The Great Betrayal (12 page)

The skirmishes that took place between the Crusaders and the forces under the Emperor Alexius show quite clearly that the Emperor never intended to promote a major engagement. It was enough that, by leading out his troops, he had caused the Venetians to withdraw. The Byzantine army, with its superior numbers, was in a good position to destroy the Crusaders in a pitched battle. Either a lack of morale on their part or an unwillingness on the part of the Emperor and his generals to commit them prevented any such event.

It had never at any time been Byzantine policy to sacrifice troops when a successful outcome to an engagement might be achieved by other means. In this respect the Byzantines have often incurred the contempt of western commentators, many of whom, brought up in the warlike tradition of northern Europe, have always in their hearts respected the Spartans more than the Athenians, and the aggressive warrior more than the cultured administrator.

“The Byzantines,” writes Professor David Talbot Rice,
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“were never a very warlike people. St. Basil had decreed that a soldier who killed should do three years’ penance, and though this dictum was soon discarded, the soldier’s profession was never a favoured one, nor was death in battle ever considered glorious. Even to fight against the infidel was to be avoided if possible, and the idea of a religious Crusade was something quite foreign to the Byzantine outlook. The endless intrigues and quibbles of Byzantine diplomacy which has so shocked westerners, were often enough the outcome of a genuine desire to avoid bloodshed…”

Of what avail in Byzantine eyes was the slaughter of an army if it entailed the decimation of their own? For centuries they had maintained their hold over eastern Europe, and large parts of Asia and North Africa, always as much by diplomacy as by feats of arms. They had seen the barbarians come and go, and they—inheritors of a complex political wisdom—had managed to survive. Only the simple believed that the sword was the sole ruler of the world. Time and again, with a minimum use of arms and a maximum use of statecraft and intelligence, they had seen barbarian invaders disintegrate into mutually hostile tribes.

Their empire was of this world—it was a mercenary trading empire—but at the root of all their thought was Christ’s dictum that ‘My Kingdom is not of the world’. It is too much to believe that corrupt Byzantine emperors like Alexius were even conscious of such ideas, but they had absorbed the essence of them in the very air that they breathed. Behind its God-guarded walls, the Imperial City, the New Rome, would continue to last (it had always been believed) only so long as God decreed that it should do. The Byzantine grew up with world-weariness in his veins. The marl at the roots of his own city was the body of ancient Rome, and behind him on every headland—from the Greek Peloponnese to Sicily, North Africa and the Levant—he saw the whitening bones of temples, fortresses and palaces: civilisations that had died centuries before his own was born. To the Byzantine these uncouth Crusaders, who for over a hundred years had been streaming out of the west to carve themselves small kingdoms in the east, were as dangerous, and just as ill-conceived in their opinions, as the Bulgars or the Turks. They had not been bought off on this occasion, but they could at least be left to batter themselves into submission against the unconquerable walls of the city.

The unwillingness of the Byzantine army to commit itself to a major engagement with the Crusaders could not be put down solely to demoralisation. Their object was to draw the attackers away from that section of the city where an unexpected success had been achieved, and to lure them to make an attack against the main landward walls. Villehardouin remarks that: “The Emperor Alexius brought out all his troops by gates which were about three miles away. So many troops moved out of the city that you might have believed the whole human race was there assembled.” It is probable that the Emperor himself came out with the main body of the army from the Golden Gate (which is about three miles from Blachernae), for at this remove he would have both space and time to draw up the army at his own convenience. The Byzantines then moved northward towards the Crusaders’ camp, being joined by other sections of the army who came out from the other gates on the main circuit of the walls—from the Second, the Third and the Fourth Military Gate, the latter just south of the civil gate of St. Romanus.

“When the Venetians came up to support the Crusaders they said to them: ‘We heard that you were engaged against all of the Greeks. We were worried about the outcome, so we hastened to help you!’ The French replied and said: ‘Thank God, we managed things well, for the Emperor did indeed march out against us—but he did not dare come to close grips.’ They asked the Venetians how things had gone with them, and the latter replied: ‘We made a successful assault, and even got within the city itself by scaling the walls. We have set fire to the city and there is no doubt that a great part of it is burned!’ ”

If the Doge and the barons felt that, on the whole, the day had resulted in nothing more than a reverse, they had at least contrived the ruin of an important part of Constantinople. The fire, sweeping under the north-easterly wind through the quarter of Blachernae, had caused more damage to the city than any previous attack in its long history. Although the palaces and the great houses, the aqueducts, the churches and state buildings were of marble and stone, the houses of ordinary citizens were built of wood. Dried out under the hot July sun, they went up in an incendiary crackle like a forest fire.

As the Crusaders withdrew to their camp “utterly exhausted, and with little to eat or drink”, they can have had small confidence in the outcome of the campaign. Although the Byzantine army had apparently been unwilling to engage, the French had been able to see for themselves just how large it was. Although the Venetians had managed for a time to take possession of part of the sea-walls, they had been forced to withdraw—and they would probably have been unable to hold them even if the Crusaders had not asked for their help.

As for the Crusaders themselves, they had had a very unpleasant surprise in their own attack on the barbican at Blachernae. There they had come up against a violent resistance—fair-haired, moustachioed, battleaxe-swinging men, who had driven them back with considerable loss of life. These defenders had shown none of the Byzantine unwillingness to engage in coarse hand-to-hand conflict. It is possible that some of the Crusaders had heard of the Warings before—possible even that among the Norman knights there were some who realised that these formidable opponents were the descendants of those Anglo-Saxons whom King William the Norman had conquered at the Battle of Hastings a century and a half before. The most loyal and hardiest troops among all the polyglot Byzantine army were the Warings—the Varangian guard of the emperors. Whatever others might feel about the Normans and the French, the Warings hated them.

7

THE WARING GUARD

The Varangian guards, who alone showed themselves faithful to the ancient Roman virtues throughout the events of the Fourth Crusade, were in many respects unique. Other civilisations in the past had used bodies of picked soldiers from foreign countries to defend their rulers, and others were to use them in the future. What distinguished the guards of the Byzantine emperors was the fact that they retained their own language and customs, and their own religious practices. They elected their own officers, and were governed by their own laws. Their commander was known as ‘The Leader of the Axe-bearing Guard’, or the Acolyte. His title of the Acolyte, or the Follower, was derived from the fact that he always followed immediately behind the Emperor, and stood behind his chair at banquets or his throne on official occasions.

The Turks were later to create a formidable body of warriors in the Janissaries. These were of Christian birth, but were converted Moslems, and were subject to the laws of Islam. The Varangian guards were distinguished from the Janissaries (who would one day occupy a similar position to themselves in the then Turkish city) in that they were free men, obeying their own laws, and—unlike the Janissaries—were never accused of turning against their rulers. Even under weak and corrupt emperors like Alexius III the imperial guard remained faithful and, when required, fought to the death. These men were certainly unusual in the history of mercenaries or ‘Foreign Legions’.

They had come to the far end of Europe prepared to fight against any who threatened the sacred person of the Emperor (no matter what his character). Of them it might indeed be said:

We can know little (as we care little)

Of the Metropolis: her candled churches,

Her white-gowned pederastic senators,

The cut-throat factions of her Hippodrome,

The eunuchs of her draped saloons…

We, not the City, are the Empire’s soul;

A rotten tree lives only in its rind.
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The first mention of a Waring guard in Constantinople occurs in 1034. They were reorganised by the Emperor Romanus IV in the mid-eleventh century, and from then on they form a colourful thread in the history of the city. The term Varini or Waring is first found in the Roman historian Tacitus writing in the first century a.d. about the peoples of Germany. It seems to have been used loosely to cover Russians, Swedes, Danes and English, although in Byzantine times it was usually applied to the two latter races.

There is no doubt that after the Norman conquest of England in 1066 a great number of the defeated left their country rather than submit to Norman rule. “When the English had lost their liberty they were eager to find a way of throwing off the yoke of the invader. Some of them, therefore, made their way to Sven, King of the Danes, and urged him to recover the kingdom of his grandfather Canute. Many others went into exile in distant places—some to escape Norman rule, others to make money with the hope of being able one day to return to their homelands. Among the English there were some young men who went far afield and offered their services to the Emperor of Constantinople… The English exiles were well received and were used in battle against the Normans, against whom the Greek troops were too weak.”
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In southern Italy, Sicily, on the Adriatic coastline, and in Asia Minor, the Warings had fought Byzantine battles for over a century, against the steady encroachment of the Normans and the Turks.

After the Norman conquest of England, it certainly appears that a large section of the emperors’ guard was English. It has perhaps been forgotten how bitter the ‘Old English’ felt against the invaders of their island kingdom. The oppressive rule of the Normans undoubtedly led many of the finest Anglo-Saxons to emigrate. The Warings’ church in Constantinople was dedicated to SS. Nicolas and Augustine of Canterbury. One contemporary Byzantine historian stated that it was founded by an Englishman who reached Constantinople after the battle of Hastings. Some of the Warings were converted to the Greek Orthodox Faith, but it would seem that most of them still acknowledged the spiritual jurisdiction of Rome. This, however, did not make them any more sympathetic to the Italians, the French or the Normans. It is an interesting thought that, as early as the eleventh century, some of the English should have become wedded to the cause of the Greeks. It was a marriage that would be reaffirmed in the nineteenth century by Byron, and by innumerable Philhellenes since that date.

Usually described as the barbarian guard, or the axe-bearers, the distinctive weapon of the Warings was the Danish battleaxe. It was similar to those used by Harold’s troops against the Normans at the Battle of Hastings. Nicetas describes these axes as having only one blade—as opposed to the more familiar double-bladed axe. In the place of the second blade, there was a bayonet-shaped bill. The axe could, therefore, be used for thrusting, as well as for cutting. When wielded by these formidable warriors (most of whom were taller and stronger than the average man), the charge of the Waring guard must have been terrifying even to the battle-hardened Normans. A Byzantine historian, Leo the Deacon, described the appearance of the Waring soldiers. “They have flaxen or reddish hair and blue eyes. They will never be taken in battle, and rather than surrender they will kill themselves.” Their hair was worn long on either side of the face, and their beards were distinguished by large moustaches.

Quite apart from their appearance, the Warings must have been curiously incongruous figures at the Greek court of Byzantium, with its Levantine love of subtlety and its oriental love of luxury. Among the bejewelled, silk-clothed nobles and the corruptions of the city, they retained not only the hardihood of the north but something of those other virtues which would one day be allied to the puritan revolution. A contemporary account illustrates their respect for women. A member of the Waring guard had attempted to rape a peasant girl, who had stabbed and killed him while protecting herself. When the matter was investigated by their own officers, the Warings not only exonerated her from any charges but apologised on behalf of their dead comrade. They gave the girl all his property and, to show their disapproval of his action, refused to bury his body. They left it lying above ground, as would have been their custom if a Waring had committed suicide.

It was a curious accident of fate that it should have been the Warings who gave the Normans the fiercest opposition during the Fourth Crusade. These Danes and English had far more in common with the northern Normans (were indeed of the same basic stock) than they had with the Byzantine Greeks, the Pisans or the Anatolians among the rest of the imperial army. They deserve the tribute paid them by a later historian: “No bodyguard in any country was ever more completely trusted than the Varangians. None more completely deserved such trust. They retained their sturdy northern independence in the midst of a corrupt court… We may well feel satisfied that the Greek writers repeatedly point out that the emperors found their greatest safety in the spotless loyalty of those among our kinsmen who guarded them, and among whom were many who had left England rather than accept foreign rule.”
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