God's War: A New History of the Crusades (90 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 realm, so providentially granted him by God’s manifest will, had been pacified and secured.
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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.
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For Innocent, the Fourth Crusade had proved a disappointment and a lesson. He proved an adept pupil.

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.
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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.
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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 (
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.