In early December, Boniface of Montferrat finally reached Zara, followed, by the end of the month, by a delegation from Philip of Swabia and his brother-in-law Alexius Angelus. In return for placing Alexius on the Byzantine throne, they offered the crusaders union of the Greek Orthodox church with Rome; a gift of 200,000 silver marks; provisions for every man in the army; 10,000 Greeks to accompany the crusaders to Egypt; and the promise of a permanent Byzantine garrison of 500 knights in Outremer.21 The timing and content were well judged to appeal to their audience, suggesting at the least careful preparation if not active collusion with elements of the crusade leadership, especially Boniface of Montferrat. What was being offered amounted to the realization of western expectations regarding Byzantium and the crusade and a revolution in relations between the Greek church and Rome. The well-informed Venetians probably recognized the inflated implausibility of some of the details, while acknowledging the potential benefits of changing the Greek regime, not least to their commercial position. The convenience of the plan’s presentation just as the crusaders were contemplating the next season’s campaign was hardly fortuitous. But the prospect on offer was little short of momentous.
BYZANTIUM AND THE CRUSADE
No such thing as a ‘western attitude’ to Byzantium existed in the twelfth and early thirteenth century. It remains a myth of crusading historiography. Instead, a variety of responses was determined by region, status, the nature of the contact or its timing. On the levels of silks, saints, soldiers, trade and icons, exchange between western Europeans and the Greeks was habitual, customary and usually mutually beneficial. While differences in religious observance increasingly grated on a western ecclesiastical establishment eager to impose discipline and achieve uniformity, there were few awkward diplomatic or political absolutes, except, perhaps, for Byzantine foreign policy’s single-minded Palmerstonian pursuit of material interests rather than set alliances or ideological posturing, a stance that so irritated successive popes and crusade leaders. Over the politics of Italy, the Danube basin, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Outremer and the Near East, western European powers and Byzantium competed, cooperated and coexisted. Whatever else, the scheme put to the crusader army at Zara spoke of contact, not alienation. It also recognized the implosion of Byzantine power since the death of Manuel I in 1180.22
Byzantium under Manuel I presented an image of universal power and a reality only little short of it. Although under Manuel’s predecessors Alexius I and John II the recovery from the defeats of the eleventh century – in Italy, Asia Minor, Syria and the Balkans – was territorially modest, by reasserting control over the ports of western Asia Minor and restoring the integrity of the Danube frontier, internal stability and the conditions for economic prosperity were secured. By 1180, the Byzantine empire included the Balkans south of the Danube, the islands of the Ionian and Aegean seas, Crete, Cyprus, western Asia Minor, Cilicia and the coastal ports of the southern Black Sea. A gold currency underpinned a comprehensive tax system and a centralized bureaucracy almost unknown further west. Diplomatically, the Greek emperor retained interests and correspondence from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, the Baltic to the Sahara Desert. Byzantine fleets operated from the Black Sea and the Adriatic to the Nile Delta. Satellite states sporadically festooned the frontiers, including Frankish Antioch and Seljuk Konya. Constantinople remained easily the grandest, largest and richest Christian city in the world, its population still about 375,000–400,000, six or seven times the size of Paris, despite its slums, inequalities of income, public affluence and private squalor, a magnet for trading communities from all over the Mediterranean and beyond. The imperial guard recruited from as far as Scandinavia and the British Isles; visitors came from Nubia. The quarters occupied by the commerical representatives of Venice, Pisa and Genoa were matched by a large Jewish settlement and a Muslim presence recognized by a number of mosques in the city.
The serenity of Manuel’s empire masked certain underlying problems. The Comnenan rulers since 1081 relied more than previous emperors on their own family rather than on state officials, on the army rather than the civilians. Power became increasingly focused on the person and immediate entourage of the emperor rather than the civil servants and system of government over which he presided. Public centralization was eroded by a sort of privatized centralization, a deliberate policy of subcontracting military, commerical and fiscal functions of the state to foreign mercenaries – Turks, Franks, Armenians, Slavs – Italian traders, provincial landlords and defence contractors. The enormous consumption of Constantinople unbalanced the economy as well as politics. Academic uncertainty remains about the extent of economic growth in some provinces, but many parts of the empire clearly seemed highly attractive to acquisitive outsiders. The empire faced active or potential threats from the kings of Sicily; German emperors; Slavs beyond the Danube; Bulgarian and Serb freedom fighters in the Balkans; Armenians in Cilicia; and Turks in Asia Minor and Syria. As with many later cosmopolitan and imperial capitals, xenophobia stalked sections of the Greek population of Constantinople, inducing paranoia that spilled over into violent anti-western riots in 1171 and 1182. This undertow of Greek nationalism, evident in the strand of self-conscious Hellenism in the culture of twelfth-century Byzantium, counterbalanced Manuel’s eclectic pro-western policies, which included holding Frankish-style tournaments and taking a German and then an Antiochene Frankish wife.
Two central weaknesses persisted despite the political success of the Comnenans; the vulnerability of the long and intricate frontiers; and the dependence on the individual emperor. For the centralized system to operate effectively, the territorial base for taxation needed to be as wide, peaceful, prosperous and secure as possible. For the system to function at all required a united court supporting or led by an unchallenged emperor. The last quarter of the twelfth century saw both conditions disappear and with them the power of the empire. Manuel himself was defeated at Myriokephalon in 1176, ending his hopes to extend the reconquest of Turkish Asia Minor. Thessalonica, second city of Greece, was briefly occupied by the Sicilians in 1185. Large parts of the northeast Balkans threw off Greek overlordship in the 1180s to form the Second Bulgarian Empire (the first having been destroyed by Basil II the Bulgar Slayer in the early eleventh century). Other parts of the Slavic Balkans, such as Serbia, slid out of imperial control. The governor of Cyprus declared independence in 1184 and the island was conquered by Richard I in 1191. Local military commanders in Asia Minor, in central Greece and the southern Peleponnese followed suit. Remoteness from central control aided the secession of outposts such as Trebizond or Adalia. Villehardouin commented on the scene that confronted the crusaders: ‘each Greek man of note… for his own advantage, made himself master of such lands as he could lay his hands on’.23 The Fourth Crusade accelerated this fragmentation but was not its cause, and after 1204 the new Latin rulers of Constantinople tried hard to reverse the process. Paradoxically, the fissiparous pressures that undermined the Byzantine empire allowing the Latins to seize power also ensured Greek political survival, as the westerners failed to rebuild a centralized empire based on Constantinople.
The regional disintegration after 1180 mirrored the collapse of the Comnenan dynastic system itself. Manuel had been succeeded by a minor, Alexius II. There followed a rapid slide into untrammelled political factionalism and chaos, exacerbated by invasion and provincial rebellion. Between 1180 and 1204, fifty-eight coups, rebellions and conspiracies against the existing emperor have been counted, at least five successful, in 1182–3, 1185, 1195, 1203 and 1204. The westerner’s involvement in those of 1203–4 followed their compatriots’ roles in 1182 and 1187. Few political systems could survive such instability intact, certainly not one whose spirit lay in autocracy. This political collapse fed off itself. The territorial losses reduced the tax base, weakening the military and patronage props that sustained imperial control, thus prompting further disintegration. Two of the most striking features of t
he crusaders’ campaign in Byzantium in 1203–4 were the foreign complexion of the Greek defence forces and the absence of an effective Greek navy. Where Manuel’s fleet had seen action from the Adriatic to the Nile, in 1203 the Greeks could not raise even a flotilla to challenge the crusaders’ passage of the Hellespont. Whether or not Alexius III was a sybaritic incompetent, as described with perhaps professional disdain by Nicetas Choniates, head of Alexius’s civil service, there seemed inadequate funds to maintain a paid army to protect Constantinople as well as a fleet to prevent an attack in the first place. Only when Alexius III learnt of the crusaders in Greek waters in the spring of 1203 did he bother to discover that his fleet comprised barely twenty ‘rotting and worm-eaten small skiffs’.24 They sat as a metaphor not for the culture and society of Byzantium but for its imperial system. To the decline of this system the Fourth Crusade added a lethal concentration of violence and purpose.
Whether this can be represented as the fulfilment of a century of conflict, in particular concerning the crusade – what could be called the ‘Byzantium confronts the west’ interpretation – is doubtful.25 Each major crusade of the twelfth century created its own particular problems, only some of which, like the difficulties over markets, especially around the capital, or the status of Antioch, were perennial. A historiographical literary topos emerged among western clerical chroniclers that portrayed the Greeks as devious, deceitful and, most importantly, religiously as well as politically suspect. This was matched by a Byzantine convention, shared by Anna Comnena, John Kinnamos and Nicetas Choniates, that depicted westerners as intemperate, untrustworthy and greedy, always eager for a chance to conquer the empire. Alexius I’s testament in 1118 had voiced anxieties over large armies from the west.26 Both Manuel I and Isaac II had enormous difficulty in managing the transit of tens of thousands of crusaders in 1147 and 1190.
On the other side, the desire to win lands in Greece and the Balkans had been a staple of Norman Italian and Sicilian foreign policy ever since they had expelled the Greeks from their last Italian mainland base at Bari in 1071. The campaigns of Robert Guiscard in the 1080s began a series of assaults, some of which were or could be interpreted as forming part of crusades. Bohemund’s attack on Durazzo in 1107–8 masqueraded as a crusade to the Holy Sepulchre. Roger II of Sicily’s campaigns in 1147, which seized Corfu and raided Corinth, Athens, Thebes and the southern Peleponnese, coincided with the Second Crusade. In the 1190s, Henry VI inherited this tradition, as well as the imperial rivalry between Frederick Barbarossa and Manuel I in Italy and elsewhere. Henry’s threats and bullying in 1195–6 were associated with his crusade but formed a continuation of an essentially secular power struggle. Alexius III’s acceptance of Henry’s terms and his difficulties in raising the agreed reparations served as a sharp comment both on the Greek emperor’s weakness and the decline of his empire’s taxation system.
Yet these conflicts ran concurrently with the usually more prosaic relations between Byzantium and its commerical clients of Venice, Genoa and Pisa. Many western immigrants, the so-called ‘phrangopouloi’, did very well in twelfth-century Byzantium. Intellectuals such as the Pisan Hugh Eteriano in the 1160s were attracted to Byzantium, as was the more obscure Englishman John of Basingstoke, who claimed to have learnt the rudiments of Greek from the glamorous intellectual daughter of the archbishop of Athens, Michael (1182–1204), elder brother of the chronicler Nicetas Choniates.27 In such a cosmopolitan society as Constantinople, Greek relations with foreigners were not necessarily confrontational. In 1204 Nicetas Choniates, a harsh critic of the westernizing appeasement, owed his and his family’s life to his acquaintance with a Venetian wine merchant.28 Contact and mutual dependence just as much as mutual suspicion characterized the relationship of Byzantium and the west. The events of 1203–4 were a direct product of that. Even the running sore of church union and the differences in theology and observance did not create insuperable barriers or entrenched enmity. In Sicily, Calabria, Cyprus and Outremer, Greek and Roman clergy coexisted. Innocent III still hoped for church union and endeavoured to maintain good relations with Alexius III. Without equivocation, he opposed any armed attack on Byzantium. When he learnt of the sack of Constantinople, Innocent angrily observed that the Greek church ‘now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs’.29 In Byzantium there flourished a fiercely anti-western, anti-Roman church party. For Byzantines, with the implosion of the state, the Greek church became increasingly a focus for identity, the disciplinarian uniformity of Rome seeming increasingly threatening and unacceptable. Yet the issue of the motives behind the diversion lies not with what the Greeks thought of westerners but what westerners thought of the Greeks. The previous century of contact had created certain stereotypes and embedded certain assumptions that informed the crusaders’ responses to events in 1202–4 but did not inspire their actions.
THE ‘GOOD EXCUSE’
The plan to help Alexius Angelus depose his uncle Alexius III presented to the crusaders at Zara in December 1202 came neither out of the blue nor from conspiratorial shadow. By the end of 1202, Alexius’s ambitions were such an open secret as not to have been a secret at all as he hawked his claims around Europe. Alexius had escaped to the west with the help of the Pisans in 1201, making his way to the court of his sister Irene’s husband, Philip of Swabia. At Philip’s Christmas court at Hagenau, Alexius met Boniface of Montferrat, but there is no evidence that any deal was struck; circumstantial evidence suggests the reverse. Early in 1202, perhaps in February, Alexius tried his luck at the papal Curia and was met by Innocent’s absolute refusal to countenance support for his claim. Not least, Innocent was hardly likely to favour a plan or a puppet sponsored by Philip of Swabia. However, these negotiations were conducted quite openly, Alexius’s presentation at the Curia attracting a large crowd of cardinals and other notables. On leaving Rome, Alexius returned to consult Philip of Swabia. The muster of the crusade gave Alexius renewed hope. During his stay at Verona in the summer, according to Villehardouin, he made contact with Boniface of Montferrat again and with the crusade leadership.30
Both the pope and Alexius III were aware of these discussions in November 1202, by which time the crusade ‘principes’ had despatched Peter Capuano to discuss a possible attack on Constantinople. While the pope reiterated his opposition to any such scheme, he made clear to Alexius III his desire for church union and the emperor’s own vulnerability.31 The chronology hinted at in Innocent III’s letter shows that the essentials of the December proposals were in place before the crusade fleet sailed for Zara in October, even if those outside the circle of leadership were unaware of them. Given papal opposition to the Zara campaign and to Philip of Swabia, and the sensitivity of the mass of crusaders to any perceived deviation of purpose, discretion was important. Peter Capuano came to Rome to obtain papal approval for further negotiations. There, he found ambassadors from Alexius III, very worried about precisely the same thing. It was another measure of how detached Innocent had become from the realities of the crusade that he could imagine his strictures would exert any influence. Throughout 1202 to 1204, Innocent was handicapped by poor or delayed information mediated though those who pandered to his wishful thinking. Even after his prohibition on the attack on Zara had been blatantly disregarded, Innocent clung to the hope that the object of the crusade would be achieved in the end.32 Once Peter Capuano and the crusade parted company at Venice, one for Rome, the other for Zara, Innocent’s dilemma was fixed. The only control over the expedition left him was its cancellation.
The prospects for young Alexius improved as the crusaders’ debts rose. Crucially, Boniface of Montferrat was persuaded to back the scheme, perhaps during his absence from the crusade fleet between October and December 1202, confirming that the diversion to Constantinople to some degree represented a revival of Hohenstaufen eastern policy evident in Henry VI’s crusade plan. The Venetians were greatly in favour of the move, officially as it would secure the funding and provisioning of the ex
pedition to Outremer. From their privileged position within Byzantium, the Venetians knew how feeble the Greek naval defences were and how the provinces were splitting away from the centre. Backing a successful coup would enhance Venice’s privileged position in the empire, stealing a march on the Genoese and Pisans, whose links with young Alexius could usefully be severed in the process. The young Alexius’s promised bounty offered full compensation for the Venetian capital expended in building and provisioning the crusade fleet. Armed with a highly dangerous army and equipped with a magnificent fighting fleet, the Venetians saw Alexius’s offer as a unique opportunity. Although there is no reason to suppose the Venetians had planned it, they would have been eccentric not to embrace it.
The crusader high command agreed, effectively settling the crusade’s future course. Alexius was summoned from Philip of Swabia’s court. However, the arguments reflected profound divisions within the army that could not easily be dismissed by the leadership’s force majeur. Hugh of St Pol argued that, without the proposed Greek subsidy, the Jerusalem journey was impossible, with no money for wages for knights and men-at-arms or siege engines.33 The Venice treaty now only had six months to run. While some thought this argued for an immediate dash for the Nile or Holy Land, others, of the leadership’s persuasion, insisted Alexius’s proposal provided funding for an additional year at least. Money talked. In retrospect, Gunther of Pairis identified five reasons for the adoption of Alexius’s scheme: political – the influence of Philip of Swabia; legal – the legitimacy of young Alexius’s claim; pragmatic – the assistance available for the crusade; religious – the end of the schism; and opportunist – the Venetians’ eagerness for Alexius’s money and the chance to assert ‘sovereignty over the entire sea’. As Gunther noted, Venetian opinion mattered; they were providing the transport wherever the crusade went.34
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