In the end this last argument won the day. If, as a majority of the leaders seemed to believe, it was possible to accept that Alexius would and could keep his promises, then the logic in delaying until the spring was overwhelming. The Venetians swore to remain in the service of the army until Christmas 1204 and, according to Villehardouin, Alexius ‘paid them enough to make it worth their while’.
25
The crusaders in turn took an oath to remain in association with the Venetians over the same length of time and the matter was settled.
With this important decision made, the emperor and the crusaders began to ready themselves to tour the provinces. The seniority of the men who accompanied Alexius on this campaign makes it clear just how serious a matter this was. Boniface of Montferrat, Hugh of Saint-Pol and Henry of Flanders, to name but a few, chose to take part in the expedition where their presence as powerful knights and skilled military men would be greatly valued. There was also, of course, the possibility of financial reward and an opportunity to accomplish feats of bravery. The Devastatio
Constantinopolitana
described Alexius proposing ‘substantial bonuses and money to our army’s knights and infantrymen for coming with him’.
26
Niketas Choniates suggests that the emperor offered Boniface of Montferrat 16 hundredweight in gold - an irresistible incentive.
27
It would not be prudent for the entire crusading army to leave Constantinople, however, because this might expose Isaac to danger. His son and the French nobles must have been well aware of the need to provide some protection to the ageing co-emperor. Thus Count Baldwin and Count Louis of Blois remained at Constantinople, along with the Venetians whose naval expertise was not required on this particular occasion.
The crusaders’ preparations were marred by the death of Matthew of Montmorency, one of the most senior knights on the whole campaign and a veteran of the Third Crusade. Matthew had strongly supported the diversion to Constantinople and headed one of the seven contingents of the army outside the city. He fell ill in August 1203 and died the same month, deeply mourned by all. Villehardouin paid glowing tribute to ‘one of the best knights in the whole kingdom of France, one of the most deeply loved and respected’.
28
Interestingly, Matthew was buried in Constantinople in the church of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, a most appropriate choice for a man who had died in the service of Christ and was striving to reach the earthly Jerusalem at the time of his death.
In mid-August Alexius and his crusader allies moved out of Constantinople to begin their task. Another object of their campaign was to capture Alexius III, who harboured hopes of a return to power. Given his present weakness, however, the renegade was unlikely to stray too close to such a formidable force. The ignominious departure of Alexius III and the presence of his successor and the western soldiers meant that most of the local tributaries to Constantinople came to pay homage to the new ruler as was required.
Alexius IV and the crusaders did not, however, travel especially widely. It seems that they chose not to visit western regions of the empire, such as Thessalonica and the Peloponnese, probably out of fear of being away from Constantinople for too long.
One important figure who chose not to acknowledge Alexius was someone who would come to haunt the crusaders when they took control of Byzantium for themselves—Johanitza, the king of Bulgaria (1197—1207). The Bulgarians, the neighbouring Vlachs and the pagan Cumans had been a thorn in the side of the Byzantines for more than 20 years and Johanitza had established independent rule over a sizeable territory. Bulgaria was formerly subject to Greek overlordship, but its rulers had cast this aside in the 1180s. The advent of a new emperor, whether he had western allies or not, gave Johanitza no reason to sacrifice his autonomy and so he declined to acknowledge the young man’s authority.
29
The emperor travelled north-west to the city of Adrianople in Thrace, where his rival Alexius III had briefly tried to establish himself - although he had prudently departed before his enemies arrived. Niketas reports that the joint crusader and Byzantine force subjugated the Thracian cities and then extracted as much money as possible from them.
30
Dissent broke out between the crusaders and the emperor because Henry of Flanders claimed that he had not been paid a sum of money promised to him. Without this incentive, the count and his troops departed for Constantinople, showing just how fragile the relationship between Alexius and at least some of the crusaders was. It also suggests - in spite of his successful campaign—the scale of the emperor’s struggle to find the cash to keep his lavish promises to the westerners. Boniface and the others remained with Alexius and completed their journey without further mishap.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘The incendiary angel of evil’
The Great Fire of August 1203
T
HOSE CRUSADERS WHO remained in Constantinople settled down for the autumn and winter, waiting for their colleagues to return and preparing for new adventures in the spring. In theory, this should have been a relatively uneventful time, but the westerners were soon to witness a most terrible event - and one largely triggered by their presence. In spite of incidents such as the anti-western purge of the 1180s and other occasional attacks on outside groups over the previous decades, a sizeable number of Europeans still lived and worked in Constantinople. Some, like the Pisans, had shown loyalty to the imperial regime during the siege, but in the aftermath of Alexius III’s demise they prudently changed policy and came to terms with Isaac and his son. Clearly this opportunism upset many Byzantines, and Niketas reports that Greek hostility towards the Pisans and a colony of Amalfitans led a Constantinople mob to burn the westerners’ dwellings, which in turn prompted most of them to move over the Golden Horn to ‘share a table and a tent’ with their fellow-Catholics.
1
The crusaders’ overt responsibility for imposing a change of regime on the Greeks and their continued presence as a blunt instrument of the young emperor fuelled resentment towards all aliens. On 19 August 1203 a brawl started between a group of Greeks and a party of indigenous westerners, in the aftermath of which someone started a fire—‘out of malice’, according to Villehardouin. Other sources indicate that the conflict was between crusaders and the Greeks and that the former, lacking any other way to defend themselves, set fire to a building. Niketas Choniates, who was present in the city at this time, gives a different and more detailed version. He makes plain that the crusaders initiated what became a catastrophic series of events and that their voracious desire for money lay at the root of the incident. Intriguingly, their initial target was not the Byzantines, but the occupants of a mosque located just outside the city walls, across the Golden Horn from the crusader camp. This building was not the only mosque in the city (there had been such buildings in Constantinople for centuries), but the others lay comfortably behind the walls. Its construction probably dated from the period of Isaac’s rapprochement with Saladin. Almost certainly as a response to the recent anti-western activity in Constantinople, a group of Flemish crusaders, along with a few Pisans and Venetians, commandeered a group of local fishing boats and ferried themselves over to the mosque.
They fell upon the building and started to seize its possessions. Taken completely by surprise, the Muslims defended themselves as best they could and used whatever came to hand to resist the drawn swords of the crusaders. They called for help from the Greeks, who came running, eager to fight back against the hated invaders. The combined efforts of the Muslims and the locals put the crusaders on the back foot, but as the Venetians did during the first siege, they resorted to arson to protect their withdrawal and as a way of inflicting retribution upon their opponents.
Not content with destroying the infidels’ place of worship, the westerners spread out to several other locations and set them ablaze, too. What Niketas describes to us, therefore, is a serious effort to avenge the earlier anti-western riots. It is doubtful whether this was sanctioned by the crusade leadership because they would not have wanted to damage the already fragile relationship with the Greeks any further, and certainly not in such a dramatic and destructive manner. The presence of Pisans, as recent victims of the mob, and the use of local rather than crusader shipping also indicate an unofficial and unauthorised raid. Notwithstanding his aversion to the westerners, Niketas provides sufficiently compelling detail for us to regard his account as the most accurate account of the incident.
In any event, the consequences were appalling. While the fire of 17 July had caused quite a lot of damage, this new conflagration was very much worse. In the dry summer heat the blaze quickly gripped the densely packed wooden houses that lay inland from the Golden Horn, about one-third of a mile from the easternmost tip of the city. No one could control the flames, let alone quell them. To Niketas it was ‘a novel sight, defying the power of description’. There had been fires in the city before, but this one ‘proved all the others to be but sparks’.
2
The first two days and nights witnessed the worst damage as the north wind carried the blaze across the city towards the Forum of Constantine. At times the breeze must have turned and the fire twisted and meandered like a starving beast gorging itself on everything in its path. It was not just the wooden buildings that fell prey to the inferno. The great Agora (market place) was consumed and its elegant porticoes toppled to the ground, while mighty columns were ensnared and licked to destruction by the flames.
The crusaders, based on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, could only watch as the fire devoured great churches, huge private houses and wide streets, packed with merchants’ shops. Smoke billowed into the sky as the flames leaped from building to building. Screams of the trapped and dying pierced the air. The crackle of burning wood, the abrasive rattle of disintegrating stonework, the percussive thud of falling masonry pierced by the sharper, staccato crack of shattering roof tiles, all generated a truly hellish noise.
For day after day the blaze rolled onwards, its front now hundreds of yards long and swallowing huge areas of the most densely populated parts of the city. The fire reached down towards the harbour and even clawed towards the great Hagia Sophia itself. Niketas reports that the nearby Arch of the Milion (this was the point in Constantinople from which all roads were measured) was burned, as was the ecclesiastical court complex known as the Synods, whose baked brick walls and deep foundations failed to resist the heat - ‘everything within was consumed like candle-sticks’.
3
The fire had torn a huge strip across the city, stretching from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. Constantinople was rent by ‘a great chasm or river of fire flowing through her midst’, and people with relatives at the opposite end of the city had to sail around the flames to reach them.
4
While the Great Palace escaped unscathed, the Hippodrome and the Forum of Constantine were slightly damaged. A westerly wind pushed the blaze towards the Port of Theodosius, where it leaped over the walls and the sparks even ignited a ship passing close by.
Finally, after three days the fire satiated itself and began to subside. Water from the cisterns and aqueducts helped to quell what remained, leaving no fewer than 440 acres of land a charred and smoking ruin. Niketas—a man with a deeply engrained love of, and pride in, his city - lamented the pitiful scene that confronted him: ‘Woe is me! How great was the loss of those magnificent, most beautiful palaces filled with every kind of delight, abounding in riches and envied by all’
5
The locals firmly believed that the westerners were responsible for the conflagration. From that time on, Villehardouin informs us, it was not safe for any to remain in Constantinople and, he estimated, 15,000 men, women and children fled, carrying all that they had managed to save, across to the crusader camp. In one sense, with more mouths to feed, these people caused a short-term problem. However, they were also a potential source of fighting strength and skilled labour: ‘one army was fashioned from all’, as the
Devastatio Constantinopolitana
summarised.
6
In any event, aside from the loss of life and property, the fire created a suppurating rift between the Byzantines and the crusaders, something that would do much to create further tensions in an already difficult relationship.
Ignoring the crusaders’ likely culpability for the fire and the huge financial hardships that many thousands of the citizens now faced, Isaac continued to gather up sacred treasures in order to make the financial payments required by the westerners. Niketas fulminated at the emperor’s apparent failure to respond to the fire and his continued defilement of religious artefacts. He condemned Isaac as ‘the incendiary angel of evil’, a play on the old emperor’s family name of Angelos that clearly indicated the writer’s anger.
7
In spite of the continued plundering, the losses caused by the fire meant that the flow of money to the crusaders now began to dry up, which inevitably caused ill-feeling.
Soon, with or without imperial direction, the Greeks rebuilt the section of wall that had been demolished at the crusaders’ request. The absence of around half of the western army, and the anger they felt after the fire, gave the Byzantines the incentive to execute such a confrontational move and showed how the popular mood was growing ever more militant. Frustrated by these developments, Baldwin sent messengers to the army with Emperor Alexius to inform his colleagues of the cessation of payments and urging them to return to Constantinople as soon as possible. On 11 November 1203 the expedition arrived back at the city, in part satisfied with the way in which the new emperor had been received, but also grimly worried at the deteriorating relations with their nominal allies.