The four assassins were never punished, even though their crime was clearly condemned by Henry’s own Assize of Clarendon; and there seems to be little doubt that Henry knew of the plan and gave it his tacit approval.
Yet his involvement does not mean that his grief was false.
In the struggle between divine authority and secular power, it was not yet clear which would prove the stronger. But it was no longer possible for both to rule, side by side. The murder of Henry’s old friend was the inevitable result of the course he himself had set. Necessary though it might have been, he could grieve over the forces that made it inevitable—and over the end of a world where God and the king could coexist in peace.
* * *
*Henry II had already given the Archbishop of York permission to coronate young Henry, and the ceremony had taken place in June; Becket was offered the chance to take part in a second coronation that would supersede the first (and make very clear that Becket was still the senior churchman in the land).
Chapter Nineteen
Foreign Relations
Between 1157 and 1168,
the emperor of Byzantium expands his borders
and inadvertently sets Serbia free
IN 1157, the Great Seljuk of the Turks died, broken.
Ahmed Sanjar had begun his reign as supreme Turkish sultan with a huge realm under his hands, the largest a Muslim ruler had held since the days of the old Abbasid caliphate.* By the end of his life, he had lost the Ghurids, who were busy plundering the eastern reaches of the lands he had once ruled; he had been driven out of his lands Transoxania (east of the Oxus river) by nomadic Chinese tribes called the Western Liao; Nur ad-Din, theoretically owing him allegiance, was doing as he pleased in the Mediterranean lands. At the very end of his life, Sanjar had tried to put down a native revolt in Khorasan itself and had failed so badly that the rebels had actually taken him captive and pillaged his capital city of Merv. His greatest achievement had been to build himself a gorgeous mausoleum in the city of Merv, where he was now laid to rest.1
He was the last Great Seljuk. No one else even tried to claim that the Turkish lands were a unity. Khorasan became a no-man’s-land, and from the Oxus to the Mediterranean shore, each Turkish sultan looked out for his own interests.2
This changed the landscape for the Byzantine emperor. The First Crusade had been sparked by Constantinople’s fear of a united Turkish front. Now Manuel I was looking at a fractured landscape filled with separate powers.
Almost all of them were threats; and the most dangerous enemies were no longer Turkish.
At its height under the emperor Justinian, six hundred years earlier, Byzantium had stretched from the tip of the Spanish peninsula, across North Africa and Egypt, up the Mediterranean coast, across Asia Minor, Greece, and all of Italy. Since Justinian, it had been shrinking. At his coronation in 1143, Manuel had been crowned emperor over Greece, half of Asia Minor, and the western and southern coasts of the Black Sea. And this was an improvement; his grandfather Alexius had inherited an empire that included little more than Greece, and only ceaseless campaigning by Alexius and his son John had recovered the lands that Manuel now ruled.
In the first decade and a half of his reign, Manuel had not managed to improve his position much. He had attacked the Sultan of Rum, who lay just east of his Asia Minor lands, but had taken no land away; he had forced the princes of Antioch and Jerusalem to swear allegiance to him, but he did not control their kingdoms. And in 1156, his yearlong campaign to take southern Italy (the “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”) away from the Normans had ended in complete embarrassment. His general John Ducas, attempting to force the surrender of the coastal city of Brindisi, had been trapped by the Norman navy and captured, along with what remained of the Byzantine fleet.
Encouraged by the Byzantine defeat in Italy, the Prince of Antioch decided to try his own fortunes against the bruised Byzantine troops. After the troublesome Raymond of Antioch had been decapitated by Nur ad-Din, the rule of Antioch had passed to his young wife, Constance, granddaughter of the original Prince of Antioch, Bohemund the rogue. Now the mother of four, Constance was still only twenty-one years old. She held the rule of Antioch by blood right, but her cousin the king of Jerusalem, the Patriarch of Antioch (the senior clergyman in the city), and her overlord Manuel himself all insisted that she marry and proposed useful (and pliable) prospects.
Constance rejected them all and instead married the French crusader Raynald of Chatillon, a young opportunist only two years her senior who had lingered in the east after the disastrous end of the Second Crusade. It was probably the first adult choice she’d ever had the opportunity of making, and it turned out to be a poor one. Raynald, handsome and dashing, was also reckless, spoiled, and a very bad judge of a fight. He decided to free Antioch from Manuel’s control, and proposed to start by attacking the island of Cyprus, a peaceful and well-to-do Byzantine possession.3
To prepare for the fight, he first ordered the Patriarch of Antioch, a wealthy and worldly Frankish nobleman named Aimery of Limoges, to lend him the necessary funds. Aimery, who hadn’t approved of the marriage in the first place, refused; so Raynald had his henchmen waylay the patriarch and beat him up. Then, says William of Tyre, Raynald “forced the aged priest . . . although an almost helpless invalid, to sit in the blazing sun throughout a summer’s day, his bare head smeared with honey.” After a few hours on top of the Antioch citadel, battling the insects, the patriarch handed over the funds.4
This childish exercise in power was followed by a much more serious action: Reynald approached one of Manuel’s bitterest enemies and proposed an alliance.
This was Thoros II, the exiled prince of Cilician Armenia. His kingdom had been overrun by Manuel’s father twenty years earlier, and Thoros II, probably still in his teens, had been taken to Constantinople in chains along with his father the king and his older brother. Both had died in captivity; only Thoros had survived, escaping from his prison in 1142 by some unknown means and returning to his occupied country. He had been fighting a desperate guerrilla war ever since, with its high point in 1152 when he managed to kill the local Byzantine governor.
At Raynald’s suggestion, the two men joined together into an anti-Byzantine assault force; with the patriarch’s money, they sacked a few outposts and then headed for the island of Cyprus. Cyprus, unaccustomed to war, had only a small garrison, headed up by the Emperor Manuel’s own nephew. The combined Antiochene-Armenian troops overwhelmed the garrison and, given free reign by their commanders, proceeded to murder and sack their way through the island. Crops burned, herds were stolen; the old and young who fell in their way were viciously slaughtered, the women raped. Gregory the Priest writes that Raynald, in a gesture of mockery, had the noses of the priests cut off, and sent them back to Constantinople to present themselves to the emperor.5
Manuel was furious. The Normans had been a strong foe; Raynald was merely an annoyance to be swatted. In person, Manuel led a massive Byzantine army across into Cilicia and rapidly retook the land Thoros had claimed; Thoros escaped to a ruined castle deep in the mountains just in time.
Raynald was not so lucky. When he got news of the size of the approaching army, he realized that he would never be able to fight it off; his only hope lay in humility. He put on sackcloth and went to Manuel’s camp barefoot. There he threw himself in the dust in front of the emperor and begged for pardon. “He cried for mercy,” notes William of Tyre, with distaste, “and he cried so long that everyone had nausea of it.” Manuel let him weep for some time before deigning to notice that he was even present. Finally, he agreed to forgive Raynald, on condition that the Prince of Antioch surrender the citadel of Antioch to imperial control and house a detachment of the Byzantine army in his city indefinitely.6
Raynald had no choice but to agree. In 1159, Manuel entered Antioch as a conqueror, wearing the imperial diadem and his purple robe (with mail beneath it), surrounded by courtiers, guards, and attendants. The emperor’s fl
ags were flown from Antioch’s walls, and Raynald himself was forced to walk on foot, bareheaded, beside the emperor’s stirrup. After sixty years of hostility, Antioch was finally in imperial hands.7
Raynald himself did not trouble Manuel again. A year later, he took a band of his men on a livestock-stealing foray across the countryside. Near Edessa, as they were driving a slow and unwieldy herd of stolen horses, cattle, and camels, he was caught and imprisoned by the governor of Aleppo, Nur ad-Din’s younger brother. No one offered to pay a ransom for Raynald, and he spent the next sixteen years in an Aleppo prison.
His wife Constance took up the rule of Antioch, and the year after Raynald’s capture she achieved the greatest advance in Antiochene politics yet; she made a match between her daughter Mary, child of her dead husband, Raymond, and the widowed emperor himself. The forty-three-year-old Manuel and the sixteen-year-old Mary (“fair in face,” says the historian Nicetas Choniates, “and of incomparable beauty”) were married on Christmas Eve, 1161.8
IN THE REMAINING YEARS of his reign, Manuel struggled more with the west than with the east, more with his Christian neighbors than with the Turks. To his north lay the kingdom of Hungary, and to his west the territories of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, all of them contested lands, all of them teetering uneasily between alliance and hostility.
Hungary, settled by an alliance of Magyar tribes at the end of the ninth century, had by the end of the tenth reached a stable and Christianized existence under a Church-recognized king; Croatia, part of the old Roman province of Illyricum, had been claimed as an independent realm by a younger branch of the royal Hungarian family. In 1102, King Colomon of Hungary had drawn it under his authority by crowning himself both king of Hungary and rex Croatiae. This “personal union” didn’t merge the two countries into one. Instead, the Croatians continued to live by their own laws, speak their own language, and serve in their own army, with loyalty to the same sovereign serving as the sole point of unity between themselves and the Hungarians.9
The rest of old Illyricum was divided into Dalmatia, an ancient coastal region that had once spoken its own language and by now had been folded into Croatia, with the king of Croatia as its protector and ruler; Bosnia, settled by another wave of Slavic tribes, but under Hungarian control since 1137; and Serbia. The Serbs, sharing a language and an old tribal identity, were divided into two territories under two families of princes who sometimes cooperated with each other, but were more often at odds. The Prince of Duklja, the coastal land, was a Byzantine vassal; Raska, the inland territory, was also more or less under Byzantine control, since Manuel had sent soldiers to help a younger brother push an elder off the throne.
19.1 The World of Manuel I
In 1161, the powerful and elderly Hungarian king Géza II died. His young and inexperienced heir was Stephen III, only fifteen when he inherited his father’s crown. Manuel I, who had long hoped for a chance to reduce Hungarian power, chose to weaken his northern neighbor by meddling in the succession. He sent weapons and money to Stephen’s two uncles, both of whom mounted challenges for the throne; and in 1164 a Byzantine army crossed the Danube in support of Stephen’s younger brother Béla.
Stephen fought back. The Byzantine-inspired civil strife dragged on until 1167, when a Byzantine army—reinforced by Turkish mercenaries and strengthened by the emperor’s personal soldiers, the Varangian Guard—met a massed Hungarian force at Semlin. Despite a letter from the emperor ordering him to delay because the astrological signs were unfavorable, the Byzantine general Andronicus led the attack and won a staggering victory. Stephen III kept his throne but was forced to accept a peace that handed over control of Croatia, Dalmatia, and eventually Bosnia to Byzantium, which was exactly what Manuel had intended.10
But Manuel’s triumph had a sting in the tail. The resentful Hungarians sent troops into Serbia to help out a budding independence movement there; it was led by the Raskan prince Stefan Nemanja, the brother of the Byzantine-supported ruler of Raska. With Hungarian help, Stefan Nemanja deposed his brother and declared himself Grand Prince of all Serbia.
Sometime late in 1168, Manuel sent an army to drive the upstart out, but Nemanja’s army met the Byzantine troops in the north of Serbia, near the Sitnica river. In the fighting that followed, Nemanja’s brother drowned in the Sitnica. But the Serbs managed to drive the Byzantines back; the Byzantine army retreated without victory, forced to give up control of the Serbian lands.
Stefan Nemanja now ruled a newly independent Serbia. His dynasty, the Nemanjić, would remain on the Serbian throne for two centuries. Manuel’s landgrab had extended the Byzantine borders; but it had also, unintentionally, set Serbia free.11
* * *
*The “Abbasid caliphate” was established in AD 750 by Abu al-Abbas, a caliph from the clan of the Prophet himself who was elected in opposition to the reigning caliph, Marwan II. Marwan II belonged to the Arab clan of the Banu Umayya, the clan of Muhammad’s companion Uthman. After his election, Abu al-Abbas had managed to wipe out most of the surviving Umayyad clan members, bringing an end to the era of the “Umayyad caliphates” which had ruled since the Prophet’s death, and introducing the Abbasid caliphate in its place. (See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 363–370.) The Fatimid caliph who controlled Egypt and Jerusalem and the Abbasid caliph who still ruled in Baghdad were enemies of each other (as well as enemies of Byzantium and the Crusader kingdoms).
Chapter Twenty
The Venetian Problem
Between 1171 and 1185,
Manuel I falls out with Venice
and lights a fuse in Constantinople
NOW THAT HE CONTROLLED Croatia and Bosnia, Manuel had become a neighbor to the maritime republic of Venice.
Venice: the wealthiest of the Italian sea-trading cities, queen of the trade routes, and wary of any threat to her dominance. Until this point, Manuel and the Venetians had been on friendly but fragile terms. The Venetians traded tax-free in some parts of the empire and had their own quarter in Constantinople, and in exchange had sent ships to help out with Manuel’s doomed invasion of southern Italy.
Venice’s goal wasn’t friendship with Byzantium. Instead, the Venetians wanted to keep the competing rulers in Italy in balance, so that no one would gain enough strength to dominate Venice. The Norman kingdom of southern Italy (the “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”) had been joined to the Norman kingdom of Sicily around 1130, when a single Norman count had inherited both titles, and the entire realm was now ruled by the young Norman nobleman William the Good. As long as Frederick Barbarossa and William the Good were both struggling for control in Italy, Manuel’s presence would help prevent either from taking over.
But as Manuel approached along the coast, the balance of power seemed to be tilting his way. To restore the useful tension that kept them independent, the Venetians now offered to make a treaty with Hungary, and the Doge of Venice—the chief magistrate and prince of the city—offered to ratify it by marrying both of his sons to Hungarian princesses. When Hungary had controlled the land next door, the Hungarian king had been their enemy; now he was a useful counterweight.1
Manuel, stung, retaliated by doing a balancing act of his own. He granted both the Pisans and the Genoans, Venice’s rivals, more trading privileges and enlarged quarters within Constantinople itself.
20.1 Byzantium and Venice
At this, the whole scale fell over. An enraged mob of Venetian expats attacked and sacked the new Genoese quarter, tearing off roofs, knocking over walls, and leaving it uninhabitable. Manuel sent a sharp message to the Doge, Vitale Michiel, demanding that Venice both rebuild the quarter and pay damages to Genoa. The Doge refused, blaming the destruction on the citizens of Constantinople. Manuel had anticipated the refusal; he had already sent secret messages all across Byzantium, ordering his officials to arrest every Venetian citizen on Byzantine soil at one time. The date set was March 12, 1171.
On that morning, the emperor’s decree was carried out. Men, wome
n, and children were taken into custody and imprisoned; all of their property—houses, shops, ships, land—was confiscated. In Constantinople, the Venetian captives very soon filled up the prisons, and monasteries were pressed into service.2
This gave Manuel over ten thousand hostages to hold against future Venetian aggression. But Doge Vitale Michiel, apoplectic with fury, declared war anyway. The Venetians spent four months building a special war fleet to retaliate, and then set sail for Byzantine territory. The first city they came to was Chalcis, the largest city on the Greek island of Euboea. They laid siege to the city; the Byzantine governor there, alarmed by the size of the fleet and unwilling to act as a sacrifice to the quarrel, offered to play mediator with Manuel if the Venetians would lift the siege.3
Mindful of all those hostages, the Doge—who was leading the fleet in person—agreed. He chose two of his men to accompany the Byzantine officials to Manuel’s court, and the Venetians removed themselves to the island of Chios, where they settled in and waited for the negotiations to proceed.
Even though he was feeding all of his Venetian prisoners at his own expense, Manuel decided to play the waiting game himself. When the ambassadors from Venice arrived, he explained that he couldn’t see them yet, but that another embassy would certainly receive his full attention. The ambassadors went back to Chios, then back to Constantinople again. All of the back-and-forthing took time; and although this could have backfired on Manuel, luck was on his side. The Venetian camp at Chios was struck with plague; one contemporary report says that more than a thousand people died in the first few days of sickness.
Manuel continued to stall, the Venetians continued to die, and finally Vitale Michiel surrendered to the inevitable. He loaded the survivors onto his ships and staggered home. According to Manuel’s private secretary John Cinnamus, the emperor sent a blistering letter after him. “Your nation,” it began, “has for a long time behaved with great stupidity”:
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 15