To Niketas, the most insufferable aspect of the sack of Constantinople was the westerners’ utterly uncompromising treatment of the inhabitants. Any attempt to reason with the conquerors provoked a drawn dagger and the prick of cold steel. People who tried to leave the city were stopped and their carts ruthlessly plundered. So focused were the crusaders on the desire for loot that many no longer seemed capable of reason.
The westerners’ aggression found an outlet in sexual violence, too. As with so many armies through the ages, the defiling of a defeated enemy’s women was both a physical release and another manifestation of victory. With no heed to their victims’ screams, and ignoring the anguished cries of fathers, husbands or brothers, the crusaders forced themselves upon women, young and old, married or maiden. Niketas asked: ‘Did these madmen, raging thus against the sacred, spare pious matrons and girls of marriageable age or those maidens who, having chosen a life of chastity, were consecrated to God?
12
Nicholas Mesarites wrote of the westerners ‘tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men’.
13
Some of those spared were taken off as captives to be ransomed. People tried to hide from the crusaders and a few attempted to seek sanctuary in the churches, but ‘there was no place that could escape detection or that could offer asylum to those who came streaming in’.
14
Over the next few days the invaders were relentless and thorough in their stripping of the city and rooted out anything of worth, no matter how well hidden it was.
They appropriated houses, turning out the inhabitants or taking them prisoner. Villehardouin’s comment on this was very matter-of-fact: ‘everyone took quarters where they pleased, and there was no lack of fine dwellings in that city’.
15
Interestingly, for Robert of Clari, the issue of accommodation was far more divisive. As a senior member of the crusade hierarchy, Villehardouin must have been allocated an appropriately sumptuous palace from the many that existed within Constantinople. From Robert’s far humbler perspective, the leadership had chosen to look after its own needs and to ignore those of the poor. Robert alleged that the division of the best houses was settled amongst the nobles, without the knowledge or agreement of the lesser men, and he saw this as a sign of future bad faith and betrayal of the common people.
16
The crusaders seized more than money, relics, precious objects and houses. They paraded around the streets wearing splendid robes. They adorned their horses’ heads with fine linen veils and the drum-shaped hats and wigs of curly white hair popular amongst the women of the city. There were enormous alcohol-fuelled celebrations. A western prostitute, quickly returned from her pre-battle exile, straddled the patriarch’s throne in the Hagia Sophia and then jumped up to sing and dance around the sacred altar, kicking up her heels and delighting her audience.
The wine cellars of Constantinople were ransacked and such was the westerners’ urge to drink that they did not, as was customary at the time, bother to mix in water. Singing and revelry lasted day and night. Some men ate local foods, others commandeered the ingredients needed to make dishes more familiar to them. They stewed the chine (backbone) of oxen in great cauldrons, they boiled chunks of pickled hog with ground beans, flavoured with a powerful garlic sauce. Then they sat and ate their fill, regardless of whether they were using sacred objects as tables, chairs or stools.
17
Niketas Choniates himself fell victim to the crusaders and from his narrative we get an exceptional insight into the experiences of an individual on the receiving end of the looting. History is often said to be written by the victors; in medieval times this was especially true and so, while bearing in mind the author’s understandable prejudices, Niketas’s work offers a rare and revelatory perspective. ‘On that truly hateful day’ (13 April), as he aptly described it, many of his friends gathered at his house. His main residence had been destroyed in the fire of late 1203 and this new property stood near the Hagia Sophia.
As the crusaders spread towards them, Niketas and his companions saw how they grabbed at people, extorted money and goods or committed assaults. The Greeks had to improvise: part of the author’s household was a Venetian-born wine-merchant named Dominic and his wife. This man possessed a helmet, armour and weapons, which he donned to pretend that he had just taken the house for himself When crusaders arrived to take over the property, Dominic beat them away, cursing them in their own language and claiming that the house and those inside were already his. Over the next few hours, more and more men tried to lay claim to the place and Dominic despaired of being able to resist them. During a lull in these events he urged Niketas and his household to depart so that the men could remain free and the women inviolate.
Dominic led the Greeks to the house of another Venetian who had elected to stay in the city despite the recent hostilities. They did not rest there long, but chose to be dragged along by the hands behind Dominic, as if they were his prisoners. Soon, however, the servants in Niketas’s household melted away to fend for themselves. They left their master and his friends to carry on their shoulders the children who were too small to walk and left the writer to protect an infant at his own breast. Niketas’s wife was heavily pregnant and this, of course, added yet another pressure to the group. This proud, educated man led his entourage around Constantinople for five days before accepting that the situation could only deteriorate further: the crusaders continued to strip the city of all its valuables and to assault its people. Niketas decided that they had to leave.
On 17 April 1204 they began to make their way towards the Golden Gate—the site of so many triumphal returns for the emperors of Byzantium in days gone by. Now it was the exit point for refugees, driven from their homes by the barbarian invaders. As Niketas and his household moved towards the gate they passed many westerners laden with booty. Sometimes crusaders stopped the group to see if they were hiding fine clothes under their dirty tunics or concealing gold or silver on their person. While some of the crusaders looked for money, others were more interested in the young women in the party, and Niketas told his female companions to dirty their faces and to walk where the crowd was thickest so as to attract least attention. The small party of Greeks prayed for their safe passage and implored God that they should pass through the Golden Gate unharmed.
At the church of the Martyr Mokios one particularly predatory crusader grabbed a young girl from the midst of the group and started to drag her away, clearly intending to rape her. The girl’s father, an ageing judge, appealed for mercy, but he was thrust aside. He fell into the mud by the side of the road where he lay calling for someone to assist his daughter. He asked Niketas himself to help and, in an act of extraordinary courage, the writer chased after the abductor, imploring him to leave the girl alone. From Niketas’s descriptions of the sack of Constantinople one might expect that his efforts would have earned him a dagger in the chest. But such callous treatment of women cannot have been universal amongst the westerners because Niketas managed to convince some passing crusaders that they should prevent this outrage. So great was his agitation that he even pulled some of them along by the hand to encourage them to help.
They followed the thug back to his lodgings, where he locked the girl inside before turning to face his pursuers. Niketas accused the man of ignoring the commands of his leaders—presumably a reference to the oaths concerning the sanctity of women taken before the siege began— and depicted him as ‘braying like a salacious ass at the sight of chaste maidens’. He then turned to the crusaders nearby and challenged them to abide by their own laws and again he implored them to defend the girl. He appealed to the feelings of those who had wives and daughters of their own and he also prayed to Christ for help. His arguments soon struck a chord with his audience and they began to insist on the girl’s release. Initially the evildoer tried to ignore these protests, but he soon realised that the men were deadly serious when they threatened to hang him unless he freed her. Finally, reluctantly, he let the girl go, much to the delight and relief of all, and Niketas and his party hurried away and out of the Golden Gate.
Niketas described his anger and sorrow at leaving the city behind. He raged against the walls for remaining upright, yet failing to protect the inhabitants. He wondered when he would see the place again, ‘not as thou art, a plain of desolation and a valley of weeping, but exalted and restored’.
18
The writer and his party found their way to Selymbria, a town in Thrace, where they settled. He mentions the ridicule to which the local people subjected the fallen citizens and how they delighted in the great and the good being brought down to their level.
Nicholas Mesarites also witnessed crusader greed, violence and ill-treatment of the Greeks. He related that:
breasts of women were searched [to see] whether a feminine ornament or gold was fastened to the body or hidden in them, hair was unloosed and head-coverings removed, and the homeless and money-less dragged to the ground. Lamentation, moaning and woe were everywhere. Indecency was perpetrated, if any fair object was concealed within the recesses of the body; thus the ill-doers and mischief-makers abused nature itself. They slaughtered the new-born, killed prudent [matrons], stripped elder women, and outraged old ladies. They tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. Mortal blood was spilled on the holy altars, and on each, in place of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of the universe, many were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs, the wretched slew the innocent.
19
Palm Sunday and then Easter Day brought a brief pause in the looting as the crusaders gave thanks for the victory that the Lord had granted them. By this point the bulk of the movable plunder had been collected and it was time to share it out according to the agreement made the previous month. Three churches had been earmarked as storehouses for all the spoils of war, and ten Frenchmen and ten Venetians were set the task of guarding them. Day after day, men or carts had drawn up carrying the most incredible riches. Mountains of gold and silver objects, jewels and precious cloth all arrived at these buildings. The scale of the haul was immense and almost impossible to convey. Robert of Clari described the volume of plunder in epic terms: ‘Not since the world was made was there ever seen or won so great a treasure or so noble or so rich, not in the time of Alexander nor in the time of Charlemagne nor before nor after. Nor do I think, myself, that in the forty richest cities of the world there has been so much wealth as was found in Constantinople.’
20
To Villehardouin the volume of treasure was similarly vast: ‘Geoffrey of Villehardouin here declares that, to his knowledge, so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world.’
21
Baldwin of Flanders wrote of ‘an innumerable amount of horses, gold, silver, costly silk tapestries, gems and all those things that people judge to be riches is plundered. Such an inestimable abundance ... that the entire Latin world does not seem to possess as much.’
22
It is plain, however, that not all the men were scrupulous in submitting the booty to the common purse. All the oaths made beforehand were an indication that the crusade leaders expected people to hold back plunder and to try to keep it for themselves. Their fears were to be entirely justified: faced with the sensational riches they discovered in Constantinople, many found it impossible to surrender everything they had taken. Greed, long portrayed by churchmen as one of the greatest vices of the crusading knight, took firm root in the hearts and minds of the westerners. Tempted by the prodigious wealth that lay in front of them and disregarding any threats of hanging or excommunication, they kept back huge sums of money—possibly as much as 500,000 marks
23
—more indeed than the sum gathered in the official treasury.
Whatever the value of the purloined goods, there was enough in the common purse to pay off the first tranche of debts recorded in the March Pact. In other words, the Venetians received the 150,000 marks owed to them and the French crusaders 50,000. There was then a further 100,000 marks that the two groups divided equally between them, as well as 10,000 horses of various breeds.
The money was distributed amongst the crusaders according to a strict formula: a knight received twice as much as a mounted sergeant, who in turn was given twice as much as a foot-soldier. The Devastatio
Constantirzopolitana
provides detailed figures, stating that each knight received 20 marks; clerics and mounted sergeants 10 marks; and foot-soldiers five marks. This matches the ratio noted by Villehardouin and computes fairly neatly to a force of 10,000 men in the combined French, German and northern Italian contingents, with a further 10,000 Venetians, bringing the total crusading army to 20,000—a figure cited by Geoffrey himself.
24
Villehardouin was, tacitly at least, disappointed with the amount of spoil collected, although as we have seen, a huge proportion of the booty never reached the official treasuries. But if he was comparatively phlegmatic, Robert of Clari was incandescent. The lesser men had all seen Constantinople’s breathtaking wealth with their own eyes and their expectations of personal gain were commensurately high. When the funds were dispensed there was disbelief; foul play was deemed certain and Robert accused the treasury guards and the senior leaders of siphoning off whatever they wished. He denounced them for taking gold ornaments, cloth of silk and gold, and for sharing nothing other than plain silver—the mere pitchers that ladies would carry to the baths, as he complained—with the lesser knights and foot-soldiers. This, Robert believed, was an unjust reward for those who had shared in the sacrifices and struggles of the campaign and he hinted that this unfair treatment had repercussions for the leaders.
25