The Great Betrayal (27 page)

But the main danger came from the Turks, who under their great leader Osman were soon once more in control of nearly all Asia Minor, having captured the great city of Brusa in 1326 and Nicea in 1329. Osman, founder of the Ottoman dynasty, welded the scattered forces of innumerable small Turkish tribal leaders into a sword that was ultimately to cut deep into the Christian world.

“God the All-Powerful,” runs an Arabic saying, “has an army which he has named the Turks. Whenever he is angry with a people, he lets loose his army upon them.” The main consequence of the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 was to ensure that sooner or later the Turks would over-run eastern Europe. With the Byzantine Empire broken and dismantled, there was nothing to stand in their way. Before the end of the fourteenth century this had happened. The Turkish army was swarming over Europe; the Serbians and Bulgarians had been crushed; Albania invaded; and Adrianople made the Turkish capital. By the mid-fifteenth century the Duchy of Athens had fallen to the Turks as had the principality of the Morea. Nothing remained but the city itself.

It has been truly said that “Constantinople constituted the Empire, occasionally it reconstituted the Empire, sometimes it was the whole Empire”. But at last, in the face of an immense army and the genius of Mehmet II, the last days of Constantinople had come. The city fell for the second time in its history on May 29th, 1453, its last Emperor Constantine IX dying heroically in the forefront of the battle, as the Turkish soldiers swarmed over the walls. For the second time, Constantinople was abandoned for three days to fire and the sword. But, despite the inevitable rapine and pillage, the behaviour of the Moslem conqueror contrasted more than favourably with that of the Christian army of the Fourth Crusade.

At long last, after twelve hundred years of astounding history and of outstanding cultural achievement, the Byzantine Empire was finally and forever extinguished. Its epitaph was spoken by the Sultan himself, as he rode through the twice-devastated city and contemplated the ruins of the ancient imperial palace. The melancholy of the gigantic broken columns and of the decaying buildings in the city that he had captured, reminded him of the lines which the Persian poet Sa’dĭ had written on the mutability of human fortune:

Now the spider weaves the curtains in the palace

Of the Caesars,

Now the owl calls the night watches in the

towers of Afrasiab.

APPENDIX

The principal sources for any history of the Fourth Crusade must inevitably be the records left by three eyewitnesses of the events. These are: the Comte de Villehardouin; Robert de Clari; and the Byzantine nobleman, Nicetas. There are a number of other subsidiary sources, among them the monk Gunther (
Historia Constantinopolitana
), the letters of Pope Innocent III, the history written by George Acropolites, and the work of Eraoul or ‘Bernard the Treasurer’, which is one of the old French continuations of the history of Outremer by William of Tyre.

In the past, historians have tended to take the work of Villehardouin
(
La Conquéte de Constantinople
, ed. Faral,
2 vols., Paris, 1938-9) as the most trustworthy. This may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Villehardouin gives us the fullest account of the Crusade, and that his history is ‘from the inside’—since he was one of the protagonists in the enterprise. It is surprising, however, to find that even as late as 1963, Mr. R. B. Shaw in his translation of Villehardouin’s chronicle (Penguin Classics:
Chronicles of the Crusades)
can write: “…He gives on the whole a very fair and honest account of an enterprise that began so well and ended so disastrously.”

Villehardouin, in fact, was a highly biased reporter. Like the other participants in the Crusade, he had come under the Pope’s displeasure—and excommunication—for his part in the attack on Zara. Subsequently, he was one of the principal go-betweens used by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo, and Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, during the negotiations with the Byzantines.

It cannot be denied that Villehardouin’s account is highly readable and, for its period, of considerable historical distinction. He sees things both as a soldier and a statesman, and his records of the conferences of the great bear all the hallmark of sincerity. At the same time, one must often be compelled to treat his words with circumspection. It is not so much that he is a guileful writer, but that he is an honest and ingenuous soldier, who tends to believe implicitly the facts of a matter as they are told him by others. Thus, one can see that in some of the negotiations to which he was party, the Comte de Villehardouin was being used as a tool by men considerably less scrupulous than he. When the Doge, or Boniface, employed him as an emissary, Villehardouin seems to have totally accepted the account of affairs as they were given to him by his superiors. His dislike of the Greeks and their ‘trickery’ inevitably brings to mind the war memoirs of distinguished soldiers in later centuries, who have had to deal with a conquered foe—and who have found it difficult to understand that the conquered will use whatever means they can to survive and, if possible, to rise again.

Biased though it is, Villehardouin’s account of the siege of Constantinople, and of the events leading up to it, is particularly invaluable regarding military affairs and the conduct of the campaign. Where it must be treated with reservation is in matters of policy, or in anything connected with the real reasons for the diversion of the Crusade.

Villehardouin, of course, had no knowledge of the Venetians’ treaty with the Sultan of Egypt, and his ignorance of this matter inevitably makes him blind to the real purposes of Doge Dandolo. One can almost equally be sure that he had no knowledge of the plot between Philip of Swabia and Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, (which had been hatched long before Villehardouin himself ever reached Venice). Valuable as his account is, it must always be treated with two major reservations: that the author was unaware of the designs of the Doge and the other participants in the plot; and that, having once broken his Crusading oaths in the attack on Zara, he was concerned to excuse himself and the other Crusaders wherever possible.

The second French account, that of Robert de Clari
(La Conquéte de Constantinople
, ed. Lauer, Paris, 1924), is completely unlike Villehardouin’s in that it is the work of a simple man with no axe to grind. In many respects it must be treated with reservation, for de Clari reports many things which he could not have known about, and records discussions and conversations which took place when he was not present. His, in fact, is a typical soldier’s story, being a mixture of camp gossip, rumour and conjecture. But when he comes to describe events which he witnessed himself, actions in which he took part, or the effect produced upon him by his first views of Constantinople, then he is a vivid and fascinating source of information.

Similarly, his account of how the ordinary soldiers felt at the various meetings that took place in Venice, Zara, Corfu and Constantinople are honest and reliable. The way he describes the reactions of the troops, as they are step-by-step committed to the attack, has all the ring of authenticity. De Clari does not know what has taken place at the conferences of the great, but he does show us how the army responded to the orders and instructions of its senior officers. In this respect, therefore, his history counterbalances that of Villehardouin. While the one gives us the official story, as it were, of the whole disastrous expedition, de Clari presents us with the soldier’s eye-view of events.

The main Greek authority for the history of the Latin conquest is Nicetas Choniates. Gibbon has this footnote about him: “Nicetas was of Chonae in Phrygia (the old Colossae of St. Paul); he raised himself to the honours of senator, judge of the veil, and great logothete; beheld the fall of the empire, retired to Nicea, and composed an elaborate history from the death of Alexius Comnenus to the reign of Henry.” One may add to this that he was secretary to the Emperor Isaac Angelus, and accompanied him on an expedition in the field against the Wallachs and Bulgars in 1187. When the blinded Isaac and his son Alexius were restored to the throne Nicetas became Great Logothete, a position from which he was dismissed by the usurper Murtzuphlus.

Nicetas is a conservative of the old school, a patriot and a man of deep religious spirit. His work is, in a sense, a cry of pain and shame—pain at the destruction of the city and the Empire, and shame at the way in which the later emperors and their courtiers conducted themselves. Sir Edwin Pears described him as “imbued with a religious spirit—religious in the sense that he believes that God rules the world and will punish national immorality”.

Although Nicetas was in Isaac’s court and one of his ministers, he has little good to say either of him or of his son. But when he comes to writing about Murtzuphlus one must suspect him of personal bias. He can find no redeeming quality in this last Byzantine emperor—even though Murtzuphlus was the only emperor during this period to show something of the ancient ‘Roman’ spirit.

But Nicetas’s account of the events leading up to the conquest, and of the conquest itself, is invaluable. Here we have the record of a man who was at the very heart of events on the Greek side. Although one must allow for his conservative and religious bias, yet his account is a fair one. Much though he may loathe the Latins who sacked and conquered his city, he is at pains to point out that it was the corruption of the Byzantines themselves that led to their downfall. Historian, art-lover and aristocrat, Nicetas could find no words too bad to describe the Latins or their behaviour. It is from Nicetas that we learn the details of some of the works of art which were destroyed during the sack of the city.

Gibbon wrote of him that “the boasted taste of Nicetas was no more than affectation and vanity”. How Gibbon, even with his notorious dislike of almost everything Byzantine, could write this after reading Nicetas’s description of the statue of Helen of Troy must remain a puzzle. Certainly, there is a querulous note running through Nicetas’s history, and this may perhaps account for Gibbon’s dislike of the Greek author. But in view of the fact that Nicetas has lost not only his city but his home, and his whole way of life in the Latin conquest, one must feel some sympathy for the old historian. Despite its defects, his work presents us with the clearest picture of Constantinople and the Empire in the last days before its fall.

NOTES

Chapter One

[1] Sir Ernest Barker, ‘The Crusades’, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition. A concise and masterly summary of the Fourth Crusade.

[2] Wilhelm Ensslin,
The Emperor and Imperial administration: Byzantium
, 1949, edited by N. H. Bayes and H. St. L. B. Moss. I am greatly indebted to this “Introduction to East Roman Civilization” for much of the background material used in the description of Constantinople.

Chapter Two

[1] ‘Byzantine Art’,
in Byzantium,
1949. An illuminating summary by Charles Diehl of Byzantine culture and artistic achievements.

[2] Quotation from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by W. B. Yeats,
Collected Poems
, 1965, quoted by permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats and Macmillan and Co. Ltd.

[3] Nicetas.
Historia.
Ed. 1835.

[4] Robert Liddell,
Byzantium and Istanbul,
1956.

[5] Sir Edwin Pears,
The Fall of Constantinople
. 1886.

Chapter Three

[1] T. Smith, Introduction to
The Chronicle of Geoffrey de Villehardouin,
1829.

[2] Quotation from ‘Easter 1916’ by W. B. Yeats,
Collected Poems,
1965, published by Macmillan.

[3] Villehardouin.

Chapter Four

[1]
For a full assessment of the ramifications behind the Fourth Crusade, its organisation and objective, see: Sir Steven Runciman,
History of the Crusades
, Vol. 3, pp. 107
et seq
. Also Sir Edwin Pears,
The Fall of Constantinople
, pp. 227
et seq.

[2] Robert de Clari gives die number of the Crusaders as “4,000 knights and 100,000 foot soldiers”, while Nicetas Choniates gives the figures as “1,000 knights and 30,000 Crusaders”. Villehardouin’s figures are the more trustworthy.

[3] V. Pears, p. ix
et seq
., and Runciman, p. 113. Of the original sources which indicate a definite agreement between the Venetians and the Egyptians, the most interesting—if not conclusive —account is that of ‘Ernoul’ or Bernard the Treasurer (many versions from the late twelfth century onwards). Hopf in
Geschicte Griechenlands
states positively that there was such a treaty, but gives no sources. The
Historia Constantinopolitana
by the Cistercian monk, Gunther, indicates collusion between Cairo and Venice. Gunther was a contemporary, dying in 1210. It is important to bear in mind that there is no
evidence
of this treaty, although there is evidence of a treaty between the Venetians and the Egyptians in 1208.

[4] See the two MSS. quoted by Buchon in
Le Livre de la Conqueste
, Paris, 1845.

Illustration between pp. 56-57.

The Attack on Zara. Tintoretto working in the 16th century depicts cannons, and soldiers armed with arquebuses, both of course unknown in 1202.