God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The fissiparous nature of Byzantium did not suddenly end. While the Latins achieved some success in policing mainland Greece, Alexius III’s son-in-law, Theodore Lascaris, established a self-proclaimed legitimist Greek empire in Asia Minor around Smyrna and Nicaea, its ecclesiastical capital. Epirus in western Greece and Trebizond on the distant southeastern shore of the Black Sea emerged as other centres of Greek resistance and particularism. More immediate danger was presented by Joannitza of Bulgaria, whose overtures to the crusaders in 1203–4 for an alliance against the Greeks had been rebuffed.71 It was not in his interests to have any powerful ruler on the Bosporus, Latin or Greek.

  Emperor Baldwin inherited the weaknesses as well as the palaces of his predecessors. Tentative moves to embrace the Greek tradition achieved little, wrecked by the issue of church union and the bitter memory of 1204. Continuity was limited. At Acre, on the news of Baldwin’s election, Bohemund IV of Antioch hurried to do homage to the new empress, Countess Maria of Flanders, who had arrived there expecting to meet her husband.72 She died before embarking for Greece. The new regime lacked money, as its tax revenues remained proportionate to its limited territorial grip. Much of Constantinople remained in ruins, its public buildings dilapidated. The Venetians, especially after Dandolo’s death in Constantinople in 1205, concentrated on securing their hold on their portion of the empire, the strategic islands of Euboea, Crete and the Aegean and trading posts such as Methone and Coron. They were, in any case, of limited use in helping Baldwin defend and extend his holdings on land.

  More worrying for the future of the new Latin realm, the fall of Constantinople created no great rush of excitement and enthusiasm, still less colonization to compare with the impact of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. As the Fourth Crusade showed, the pull of the Holy Land cast other destinations into the shade even if, as in the case of those thousands who reached Palestine in 1202–4, little could be achieved there. Except for Venice, a few French families, especially from Champagne, the papacy and later the Angevin rulers of Sicily, no consistent help or material commitment came from the west. Indifference or a sense of a burden characterized reactions. Successive popes pleaded for aid for ‘Romania’, as the western conquests were known, and began proclaiming crusades for its aid, but, by the 1230s, the response of western knights was to swear oaths to prevent their crusade vows being deflected to Greece. No significant expedition, crusade or garrison ever came to aid or maintain Romania.

  The Latin empire was a failure, politically, financially, culturally and dynastically. Exactly a year after the triumph of Constantinople, on 14 April 1205 Emperor Baldwin was captured and Louis of Blois killed in battle at Adrianople, where a Greek rebellion had been joined by Joannitza of Bulgaria. It was in the precarious aftermath of this defeat that Peter Capuano ended any fanciful lingering hopes for a campaign to the Holy Land by absolving from their Jerusalem vows those fighting for the Latins in Greece. The succession of disasters after 1205, including the death in battle of Boniface of Montferrat in 1207, severely limited the extent of Latin rule. Boniface’s so-called kingdom of Thessalonica was annexed by the Greeks of Epirus in 1224. The apparent unravelling of the achievement of 1204 provided a context and possibly a spur to the works of veterans such as Villehardouin (writing before 1212/13) and Robert of Clari (c.1216) in praise of deeds of the Fourth Crusade. While western rule in Athens, the southern Peloponnese and the Venetian maritime colonies persisted, and in places flourished, into the fourteenth century and beyond – Crete only fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1669–the imperial centre soon degenerated into a bankrupt husk, having to pawn relics such as the Crown of Thorns (in 1237) and, from the 1220s, sell the lead from the roofs of churches and palaces to survive.73 Emperor Baldwin II cut a pathetic, forlorn figure when he toured the west in the 1240s trying to drum up support for his failing cause. The succession of regents, minors and guardians who held the imperial title (Henry of Flanders; Peter of Courtenay; Robert of Courtenay; Baldwin II; John of Brienne), after surviving the crisis of 1205–6, when the existence of the empire seemed in doubt, played an increasingly minor local role in the politics of the region, increasingly insignificant in comparison with the Greeks of Nicaea and, briefly, Epirus, and the Bulgarian empire. In 1261, Constantinople was recaptured almost without a murmur by a Nicaean reconnaissance force taking advantage of the absence of the Latin garrison on a raid up the Bosporus. The suddenness of its fall even caught the new emperor Michael VIII Palealogus of Nicaea totally by surprise. Yet the end could not have long been delayed. In contrast to parts of the Peleponnese, the Latin emperors’ attempts to reach accommodation with the Greeks failed. No attempts were seriously pursued to create a new imperial cultural identity. Latin Constantinople appeared a shabby outpost, increasingly irrelevant as well as impotent, neglected by the nobility and people of the west, to whom its original conquest had been represented as being such a vindicating triumph.

  The prime export of the Latin empire, from the night of 12–13 April 1204 onwards, lay in relics. Such was the flood of them on to the western market that Innocent III issued instructions on how rationally to authenticate them. In Constantinople, tourists and sacred bargain hunters sought certificates guaranteeing that the piece of bone, wood, cloth or stone was genuine. Gunther of Pairis’s account of Abbot Martin’s grand larceny amid the fires and chaos of Constantinople sought to validate the great haul that constituted the most tangible profit of the enterprise for his abbey. Martin and his chaplain had stuffed their folded habits with over fifty treasures from the monastery of Christ Pantocrator, ranging from relics of the True Cross and Holy Blood, to stone chips from the main Holy Sites to miscellaneous physical detritus and body parts of saints, including ‘a not inconsiderable piece of St John’.74 Similar motives of validation lay behind the descriptions of the deeds of the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt, both of which listed the sacred booty acquired by their episcopal heroes, in Conrad of Halberstadt’s case including distinctly secular trophies: jewels, silks and tapestries. Bishop Nivelo of Soissons stayed at Constantinople in 1204–5, sending home a number of choice high-prestige objects associated with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist and, when he returned, bringing with him pieces of the True Cross. Even Robert of Clari’s memoirs may be seen as adding lustre to his gifts of relics of the Passion at the monastery of St Pierre, Corbie.75 These relics provided the Fourth Crusade’s most positive and lasting legacy in western Europe. The recipients of the holy treasure across northern France hoped to benefit through increased visitors to their new shrines. In places, entrepreneurial clerics transformed the fortunes of previously impoverished and obscure religious houses and churches. The struggling Cluniac house at Bromholm in Norfolk made its fortune after acquiring a piece of the True Cross purloined from the imperial chapel by an English priest in 1205.76 The key to success lay in miracles. Across western Christendom, this new influx of divine favour manifested in these fresh agents of the miraculous provided its own justification for the enormities of 1204. More tangibly, miracles attracted pilgrims. Church income rose. The new buildings erected to house the relics and cater for the tourists employed local labour and skilled craftsmen. The increase in church profits generated higher incomes, which were used to improve estates, roads and bridges.

  Whatever transcendent gains accrued, the relics of Byzantium contributed to patches of economic prosperity across Europe. Some relics could even play a political role. The Crown of Thorns pawned to the Venetians in 1237 and later sold to Louis IX of France prompted the construction of the luminous Sainte Chapelle in Paris and played a significant part in the manufacture of a Capetian religion of monarchy. The acquisition by wealthy nations of the cultural icons of conquered or exploited weaker lands is a staple of world history, as shown by glancing at Ancient Rome, nineteenth-century England or the United States of America in the past century. Byzantium was another prime example, a storehouse of classical and Christian artefacts, many of which had been translated, stolen or othe
rwise removed from provinces of the empire. After 1204, this process took another step, if in an unrefined, vicious and unwelcome manner. The transfer of treasure and relics stood as symbol of defeat, the four horses from the Hippodrome erected in front of St Mark’s in Venice, although only placed there after 1260, a careful, considered celebration of victory and a new imperialism.

  The consequences of the Fourth Crusade were not measured in spiritual or material profit and loss alone. In his history of the Crusades, Runciman’s pro-Hellenist complaint has two barbs; the duplicitous destruction of a civilization and the gratuitous weakening of a bastion of Christendom against invasion from the east. The Byzantine empire never recovered from the events of 1203–4. Much of the damage was self-inflicted by the political chaos and myopic self-interest so vividly displayed in the tawdry or desperate parade of emperors. Much of the physical destruction in Constantinople came from the secondary effects of the conquest, the fires of 1203–4 and Alexius IV’s frenzied scrabbling for bullion. There is no convincing evidence that the crusaders plotted the violent overthrow of the Byzantine system until they were presented with no viable alternative in 1204. That is not to say that Greeks were not demonized, their religious observances despised and feared by western elites as much as the rest. Doctrinal differences and the traditional Greek lukewarm response to the call of the cross could be and were exploited. Baldwin declared in his coronation circular that Constantinople had been stormed ‘for the honour of the Holy Roman Church and for the relief of the Holy Land’, a not completely mendacious justification.77

  However destructive the sack of 1204, ultimately more damaging to the cohesion of Byzantium was the effect on church union and the inability of the Latins to re-establish a thriving capital. The failure of Latin – Greek accommodation and the inability of the Latins to suppress opposition changed the nature of the Greek polity as much as it failed to create a new Latin one. After 1204, independent, autonomous Greek statelets emerged, as at Nicaea/Smyrna, Epirus and Trebizond, with no constitutional relations with each other and owing no allegiance to a central Greek political authority. By 1261, this separatist tradition, unknown before 1204, had become enshrined as a feature of Byzantium, which persisted until the Ottoman conquests. Before 1204, Greek regional opposition had been reflected in central, imperial politics. Now the regions appeared entire to themselves. The Fourth Crusade had unstringed the lyre of universal order and degree. Between 1204 and 1261 Constantinople was no longer a centre of bureaucracy or consumption, had ceased to be a functioning capital except in name only. The restoration of 1261 could not recover its imperial dominance. The absence of metropolitan authority that had underpinned Byzantine power and unity before 1204 allowed the Orthodox church to fill the void. The role of emperor after 1261 was permanently weakened as the Christian religion rather than the Christian state acted as the chief source of cultural cohesion and political identity. This shift in authority was emphasized when successive Byzantine emperors over the next two centuries sought church union with Rome as the price for western military help. Thus the Fourth Crusade destroyed but redefined Byzantium, enshrining a political fragmentation that included the remaining western enclaves and was to be so brilliantly exploited by the Ottomans from the mid-fourteenth century.

  This does not necessarily establish the Fourth Crusade’s blame for the later woes of eastern Europe, the second of Runciman’s complaints. He saw Byzantium so undermined by 1204 that it could ‘no longer guard Christendom against the Turk’. This ultimately handed ‘the innocent Christians of the Balkans’ to ‘persecution and slavery’.78 This is a view clouded by a crude religious and cultural analysis. Many Christians in the Balkans, innocent or not, had fought for generations against the Greeks – Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians – just as they later fought against the Turks. Byzantium had hardly been universally beneficent in its rule. Equally, the failure of Byzantium to retain its own territorial integrity from 1180 or defend itself in 1203–4 did not suggest it could necessarily have presented much of a bastion against later Turkish attack. However unpleasant, the Fourth Crusade did not precipitate the triumph of the Turk. The occupation of parts of the Greek empire by Latins and Venetians at least ensured some continuing western investment in resistance to the Ottomans that outlasted the Byzantine empire itself. More widely, the assumption that Ottoman rule was per se bad, ‘worse’ than Greek imperial rule or that of fractious and often vicious Christian groups in the Balkans, depends upon racial and religious stereotypes and prejudices. Not all fourteenth-century Greeks preferred Byzantium to Latin or Turkish rule. The translation of later historical, religious or cultural prejudices to explain past phenomena is here unprofitable. However, it reflects the most enduring legacy of the Fourth Crusade, one that as recently as 2001 elicited an apology from Pope John Paul II. The Fourth Crusade, the subsequent failure of the victorious Latins to build firm bridges between the Latin and Greek communities and the exploitation of the catastrophe by the Orthodox church to buttress its sense of unique righteousness confirmed and deepened the still unresolved and perhaps irrevocable estrangement of Greek and Roman Christendom. At least Innocent III was right about that.

  The Expansion of Crusading

  18

  The Albigensian Crusades 1209–29

  On 24 June 1213, in a field outside the walls of Castelnaudary, between Toulouse and Carcassonne, Amaury of Montfort was knighted by Bishop Manasses of Orléans. Amaury’s father, Simon of Montfort, commanded the forces summoned by the pope in 1208–9 to extirpate heresy in Languedoc and dispossess its adherents, promoters and protectors. He now insisted the reluctant bishop ‘appoint his son a knight of Christ and personally hand him the belt of knighthood’. In a very public show, Amaury was presented by both his parents:

  they approached the altar and offered him to the Lord, requesting the Bishop to appoint him a knight in the service of Christ. The bishops of Orléans and Auxerre, bowing before the altar, put the belt of knighthood round the youth and with great devotion led the Veni Creator Spiritus.

  ‘A novel and unprecedented form of induction into knighthood’, some said.1

  The Castelnaudary ceremony distilled many of the elements that distinguished the twenty years’ war sponsored by the church and fought between the Dordogne, Mediterranean and Pyrenees. It represented, in a ceremony previously uncommon so far south in France, the rededication of the Montfort clan to Pope Innocent III’s vision of holy violence by creating almost a fresh category of knight, dedicated to Christ’s war yet without the religious vows of the military orders. It signalled an alien cultural imposition, witnessed by two northern French bishops and an army almost exclusively containing warriors, like the Montforts themselves, from north of the Midi, conquerors who brought their own churchmen, laws, hierarchy and military self-sufficiency. Simon claimed, by right of conquest and ecclesiastical sanction, to be ruler of large swathes of Languedoc. At Castelnaudary, Simon demonstrated that his dynasty had come to stay, a message underpinned by memories of the startling military victory Simon had won on those same fields two years earlier against the forces of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, whose lands and titles Simon was seeking to appropriate. The knighting emphasized the sanction of orthodox religion in the exercise of political authority, a crude identification of church and secular power that disconcerted the bishop of Orlé ans. Castelnaudary showed how Simon specifically identified his and his family’s mission as holy. The primacy of the anti-heretical message that had inspired Innocent III to call for a crusade in 1208–9 was increasingly drowned out by the secular implications of Simon’s conquests: the political reorganization of Languedoc. The Castelnaudary rite consecrated a new religious cause, that of Montfort authority.

  18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade

  The knighting of Amaury formed part of the campaign of conquest and destruction that had begun as a crusade to crush the Cathars and their protectors in 1209.2 The fighting lasted until the Treaty of Paris in 1229 confirmed the a
nnexation of Languedoc by the French crown. With Simon of Montfort’s holy war ending in violent death outside the walls of Toulouse in 1218 and Amaury’s subsequent failure to make good his father’s claims, the Montfort rights and ambitions were adopted by their overlord, the king of France, in 1224, on political as much as religious grounds, heresy surviving better than did the counts of Toulouse or the viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne. The sweeping away of the ancien régime in south-west France stirred anger and nostalgia at the time but much more since. The crusades that assisted the process attracted condemnation as cynical frauds, a hostile English monk pointedly calling the invasion of the south by Louis VIII of France in 1226 a ‘bellum injuste’.3 The theme has echoed down the centuries. Later criticism of the Albigensian wars has tended to the sentimental and unhistorical, as have assessments of the virtues and open-mindedness of the heretics. Faith, bigotry and atrocities were the prerogatives of all sides. Heresy was not a yardstick of southern liberality and sophistication, even if certain aspects of heretics’ behaviour appeal to modern audiences, such as their acceptance of women in roles of authority or their vegetarianism. Languedoc social structures and culture did not depend upon heresy nor were they defined by it, even where they sustained it. The Albigensian crusades failed in their objective of eradicating heresy while succeeding in reordering political society and the local Catholic church. This failure paved the way for the introduction of the Inquisition, which, through reason and judicial process not the arbitrariness of the sword, achieved what eluded the crusaders, the destruction of heresy.