the western troops.
The sack of Constantinople proceeded in two stages.62 The first, the indiscriminate violence and pillage of the assault, was reined in the day after the crusaders’ entry. With substantial Greek forces still in the city, a descent into disorganized mayhem could have put the victory at risk. The second stage, perhaps more chilling than the first, saw the systematic plundering of the capital, the customary penalty suffered by cities taken by storm. For three days the crusader captains allowed their troops to vent their anger, relief and greed in an orgy of looting the thoroughness and lack of finesse of which appalled most of those who heard of it. The main savagery was reserved for the pursuit of treasure and property, including houses, palaces and churches, rather than people. Two of the most hysterical Greek eyewitnesses, Nicetas Choniates and Nicholas Mesarites, while lamenting in lurid terms the drunken rapine and sexual violence, both record individual instances where Greeks were treated with respect and afforded protection by the invaders. Much of the Greek shock was stimulated by the wholesale desecration of holy places, an aspect of the sack that western observers, proud of their purloined relics, rather admired. The worst excesses against citizens appeared concentrated only on the first day while the victims, according to one account, amounted to a couple of thousand, about half of one per cent of the city’s pre-1204 population.63 Sufficient control was exerted on the looters to ensure the collection of much of the looted treasure in the three churches chosen as central depositories. When the looting was called off on 15 April, the official treasury had deposits worth 300,000 marks, along with 10,000 horses. This constituted perhaps less than half the total value of the goods plundered, the rest being kept by the looters, possibly as much as 500,000 marks, enough to fund a European state for a decade. The figures also exclude the boat-loads of relics stolen by ‘holy robbers’ like Bishop Nivelo of Soissons and Abbot Martin of Pairis.64 During the sack and for the difficult days immediately afterwards, anecdotal evidence suggests a measure of discipline and order in the plundering, including some respect for the lives at least of the Greek upper classes.65 The sack of Constantinople was an atrocity, but in the terms of the day not a war crime. The fire of August 1203 may have caused as much physical damage, not to mention those of July 1203 and April 1204 or the riots of the winter of 1203–4. Alexius IV’s own rapacity in stripping churches and icons for gold and silver to pay the crusaders’ tribute exactly matched the behaviour of the western conquerors. The loss of classical and Byzantine art, architecture and libraries is incalculable, although possibly not on a par with the cultural devastation wrought by the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. The intensity of human butchery pales beside the bloodlust in Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. If the victors had proceeded to the Holy Land the following spring, the fall of Constantinople may have never acquired its reputation for unique barbarism.
ROMANIA AND BYZANTIUM
The immediate distribution of Byzantium’s spoils caused some disappointment that so much had been diverted into private streams. Among the rank and file it provoked fury as they accused the leaders themselves of being the worst hoarders, denying the ordinary crusaders (‘the commons of the host’), the poor knights and the sergeants ‘who had helped to win the treasure’ their due.66 The ratio of payment to knights, twenty marks, clerics and mounted sergeants, ten marks, and infantry, five marks concealed the injustice, as Robert of Clari saw it, of the common soldiers being fobbed off with plain silver while the choice gold, jewels and precious fabrics found their way into the coffers of the great. Some hoarders were convicted and hanged.67 Nonetheless, the sense of achievement rang through the memories of the conquerors. The greatest city in the Christian world had fallen to an army of 20,000.68 God’s will seemed clear.
It soon became less pellucid. By mid-May, Baldwin of Flanders had been elected the new Latin emperor. The Venetian Thomas Morosini became patriarch. Baldwin grandly proclaimed on his election his intention to proceed to the Holy Land once his new r
ealm, so providentially granted him by God’s manifest will, had been pacified and secured.69 Although Murzuphlus was soon apprehended and executed, pacification of the area around the capital, let alone exerting control over the rest of the empire, proved much harder. Many of the crusade leaders were eager to receive and secure new lands, notably Boniface of Montferrat, who had been given Thessalonica as consolation for not gaining the imperial diadem. Relations between Baldwin and Boniface, perhaps understandably, deteriorated to the point of outright hostility. Others struck out on their own, such as Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s nephew and namesake in the Peloponnese. From the start, the Latin emperor in Constantinople lacked adequate manpower. In the provinces, where the same was true, the new Latin lords sought accommodation with local vested interests, religious and secular, of a sort denied the Latin emperor. The pope’s initial enthusiasm for the union of the churches turned to disillusion and anger when he learnt of the carnage and destruction of the sack and the cancellation of the crusade in 1205. He was soon opening diplomatic channels to the Byzantine successor regime in Asia Minor.70 For Innocent, the Fourth Crusade had proved a disappointment and a lesson. He proved an adept pupil.