Lost to the West (38 page)

Alexius III had already proved lazy and corrupt, and he now showed that he was a coward as well. The moment the crusading army showed up beneath Constantinople’s walls, he fled for Thrace—taking the crown jewels with him—and left the capital to its fate. The dumbfounded inhabitants of the city watched as the crusading fleet dismantled the massive chain protecting the imperial harbor and launched a ferocious attack against the lower, vulnerable seawalls. Soon they came pouring into the city, setting fire to every house they found. In the imperial palace, the terrified courtiers realized that there was only one way to stop the invaders. These terrible westerners had come to topple the usurper and restore the rightful emperor, so they hurriedly sent someone to fetch Isaac from the dungeons. Within moments, the blind, bewildered emperor had been mounted on the throne with a crown perched precariously over his remaining wisps of hair, and messengers were speeding toward the crusader camp to inform them that their demands had been met. Alexius IV was solemnly crowned alongside his father, the treaty he had made with the Crusade was ratified by both of them, and the crusaders withdrew across the Golden Horn to await their reward.

Old emperor Isaac may have been blind—and thanks to his prison stay more than a little mad—but he realized at once that his son had made impossible promises to these western thugs. It wasn’t long before Alexius IV came to the same conclusion. Emptying the treasury and confiscating most of his citizens’ wealth only managed to
raise half the sum, and by Christmas of 1203 his popularity matched that of the Antichrist. He had brought nothing but calamity to the city from the moment he had appeared with these barbaric savages in tow, and now he was bleeding them white. If only, some of his citizens mused, this unsatisfactory emperor had remained in his prison cell, none of this would have happened.

The crusaders had an even lower view of Alexius IV. To them, he was a pathetic figure, and a liar to boot. They couldn’t believe that the ruler of such a magnificent city of grand monuments and soaring buildings would have trouble raising the sums promised. Surely the emperor could snap his fingers and raise ten times the amount offered. Enrico Dandolo was not the least bit interested in the promised reward, but he smoothly played on the crusader fears, suggesting that Alexius IV was holding out on them, stonewalling while he prepared his army to resist. The emperor, he said, was a treacherous snake whose promises were worthless. The only way they would see their reward now was war.

While Enrico Dandolo steered the crusaders inexorably to war, Constantinople finally shook off its lethargy. There were many who wished to see the Angeli gone, but it was a remarkable figure named Alexius Murtzuphlus who finally acted.
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He rushed into the emperor’s quarters at midnight, shook his drowsy sovereign awake, and told him that the entire city was howling for his blood. Promising to spirit the terrified emperor to safety, Murtzuphlus instead rushed him into the arms of his co-conspirators, who shackled the youth and threw him into the dungeons where his father, Isaac, already waited. The reunion between the two of them was understandably bitter, and this time it was also short, since Murtzuphlus was taking no chances. Isaac Angelus, old and ailing, was easily dispatched; but after
poison failed to achieve the desired result with his son, Alexius IV was strangled with a bowstring.

In another time and place, Murtzuphlus would have made a fine emperor. In his mid-sixties, but still vibrant and decisive, he infused his citizens with a new spirit, shoring up walls, setting aside food, and posting guards on the ramparts. But his forces were too spread out, the walls were too long, and his enemy too numerous. On Monday, April 12, 1204, spurred on by Dandolo’s whispers, the crusaders again attacked, hurling themselves against the same stretch of seawalls that had proved vulnerable before. Murtzuphlus, who had sensibly raised the height of the walls, seemed to be everywhere at once, racing along the ramparts to encourage his men where the fighting was thickest, but within a few hours several towers had fallen and a group of French soldiers managed to smash open a gate. The crusaders poured into the breach, and from that moment on the city was doomed. The Varangians surrendered, and after a valiant attempt to rally his men the emperor realized that all was lost, and slipped out of the Golden Gate to plan a counterattack.

The moment Murtzuphlus fled, any semblance of Byzantine resistance collapsed. The crusaders, however, fearing a last stand in the crowded warren of streets, set fire to as many buildings as they could, hoping to keep the inhabitants at bay. Most of them had never dreamed of a city so large and were staggered by its sheer size. Palaces and magnificent churches rose up on every side in cascading rows of wealth, manicured pleasure gardens sprawled luxuriously down to dappled harbors, and grandiose monuments seemed to stretch out around each corner. A French chronicler, disbelieving the evidence of his own eyes, wrote that more houses were burned in the fires they set than could be found in the three greatest cities of France combined. The great crusading princes were just as astonished as their men. Overwhelmed by Constantinople’s vastness, they called a halt to the slaughter when night fell, thinking that a city of such size couldn’t possibly be conquered in less than a month. That night the invaders
camped in one of Constantinople’s great forums, resting in the shadow of brooding monuments to long-lost Byzantine greatness.

The citizens of Constantinople awoke the next morning to find their city still burning, but they hoped that the worst of the violence was at an end. The nightmare, however, had only just begun. The proud city on the Bosporus had stood inviolate since the days of the Roman Empire’s strength, a great beacon of light in a swiftly darkening world. Unrest and turmoil may have stained its streets, threats and privations may have dimmed its luster since Constantine had made it his capital nearly nine hundred years before, but alone among the cities of antiquity it had never felt the sting of a foreign conqueror’s boot. Its libraries still brimmed with lost Greek and Latin writings, its churches were packed with priceless relics, and its palaces and squares were adorned with wondrous works of art. The city was unlike any other in the world, the last jewel in the Roman crown, and when the crusaders awoke that Tuesday morning, they fell on it like wolves.

Armed bands went roving through the city in an orgy of destruction. Nothing was sacred in the frenzied search for riches. Tombs were smashed open, reliquaries had their contents flung aside, and priceless manuscripts were hacked apart to extract the jeweled coverings. Churches were desecrated, women defiled, and palaces pulled down. Neither the living nor the dead were spared. The lid of Justinian’s magnificent sarcophagus was cracked open, and though the sight of his preserved corpse gave the vandals a momentary pause, it couldn’t stop them from hurling it aside to get at the golden vestments and silver ornaments.

For three days, the fire and the looting continued unabated, and what escaped the clutches of one was inevitably claimed by the other. When silence finally settled on the shocked and shattered city, even the crusaders were taken aback by the amount of plunder. No city, one of them wrote, had produced such loot since the creation of the world.

Of all the crusaders, only the Venetians thought to preserve—not destroy—the priceless artifacts that had fallen into their power. They knew beauty when they saw it, and while the rest of the army
hacked apart classical statues, melted down the precious metals, and divided the spoils, the Venetians sent back the works of art to adorn their city on the lagoon.
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For Dandolo, it had been a remarkable triumph. Venetian commercial power was guaranteed for the foreseeable future, and her main rivals of Pisa and Genoa were completely excluded. The old doge had effortlessly hijacked the armed might of Europe and used it to his advantage, disregarding threats of excommunication along the way and ensuring Venetian greatness for decades to come. But in doing so he had perpetrated one of the great tragedies of human history. Byzantium, the mighty Christian bulwark that had sheltered western Europe from the rising tide of Islam for so many centuries, had been shattered beyond repair—wrecked by men who claimed that they were serving God. Blinded by their avarice and manipulated by the doge, the crusading leaders broke the great Christian power of the East, condemning the crippled remnants—and much of eastern Europe—to five centuries of a living death under the heel of the Turks.

After the events of the Fourth Crusade, the already deep divide between East and West stretched into a yawning chasm that was truly irreconcilable. The crusading spirit, which had started out as a desire to help Christian brothers in the East, was revealed as a horrendous mockery. In the name of God, they had come with hardened hearts and cruel swords to kill and maim, to plunder and destroy—and in the work of a moment they had broken the altars and smashed the icons that generations of the faithful had venerated. Once the riches drifted away and the palaces subsided in ruins, the West eventually lost interest and turned away, but the East never forgot. Watching the crusaders
walk their charred and blackened streets, the Byzantines knew that these men with the cross sewn brightly over their armor could no longer be considered Christians at all. Let the powers of Islam come, they thought. Better to be ruled by an infidel than these heretics who made a mockery of Christ.

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By the time he came to the throne he had already seduced no fewer than two of his nieces.

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Like King Arthur in Britain, a legend soon grew up that Barbarossa wasn’t dead but merely asleep in the brooding mountains of Germany. He will arise—so the story goes—when ravens cease to fly, and restore Germany to her ancient greatness.

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Murtzuphlus means “downcast” or “depressed.” Alexius’s real name was Ducas, but since he had unusually bushy eyebrows that gave him a permanently despondent look, he was universally known by the nickname Murtzuphlus.

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Where a large part of it still remains. One Venetian in particular climbed on the Carceres—the monumental gate to the Hippodrome—and removed four life-size bronze horses. Once shipped to Venice, they were brought to Saint Mark’s, where they can still be seen today.

23

T
HE
E
MPIRE IN
E
XILE

W
hen Pope Innocent III was informed of the sacking of Constantinople, he understood at once the damage that had been done. Furiously excommunicating everyone who had taken part, he wondered aloud how the dream of church unity could ever now occur. How could the Greeks, he wrote to his legates, ever forgive their Catholic brothers, whose swords still dripped with Christian blood, and who had betrayed and violated their holiest shrines?
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Eastern Christians, he concluded with good reason, now detested Latins more than dogs.

The new masters of Constantinople, meanwhile, seemed determined to increase the native resentment. In a hastily cleaned Hagia Sophia, where a few days before a prostitute had been mockingly perched on the patriarchal throne, a Latin emperor was crowned, and the feudal arrangements of the West were forced on the corpse of the Byzantine Empire. The various nobles were rewarded with large estates, and a patchwork of semi-independent kingdoms replaced the single authority of the emperor. A crusader knight seized Macedonia, calling himself the king of Thessaloniki, and another set himself up as
the lord of Athens.
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Not even in its most advanced decay had the Byzantine state been as powerless as the Latin one that took its place.

Remarkably enough, given the deplorable state of the capital, the vast majority of Byzantines in the countryside were reasonably well off. As the central authority of the emperors had weakened in the years before the Fourth Crusade, the towns and villages of Byzantium had flourished. Merchants of the West, the East, and the Islamic world converged in fairs held throughout the empire, where they displayed exotic wares from as far away as Russia, India, China, and Africa. The urban population boomed, and since the corrupt and paralyzed imperial government was unable to collect taxes, the wealth stayed in private hands. Emperors could no longer afford their lavish building programs as the treasury dried up, but private citizens could, and the cities became showpieces for personal fortunes. A new spirit of humanism was in the air, along with an intellectual curiosity. Byzantine art, which had been stylized for centuries, became suddenly more lifelike; writers began to depart from the cluttered, archaic styles of antiquity; and individual patrons of the arts sponsored vibrant local styles in the frescoes and mosaics of their villas. The spirit of Byzantium was flowering even as imperial fortunes declined, and not even the terrible trauma of the Fourth Crusade could dampen it for long.