The pope heard of the secret agreement and protested vigorously. It was an unconscionable offense against morality for a Christian city to be attacked by a Crusader fleet. His protests went unheard. The doge, and the Venetians with him, had often angered the pope without suffering any dire consequences. In a state of great excitement, before a high mass in the Church of St. Mark, the doge himself ostentatiously took the Cross, and proclaimed himself the leader of the expedition. At that moment power-real powerâhad slipped from the Crusaders. The blind doge commanded. The Crusade, which had begun with the young and idealistic count of Champagne, was now falling into the hands of the doge, a man of extraordinary willpower and immense ability, who surpassed the marquis of Montferrat in the arts of war and conspiracy. He was the war leader, but he had not the least intention of attacking Cairo or of aiding the shattered Kingdom of Jerusalem or of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre. His single aim was to establish an empire under the Republic of Venice, which would permit the Venetians to become “Lords and Masters of a Quarter and a
Half-quarter of the Roman Empire.” In all this he succeeded brilliantly, and in doing it, he destroyed the Crusade.
The doge had a flair for the drama of conquest. For the Crusaders he became a legend, a mysterious and powerful force capable of commanding the destiny of kingdoms and empires.
About this time another mysterious and powerful force stepped on the stage briefly. The young Prince Alexius Angelus was the son of the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II. The brother of the emperor, also called Alexius, had been ransomed from Turkish captivity, and on his arrival in Constantinople he promptly seized the emperor, blinded him, and threw him into prison. One Alexius became emperor and the other, a fugitive, made his way to Italy and then to Germany, to the court of Philip of Swabia, who had married his sister. Then he settled in Verona, proclaiming himself the rightful emperor. He sent messages to the marquis of Montferrat and to other Crusading princes at Venice, urging them to help him regain his father's throne, promising great rewards from the treasury of Byzantium.
Prince Alexius Angelus thus provided with superb timing the provocation the doge and the marquis had been looking for. The young prince soon offered a prospectus of the coming rewards. He would offer the Crusaders the money they needed to pay the Venetians, he would assume the entire cost of the conquest of Egypt, and he would provide an army of ten thousand Byzantine soldiers and pay for the maintenance of five hundred knights. Finally, he offered to ensure that the Orthodox Church would submit to Rome. This last offer, if it had been carried out, would have plunged Constantinople into civil war. These breathtaking offers came from a mind at least as conspiratorial as the minds of the doge and the marquis. They were calculated to please the pope and the entire Crusading host. The pope, who had met the young prince and found him to be a braggart and a nincompoop, was not averse to receiving the submission of the Orthodox Church. But he was averse to bloodshed, and wrote that it was intolerable that Christians should kill Christians except under exceptional circumstances. In the eyes of the doge and the marquis, now firmly committed to the destruction of Zara and the sack of Constantinople, the “exceptional circumstances” already existed.
The Christian army, now fretting under close guard on the island of Lido, knew nothing about this. They were being manipulated by the doge, the marquis and a Byzantine prince. Most of the knights and foot soldiers believed they would be sailing to Egypt or the Holy Land. Because there were signs that the Crusade was about to begin, the soldiers on the island of Lido tied torches to their lances and paraded around their camp.
But there were more delays. The doge was in a conquering mood, and he decided that the time had come to demand the submission of Trieste and Moglie. Accordingly, part of the Venetian fleet set sail for these cities; they were invested and, finally, they surrendered. Only when they returned could the combined fleet attack Zara. Robert of Clari, standing on the poop
of one of the great galleys, was overwhelmed by the sight of the great fleet sailing down the Adriatic, led by the galley of the doge, painted in bright vermilion with a canopy of vermilion silk spread over his throne, the drummers beating on their drums and four trumpeters sounding the notes that could be employed only in the doge's honor. The noise was deafening, for there were a hundred more trumpeters on the other vessels. When the trumpets died down, the priests and clerks sang
Veni creator spiritus
, weeping with joy at the prospect of sailing to the Holy Land. Even at this late stage there were very few who were in on the secret.
Long before the fleet dropped anchor in the harbor, the people of Zara had been warned of the coming invasion. They had taken precautions. The walled city had crosses set up along the whole length of the walls, to remind the invaders that the city belonged to Christians. In addition, they acquired from the pope a formal statement that anyone who made war on them would be excommunicated. With its strong walls and its navy, Zara could, in the ordinary course of events, keep invaders at bay, but the Crusader fleet led by the doge represented force on a massive, unprecedented scale. The Zarians saw they would have to capitulate. The doge had set up a pavilion outside the walls, and here came ambassadors from the city, offering to surrender on condition that their lives be spared. The doge was not content with their answer. The people must be punished for having deserted the Venetian cause; a suitable number of people must be massacred, a vast indemnity must be paid, Zara must never again be in a position where it could defy the power of Venice.
The chiefs of the Crusading army were of two minds: those who had no trouble with their conscience were all for attacking Zara; those with a more tender conscience asked themselves how they could avoid taking part in the conflict. What the Crusading soldiers thought of making war against a city whose battlements were crowned with crosses may only be guessed at, but they cannot have been pleased to discover that they had been lured into an adventure over which they had no control whatsoever.
The attack on the city was organized by the Venetians, who brought up wooden towers and mangonels for hurling huge stones at the city walls. Sappers mined the walls. From the masts of ships in the harbor, ladders reached out to the top of the walls. For five days the Venetians battered the city into submission; the city fathers, realizing that further resistance was impossible, surrendered. Their property and valuables now belonged to the conquerors, who formally entered the city and took possession of it. The Venetians kept the lion's share: the port, the warehouses, the shipyards, and the ships. To the Crusaders was granted the rest of the town, and they lodged in the houses of the citizens, who were reduced to slaves. Three days later, toward evening, the Crusaders, feeling that they might be the next victims, because they were hemmed in by the Venetians, rose in rebellion, and attacked the Venetians wherever they could find them. There was scarcely a street in Zara where there was not fierce fighting with
swords, lances, crossbows, and javelins. The fighting lasted all night. By morning the doge and the Crusader knights had established a kind of peace, but there was sporadic fighting for another week. The expedition was in danger of wasting all its energies in civil war within a conquered city. “This was the greatest misfortune to overtake the army,” wrote Villehardouin, “and it very nearly resulted in the total loss of the army. But God would not suffer it.”
By harsh measures the rebellion was stamped out, the doge reestablished his position as commander, and two weeks later Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, arrived to conduct discussions with the doge. A few days later, Philip of Swabia, brother-in-law of Alexius, sent a message to Boniface with the terms of a treaty to be agreed upon by Alexius and the leaders of the expeditionary force. The treaty was not signed immediately, and was kept secret until the last possible moment. The Crusading soldiers had no way of knowing what was happening, but they were restless and querulous in their winter quarters, while supplies ran low and there were limits to the exploitation of the Zarians.
Villehardouin, who consistently took the side of the doge, says there were forces at work to disband the Crusading army. Five hundred soldiers escaped from Zara by ship, and Villehardouin notes with satisfaction that the ship capsized and they were all drowned. Others escaped into the hinterland, and again Villehardouin notes with satisfaction that the peasants massacred them. In order to escape from Zara, some knights begged to be allowed to go to Syria on an embassy in one of the vessels belonging to the fleet; they never returned. Villehardouin was incensed by their ingratitude. The army was rapidly dwindling, for the good reason that the soldiers did not trust their commanders, and because the papal ban of excommunication was taken very seriously indeed. Accordingly, four ambassadors, two knights and two clerks, were sent to Rome to urge the pope to grant absolution to the conquerors of Zara. In a moment of weakness the pope granted it.
The long winter was followed by a short spring. Alexius arrived at Zara on April 25 and was received with the honors due an emperor. He seems to have been a youth of about fourteen, handsome, modest, easily manipulated. With his coming, there was no longer any doubt that the doge was determined to sack Constantinople as he had sacked Zara, using the young claimant to the Byzantine throne merely as a tool. The huge fleet, led by the doge's vermilion galley, sailed out of Zara with a fair wind, while the pipers and the trumpeters filled the air with their tumultuous music. They put in at Durazzo for provisions, and here, according to Villehardouin, Alexius received the acclamation of the people as the true emperor of Byzantium. Then they put in at Corfu, where the army rested in tents and the horses were removed from the transports and put out to pasture.
They were on their way to commit one of the greatest crimes in history.
THE sack of Constantinople can be explained only by sheer lust for conquest, at whatever the cost in lives and treasure. It was accomplished by treachery in the modern manner, in cold blood, without any regard for the consequences, which inevitably included the weakening of the Byzantine empire, an empire that had for so long been a bastion against the Turks. The pope had promulgated that the Christians should not fight Christians except when one party was hindering the success of the Crusades. The Byzantines were not hindering the success of the Crusades; they were, and had been for a long time, helpful to the Crusaders. The excuse that they were about to attack Constantinople in order to put young Alexius on the throne was a fiction concocted by the doge, the marquis of Montferrat, and Philip of Swabia. They did not even have an interest in recovering the Holy Land; they wanted loot.
During the First Crusade, the Crusaders had found themselves at odds with the Emperor Alexius Comnenus, who had not permitted them to sack the imperial city. When they attacked the walls of Constantinople, he fought them to a standstill. When, with the help of the Byzantine army, Nicaea was captured, the emperor had again refused them permission to sack the city, the second most important in his empire. He demanded from them an oath of loyalty, which they gave him reluctantly with the secret reservation that they would break it whenever they pleased. The relations between Byzantium and the Crusaders were always strained, and this was due largely to the fact that in the eyes of the Crusaders, the civilization of Byzantium was a dying one ready for plunder. They did not know that great civilizations can die many times and be reborn many times. Before the Arabs poured out of Arabia, the Byzantine empire stretched all over Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Byzantium was still an imperial power, and would endure for many more years. Even after the sack of Constantinople, even after Frankish kings ruled from the jewel-studded imperial
throne, there remained in the eyes of the Byzantine people the firm promise of a
restoratio
, a new birth, a revival of the Byzantine spirit.
Except for the Venetians, those who were determined to sack Constantinople were in a minority. At Corfu, where the battle plans for the attack on the city were finally worked out, the commanders of the Crusaders found themselves with a revolt on their hands. Many of the knights protested the Venetian plans, and they were not alone. The foot soldiers set up the cry, “Go to Acre!”â
“Ire Accaron!”
There was a plot to ferry troops from Corfu to Brindisi, which was in the possession of Count Walter of Brienne. Count Walter would see that they reached the Holy Land safely. “More than half the army,” Villehardouin admits, “was of this mind.” They had suffered atrociously at Zara, and they had been under heavy guard on the island of Lido, and the Venetians had amused themselves by charging extravagant sums for bread and provisions. Now, at last, they had seen through the Venetian pretensions.
In a formal act of rebellion the Crusaders struck their tents and marched inland into another valley at some distance from the city, to separate themselves from the doge and his army; they hoped that ships from Brindisi would rescue them from their plight.
Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, decided upon desperate measures. He would abase himself before the Crusaders, he would promise everything they demanded, and at the same time he would cajole a rebellious army with promises and half-promises he had no intention of keeping. He was the supreme commander of the Crusaders, and his staff included Baldwin, Count of Flanders, Louis, Count of Blois and Chartres, and the count of Saint-Pol. With them, and with a retinue of bishops and abbots, and with the young Alexius, he rode to the valley where the Crusaders were in camp and presented himself to them while they were holding a mass meeting. At some distance from the camp he dismounted, and all the others dismounted, to show that they had come on a peaceful errand.
Walking up to the Crusaders he threw himself abjectly down on the ground. All those who accompanied him did the same. There were about twenty people on their knees. It was a
coup de théâtre
, a spectacle so incredible that the Crusaders were surprised out of their wits. Boniface announced that he would remain on his knees until they had listened to him, that he had many things to say to them, and the most urgent of all was that the army must remain intact and follow the Venetians to Constantinople; all the rest was negotiable. He was a master of oratory. He implored, begged, pleaded. The young emperor was presented to them. It was right and proper that the Christian army should restore him to his throne; it was their Christian duty, and once they had performed this duty, then of course, with his permission and blessing, the Crusaders would sail to the Holy Land.