Authors: Jonathan Phillips
Last-ditch attempts at diplomacy failed and, as Choniates pithily noted, “Their inordinate hatred for us and our excessive disagreement with them allowed for no humane feeling between us.”
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Murtzuphlus still feared that the crusaders might join with Alexius IV, and so on February 8 he strangled the young man; a grim end to the life of an individual whose efforts to assume his personal inheritance had provoked consequences of such terrible magnitude. To the crusaders, the murder of Alexius IV provided a powerful justification for the removal of his killer. Now, camped outside an implacably hostile city hundreds of miles from home, denied food, and in no condition to continue to the Holy Land, their options were extremely limited. If they gave up it would be a cause of intolerable shame and criticism, and their justification for going to Constantinople in the first instance had become redundant. In these circumstances, they decided to assault the city and to remove the treacherous Murtzuphlus.
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Both sides prepared for war. The Venetian ships were equipped with, as Robert of Clari wrote, “marvellous engines.” They lashed together yardarms
to form bridges about 110 feet long, suspended high on the mastheads and covered with hides to protect the attackers from missiles. These huge tubes would be brought up to the city walls to disgorge the crusader knights onto the battlements. Similar devices had been deployed the previous summer and, in an effort to counter them, Murtzuphlus ordered huge wooden towers to be constructed on top of the walls along the Golden Horn. These unwieldy creations, projecting perilously outward from the fortifications, and in some cases six or seven stories high, were covered in vinegar-soaked hides to protect them from missiles and flames. The end result must have looked like some freakish shantytown, but they were to play a crucial role in resistance to the attack.
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As the crusaders organized their resources they also planned the division of their conquest. The senior leadership drew up what is known as the “March Pact” in which they agreed that all booty was to be centrally pooled with the first call being to pay off remaining debts to the Venetians. The identities of the Latin emperor and the patriarch were to be decided by a committee of six Frenchmen and six Venetians, a reflection of the parity of effort that the two groups had put into the enterprise. A further committee would allocate the lands of the Byzantine Empire to the conquerors while, naturally, the Venetians were guaranteed a position of economic dominance. The need to bring stability to the new empire was recognized in a decision to put off sailing to the Holy Land until 1205; finally, oaths were taken to try to prevent assaults on women and churchmen in the aftermath of the capture.
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On April 8, 1204, the crusaders loaded their ships, then sought absolution for their sins from the priesthood and prayed for divine aid. The next day the fleet—almost a mile long according to Villehardouin—began the short journey over the Golden Horn. Arranged in their familiar divisions, they moved across the inlet. In some areas a narrow strip of land lay between the fortifications and the water and it was here the French set to work. Scaling ladders were put to the walls and siege engines began to bombard the city; in turn, the defenders fired back their own missiles and poured boiling oil down onto the besiegers. Murtzuphlus proved an able commander and his sharp direction brought proper spirit to the Greeks’ resistance. The weather conditions helped him too—a contrary wind prevented the Venetian ships from drawing as near to the walls as they had hoped. Being unable to engage closely, the crusaders withdrew, to a huge
cheer from the Greeks. Morale in the crusader camp was, unsurprisingly, fragile. The leadership acted quickly to prevent a complete collapse of hope and tried to encourage the troops; the clergy argued that the day’s events were simply a divine test of the crusaders’ resolve. They preached powerful sermons that claimed the Greeks were “worse than the Jews” and that their disobedience to the papacy merited punishment. In consequence, the crusaders were justified in their actions and deserved divine blessing and remission of their sins.
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Four days later a second assault began. Again there was a period of fierce bombardment from both sides: “cries from the battle were so great that it seemed that the whole world was quaking,” wrote Villehardouin.
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At first it looked as though the Byzantines were holding firm but a fortuitous change in the breeze finally brought the crusaders’ ships up to the walls. Robert of Clari described what happened next: “by a miracle of God, the ship of the bishop of Soissons struck against one of the towers, as the sea, which is never still there, carried it forward.”
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Some of the Venetian vessels were lashed together in pairs and, appropriately enough, the
Paradise
and the
Lady Pilgrim
were the ships whose ladders locked one of the towers in a lethal embrace. Fortified by a potent combination of prayers and the offer of 100 silver marks to the first man onto the walls, crusaders gathered at the exits of their fortified bridges, swaying high above the deck and conscious that a mistimed jump would cause them to plummet to their death. Once over the dizzying chasm there remained the small matter of the defenders. A Venetian leaped across only to be killed, but two French knights succeeded in creating the space for others to join them and soon the first crusader banner fluttered above the battlements of Constantinople. To make real progress, however, required an entrance at ground level.
On the shoreline a group of men from Amiens hacked and battered away at a small, bricked-up door.
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As stones and debris thudded down onto their protective mats and shelters they managed to breach the makeshift barrier. Aleaumes of Clari, a belligerent priest, volunteered to be the first to enter. He had to struggle through a hole about the size of a small fireplace, beat off the waiting Greeks, and then resist long enough to allow his colleagues to follow. As he crawled through the gap, blows rained down on top of him but, incredibly, he survived and then, much to the defenders’ horror, he stood up, stepped forward, and began to fight. Such was their fear of this seemingly indestructible man that the Greeks fled, leaving Aleaumes to call
back for his friends to join him. Once into the streets this small group of crusaders soon found a gate and forced this open to allow mounted knights to pour into Constantinople and seal the city’s fate. By nightfall the districts close to the Golden Horn had fallen and the crusaders paused to rest. Overnight Murtzuphlus decided to emulate Alexius III by fleeing; once news of this spread, the senior figures who remained decided to surrender. The Greeks hoped that their submission would prevent any further violence, but to the crusaders the removal of any active opposition meant they could begin the sack of Constantinople in earnest.
As the mob fanned out across the city, the senior nobility hurried to secure the imperial palaces. Boniface of Montferrat took the Bucoleon, where he found “such a store of precious things that it is impossible to describe the treasures that were in that palace, for there were so many they were endless and innumerable.”
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While the takeover of the palaces was relatively orderly, the rank and file ignored their earlier vows to behave with restraint. Infuriated at their dismal treatment by the Byzantines, fortified by a belief in divine favor, and inspired by pure and simple greed, they despoiled churches and houses and killed and savaged without distinction. “So those who denied us small things have relinquished everything to us by divine judgement,” was the sanctimonious observation of Baldwin of Flanders.
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The crusaders ransacked the Hagia Sophia, the spiritual heart of Byzantium. Drunken westerners cavorted beneath its magnificent mosaic ceiling, a prostitute danced on the altar and then straddled the patriarch’s chair; meanwhile pack animals were brought in to carry away the spoils of war. Elsewhere, even Latin churchmen joined this orgy of acquisitiveness. Abbot Martin of Pairis found the treasury at the imperial foundation of the Church of the Christ Pantocrator. He grabbed the feeble old Orthodox monk who guarded the precious objects stored there and bellowed at him: “Come, faithless old man, show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.”
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The quivering monk handed over what he had and the abbot departed, his robes bulging with booty like an incompetent shoplifter. Such an image, regardless of explanations of divine favor, is hard for us—and indeed for some contemporaries as well—to see in anything other than an overwhelmingly cynical light. Immense numbers of relics made their way back to the churches of western Europe. While the four horses and the objects in the treasury of Saint Mark’s in Venice are the most famous of these,
many other crusaders gave precious objects to their local churches when they returned home.
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It was not just the fabric of Constantinople that was shattered; its people were brutalized too—even nuns were violated. Nicholas Mesarites, a contemporary Byzantine author, wrote of “westerners tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men.”
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To the Greeks, such behavior was inexcusable. Choniates argued passionately that the crusaders were exposed as greedy fraudsters, sinners against Christ. He compared Saladin’s humane treatment of his captives at Jerusalem in 1187 with the brutality of the westerners against their fellow Christians; the implication was clear: even a Muslim was superior to the barbaric crusaders.
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Even though many of the crusaders had taken loot for themselves the conquerors gathered mountains of spoils to share out. The Venetians were finally paid off and individuals given specific amounts according to their rank. The next major decision was to elect an emperor.
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On May 9 the committee assembled and after a long debate it voted for Count Baldwin of Flanders. To Boniface of Montferrat, the nominal leader of the crusade, this was something of a blow, but he conceded with some grace; in any case, Baldwin was recognized as a good choice. A week later, dressed in the magnificent imperial robes, the Fleming was anointed and crowned the emperor of Constantinople, one of the greatest titles in the known world. The fate of Doge Dandolo is worth mentioning too. Given his extreme age he wrote to the pope and asked to be released from his pilgrimage vow to go to Jerusalem. Innocent remained furious with the doge for his behavior at Zara and his lack of any subsequent remorse. Thus, one imagines, the pope took grim pleasure in rejecting the request. Innocent assured Dandolo that because the doge was so important to the leadership of the crusade it would be dangerous to agree to his petition because it might endanger the expedition. Politely checkmated, the doge could argue no further, although the issue soon became irrelevant when he died in June 1205.
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In the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople the Latins fought hard to extend their power. Boniface of Montferrat took control of Thessalonica, the Venetians seized Crete and Corfu to form essential parts of their trading empire, and the Villehardouin clan established themselves in the Peloponnese.
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There was, of course, opposition. Murtzuphlus was soon
captured and executed, but other Greek nobles became a focus for anti-Latin feelings and the hostility of the Christian king of Bulgaria was a further distraction. It was fighting the latter’s armies at Adrianople in April 1205 that Louis of Blois was killed and Emperor Baldwin seized and never seen again. This disastrous defeat led to the first of a series of appeals for help from western Europe. In the same way that many men had returned home after the First Crusade, so the Latin Empire of Constantinople (as it is known) suffered from a lack of manpower too. In part this was a consequence of its unforeseen creation. While it possessed ties with certain regions, such as Flanders, Montferrat, and Venice, the thirteenth century saw a multiplicity of different draws on crusading enthusiasm. Some proved much closer to home than the Latin Empire and because it could never possess the allure of the holy city of Jerusalem, it was doomed to be something of a poor relation to the Holy Land.
One of the most intriguing reactions to the Fourth Crusade was that of Innocent III.
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He had, as we saw, tried to prevent the expedition from attacking Christian lands, although the caveats within these directives proved easy to circumvent or to ignore. The pope’s early reaction to the news of the capture was very positive. He wrote in November 1204 that God had transformed the Byzantine Empire from “the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the obedient, from schismatic to Catholic.”
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He was prepared to award full crusading privileges for the defense of the Latin Empire and continued to speak of “the miracle that has come to pass in these days” into 1205.
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By midsummer of that year, however, his tone had changed. First, the legate on the crusade released the men from their vows to go to the Levant—a realistic move given the vulnerability of the empire, but one that ended Innocent’s hopes of the crusade ever reaching the Holy Land. More seriously, visitors to Rome began to detail the full atrocities of the sack—matters passed over by the crusaders’ reports of the event—and the pope learned of the terrible violation of women and the destruction of churches. He was appalled at the sordid, grasping behavior of the crusaders and noted that the Orthodox Church would have no wish to acknowledge papal primacy if it saw in the Latins “nothing except an example of affliction and the works of hell, so that now it rightly detests them more than dogs.”
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To Boniface of Montferrat he railed, “you turned away from the purity of your vow when you took up arms not against Saracens but Christians . . . preferring earthly wealth to celestial treasures.”
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Most dramatically of all, we
sense a spiritual crisis in the head of the Catholic Church, baffled by the ways of the Lord and wondering how his God could let such a thing happen. “Who can know the mind of the Lord?” was his troubled and unsettled conclusion.
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