The Great Betrayal (26 page)

“Seeing that the French were widely scattered throughout the land and were all occupied with their own affairs, the Greeks thought they could overcome them by craft and double-dealing. So they sent messengers secretly to King Johanitza of Bulgaria (who had long been their enemy and indeed was technically still at war with them) saying they would make him emperor if he would come to their aid…”

One of the reasons that prompted what has been called this “Unnatural alliance between Greeks and Bulgarians”
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was the claim of the Latin Patriarch, Thomas Morosini, to jurisdiction over the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Now the latter, like the Orthodox Church of Russia, was a direct offshoot of the Byzantine Church and was adamant at refusing to accept the claims of the Papacy. Greeks and Bulgars were thus wedded together for the first time against an outside enemy, an enemy not only of their lands but of their Faith. At the Battle of Adrianople, on April 15th, 1205, the army under Baldwin was almost annihilated by a combined Greek and Bulgarian force, and the Emperor himself was captured. Taken to the Bulgarian capital of Tirnovo, Baldwin was imprisoned in a tower and later executed. According to one contemporary account, his hands and feet were cut off and he was thrown into a valley, where it took him three days to die. So perished Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, Baldwin I of the Latin Empire of Romania. He was succeeded by his brother Henri, a capable and energetic man who did his best to maintain a hopeless inheritance.

A few months later, in June 1205, Doge Dandolo died peacefully in the palace of Boucoleon. The man who more than any other had been responsible for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, who had duped, controlled and master-minded the leaders of the army for the purposes of Venice, did not live long enough to see the Empire of Romania disintegrate. Perhaps he had always anticipated that this would happen, but he had been rightly confident that the gains he had made for Venice would long outlast his own time. Born about 1120, this octogenarian could look back on a long life dedicated to the interests of the Republic. He had achieved more since his seventieth year than most men in a lifetime. When he had been elected Doge on January 1st, 1193, the Dalmatian coastline had been lost to Venice and had become a protectorate of the King of Hungary. In a brilliantly successful campaign Dandolo had restored Venetian authority over Dalmatia, defeating the Pisan fleet in the course of the struggle. His only failure had been his inability to subdue the ancient seaport of Zara—but he had more than made up for this by his diversion of the Crusaders to Zara in November 1202. From then on his ascendancy over the Crusade was complete, and in the capture of Constantinople he fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime. Whether there is any truth in the story that he had a personal desire for vengeance and that he had been deliberately blinded during his previous embassy to the city or whether this is legend, the fact remains that he had more than avenged Venice’s previous defeat at the hands of the Byzantines. He had succeeded in destroying Venice’s greatest rival for the trade of the East, and he had established a lifeline for his city consisting of most of the important islands, ports and trading bases on the route to Asia and the Levant.

As a Venetian he could die happy, conscious of having immensely furthered and strengthened the power and prosperity of the Republic. In the subsequent chronicles of Venice he was deservedly acclaimed as one of the greatest Doges of all time, a unique consolidator and promoter of his city’s fortunes. To the historian concerned with the subsequent history of Europe, Dandolo’s success in diverting the Fourth Crusade must be reckoned one of the greatest disasters ever to befall the continent. “Constantinople had been for centuries the strongest bulwark of defence against Asia. The men of the West had every interest to maintain and to strengthen it. Instead of doing so they virtually let loose Asia upon Europe.”
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The man who was mainly responsible for this disaster was buried with the Latin rites in the desecrated Cathedral of Santa Sophia. The fact that the Church of Divine Wisdom would one day be turned into a mosque was as much the doing of Doge Dandolo as it was of its ultimate conqueror, the Sultan Mehmet II.

The third principal figure in the history of the Fourth Crusade, Boniface Marquis of Montferrat, was temporarily more successful than the unfortunate Baldwin. Apart from securing his kingdom in Thessalonica, he managed to subdue a large part of continental Greece, and introduced his vassals as rulers of small separate kingdoms. The Burgundian family of La Roche were established as Dukes of Athens and of Thebes, while in the Morea the nephew of Villehardouin the historian established the Principality of Achaea. Boniface himself remained a doubtful subject of the new Emperor Henri until he succeeded in cementing an alliance with him by marrying his daughter Agnes to Henri in the spring of 1206.
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Meanwhile King Johanitza of Bulgaria continued to ravage large areas of northern Thrace, so “the Emperor Henri and the Marquis of Montferrat agreed to meet at the end of summer, in the month of October 1207, and make war together on the King. They parted good friends and in good spirits, the Marquis making his way back to Mosynopolis and the Emperor returning to Constantinople…” A few days later Boniface was caught by the Bulgarians in a defile near the city, and was mortally wounded. “The few men who were with him at the time were all killed, and the Bulgarians cut off the Marquis’s head and sent it to King Johanitza…”

Villehardouin ends his history of the Fourth Crusade with the death of Boniface, adding: “Alas, what a terrible disaster this was for the Emperor Henri and for everyone in the Empire, whether French or Venetian, to lose so great a man in such a tragic way. He was one of the finest and noblest of all the barons, and one of the bravest men in the world!”

His death merely served to confirm the fact that there was little or no chance of the Latin Empire of Romania ever taking root in the ruins of Byzantium. (Death in battle or disease had already killed off many of the other major participants in the Fourth Crusade.) Despite the fact that the Emperor Henri was a far abler man than his brother—indeed, the only able Latin Emperor in the brief history of that absurd feudal improvisation —there was no chance of such an unnatural graft taking root upon the stem of a civilisation so alien to feudal Europe.

Although the Emperor Henri managed to save the Latin Empire for ten years by an exercise of tolerance towards the Orthodox Church unusual in a Latin, and by an energetic efficiency that had been lacking in his brother, there was no possibility of preserving it intact. The Venetians in their wisdom had taken as their share only the places that they knew they could successfully use and—by their sea-power—retain. Carved up into pathetic fiefs among quarrelling barons and knights, the fabric of the ancient Empire quickly disintegrated.

The Greeks, meanwhile, refusing to acknowledge either the faith or the rule of the conquerors, set up three separate kingdoms—all of which claimed for themselves the inheritance of the Byzantine Empire. In Epirus, a district extending from Naupactus (better known today as Lepanto) in the Gulf of Patras to Durazzo in Albania, a bastard of the Angeli dynasty of Byzantine Emperors set up a Greek principality; this ultimately absorbed the Thessalonica kingdom that Boniface had carved out for himself. Far away on the shores of the Black

Sea, descendants of the earlier Comneni dynasty of Emperors established the extraordinary small kingdom of Trebizond. Despite several sieges, despite the hostility of Genoese traders eager to establish a monopoly in the Black Sea trade, and despite the occupation of nearly all Asia Minor by the Turks, the kingdom of the Comneni managed to survive until 1461. Eight years after Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Trebizond was finally captured by the same victorious Sultan, Mehmet II.

The third Greek splinter-kingdom arising from the Latin conquest was the one that was ultimately to regain Constantinople for the Greeks. This was the ‘Empire of Nicea’ established by Theodore Lascaris and his family. It was here that the new Greek Patriarch was elected, and here therefore that the new centre of the Orthodox Church was established. Within two years of the conquest of Constantinople, the Crusaders were happy to conclude a peace treaty with Lascaris, leaving him in possession of all that remained of the ancient Greek territories in Asia Minor. Under his successor, the remarkable John Vatatzes, nearly the whole of western Asia Minor was regained from the Turks by the Greeks.

Meanwhile, throughout ruined Greece, on promontories and headlands, and in distant parts of the Morea, there proliferated those extraordinary small feudal kingdoms and petty baronies that derived from the wreck of the ancient Empire. The ruins of their castles can still be seen, dominating some silent cove or bay, or overhanging a ‘romantic’ pass through angular silver cliffs. Jousting and the ritual of the Courts of Love invaded Greek territories—exotic grafts that were doomed to perish in so different a soil and climate. Seneschals, Grand Butlers, Grand Constables, these western tides resounded strangely and for a brief while on the Byzantine air—and then were gone.

In the years immediately following the conquest, many western knights hastened to carve out small kingdoms for themselves, and fiefs in Greece and eastern Europe. Some, who had lost their inheritances in Syria to the infidel, sailed for Constantinople and Greece to re-establish their fortunes. Others, who had once thought of crusading in Outremer, turned aside to find for themselves wealth and estates in eastern Europe. The breakdown of the Empire was soon complete, and it was hardly surprising that even the surviving trunk and head —Thrace and Constantinople—were not sufficiently coordinated to be able to withstand the first real attack made upon them.

In 1261, only fifty-seven years after the conquest of the city, Constantinople fell to the forces of Michael Palaeologus, Greek ruler of the kingdom of Nicea. The last Latin emperor, Baldwin II, fled—and with him went the Latin Patriarch and the Venetian settlers. Constantinople was once more restored to a Greek dynasty and the Orthodox Church, as its Patriarch returned to Santa Sophia. It seemed for a moment as if the glories of the past might yet return. “The exile of the Greek monarchy and of its Church in Nicea had, as it were, spiritually purified the State of Nicea and had given it a national character which Constantinople no longer possessed… A new spirit was born there, and it was to this spirit that the restored Byzantine Empire was to owe for two more centuries, a life which was not always humble and threatened.”
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The fact remained that the restored Byzantine State, even though it endured until the mid-fifteenth century, was no more than a travesty of its former self. The Crusaders and the Venetians had done their work. Even though they were expelled from the city, they still controlled most of Greece, while the Genoese and Venetians between them held nearly all the important islands of the Aegean. As for the brief half-century of the Latin Empire its epitaph was best written by Gregorovius: “A creation of western European crusading knights, of the selfish trade-policy of the Venetians, and of the hierarchical idea of the papacy, it fell after a miserable existence of fifty-seven years, leaving behind it no other trace than destruction and anarchy. That deformed chivalrous feudal state of the Latins belongs to the most worthless phenomena of history.”

The subsequent history of the city and of the remnant of the Empire is one of slow decline. Even though there was a great artistic revival during the fourteenth century, Constantinople’s fate was sealed. The city that had once held over a million inhabitants became sparsely populated, great sections of it being turned over into vegetable gardens, orchards and farming plots. Whole quarters had disappeared, the beautiful palace of Boucoleon lay in ruins—largely because the last Latin emperor had stripped all the lead off its roof in an effort to pay his debts. More than half the churches were deserted or destroyed.

By the fourteenth century the Arab geographer Abulfeda could remark that there were “sown fields within the city and many ruined houses.” The traveller Gonzales de Clavijo who visited Constantinople in the early fifteenth century (some fifty years before the Turkish conquest), wrote that most of the great palaces, churches and monasteries were in ruin, adding, “But it is clear that once upon a time, when Constantinople was in its pristine state, it was among the noblest cities in the world.” Coming two centuries after the Latin conquest he could hardly envisage the fabulous capital that had made Venetians and Crusaders alike catch their breath in awe.

By the mid-fourteenth century little or nothing was left of the city’s ancient splendour. When the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus and his consort were crowned, a foreign visitor remarked that not even the jewels in the imperial diadems were real. Imitation pearls and pastes had replaced the pearls, innumerable diamonds, emeralds and rubies of the past. Pewter and earthenware served instead of the silver of ancient days, and at the coronation banquet brass did duty for what had once been the imperial gold plate. Yet there was a dignity about the last of these Byzantine emperors, as the great Greek poet of Alexandria, C. P. Cavafy, wrote:

Nothing

That is mean or that is unseemly

Do they have in my eyes, those little bits

Of coloured glass. They seem, on the contrary

Like a sorrowful protestation

Against the unjust misfortune of those being crowned.
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But however unjust the misfortune of these later emperors and their subjects, nothing could save the city. The Bulgarians under a succession of able sovereigns had become a formidable power in the Balkan peninsula, while, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the rise of the Serbian Empire menaced even Constantinople itself. Western Europe also remained hostile to the ancient kingdom, for the idea of re-establishing the Latin Empire of Romania was never entirely abandoned.