God's War: A New History of the Crusades (89 page)

17. Constantinople at the Time of the Fourth Crusade

Although the assaults of 17 July failed to give the crusaders the city, its political impact achieved their aims. His city in flames, his enemies intact, his reputation disintegrating, the ill-prepared, discomposed and out-manoeuvred Alexius III, never a strong military figure, prudently chose to flee the city. By abandoning his post – ‘driven away by no one’ was Nicetas Choniates’s contemptuous if unfair comment
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– Alexius did more to wrong-foot the crusaders than he managed by his military ploys. Once his departure was known, in an attempt not to have to submit to foreign conquerors, remaining elements in the imperial bureaucracy, many of whom, like Nicetas Choniates, had served Alexius III’s predecessor, released the blinded Isaac II and reappointed him emperor. This preserved the fiction of Byzantine imperial integrity. It also presented the crusaders with a problem, as Isaac was not party to their agreement with his son Alexius and his presence on the throne ensured the continuance of pro-Hellenic factions proximate to power. Only after a rather tense conference with representatives of the Venetians and crusaders did Isaac accede to the Zara/Corfu compact to reunite the Greek church with Rome and pay for the crusaders’ expenses and projected campaign in the east.
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The guarantee for the westerners’ price for peace was the association in the imperial dignity of young Alexius. On 1 August, the pretender was crowned co-emperor as Alexius IV. Appropriately Alexius IV’s first act, presented by Robert of Clari effectively as the condition for his elevation, was to hand over 50,000 marks to the Venetians, with another 34,000 as the balance of the crusaders’ debt. A further 16,000 went to pay off the debts incurred by crusaders to meet the transport charges in 1202, mainly with Venetian bankers. Thus all, or almost all, of 100,000 marks went to Venice and her citizens.
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Nothing could have more starkly exposed the centrality of
the 1201 treaty and the continued Venetian role in the whole enterprise.

Unlike his father, whose support was feeble enough, Alexius IV had no political base within the Greek establishment. Recognizing his survival depended on the crusaders’ continued presence, Alexius IV, a frequent visitor to his patrons in the western army’s camp and knowing how they operated, privately offered to hire them to stay as his protectors in Constantinople until March 1204, when it was thought the expedition to Egypt could begin. In return he would subsidize the crusaders for a full year from the expiry of the Venice treaty, Michaelmas 1203 to Michaelmas 1204, thus underwriting a summer campaign season in the east.
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The leaders’ reaction revealed with startling clarity how the crusade was organized. After being told of Alexius’s scheme, the wider council of barons insisted they could not give their approval without the general consent of the army, ‘le comun de l’ost’. A
parlement
was summoned, attended by the barons, company commanders (‘li chevetaigne’) and ‘most of the knights’ (‘des chevaliers la graindre parties’).
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Those who at Corfu had only consented to stay with the expedition on condition they would be assisted to travel to Outremer in the autumn passage objected to yet another delay: ‘Give us the ships as you swore to do’.
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After the now familiar wrangling over what would best serve the interests of the Holy Land, to reassure the impatient and doubtful yet another deal was struck with the Venetians. After Alexius IV had ‘paid them enough to make it worth their while’, they promised to keep their fleet on station and at the crusaders’ disposal until Michaelmas 1204. To signal their serious intent, the leadership announced they had sent envoys to Egypt to challenge al-Adil.
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With transport apparently secured and underwritten by Alexius IV, the crusaders agreed to the emperor’s proposition. The immediate benefit to Alexius was realized when he hired Boniface of Montferrat, Hugh of St Pol and Henry of Flanders, among others, to escort him on a tour of Thrace to begin to establish his authority in provincial Byzantium and prevent a counter-coup by Alexius III. Allegedly huge amounts of gold were showered on the crusade leaders who accompanied Alexius IV, and even then some felt underpaid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.