The Great Betrayal (23 page)

Another mammoth bronze to suffer a similar fate depicted Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus, one hand flung wide to the sky as if to command the sun to stand still. “It was so large,” de Clari tells us, “that between the crupper and the horse’s head there were ten herons’ nests, and the birds came back there every year to nest and lay their eggs…” Neither its beauty nor its size saved it from destruction. The colossal figure of the Hera of Samos, which had long dominated the forum of Constantine, suffered a similar fate. It was in the island of Samos that the two sculptors Rhoecus and Theodoras were said to have invented the art of bronze casting, and this statue was the masterpiece which had graced the great temple of Hera, founded by the tyrant Polycrates in the sixth century
b.c. The “ox-eyed, flower-bearing” Queen of the classical Heaven was soon no more than molten bronze to be recast as ingots and coins.

One of the marvels of Constantinople which had fascinated generations of travellers and visitors to the city was the Anemodoulion, the Servant of the Winds. This was the bronze figure of a woman set upon a tall obelisk. The statue was so perfectly balanced upon a revolving sphere that it swung and pointed in the direction of the wind. The sides of the obelisk were carved with bronze bas-reliefs depicting country scenes, rural festivities and the procession of the seasons of the year. Like ants picking clean a corpse, the troops swarmed all over the obelisk with ropes and tackles, pickaxes and crowbars. Soon nothing was left but a stone column pointing like a finger to the sky. The wind blew free over the bare top of the obelisk, where for so many centuries its Servant had twisted and turned, marking the onset of winter northerlies or the Sirocco blowing up in autumn from the Sea of Marmora.

Relics of ancient Rome, which subsequent generations would have given incalculable sums to be able to see and admire, were torn down and dragged off in handcarts to the greedy furnaces. The bronze statue of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, which had been one of the sacred monuments of ancient Rome, was borne away. Paris presenting the apple to Venus, and a famous bronze group which the Emperor Augustus had had cast to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium—these, too, were dragged off to the furnaces.

Nothing deterred the vandals. They did not destroy the idols and images of the ancient world out of any religious fanaticism. Their own Faith was equally desecrated, and a bronze statue of the Mother of God, long the focal point in the Forum of the Ox, was broken up and melted down. They had as little regard for it as for the great bronze charioteers—monuments to famous victors in the races—which they hauled away from the eastern end of the Hippodrome.

Meanwhile the fire continued to sweep through the rich quarter of the city between the Golden Horn and Mesé Street. It will never be known what treasures were lost in this and the previous two fires—what manuscripts from the classical world, what monuments of Byzantine art, painted ikons, illuminated manuscripts, and copies of the gospels and other religious works. In the roaring heat of the wood-fired blaze, marbles cracked and disintegrated and painted walls went up in smoke. Mosaic ceilings fell in as the inlaid pieces of marble, enamel and glass fell away from the liquefying bitumen that had held them in place. Walls and ceilings made of gold tesserae shrilled to the ground, as the twin layers of glass that held the gold-leaf intact cracked in the intense heat. Enamels ran like tears from images of the Virgin and of the Saints.

Through the crumbling ruins of the city scurried the greed-obsessed, lust-filled figures of the Crusaders. Here a group of men carried off one of the most curious bronzes of history—curious, for it was the work of a philosopher, the Saintly Apollonius of Tyana. He had depicted the force of good triumphing over evil in the shape of an eagle destroying a snake. It had reached Constantinople from Ephesus, where Apollonius (a mystic who had reconciled the spiritual beliefs of the Orient with the doctrines of Pythagoras) had died in his hundredth year. Born before Christ, Apollonius had outlived the Messiah by nearly half a century, had been acclaimed with divine honours, and had been hailed by many pagans as greater than his Hebrew predecessor.

In another part of the city a statue of Helen of Troy, dating from the finest period of Greek art, was dragged away to be broken up. “Fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars”, this statue caused Nicetas to lament: “Why could not Helen with her white arms and lovely form soften the hearts of the barbarians? Formerly she had made captive everyone who looked at her. She was clothed in a robe that hardly concealed her body but enhanced its beauty. Her forehead was high, and her hair seemed to move in an invisible wind. Her eyebrows were arched, and her lips looked as if she was just on the point of speaking. I do not possess the art to describe her adequately to those who now will never see her. She was all harmony, grace and elegance, and had been a delight to the eye of all who had ever beheld her.”

If the sublimity of great works of art could not move the heart of the conquerors, it was unlikely that the living bodies of the despised Byzantines would be treated with any kindness or charity. Slaughter and rapine was the order of the day. “On all sides there was nothing to be heard but cries, groans, laments and screams. Here there were fights and quarrels over loot, there prisoners were being led away, and everywhere among the raped and the wounded lay the dead…”

The story of how Nicetas himself escaped from the city must be typical of what happened to many others. His own large house had been burned to the ground in the second great fire. Now Nicetas was not only a Byzantine nobleman but had held the office of Great Logothete, so one may well believe him when he sighs over the loss of innumerable works of art and other treasures from his personal collection. After this disaster he and his family had been hidden by a Venetian merchant and his family in a small house near Santa Sophia. The reason for this act of kindness was that Nicetas himself had helped and hidden the Venetian in exactly the same way at the time when the Latins were being expelled from the city. A group of Nicetas’s friends also took refuge with him, but finally their protector was no longer able to conceal his distinguished guests and there was nothing for it but for all of them to try and-make their escape. Nicetas describes how his own daughters and several other young women in the group were dressed in rags, with their faces disfigured by dirt, so as to try and save them from the lust of the soldiers. Even so, as the small party was making its way out of the city, one of the young women (the daughter of a magistrate) was seized by a passing soldier. Her father, who was old and feeble, could do nothing to help and it was only the efforts of the historian himself that saved her. Nicetas pleaded with a group of passing soldiers and reminded them of their oath to respect the women of the city. His eloquence led them to restore the magistrate’s daughter, and to threaten to hang the Crusader who had tried to violate her.

As Nicetas and his friends left Constantinople they saw on all sides of them scenes of unbridled lust and cruelty, while the sight of the burning city filled their hearts with unspeakable anguish. Making their way south towards Selymbria in northern Thrace they saw among the stream of refugees in front of them the Patriarch of Constantinople himself. “Like a true follower of Jesus Christ he had neither money nor shoes, but rode out wearing but a single coat, and mounted on an ass. What so sadly distinguished him from the apostles of old was that, far from entering the New Jerusalem in triumph, he was leaving it behind him.”

They turned and took one last look at the great landward walls and the Golden Gate. Behind the defences, the roofs of palaces and houses and churches lifted above a haze of smoke. Were there any, among these nobles and church dignitaries who were now fleeing the city, who remembered the words of the Empress Theodora to Justinian when he was contemplating flight after the famous Nika Rebellion seven centuries before? “I hold,” she had said, “that now, if ever, flight is inexpedient even if it brings safety. When a man has once been born into the light it is inevitable that he should also meet death. But for an Emperor to become a fugitive is not a thing to be endured… Royalty makes a fine winding-sheet.”

For most of these fugitives this was the last sight that they would ever have of “Byzantium radiant in a blaze of gold”. For the rest of their lives they would remember with tears the Incomparable City. But the Constantinople for which they would mourn was already dead. Together with the Byzantine Empire it had ceased to exist on that fateful morning of Monday April 12th, 1204, when the Venetians and the Crusaders had breached the sea-walls on the Golden Horn. For two and a half centuries more it would lie, framed by its blue waters, a ravished and plundered husk awaiting extinction.

16

THE TRIUMPH OF VENICE

After three days the leaders of the army seem suddenly to have realised that they were destroying their inheritance. Order must be restored so that the formal collection and distribution of the plunder could take place. The Venetians must be paid, and that fatal debt which had been overhanging the Crusaders for the past three years must be discharged. From now on discipline was the order of the day and, as Villehardouin tells us, “The Count of Saint-Paul had one of his own knights hanged, with his shield suspended from his neck, for concealing treasure that should have gone into the common fund…”

Three churches had been set aside as collecting points for the loot. The conquerors appear to have felt no shame in, thus converting churches into depositories for plunder (much of it taken from other churches). It did not occur to them that they were offending their God even more than the money-changers whom Jesus had driven out of the temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the words of Jesus as reported by St. Matthew were singularly applicable to the Crusaders: “And he said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

The plunder that had been brought into the churches was now divided equally between the Crusaders and the Venetians, as had been agreed before the assault on the city. Out of the Crusaders’ share, 50,000 silver marks was immediately handed over to the Venetians to discharge their debt to them, and a further 100,000 marks was then divided among the troops. “A mounted sergeant,” Villehardouin tells us, “received twice as much as a foot sergeant, while a knight received twice as much as two mounted sergeants. No one, whoever we might be, received any more unless there was some special arrangement—or unless he happened to steal it.”

Of course the term ‘special arrangement’ may well have covered a multitude of sins while, as we know, an incredible amount of treasure had already been stolen by private individuals. But even allowing for all this, the total value of the plunder was in the region of 400,000 silver marks as well as some 10,000 horses. An early nineteenth-century calculation of the wealth in Constantinople in coin and property before the conquest gives a figure of £24,000,000.
^[1]
Sir Edwin Pears writing in the late nineteenth century commented that “the total amount distributed among the Crusaders and Venetians shows that the wealth of Constantinople had not been exaggerated. £80,000 was given to the Crusaders, a like sum to the Venetians, together with the £100,000 due to them. These sums had been collected in hard cash from a city where the inhabitants were hostile, and where they had in their wells and cisterns an easy means of hiding their treasures of gold, silver and precious stones—a means traditionally well known in the East—and in a city
half of which had been recently burned in three great fires
.”
_[2]
In terms of modern currency it would seem that not less than £6,000,000 was officially divided in coin between the Crusaders and Venetians. This does not take into account the enormous, but unknown, quantity of money and valuables which were stolen.

The systematic looting of Constantinople for relics went on for years after the conquest, so that before very long there was hardly a cathedral, monastery or church of any importance in western Europe, which did not contain some enamelled and bejewelled reliquary dating from the sack of the city. Venice itself is a monument to the Fourth Crusade. It was the Venetian acquisition of, in Dandolo’s own phrase, “a half and a quarter of the Roman Empire” that truly established the city’s fortunes. The Treasury of St. Mark’s contains the finest collection of Byzantine craftsmanship in the world, nearly all of it stemming from loot brought back after April 1204. The famous Pala d’Oro, the retable of the high altar within which rests the body of St. Mark—one of the greatest examples of the goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ craft in existence—was largely a Byzantine work of the early twelfth century. It contains, however, numerous pieces of Byzantine enamel work taken from Constantinople in 1204. These were set into the retable when it was enlarged and modified in 1209. The finest Byzantine ivory casket in the world, the Veroli casket, so-called from its having belonged to the Cathedral Treasury of Veroli near Rome, may also have reached Italy after the sack of Constantinople.
^[3]

The dissemination of Byzantine works of art throughout Europe provided the springboard which later helped to launch the Renaissance. Although metal-workers, artists, mosaic-workers, textile-designers and other craftsmen from Constantinople had long been active in the Italian world, their home and the home of their guilds had always—until the Latin conquest—been the Greek city on the Bosphorus. After the sack many of them left, never to return. The gradual diffusion of Byzantine learning and artistry continued throughout the next two and a half centuries, until the Turkish conquest of the city wrote an end to a unique Christian civilisation.