The twin emphases of the new emperor’s letter were, first, the moral justification of his cause—namely to reinstate his unjustly deposed father - and, second, the glorious news that the Orthodox Church accepted papal supremacy. Naturally he acknowledged God’s hand in his own and Isaac’s deliverance. He also took pains to explain why the crusaders had needed to besiege Constantinople, although he provided no details of the military engagements. In line with Hugh of Saint-Pol’s report, he argued that it was ‘a totally unforeseen task’ that caused force to be needed to establish his power in the city. He blamed the wicked propaganda spread by the usurper Alexius III: ‘He had so polluted with poisonous speeches the royal city, which sighed for us, that he declared the Latins [the crusaders] came to subvert ancient public freedom.’ In fact, of course, Alexius III had, quite naturally, been playing on negative perceptions of westerners to help his cause. The essence of these ideas was certainly attractive to the Byzantines and undoubtedly remained a potent factor under the new regime, too.
Alexius IV then addressed the issue of greatest interest to Pope Innocent, the standing of the Orthodox Church. He stressed how much this had motivated the crusaders to help him: ‘One factor, I confess, especially disposed the hearts of the pilgrims to our aid.’ In other words, the crusaders were not driven by the earthly desires of greed or glory, but by higher motives. He continued:
... we devoutly promised that we would humbly recognise the ecclesiastical head of all Christendom, namely, the Roman pontiff ... and we would, with all our might, lead the Eastern Church to him if Divine Mercy should restore the throne due to us, knowing full well that tremendous honour and advantage should accrue to the empire and eternal glory to our name if the Lord’s seamless tunic should regain its unity in our time and through our efforts.
Alexius also stressed his own determination and desire to recognise papal supremacy.
After all these good tidings, however, a complication emerged that revealed Alexius’s weakness as an emperor and the potentially porous nature of his promises. He wrote: ‘we will prudently and with all our might influence the Eastern Church toward the same end’. Pope Innocent might have smiled wryly at this line. Alexius was, in effect, saying that he would try to persuade the Orthodox churchmen to follow his lead, but such was his restricted power that he could not—as emperors in times past had done - simply order his ecclesiastics to take a particular course of action, certain in the knowledge that they would agree. Even if the Orthodox patriarch consented to this, such was the fragmented nature of imperial authority at this time that churchmen in the provinces might continue to act differently, if they so wished. To the cynic, therefore, Alexius’s promises had a hollow ring: only his own restoration to power was the one certain accomplishment of the crusaders.
Once Alexius was crowned, the crusade leaders en masse sent copies of a letter to the West parading their achievements.
19
To their advantage, of course, was their success and, self-evidently, God’s favour, although as Alexius IV’s own letter revealed, a few issues were not as clear-cut as might have been hoped. The nobles’ letter survives in similar copies addressed to King Otto IV of Germany, to all western Christians and to the pope himself. Several other copies of this message may have been sent, but are not extant.
The letter covers the main points of the story: the Treaty of Zara, the journey to Constantinople, the surprise at the poor reception accorded to Prince Alexius, the conflict with the usurping Alexius III, the crusaders’ steadfastness against superior forces, the emperor’s ignominious flight and the coronation of Alexius IV All of this was made possible because they were divinely blessed. The opening line makes this clear: ‘How much the Lord has done for us - on the contrary not for us, but for His name—how much glory he has bestowed in these days we will briefly narrate ...’ Later on, similarly: ‘if anyone of us wishes to be glorified, he be glorified in the Lord and not in himself or in another’. That the crusaders acted with absolute propriety is made resoundingly clear. The scale of their achievement lends the letter a predictably upbeat tone and their decision to remain at Constantinople over the winter of 1203 is portrayed in the most positive manner. Furthermore, Alexius IV’s financial and military support for the crusaders also seemed assured.
The copy of the letter addressed to the Christian faithful tried to capitalise on this encouraging presentation of events by urging churchmen to rouse volunteers to complete the Lord’s work. In other words, more crusaders were needed. Strong, virile men were required and, perhaps over-optimistically, they were assured that the easier section of the campaign was to come: ‘Certainly, the vexing and almost unbearable great mass of hardships that stretched across our backs does not await them, for the power that descends from Heaven has mercifully relieved us of it.’ The crusade leaders argued that ‘a modicum of tribulation and labour will not only make for them a momentary name, but it will also bestow upon them an eternal hundredweight of glory’. Thus, the usual allurements of honour and divine approval were enhanced by the thought that the campaign would succeed quite quickly.
20
It was hoped that these new recruits would not only ensure a greater chance of success in the Holy Land, but would help to make good the losses of men at Zara and Corfu.
Alexius was quick to begin to honour his undertaking to pay over a large sum of money to the crusaders. He presented 50,000 marks directly to the Venetians and a further 36,000 were given to the doge as the outstanding balance owed by the crusaders from the original contract of April 1201. The remainder went to the crusade leaders and allowed those who had borrowed money for their passage on the ships to pay it back.
21
At last it seemed as though the burden under which the expedition had been labouring was beginning to lift. Yet underneath, all was not well.
While the crusaders’ financial situation improved, that of Isaac and Alexius was becoming critical. The huge sums of money needed to keep their promises to the westerners were far beyond their means. Alexius III had managed to take considerable wealth with him into exile, and this, plus the cost of fighting the crusaders and the general degeneration of imperial authority over recent months, meant that the treasuries were almost bare. Yet the new emperors knew that they had to satisfy the demands of their warlike guests.
One option remained, a route that opened them up to divine punishment : to provide the necessary gold and silver, they started to melt down some of the precious ecclesiastical ornaments that made Constantinople a spiritual powerhouse. This decision shows just how desperate the Greeks had become; to commit such an act of sacrilege was surely to provoke God’s wrath. There are occasional examples of churches in western Europe melting down precious vessels to generate cash for departing crusaders, but at least this could be excused as helping God’s work. Here, it was the rapacious demands of the crusaders - ‘thirsting after libations as copious as the Tyrrhenian Sea’, as Niketas Choniates vividly described it - that led to this outrageous behaviour. Words could barely express the mixture of fury, exasperation and shock that Niketas felt. He saw this as a turning point for Byzantium, a moment at which Alexius IV so shattered the proper order of things that he destroyed the integrity of the empire. Niketas wrote: ‘In utter violation of the law, he touched the untouchable, whence, I think, the Roman state was totally subverted and disappeared.’ The emperor’s men went to their work with vigour: ‘It was a sight to behold: the holy icons of Christ consigned to the flames after being hacked to pieces with axes and cast down, their adornments carelessly and unsparingly removed by force, and the revered and all-hallowed vessels seized from the churches with utter indifference and melted down and given over to the enemy troops as common silver and gold.’ For Niketas this heresy was compounded by the apparent indifference of both the emperors and the general population. As he concluded: ‘In our silence, not to say callousness, we differed in no way from those madmen, and because we were responsible, we both suffered and beheld the most calamitous of evils.’
22
As the summer wore on, the emperor often came to see the crusader nobles. He had grown close to some of them, particularly Boniface of Montferrat. While his dealings with the westerners were cordial enough, he was finding the imposition of his authority on the people of Byzantium a much more challenging task. Just as the crusaders had viewed the Greeks with suspicion for decades, so the reverse was true: the Byzantines were always sceptical about the motives of western armies passing by Constantinople and feared their possible aggression. It should also be remembered that the anti-Latin riots of the early 1180s had attracted massive popular support. The role of the crusaders as the men who had delivered Prince Alexius to the imperial title raised potentially enormous anxieties and animosities. As we have seen, the young man had no experience of power, or any base of loyal supporters to call upon. In effect, Alexius had only become emperor because of the danger that his western allies posed to Constantinople and the cowardice of Alexius III. In the weeks since his return the new ruler had become painfully aware of the antipathy that many of his people bore him and his allies. He also needed to impose his control on those parts of the Byzantine Empire outside Constantinople. In the days before television broadcasts could transmit images of authority to the provinces, a medieval ruler—and particularly one who had come to the throne in such complicated circumstances - had to get in the saddle and go out to show his face. The emperor needed to process around his territories and receive the submission of his subjects or, if they resisted, bring them to heel by force. A progress of this sort would also raise more of the funds he so urgently needed, but to undertake this Alexius would require help and inevitably it was to the crusaders that he turned.
He came to the camp and summoned a meeting of the leading nobles. This was no social visit; all assembled in Baldwin of Flanders’s tent. Alexius paid tribute to his allies’ help - ‘you have done me the greatest service that any people have yet rendered to any Christian man’—but he had to state what must have been increasingly apparent to all: ‘I should like you to know that a number of my people do not love me, though they make a fair pretence of doing so. Moreover, the Greeks as a whole are full of resentment because it is by your help that I have regained my empire.’
23
Alexius knew that the crusaders’ contract with the Venetians was due to expire in late September and that they would, therefore, be leaving Constantinople very soon. He acknowledged that he had little chance of fulfilling his promises to the westerners by then: he needed time to gather the money, the shipping and the military forces that he was obliged to provide. More pertinently, he had his own fate to think of Villehardouin’s report of the emperor’s speech has an authentic whiff of desperation: ‘The Greeks, I must tell you, hate me because of you; if you leave me, I shall lose my empire, and they will put me to death.’
24
The new emperor simply had not had the time to cement his position. He pleaded with the crusaders to help him and, again, he offered hugely attractive financial incentives. Alexius asked them to stay with him until March 1204, the time of the next-but-one sea passage. If they remained he vowed to pay for the cost of the fleet until September 1204, one year after the expiry of the deal with the Venetians, and to provide foodstuffs for the Frenchmen and Italians until their departure in the spring. By then, he estimated, he would have established genuine order in his lands and there would be no danger of his predecessor regaining them. With Alexius holding real power, taxes and tributes would be available to pay the crusaders and to provide the fleet to transport the Byzantine forces. If these proposals were adopted, the crusaders would have the entire summer of 1204 to fight the Muslims - properly supplied and with their army enhanced by the support of the Greeks.
The nobles absorbed what the emperor had just told them. To many, Alexius’s present weakness was all too plain and the advantages of the deal he suggested were obviously mutually beneficial. They were painfully aware, however, of just how excruciatingly difficult it had been to persuade the army to accept the young man’s first offer at Corfu. The fact that much of it had not yet been fulfilled, coupled with the need for an even greater delay before sailing to the Holy Land, would be a truly awkward proposition to sell. The leadership told Alexius that they needed to consult their men, and the emperor returned to his city.
The following day Baldwin, Boniface and Dandolo summoned the nobles and the knights to a meeting. Inevitably there was uproar when these new ideas were presented and the same fault-lines as on Corfu opened up afresh. The bulk of the leadership, having committed themselves to the attack on Zara and to the support of Alexius, wanted to accept the plan and winter in Constantinople. To the faction that had threatened to go to Brindisi, this was merely another delay: the whole affair seemed to them to be dragging on interminably. The dissenters reminded Baldwin and Boniface that they had agreed to come to Constantinople on the condition that they could leave the city when they so requested.
The senior crusaders’ argument played upon the lateness of the sailing season. If they allowed a couple of weeks to gather everything together and to fettle the fleet, and then were a month at sea, the crusade would not arrive in Syria until the early winter. Rain and cold meant that the Holy Land would be unsuited to warfare. Instead the army would be penned up in one of the coastal cities, probably creating tension with the locals and certainly consuming valuable supplies. Waiting in Constantinople until March meant free provisions, and would ensure that Alexius was safely established in power, thereby enabling him to give his full support to the expedition. The Venetians would remain in the city as well and a rested, properly equipped, force would be very much better placed to conquer the land overseas.