Two other important sources are troubadour songs and official documentary material. The former do not necessarily provide factual information, but offer an expressive insight into the preoccupations of the knightly classes who so dominated crusading at this time. The latter encompasses the commercial agreements faithfully preserved by Italian mercantile communities and, from the archives of countless monasteries, the contracts of sales and mortgages of land and rights made to departing crusaders seeking to finance their campaigns.
The history of the Fourth Crusade is not just recorded from the perspective of the Catholic West, however. Several contemporary Byzantine writers witnessed the campaign and their observations survive in the highly ornate and learned style of classical authors, so beloved by the court of Constantinople.
13
Alongside these accounts, travel writings are another important resource. Just as today’s tourist looks to a plethora of guide-books, so too did the medieval traveller, and the commentaries of these individuals—be they Muslim, Jewish, Greek Orthodox or Catholic—are often interesting and evocative supplements to the main narratives.
Finally, an indispensable and exciting sort of information is in a visual form. Sometimes this survives as buildings (ruined, or modified through the ages) or figurative sculptures, wall paintings, coins, as well as manuscript illuminations of people, events or objects (such as ships) connected with the crusades.
Although there are some tantalising gaps in the evidence—for example, there are no extant contemporary Venetian accounts—there remains a remarkably broad palette from which to write the history of the Fourth Crusade. To explain why it sacked Constantinople we must first sketch out the emotional, spiritual and political landscape of the early thirteenth century.
The world of the crusaders was, in many respects, fundamentally different from the society of today. Learning, communications, centralised authority and healthcare were, at best, rudimentary. Travelling times, for example, were measured in weeks and not hours, and knowledge of the world outside the Catholic West was clouded by fear, prejudice and lack of information.
14
The two most dominant factors in medieval life were violence and religion.
15
Violence took the form of both national-level conflicts and, more commonly, local warfare where the limited power of central authority allowed small-scale feuding between neighbouring lords.
Probably the greatest difference between the secularised western world of the early twenty-first century and the Middle Ages was the importance of the Christian faith. Religion saturated the medieval period in a way that is hard for us to comprehend. The sermons and imagery of the churches ceaselessly reminded men and women of their sinful lives and luridly depicted the eternal tortures of hell that awaited them if they failed to repent. The pressure to make good the consequences of those sins through penitential prayers and devotional acts, such as pilgrimage, was an integral part of the relationship between the Church and its flock. People also looked to God and His saints for protection against enemies, for cures from sickness, for good harvests, for judgement of legal cases (through Trial by Ordeal) or battles. In a modern context some of this can seem little more than superstition, yet to begin to understand the context of the Fourth Crusade it is vital to accept, for example, medieval man’s belief in the ability of saints to perform miraculous cures, or to intervene in warfare.
When, on 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II stood up to speak at the Council of Clermont in central France, he fused the familiar ideas of pilgrimage, violence and the need for penance to create a new and enduring concept—the crusade. He argued that the knights of France should march to the Holy Land and reclaim it from infidel hands. In doing so the warriors would undertake a penitential act of such an arduous nature that it merited a spiritual reward of an unprecedented magnitude: the remission of all penance. This meant that the sins accumulated through a life of violence would be wiped clean and the fires of hell would be avoided—the perfect opportunity for people so concerned with their spiritual welfare. Guibert of Nogent, a contemporary observer, described this most eloquently: ‘In our time God instituted holy warfare, so that the arms-bearers and the wandering populace ... should find a new way of attaining salvation; so that they might not be obliged to abandon the world completely, as used to be the case, by adopting the monastic way of life ... but might obtain God’s grace to some extent while enjoying their accustomed freedom and dress, and in a way consistent with their own station.’
16
The knight was being offered a chance to do what he excelled at—fighting and killing—yet because he fought for a cause judged by the pope to be just, he would be rewarded. As Urban finished his speech, the crowd roared their approval and one reporter claimed they shouted,
‘Deus vult! Deus vult!’
—‘God wills it! God wills it!’—before rushing forward to be signed with the cross.
The response to Urban’s appeal was incredible. News of the call to arms spread rapidly across Europe and over the next four years more than 60,000 people from all areas and every level of society set out to march the 2,500 miles (the distance from northern France) to the Holy Land. After an extraordinarily arduous journey they took Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 to secure Christ’s city for the Catholic faithful.
The capture of Jerusalem released an horrific tension within the crusaders and they massacred the Muslim and Jewish defenders of the city. A later Frankish writer described the terrible scene: ’... everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping in blood from head to foot.’ Yet, alongside this horror, ‘Clad in fresh garments, with clean hands and bare feet, in humility they [the crusaders] began to make the rounds of the venerable places which the Saviour had deigned to sanctify and make glorious with his bodily presence.’
17
The people of Christendom were overjoyed at the news —truly God had blessed the crusaders and, by their success, He had signified divine approval for their cause.
Most of the crusaders returned home having completed their vow, but a small core remained to cement the Frankish hold on the Levant (Frank is a generic contemporary term used by both Europeans and Muslims for the settlers, notwithstanding their heterogeneous origins across the West). Over the next few decades, thousands of Europeans came to settle in the eastern Mediterranean as farmers, traders, churchmen and nobles. Many more took advantage of the Catholic hold on the holy places to visit as pilgrims. The needs of these pilgrims led to the formation of the Military Orders—organisations of warrior-monks, sworn to protect Christ’s patrimony and to look after visitors. The Knights Hospitaller had a dual military and medical function (and survive today in the guise of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade) while the Templars were a purely military force. The First Crusade had crossed the rubicon of religiously directed violence and allowed the formation of bodies of men sworn to the service of God, fighting the Devil in the world, rather than in the cloister. Holy war and crusading thus showed a remarkable flexibility that would enable the concept to expand and adapt to many different situations.
The reaction of the Muslim world to the First Crusade was one of incomprehension. They had no way of knowing that this ferocious band of warriors was bent upon a war of religious colonisation and, in any case, the Muslims of Syria were distracted by intense internal feuding, which meant they offered little concerted opposition to the invaders. Yet, over time, the Muslims began to fight back and through the
jihad,
the Islamic holy war, their leaders started to take the struggle to the Franks.
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In 1144, the Muslims of Aleppo took the city of Edessa in northern Syria and this led to the call for what we know as the Second Crusade (1145—9). This numbering system is actually a creation of eighteenth-century French historians and applies only to the largest of the crusades, although we can now identify several smaller campaigns between (for example) the Second and Third Crusades that fulfil the criteria of a papally authorised holy war. In outcome the Second Crusade proved a disastrous failure. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux had inspired participants with the promise that they were a lucky generation who had been given a special opportunity to reap divine rewards. His assurances fell flat, however, as the armies of the kings of France and Germany suffered terrible losses on their journey through Asia Minor and then abandoned the siege of Damascus after only four days—a terrible humiliation. Nonetheless, the Second Crusade was important in that it saw a formal expansion in the compass of crusading.
Back in the eighth century the Iberian peninsula had been conquered by the Moors of North Africa. Over time the Christians had pushed back the invaders, and with the advent of crusades to the East the idea was adopted in Spain to give the struggle there a new and sharper edge. Since 1113—14 the wars against the Spanish Muslims had been accorded the same status, and given the same spiritual rewards, as campaigns in the Holy Land. In 1147—8 the papacy drew explicit parallels between the simultaneous expeditions to the Levant and crusading activity in Iberia. The pope also accorded crusading status to the wars against the pagan tribes of the Baltic region, on the grounds that it would extend the frontiers of Christianity and serve to revenge the murder of Christian missionaries in times past.
19
By 1150, therefore, crusading was developing far beyond its origins as a war against the infidel in the Holy Land, to become a wide-ranging instrument of Catholic defence and expansion.
During the 1170s Saladin emerged as the leader of the Muslim world and he gathered the forces of Egypt, Syria and the Jazira (northern Iraq) to create the biggest threat that the Franks in the East had ever faced. The settlers appealed for support from the Greek Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire and the Catholics of western Europe.
The Byzantine Empire was the successor to the Roman Empire, and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the seat of the ecumenical patriarch, the head of the Church within these lands. In 1054, however, there was a clash between the papacy and the patriarch of Constantinople that led to the declaration of a formal schism between the two churches, which remains in place to the present day. The dispute arose over liturgical and doctrinal differences, plus the vital matter of who possessed the supreme authority: the successor of St Peter (the pope) or the pentarchy of the five patriarchs of the Christian Church (Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constantinople). In theory, therefore, after 1054 the Catholics viewed the Greeks as schismatics and heretics and as enemies of the faithful. By the time of the Fourth Crusade this long-standing crack in the relationship between Byzantium and the West would do much to enable the crusaders to justify the final attack on Constantinople in 1204.
Contact between Byzantium and the West was complex and, on occasion, seems contradictory. Attempts to end the schism sometimes brought the two sides closer, and in 1095 a request by Emperor Alexius I (ruled 1081—1118) for help against the Turks of Asia Minor was another reason why Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade. The notion of the two Christian forces joining together against Islam was an attractive one, but in the course of the major crusading expeditions of the twelfth century there was serious ill-feeling between the western armies and their Greek hosts. The latter saw the crusaders as poorly disciplined barbarians who posed a real danger to Constantinople; indeed, some on the Second Crusade advocated an assault on the city. The crusaders were always suspicious of their hosts. They mistrusted Greek promises to provide food and supplies and blamed them for failing to keep such agreements or, in the case of the Second Crusade, for allegedly betraying them to the Turks in Asia Minor. Prior to the Fourth Crusade, this history was another element of tension in relations between Constantinople and the West.
At times, however, the Greeks and the Catholics were on good terms. Contacts between Emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143—80) and the kings of Jerusalem were very positive, with intermarriage between the royal houses and the submission of King Amalric (1163—74) to Byzantine overlordship in 1171. Manuel also used western administrators and officials in his government and was friendly with King Louis VII of France (1137—80). After the emperor’s death, however, there was a dramatic change of attitude towards westerners in Constantinople, largely engendered by the rise to power of Andronicus Comnenus (1183—5).
In May 1182 a group of his supporters, in conjunction with the Constantinople mob, targeted the merchant communities who lived close to the city’s main harbour on the shores of the Golden Horn.
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Some of the traders, who were mainly Genoese and Pisans, managed to flee, but the old and the infirm were caught and slain. Property was destroyed, churches burned and, showing the darker side of Catholic—Orthodox relations, churchmen were captured and tortured. Most notoriously, a hospital run by the Knights Hospitaller was attacked and the sick slaughtered in their beds. A papal legate was seized and killed: his head was cut off and tied to the tail of a dog to emphasise the insult to the Catholic Church. Many other westerners were taken prisoner and sold into slavery under the Turks. The viciousness of this episode horrified commentators on all sides. Eustathios of Thessalonica, a contemporary Byzantine observer, wrote: ‘This was a bestial act and cannot be compared with any other form of madness.’
21
William of Tyre, who composed his
Historia
before 1185, commented: ‘In such a fashion did the perfidious Greek nation, a brood of vipers, like a serpent in the bosom ... evilly requite their guests —those who had not deserved such treatment and were far from anticipating anything of the kind.’
22
While trade between the Italians and Byzantium soon resumed, there is no doubt that such a hideous incident added another drop of poison to the swelling undercurrent of ill-feeling between the Greeks and the West.