On Thursday 17 July the onslaught began. The crusaders feared an assault on their camp while their forces were occupied trying to take the walls of the city. They therefore divided their troops to leave three divisions, led by Boniface of Montferrat, to stand guard, while another four, headed as ever by Baldwin of Flanders, were to give battle. The Venetians were to begin an attack from the water, thereby subjecting the defenders of the Blachernae quarter to pressure from two sides simultaneously. The trumpets of war sounded and the French forces made a determined advance towards the walls. The carrying of scaling ladders made their intent plain to all inside, and Alexius III had taken care to deploy his crack troops, the Varangian guard, at this crucial location. A hail of enemy missiles greeted the crusaders’ approach, but a group of four men managed to duck and weave through the deadly storm to place two ladders against a barbican close to the sea. They struggled up the ladder and made enough of a bridgehead for another eleven men to join them. The Varangians wielded their heavy battle-axes and the crusaders defended themselves with their swords. In the cut and thrust of the fight the sheer power of the Byzantine army’s elite won the day and the crusaders were driven back down the ladders, except for two unfortunate individuals who were captured and paraded before a delighted Emperor Alexius. For the first time his soldiers had succeeded in resisting the enemy and many of the Frenchmen had been wounded or suffered broken limbs from missiles or by falling from the scaling ladders. Hugh of Saint-Pol mentioned that the crusaders had even managed to tunnel under the walls and collapse a tower, but such was the scale of the city’s fortifications and the ferocity of the defenders’ resistance that they could not exploit this breakthrough. Perhaps the emperor’s policy of relying on his city’s formidable walls and the savage determination of his personal bodyguard would be enough to save Constantinople. It seemed that the French forces might be contained, although the Venetian fleet posed another, and very different, threat.
Dandolo had drawn up his ships in a huge line facing the northern walls of the city. These particular defences were only a single layer thick and, at around 35 feet high, relied upon their proximity to the Golden Horn as much as on their own innate strength to repel the enemy. The Golden Horn is only about 250 yards wide at this point, which created a narrow, funnelled arena for this stage of the conflict. A triple barrage of weaponry flew from the Venetian vessels. From the castles at the top of each ship crossbowmen sent their stubby, lethal bolts fizzing across the water; archers shot their slender arrows soaring higher; while down on deck the crew released the mangonels that hurled stones towards the crowded walls of Constantinople. Once again there was stern resistance from the battlements, where a group of Pisans, determined to protect the commercial interests of their home city, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a few Varangians. In some areas the walls came almost to the sea and the Venetians’ ship-mounted scaling ladders lurched close enough to allow an exchange of blows with the enemy. Villehardouin wrote of the tremendous noise of this struggle: the creaking of the timber ships, the slap of oars as rowers held their boats steady, the shouts and screams of war and the sharp ring of metal on metal. In one area a group of heavily armed knights managed to land and bring a battering-ram to bear against the wall. The dull, rhythmic thud of the machine announced its presence and soon smashed through the stonework. Yet the Pisans, Varangians and Greeks resisted sternly and the attackers were forced out.
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Niketas Choniates lamented that ‘the horrendous battle that followed was fought with groanings on all sides’.
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Standing at the prow of his vermilion galley, Doge Dandolo sensed that his men were making too little progress; he needed to inspire them. With the winged lion on the banner of St Mark flying in front of him, he threatened dire punishment for any shirkers and demanded that the sailors land him on the shore. The crew immediately obeyed and propelled the galley forwards with a series of vigorous pulls on the oars. The Venetians saw the doge’s ship move ahead and their banner land. As Dandolo had calculated, they were shamed by the old man’s bravery; they could not abandon their venerable leader and rushed to join him. As soon as the first vessels reached the shallows the men did not wait to touch the shoreline, but jumped down and waded to land. The bigger ships with their deeper draught could not risk disaster by getting so close, but their crews let down smaller boats and raced for the shore. Dandolo’s charismatic leadership paid off. At this sudden onslaught the Byzantine defenders lost heart and fled, leaving the Venetians free to stream in through the gates and take control of a section of wall containing 25 towers.
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It seems that Alexius III had made a calamitous mistake. He had concentrated most of the Varangian guard opposite the French forces at the Blachernae palace, believing that this was where the main threat to his city lay. He had underestimated the ability of the Venetians to deliver a serious attack against the sea walls and to land their troops. While the defenders on the walls of the Golden Horn had been content to bombard the Venetians from the comparative safety of the battlements, the prospect of hand-to-hand fighting was enough to make most of them flee. Given the strength and determination of the Varangians up at Blachernae, had a larger contingent of the guard been deployed with the Pisans and the local forces along the Golden Horn, the Venetians would have encountered far more serious resistance.
Villehardouin described this success as ‘an event so marvellous it might be called a miracle’.
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The doge understood the value of this news to the French forces and dispatched messengers to tell them of the breakthrough. He also showed an acute awareness of their needs when he immediately ferried as many as 200 captured horses or palfreys up to the main camp to replace those that had been lost in battle. Without war-horses the knights clearly lacked the speed, weight and manoeuvrability so crucial to their military role.
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Alexius soon realised the gravity of the incursion and ordered a contingent of Varangians to try to force the Venetians out. The arrival of these men dramatically changed the balance of the struggle and the Venetians began to fall back. As they did so they tried to slow the Byzantines’ advance by setting fire to the buildings between the two forces. Whether by chance or calculation, the wind blew from behind the Venetians and into the faces of their adversaries. As the flames were fanned ever higher the Venetians disappeared behind a dense cloud of smoke that created an impenetrable protective screen. The breeze continued to take the fire towards the Greeks, allowing the attackers to consolidate their hold on the walls and towers. The blaze grew stronger still and swallowed homes and businesses inside the wall. The hill of Blachernae stopped the conflagration from heading north-west towards the palace, but the gentler slopes to the south were a less serious barrier and only the open cistern of Aetius halted the inferno. Historians have calculated that just over 120 acres of the city were destroyed by the blaze, leaving 20,000 Byzantines homeless and without their possessions. Niketas Choniates grimly recounted the damage: ‘It was a piteous spectacle to behold that day, one that required rivers of tears to counterbalance the fire’s extensive damage...’
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At this moment it appears that Alexius III appreciated, as if for the first time, that if he was to win the battle and save his throne he had to seize the initiative. As Niketas wearily wrote: ‘he at last took up arms’. The emperor’s relative inactivity had started to provoke discontent amongst the citizenry; some accused him of cowardice, staying safely inside his palace, rather than taking on the enemy face-to-face. ‘It was as though he had not realised that forethought is superior to afterthought, that it is better to anticipate the enemy than to be anticipated by him’ was the Byzantine chronicler’s exasperated assessment of Alexius III’s performance.
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There were, however, some grounds for optimism amongst the Greeks. Notwithstanding losses of life and property, they had successfully fended off one French assault and next they sought to drive them from the field of battle. It was hoped that such a victory would compel the Venetians to give up their slim hold on the sea walls, at which point the crusade might effectively disintegrate.
As if the city walls and the Blachernae palace did not provide a dramatic enough skyline, the billowing clouds of smoke from the burning metropolis behind added a distracting, doom-laden atmosphere to the situation. Against this sombre backdrop the emperor assembled a large body of men and marched them out of the St Romanus Gate about a mile south-west of the crusader camp.
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As line after line of Greek troops strode out of the city, the sheer size of the Byzantine army daunted Villehardouin: ‘you would have thought that the whole world was there assembled’.
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Niketas stated that ‘when the opponents’ land forces suddenly beheld this huge array they shuddered’.
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Robert of Clari believed that the Greeks had 17 divisions, compared with the seven mustered by the crusaders. Alexius III planned to trap his enemies in a pincer movement: as the main army drew up to face the westerners on the plain outside Constantinople, he had another contingent of men ready to surge out of the three gates nearest to the camp.
The crusaders acted quickly to deal with this terrible threat. They divided their forces, leaving Henry of Flanders’s division to guard the siege machines while the bulk of the men formed into six divisions in front of the palisade. The westerners took up their positions with care. To compensate for their lack of numbers they tried to present one formidable target to the vastly bigger Byzantine army. In the first line the archers and crossbowmen stood ready to unleash a lethal rain of metal against any who dared come close. Behind them were at least 200 knights who had to fight on foot because they had lost their horses. Even so, the training and armour of these troops would make them difficult adversaries. The remainder of the crusader army consisted of the mounted knights - numbered at only around 650 by Robert of Clari; or 500 knights, 500 other mounted men and 2,000 foot-soldiers, according to Hugh of Saint-Pol.
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Villehardouin believed that so great was the size of the Greek army that, had the crusaders advanced from this position, ‘they would, so to speak, have been drowned amongst them’.
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The Byzantine force seemed to cover the plain. This terrifying sight, flanked to the crusaders’ left by the walls of Constantinople, once again crammed with enemy troops, made clear to the westerners the stark fact that they were a small, isolated army, thousands of miles from home and trying to conquer one of the greatest cities in the world. In fact, the crusaders were so desperate that they armed the stable-lads and cooks by covering them with horse-blankets and quilts to protect their bodies and giving them copper cooking pots for helmets. For weapons they carried kitchen implements. This motley collection of individuals was turned to face the walls of the city and Robert of Clari claimed that ‘when the emperor’s foot-soldiers saw our common people so hideously arrayed they had so great fear and so great terror of them that they never dared move or come towards them’.
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Slowly the Greek army advanced towards the French knights, gradually increasing the pressure on them, inexorably closing the space between the forces. The crusaders were not daunted, and they too began to move forwards. Like boxers sizing each other up, the two sides shadowed and feinted, yet neither was willing to deliver the first blow. The leaders of the French army had laid down the strictest, most explicit instructions for the knights to maintain order and not to charge before any formal command. Countless times in the past, small groups of crusading knights, fired by the chance to perform heroic deeds, had hurtled into the enemy and fatally fragmented their own forces, often losing their lives as well. This was such a problem in western armies that the Rule of the Knights Hospitaller (the regulations governing the order) threatened the loss of his horse to any man who broke ranks before a general instruction to charge. The idea of maintaining good order sounds so simple, but in the heat of a battle, with communications almost impossible and adrenaline coursing through the warriors’ veins, it was incredibly difficult to achieve.
The crusaders decided to choose two of the bravest warriors from each contingent to take command of each section of the army. They were to order the men to ‘trot’ to move forwards and to ‘spur’ if they wanted to attack. Count Baldwin of Flanders led his men forwards at a trot, followed by the count of Saint-Pol and Peter of Amiens, and then Henry of Flanders in the third group. In contrast to their bizarrely clothed camp followers, the main body of knights was a splendid sight. Set in close formation with all their horses brightly covered in silk or cloth caparisons, their banners bearing the different coats of arms fluttering above them, their shields gleamed and their helmets and chain mail shone brightly. This undulating array of colour moved gently along, accompanied by the clicking of their horses’ hooves and the clinking of weapons and equipment. The foot-soldiers marched behind them, again keeping close order.
By this time, news of the impending battle had reached the doge over on the Golden Horn. Dandolo again showed how fiercely loyal he was to his crusading comrades and declared that he would live or die in the company of the pilgrims. Quickly he led as many of his men as possible towards the crusader camp at the Blachernae.
When Baldwin had moved two full bowshots from the camp, the senior warriors in his contingent advised him to halt. ‘Lord, you do not well to fight the emperor so far away from the camp, for if you fight him there and have need of help, those who are guarding the camp will not be able to help you.’
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They recommended that he return to the palisades where the crusaders could engage in combat more effectively. Baldwin agreed and he, along with his brother Henry, began to turn back. The matter of preserving good, coherent order in a medieval army was not simply a question of discipline, however. One central concern to the whole knightly ethos was the issue of honour. When Hugh of Saint-Pol and Peter of Amiens saw Baldwin turn back, they were shocked and felt that he brought shame upon the crusading army for doing so. Disregarding the earlier instructions to hold together, they resolved to take over the vanguard themselves in order to preserve the honour of the French forces. Baldwin was appalled and sent urgent messages that they should drop back, but three times Hugh and Peter refused. On the contrary, they started to move towards the Greeks. The crusaders’ carefully constructed unity looked perilously compromised. Peter of Amiens, along with Eustace of Canteleux, one of the senior knights in the Saint-Pol contingent, gave the order: ‘Lords, ride forward now, in God’s name, all at the trot.’
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Far from being cowed by the size of the imperial army, it seems that some of the crusaders were prepared to take an emphatically aggressive approach. The rest of the army saw what was happening and cried out for God to protect these brave men. Robert of Clari described the windows of the Blachernae palace and the walls of the city as being filled with ladies and maidens watching the battle, who said that ‘our men seemed like angels because they were so beautiful, so finely armed and with their horses so finely accoutred’.
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Here, Robert appears to be drawing rather too heavily on the conventions of a tournament and one doubts that the crusaders were viewed by their adversaries as being remotely angelic.