A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (10 page)

The state of the Empire in 1081 was such that
only a man of great courage or of great stupidity would have undertaken its
government. There was no money in the treasury. Recent Emperors had been
spendthrift; the loss of Anatolia and rebellions in Europe had sadly diminished
the revenue; the old system of tax-collection had broken down. Alexius was no
financier; his methods would have left a modem economist aghast. Yet somehow,
by taxing his subjects to their utmost limits, by exacting forced loans and
confiscating property from the magnates and the Church, by punishing with fines
rather than imprisonment, by selling privileges and by developing the palace
industries, he managed to pay for a large administrative organization and to
rebuild the army and the navy, and at the same time to maintain a sumptuous
court and to make lavish gifts to loyal subjects and visiting envoys and
princes. For he realized that in the East prestige depends entirely on
splendour and magnificence. Niggardliness is the one unforgiven sin. But
Alexius was guilty of two great errors. In return for immediate aid he gave
commercial advantages to foreign merchants, to the detriment of his own
subjects; and at one crucial moment he debased the imperial coinage, the
coinage that for seven centuries had provided the
only
stable currency in a chaotic world.

In foreign affairs the situation was even more
desperate — if ‘foreign’ was still an applicable epithet; for on all sides
enemies had penetrated far into the Empire. In Europe the Emperor maintained a
precarious hold over the Balkan peninsula; but the Slavs of Serbia and Dalmatia
had risen in revolt. The Turkish tribe of Petchenegs, roaming beyond the
Danube, continually crossed the river to raid. And in the West Robert Guiscard
and the Normans had captured Avlona and were besieging Dyrrhachium. In Asia
little was left to Byzantium except the Black Sea coasts, a few isolated cities
on the south coast and the great fortified metropolis of Antioch; but
communications with these further cities were uncertain and rare. Several
cities in the interior were still in Christian hands; but their rulers were
entirely cut off from the central government. The bulk of the country was in
the hands of the Seldjuk Sultan Suleiman, who ruled from Nicaea domains
stretching from the Bosphorus to the Syrian frontier; but his state had no
organized administration and no fixed frontiers. Other cities were in the power
of pettier Turkish princes, some of them acknowledging the suzerainty of
Suleiman, but most of them admitting no master but Malik Shah. Of these the
most important were the house of Danishmend, now in possession of Caesarea,
Sebastea and Amasea; Menguchek, the lord of Erzindjan and Colonea; and, most
dangerous of all, the adventurer Chaka who had captured Smyrna and the Aegean
littoral. The Turkish chieftains had established some sort of order round their
main cities; but the countryside was still overrun by nomad Turcoman hordes,
while bodies of Greek and Armenian refugees added to the confusion. Large
numbers of Christians adopted Islam and were gradually merged into the Turkish
race. A few Greek communities lingered on in mountain districts; and the
Christian Turks, settled some centuries before round Caesarea in Cappadocia,
retained their identity and their religion right down to modem times. But the
majority of the Greek population made its way as best it could to the shores of
the Black Sea and the Aegean.

The Armenians in
the Taurus

The migration of the Armenians was more
deliberate and orderly. The various Armenian princes dispossessed by the
Byzantines had been given estates in Cappadocia, especially in the south,
towards the Taurus mountains. Many of their retainers had accompanied them; and
when the Seldjuk invasions began in earnest a continual stream of Armenians
left their homes to join these new colonies, till almost half of the population
of Armenia was on the move south-westward. The Turkish penetration of
Cappadocia drove them further into the Taurus mountains and the Anti-Taurus;
and they spread out into the valley of the middle Euphrates, to which the Turks
had not yet come. The districts that they had abandoned were soon filled not by
Turks but by Moslem Kurds from the hills of Assyria and north-west Iran. The
last Armenian prince of the old Bagratid dynasty, a dynasty that proudly
claimed descent from David and Bathsheba, was killed by Byzantine orders in
1079, after his own peculiarly atrocious murder of the Archbishop of Caesarea;
whereupon one of his relatives, by name Roupen, rebelled from the Empire and
set himself up in the hills of north-west Cilicia. About the same time another
Armenian chieftain, Oshin, son of Hethoum, founded a similar lordship a little
further to the west. Both the Roupenian and the Hethoumian dynasties had parts
to play in later history; but at the time Roupen and Oshin were outshone by the
Armenian Vahram, whom the Greeks called Philaretus.

Philaretus had been in Byzantine service and
had been appointed by Romanus Diogenes to the governorship of Germanicia
(Marash). When Romanus fell he refused to recognize Michael Ducas and declared
himself independent. During the chaos of Michael’s reign he conquered the chief
cities of Cilicia, Tarsus, Mamistra and Anazarbus. In 1077 one of his
lieutenants, after a siege of six months, took Edessa from the Byzantines. In
1078 the citizens of Antioch, whose governor, the successor to Isaac Comnenus,
had just been assassinated, begged Philaretus to take over the city to save it
from the Turks. His dominion now stretched from Tarsus to the lands beyond the
Euphrates; and both Roupen and Oshin became his vassals. But he felt insecure.
Unlike most of his contemporaries he was Orthodox, and he did not wish to
separate himself entirely from the Empire. On Michael’s abdication he announced
his allegiance to Nicephorus Boteniates, who left him as governor of the lands
that he had conquered. He apparently recognized Alexius also; but he took the
additional precaution of paying some sort of homage to the Arab lords of
Aleppo.

The Seldjuk
Conquest of Syria

Alexius on his accession was obliged to decide
against which of his enemies it was necessary first to campaign. Calculating
that the Turks could only be driven back by a long sustained effort for which
he was not yet ready and that in the meantime they were likely to quarrel
amongst themselves, he considered it more urgent to defeat the Norman attack.
It took longer than he had thought. In the summer of 1081 Robert Guiscard,
accompanied by his Amazon wife, Sigelgaita of Salerno, and by his eldest son,
Bohemond, laid siege to Dyrrhachium. In October Alexius, with an army whose
chief regiment was the Anglo-Saxon Varangian Guard, went to relieve the
fortress. But there, as at Hastings, fifteen years before, the Anglo-Saxons
were no match for the Normans. Alexius was decisively beaten. Dyrrhachium held
out over the winter but fell in February 1082, enabling Robert in the spring to
march along the great main road, the Via Egnatia, towards Constantinople.
Italian affairs soon obliged him to return home; but he left his army under
Bohemond to secure Macedonia and Greece. Bohemond twice defeated Alexius, who
was obliged to borrow men from the Turks and ships from the Venetians. While
the latter interrupted Norman communications, the former enabled the Emperor to
deliver Thessaly. Bohemond retired to Italy in 1083 but returned with his
father next year, destroying the Venetian fleet off Corfu. The war only ended
when Robert died in Cephalonia in 1085, and his sons quarrelled over his
inheritance.

The authority of the Emperor was at last
established over the European provinces; but during those four years the
eastern provinces were lost. Philaretus fatally involved himself in Turkish
intrigues. Early in 1085 Antioch was betrayed by his son to the Sultan
Suleiman, together with his Cilician cities. Edessa fell in 1087 to a Turkish
chieftain, Buzan, but was recaptured later in 1094 by an Armenian, Thoros, who
had been a vassal of Malik Shah and was at first kept in order by a Turkish
garrison in the citadel. Melitene meanwhile was occupied by another Armenian,
his father-in-law, Gabriel, who, like Thoros, belonged to the Orthodox rite.
Quarrels between the Orthodox and the Jacobite and Armenian Churches increased
the disorder throughout northern Syria. To the latter the decline of Byzantine
power was a matter for rejoicing. They preferred the rule of the Turk.

In southern Syria Seldjuk domination was now
complete. Ever since Tughril Bey had entered Baghdad in 1055 the Syrian
possession of the Fatimites had been threatened; and growing alarm and suspense
there had resulted in disorder and petty rebellions. When in 1056 the Byzantine
frontier officials at Lattakieh had refused to allow the pilgrim Bishop of
Cambrai to proceed southward, their motive was not, as the westerners
suspected, just to be unpleasant to a Latin (though there was probably a ban on
Norman pilgrims); they were informed that Syria was unsafe for Christian
travellers. The experience of the German bishops who eight years later insisted
on crossing the frontier against local advice shows that the Byzantine
officials were justified.

In 1071, the year of Manzikert and the fall of
Bari, a Turkish adventurer, Atsiz ibn Abaq, nominally vassal to Alp Arslan,
captured Jerusalem without a struggle and soon occupied all Palestine down to
the frontier fortress of Ascalon. In 1075 he took possession of Damascus and
the Damascene. In 1076 the Fatimids recovered Jerusalem, from which Atsiz drove
them again after a siege of several months and a massacre of the Moslem
inhabitants. Only the Christians, safe within their walled quarter, were
spared. Despite this, the Fatimids were soon able to attack Atsiz at Damascus;
and he was obliged to call in the help of the Seldjuk prince, Tutush, the
brother of Malik Shah, who was trying, with his brother’s approval, to build
himself a sultanate in Syria. In 1079 Tutush had Atsiz murdered and became sole
ruler of a state stretching from Aleppo, which remained still under its Arab
dynasty, to the borders of Egypt. Tutush, and his lieutenant Ortoq, governor of
Jerusalem, seem to have provided an orderly government. There was no special
animosity shown against the Christians, though the Orthodox Patriarch of
Jerusalem seems to have spent much of his time in Constantinople, where his
colleague from Antioch now took up residence.

The Danishmends
and Chaka

In 1085 the Emperor Alexius, freed from the
Norman danger, turned his attention to the Turkish problem. Hitherto it had
only been by unceasing intrigues, setting one Turkish prince against another,
that he had been able to keep any check on them. Now, combining his diplomacy
with a show of arms, he secured a treaty that restored to the Empire Nicomedia
and the Anatolian shores of the Marmora. Next year his patience was rewarded
still further. Suleiman ibn-Kutulmish, having taken Antioch, marched on Aleppo,
whose Arab ruler called on Tutush to rescue him. In a battle fought outside the
city, Tutush was victorious and Suleiman was slain.

The death of Suleiman brought chaos to the
Turks in Anatolia; and Alexius was in his element, plotting with one chieftain
against another, playing on their mutual jealousies, offering each in turn
bribes and hints of a marriage alliance. Nicaea was held for six years by the
Turkish rebel, Abu’l Kasim; but in 1092 Malik Shah was able to replace him by
the son of Suleiman, Kilij Arslan I. Meanwhile Alexius had been able to
consolidate his position. It was not easy. The only territory that he could
recover was the town of Cyzicus; and he could not prevent the Danishmends from
extending their dominion westward and taking his own family home, Kastamuni, in
Paphlagonia. Palace conspiracies hampered him; and in 1087 he had to meet a
serious invasion from over the Danube, led by the Petchenegs with Hungarian
help. It was not till 1091 that his diplomacy, aided by one tremendous victory,
permanently freed him from the threat of barbarian inroads from the north.

More alarming still was Chaka, the Turkish Emir
of Smyrna. Chaka, more ambitious than most of his compatriots, aimed at
succeeding to the Empire. He employed Greeks rather than Turks, for he realized
the need for sea-power; but at the same time he attempted to organize the
Turkish princes into an alliance and married his daughter to the young Kilij
Arslan. Between 1080 and 1090 he made himself master of the Aegean coast and
the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Rhodes. Alexius, one of whose first
cares had been to recreate the Byzantine fleet, managed at last to defeat him
on the sea at the entrance to the Marmora; but the menace remained till in 1092
Chaka was murdered by his son-in-law, Kilij Arslan, at a banquet at Nicaea. The
murder was the result of the Emperor’s advice to the Sultan, who feared to see another
Turk grow greater than himself.

With Suleiman and Chaka dead, Alexius could
contemplate a more aggressive policy. He himself was now secure in
Constantinople; and the European provinces were quiet. His fleet was efficient;
his treasury was temporarily full. But his army was very small. He had few
native troops on which to draw, with Anatolia lost to him. His need was for
trained foreign mercenaries.

Certainly, by about the year 1095, it seemed
that the Seldjuk power was at last declining. Malik Shah, who had kept some
control over the whole Turkish empire, died in 1092; and his death was followed
by civil war between his young sons. For the next ten years, till they could
agree to a division of their inheritance, the main attention of the Turks was given
to this struggle. Meanwhile Arab and Kurdish chieftains arose in Iraq. In
Syria, where Tutush died in 1095, his sons, Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of
Damascus, proved themselves incapable of keeping order. Jerusalem passed to the
sons of Ortoq. Their government was ineffectual and oppressive. The Orthodox
Patriarch Symeon and his higher clergy retired to Cyprus. At Tripoli a Shiite
clan, the Banu ‘Ammar, set up a principality. The Fatimids began to reconquer
southern Palestine. In the north a Turkish general, Kerbogha, Atabeg of Mosul
under the Abbasid Caliph, gradually encroached upon Ridwan’s territory of
Aleppo. To the travellers of the time it seemed that every city had a different
master.