A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (8 page)

CHAPTER IV

TOWARDS DISASTER

‘In prosperity
the destroyer shall come’
JOB XV, 21

In the middle of the eleventh century the
tranquillity of the cast Mediterranean world seemed assured for many years to
come. Its two great powers, Fatimid Egypt and Byzantium, were on good terms
with each other. Neither was aggressive, and both wished to keep in check the
Moslem states further to the east, where Turkish adventurers were stirring up
trouble, without, however, seriously alarming the governments of Constantinople
or Cairo. The Fatimids were friendly towards the Christians. Since Hakim’s
death there had been no persecution; and they were opening their ports to
merchants from Byzantium and from Italy. Traders and pilgrims alike enjoyed
their goodwill.

This goodwill was guaranteed by the power of
Byzantium. Thanks to a series of great warrior Emperors the Empire now
stretched from the Lebanon to the Danube and from Naples to the Caspian Sea.
Despite occasional corruption and an occasional riot, it was better
administered than any contemporary kingdom. Constantinople had never before
been so wealthy. It was the unrivalled financial and commercial capital of the
world. Traders from far and wide, from Italy and Germany, from Russia, from
Egypt and the East, came crowding there to buy the luxuries produced by its
factories and to exchange their own rougher wares. The bustling life of the
vast city, far more extensive and populous than even Cairo or Baghdad, never
failed to amaze the traveller with its crowded harbour, its full bazaars, its wide
suburbs and its tremendous churches and palaces. The imperial court, dominated
though it was at present by two wildly eccentric, elderly princesses, seemed to
him the centre of the universe.

If art is the mirror of civilization, Byzantine
civilization stood high. Its eleventh-century artists showed all the restraint
and balance of their classical ancestors; but they added two qualities derived
from Oriental tradition, the rich decorative formalism of the Iranians and the
mystical intensity of the ancient East. The works of the age that survive,
whether they be small ivories or great mosaic panels or provincial churches,
such as those of Daphne or Holy Luke in Greece, all display the same triumphant
synthesis of traditions merged into a perfect whole. The literature of the
time, though more hampered by the overstrong memory of classical achievement,
shows a variety all of excellent standard. We have the polished history of John
Diaconus, the delicate lyrics of Christopher of Mitylene, the sweeping popular epic
of Digenis Akritas, the rough, common-sense aphorisms of the soldier Cecaumenus
and the witty, cynical court memoirs of Michael Psellus. The atmosphere almost
has the complacency of the eighteenth century, but for an other-worldliness and
a pessimism from which Byzantium never was freed.

The Greek has a subtle and difficult character,
not to be recognized in the picture that popular students of the fifth century B.C.
like to paint. The Byzantine complicated this character with the strains of
eastern blood in him. The result was full of paradox. He was highly practical,
with an aptitude for business and a taste for worldly honours; yet he was
always ready to renounce the world for a life of monastic contemplation. He
believed fervently in the divine mission of the Empire and the divine authority
of the Emperor; yet he was an individualist, quick to rebel against a
government that displeased him. He had a horror of heresy; yet his religion,
most mystical of all the established forms of Christianity, allowed him, priest
and layman alike, great philosophical latitude. He despised all his neighbours
as barbarians; yet he easily adopted their habits and their ideas. Despite his
sophistication and his pride his nerve was unsteady. Disaster had so often
nearly overwhelmed Byzantium that his confidence in things was sapped. In a
sudden crisis he would panic and would indulge in savagery that in his calmer
moments he disdained. The present might be peaceful and brilliant; but
countless prophecies warned him that some day his city would perish, and he
believed them to be true. Happiness and tranquillity could not be found in this
dark transitory world, but only in the kingdom of Heaven.

The Decline of
Byzantine Economy

His fears were justified. The foundations of
Byzantine power were insufficiently sure. The great Empire had been organized
for defence. The provinces were governed by military officials, themselves
controlled by the civil administration at Constantinople. This system provided
an efficient local militia that could defend its district in times of invasion
and which could supplement the main imperial army on its great campaigns. But,
with the danger of invasion over, it gave too much power to the provincial
governor, especially if he were rich enough to ignore his paymaster at the
capital. Moreover, prosperity was ruining the agrarian organization of Asia
Minor. The backbone of Byzantium had been its communities of free peasants,
holding their land directly from the State, often in return for military services.
But, there as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, land was the only safe investment
for wealth. Every rich man sought to acquire land. The Church persuaded its
devotees to bequeath it land. Land was the usual reward given to successful
generals or deserving ministers of state. So long as the Empire was winning
back land from the enemy or repopulating areas emptied by raids and
devastation, all seemed well; but its very success created a land-hunger.
Magnates and monasteries could only increase their estates by buying out
peasants that were in need of cash or by taking over whole villages, either as
a gift from the state or by undertaking the responsibility for paying the taxes
of the community. The wiser Emperors sought to prevent them, partly because the
new landlord seldom resisted the temptation to turn his land into a
sheep-ranch, and still more because the transference of peasant-soldiers’
holdings gave to the landlord the power to raise a private army and weakened
the army of the state. But their legislation failed. In the course of the tenth
century there arose in Byzantium a hereditary land-owning aristocracy, rich and
powerful enough to defy the central government. The Emperor Basil II, the
greatest of the Macedonian dynasty, had with difficulty suppressed a revolt by
members of this aristocracy early in his reign. He triumphed; and his prestige
lasted on till his dynasty ended in 1056, at the death of his niece, Theodora.
Had the Macedonian line produced male heirs, the hereditary principle might
well have been established for the imperial throne, and Byzantium would have
possessed a force capable of curbing the hereditary nobility. But, though
loyalty to the dynasty enabled the Empress Zoe and her successive husbands to
reign on in profligate insouciance for nearly thirty years and the aged Empress
Theodora to rule alone, disruptive forces were growing all the while. When
Theodora died, two parties in Byzantium faced each other in bitter opposition,
the court clique which controlled the central administration and the noble
families who controlled the army; while the Church, with a foot in both camps,
attempted to hold the balance.

Hardly had the septuagenarian Empress, trusting
till the end in a prophecy that offered her a reign of many years, sunk into her
final coma before the court had pushed on to the throne an elderly civil
servant, Michael Stratioticus. The army refused to accept the new Emperor. It
marched on Constantinople determined that its commander should succeed. Michael
retired without a struggle; and the general, Isaac Comnenus, became Emperor.
The military aristocracy had won the first round.

Comnenus and
Ducas

Isaac Comnenus, like many of his
fellow-Byzantine noblemen, was an aristocrat of only the second generation. His
father was a Thracian soldier, probably a Vlach, who had caught the fancy of Basil
II and had been given by the Emperor lands in Paphlagonia, where he built a
great castle known as
Castra Comnenon
, and still to-day called
Kastamuni. Isaac and his brother John inherited their father’s lands and his
military prowess, and both had married into the Byzantine aristocracy. Isaac’s
wife was a princess of the former royal house of Bulgaria, John’s an heiress of
the great family of the Dalasseni. But despite his wealth and his high command
and the support of the army, Isaac found his government continually thwarted by
the ill will of the civil service. After two years he gave up the struggle and
retired to a monastery. He had no son; so he nominated as his successor
Constantine Ducas. His sister-in-law, Anna Dalassena, never forgave him.

Constantine Ducas was head of probably the
oldest and richest family of the Byzantine aristocracy; but he had made his
career at court. Isaac hoped that he would therefore be acceptable to both
parties. But he soon showed that his leanings were away from his caste. His
treasury was empty; and the army was dangerously powerful. His solution was to
reduce the armed forces. As a measure of internal policy this could be
defended. But at no time in Byzantine history would it have been safe to weaken
the Empire’s defensive power; and at this moment such an action was fatal.
Storm clouds were blowing up from the East; and in the West a storm had broken.

For some decades past, the state of southern
Italy had been turbulent and confused. The frontier of the Byzantine Empire
officially ran from Terracina on the Tyrrhenian coast to Termoli on the
Adriatic. But within that line only the provinces of Apulia and Calabria were
under the direct rule of Byzantium. There the population was mainly Greek. On
the west coast were the three merchant city-states of Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi.
All three were nominally the vassals of the Emperor. The Amalfitans, who by now
had a considerable trade with the Moslem East, found the Emperor’s goodwill
useful in their negotiations with the Fatimid authorities; and they kept a
permanent consul at Constantinople. The Neapolitans and the Gaetans, though
equally ready to trade with the infidel, were less punctilious towards the
Emperor. The interior of the country was held by the Lombard princes of
Benevento and Salerno, acknowledging alternately the suzerainty of the eastern
and the western emperor and equally disrespectful to both. Sicily was still
held by the Moslems, despite many Byzantine attempts to reconquer the island;
and raids along the Italian coasts from there and from Africa added to the
chaos of the country.

Into these districts had come large numbers of
Norman adventurers from northern France, pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem or
to visit their favourite shrine of St Michael on Monte Gargano, many of them
soldiers of fortune who stayed on to serve the Lombard princes. There was a
land-hunger in Normandy, whose thickly populated estates offered no scope for
ambitious and restless younger sons and landless knights. This impulse for
expansion, which was soon to make them undertake the conquest of England,
turned their eyes towards the East and all its riches; and they saw southern
Italy as the key to a Mediterranean empire. Its
confusion
gave them their opportunity.

The Sons of
Tancred de Hauteville

In 1040 six brothers, the sons of a petty
Norman knight, Tancred de Hauteville, seized the town of Melfi in the Apulian
hills and founded there a principality. The local Byzantine authorities did not
take them seriously; but the western emperor, Henry III, eager to control a
province for which the two empires had long contended, and the German Pope whom
he had nominated, resentful that the Patriarch of Constantinople should rule over
any Italian see, both gave the Normans their support. Within twelve years the
sons of Tancred had established a mastery over the Lombard principalities. They
had driven the Byzantines into the tip of Calabria and to the Apulian coast.
They were threatening the cities of the west coast; and they were sending raids
through Campania northward to the neighbourhood of Rome. The Byzantine
government was alarmed. The governor of Apulia, Marianus Argyrus, was summoned
home to report and sent out again with fuller powers to repair the situation.
Militarily, Marianus achieved nothing. The Normans easily repulsed his small
army. Diplomatically he was more successful; for the Pope, the Lorrainer Leo
IX, was equally nervous. The Norman successes were greater than he or Henry III
had envisaged. Henry was now occupied with a Hungarian campaign; but he sent
help to the Pope. In the summer of 1053 Leo set out southward with an army of
Germans and Italians, proclaiming that this was a holy war. A Byzantine
contingent was to have joined him; but as he awaited it outside the little
Apulian town of Civitate the Normans attacked him. His army was routed and he
himself made prisoner. To obtain his release he disavowed his whole policy.

This was the last serious attempt to curb the
sons of Tancred. Henry III died in 1056. His successor was the child Henry IV;
and the regent, Agnes of Poitou, was too busy in Germany to concern herself
with the south. The Papacy decided to be realist. In 1059, at the Council of
Melfi, Pope Nicholas II recognized Robert Guiscard, ‘Robert the Weasel’, the
eldest survivor of Tancred’s sons, as ‘Duke of Apulia and Calabria, by the
grace of God and Saint Peter, and, by their help, of Sicily’. This recognition,
considered by Rome but not by Robert to involve vassaldom to Saint Peter’s
heir, enabled the Normans easily to finish off their conquest. The maritime
republics soon submitted to them; and by 1060 all that was left to the
Byzantines in Italy was their capital, the coastal fortress of Bari. Meanwhile
Robert’s younger brother Roger began the slow but successful conquest of Sicily
from the Arabs.

So long as Bari held out, the Byzantines kept
some check on further Norman expansion to the east. But the political troubles
in Italy had inevitably led to religious troubles. The arrival of Latin
conquerors in southern Italy brought up the question of the Greek Church in the
province and the ancient dispute between Constantinople and Rome over its
ecclesiastical allegiance. Reforms at Rome had resulted in the Papacy’s
determination to allow no compromise over any of its claims; while the
Patriarchal see of Constantinople was now occupied by one of the most
aggressive and ambitious of Greek Church statesmen, Michael Cerularius. The
unhappy story of the visit of Pope Leo IX’s legates to Constantinople in 1054
should be told in connection with the whole sequence of the relations between
the eastern and western Churches. It ended in scenes of mutual excommunication,
in spite of the Emperor’s attempt to secure a compromise; and it made
impossible any sincere co-operation between Rome and Constantinople as far as
the immediate needs of Italy were concerned. But it did not cause the final
schism which later historians have attributed to it. Political relations
between the imperial courts were strained but unbroken. Cerularius soon lost
his influence. Snubbed by the Empress Theodora, whom he had tried to exclude
from her heritage, and deposed by the Emperor Isaac, he died an impotent exile.
But in the end he triumphed. To subsequent generations of Byzantium he was seen
as a champion of their independence; and, even at a moment when the Emperor and
the Pope wrote to each other with renewed cordiality, the Empress Eudocia
Macrembolitissa, his niece and the consort of Constantine Ducas, secured his
canonization.

To judge from the contemporary historians of
Byzantium the quarrel was barely noticed by the rulers of the Empire. Trouble
in the West was overshadowed in their eyes by the problems arising in the East.

The Turks move
Westward

The decline of the Abbasid Caliphate had not
proved entirely beneficial to Byzantium. The growing impoverishment of Iraq
began to alter the trade routes of the world. The far eastern merchant no
longer brought his goods to the markets of Baghdad, from which much was carried
on into the Empire, to be transhipped from the ports of Asia Minor or from
Constantinople itself to the West. He preferred now to go by the Red Sea route
to Egypt; and from Egypt his goods were taken to Europe by Italian merchant ships.
Byzantium no longer lay across the route. Moreover, lawlessness in the outlying
provinces of the Abbasid empire caused the closing down of the old caravan
route from China that ran through Turkestan and northern Persia to Armenia and
the sea at Trebizond. The alternative route, going to the north of the Caspian,
was never secure for long. For the whole Mediterranean world, politically as
well as commercially, the Abbasid power had been a benefactor, in providing an
outer defence against the barbarians of central Asia.

The defences now were down. Central Asia was
able once again to burst out over the lands of ancient civilization. The Turks
had long played an important role in history. The Turkish empire of the sixth
century had during its short life been a civilizing and stabilizing force in
Asia. Outlying Turkish peoples, such as the Judaistic Khazars of the Volga or
the Nestorian Christian Ouigours, later established on the frontier of China,
showed themselves adaptable and capable of cultural progress. But in Turkestan
itself there had been no advance since the seventh century. A few cities had
grown up along the caravan routes, but the population of Turcomans remained for
the most part pastoral and semi-nomadic; and its growing numbers gave it a continual
desire to migrate beyond its boundaries. In the tenth century Turkestan was
ruled by the Persian dynasty of the Samanids, whose chief role in history was
their conversion of the Turks of central Asia to Islam. Henceforward the eyes
of the Turks were directed towards the lands of south-western Asia and the
eastern Mediterranean.

The Samanids were displaced by the first great
Moslem Turk, Mahmud the Ghaznavid, who during the first decades of the eleventh
century built up a great empire stretching from Ispahan to Bokhara and Lahore.
Meanwhile Turkish soldiers of fortune were penetrating the whole Moslem world,
much as the Normans were penetrating Christian Europe. Turkish regiments were
maintained by the Caliph at Baghdad and by many other Moslem rulers. Amongst
the subjects of the Ghaznavids was a clan of Ghuzz Turks from the Aral steppes,
called from the name of a semi-mythical ancestor the Seldjuks. The Seldjuk
princes formed a group of adventurers, jealous of each other but uniting to
secure the advancement of the family, not unlike the sons of Tancred de
Hauteville. But, luckier than the Normans whose compatriots were few, they
could call upon the support of the vast, restless hordes of Turcomans. After
Mahmud’s death in 1030 they rose against the Ghaznavids and by 1040 had driven
them to take refuge in their Indian domains. In 1050 Tughril Bey, the senior
prince of the house, entered Ispahan and made it the capital of a state
comprising Persia and Khorassan, while his brothers and cousins established themselves
on his northern borders, forming a loose confederation that acknowledged his
overlordship and freely raiding the countries around. In 1055, on the
invitation of the Abbasid Caliph, who had been terrified by the intrigues of
his Turkish minister Basasiri with the Fatimids, Tughril entered Baghdad as the
champion of Sunni Islam, and was made king of the East and the West, with
supreme temporal power over all the lands that owed spiritual allegiance to the
Caliph.

The End of
Armenia

There had been Turkish raids into Armenia as
far back as the reign of Basil II, while the Seldjuks were still under
Ghaznavid rule; and it was to protect his empire against the Turks that Basil
had inaugurated the policy of the piecemeal annexation of Armenia. After the Seldjuk
conquest of Persia the raids became more frequent. Tughril Bey himself only
once took part, in 1054, when he devastated the country round Lake Van but
failed to take the fortress of Manzikert. The raiding armies were usually led
by his cousins, Asan and Ibrahim Inal. In 1047 they had been defeated by the
Byzantines before Erzerum, and during the next years they concentrated on
attacking the Georgian allies of the Empire. In 1052 they ravaged Kars; in 1056
and 1057 they were again in Armenia. In 1057 Melitene was sacked. In 1059
Turkish troops advanced for the first time into the heart of imperial
territory, to the town of Sebastea.

Tughril Bey died in 1063. He himself had not
taken much interest in his north-western frontier. But his nephew and successor,
Alp Arslan, nervous of a possible alliance between the Byzantines and the
Fatimids, sought to protect himself from the former by the conquest of Armenia
before he pursued his main objective against the latter. Raids into the Empire
were intensified. In 1064 the old Armenian capital of Ani was destroyed; and
the prince of Kars, the last independent Armenian ruler, gladly handed over his
lands to the Emperor in return for estates in the Taurus mountains. Large
numbers of Armenians accompanied him to his new home. From 1065 onwards the
great frontier-fortress of Edessa was yearly attacked; but the Turks were as
yet inexpert in siege warfare. In 1066 they occupied the passes of the Amanus
mountains, and next spring they sacked the Cappadocian metropolis, Caesarea.
Next winter Byzantine armies were defeated at Melitene and at Sebastea. These
victories gave the Turks full control of Armenia. During the following years
they raided far into the Empire, to Neocaesarea and Amorium in 1068, to Iconium
in 1069, and in 1070 to Chonae, close to the Aegean coast.

The imperial government was forced to take
action. Constantine X, whose policy of reducing the armed forces was largely
responsible for the serious situation, had died in 1067, leaving a young son,
Michael VII, under the regency of the Empress-mother, Eudocia. Next year
Eudocia married the commander-in-chief, Romanus Diogenes, and raised him to the
throne. Romanus was a distinguished soldier and a sincere patriot; but the task
before him required a man of genius. He saw that the safety of the Empire
demanded the reconquest of Armenia. But the Byzantine army was no longer the
magnificent force it had been fifty years before. The provincial troops were
inadequate to protect their own districts against the raiders; they could spare
no troops for the Emperor’s campaign. The noble families, who could have raised
men from their estates, were suspicious and held aloof. The cavalry regiments,
sixty thousand strong, that had patrolled the Syrian frontier till the middle
of the century, were now disbanded. The imperial guards, hand-picked and highly
trained Anatolians, were far below their old strength. The bulk of the army
consisted now of foreign mercenaries, the Norsemen of the Varangian Guard,
Normans and Franks from western Europe, Slavs from the north, and Turks from
the steppes of southern Russia, Petcheneg, Cuman and Ghuzz. Out of these
elements Romanus collected a force of nearly a hundred thousand men, of which
perhaps half were Byzantine-born, but only a very few of these were
professional soldiers and none was well-equipped. Of the mercenaries, the
largest contingent was that of the Cuman Turks, under the leadership of the
Turkish-born Joseph Tarchaniotes. The
corps d’elite
was the Frankish and
Norman heavy cavalry, under the Norman, Roussel of Bailleul. The former
Frankish commanders of the corps, Herve and Crispin, had each in turn been
deposed for open treachery; but the men would only serve under a compatriot.
The chief Byzantine commander under the Emperor was Andronicus Ducas, the late
Emperor’s nephew and, like all his family, a bitter enemy of Romanus, who did
not dare to leave him behind at Constantinople. With this large but
untrustworthy army Romanus set out in the spring of 1071 to reconquer Armenia.
As he was leaving the capital the news came through from Italy that Bari, the
last Byzantine possession in the peninsula, had fallen to the Normans.

The Battle of
Manzikert

The chroniclers tell in tragic detail of the
Emperor’s march eastward along the great Byzantine military road. His intention
was to capture and garrison the Armenian fortresses before the Turkish army
should come up from the south. Alp Arslan was in Syria, near Aleppo, when he
heard of the Byzantine advance. He realized how vital was the challenge; and he
hurried northward to meet the Emperor. Romanus entered Armenia along the
southern branch of the upper Euphrates. Near Manzikert he divided his forces.
He himself went on to Manzikert itself, while he sent his Franks and Cumans to
secure the fortress of Akhlat, on the shores of Lake Van. At Manzikert he
received news that Alp Arslan was approaching; and he swung to the south-west
to reunite the army before the Turks should be on him. But, forgetful of the
first principle of Byzantine tactics, he neglected to send out scouts. On
Friday, 19 August, as he lay in a valley on the Akhlat road, awaiting his
mercenaries, Alp Arslan fell on him. His mercenaries never came to his rescue.
The Cumans, remembering that they were Turks and in arrears with their pay, had
gone over in a body on the previous night to join the enemy; and Roussel and
his Franks decided to take no part in the battle. The issue of the battle was
not long in doubt. Romanus himself fought bravely; but Andronicus Ducas, seeing
that his cause was lost and guessing that the next act of the drama would be
played at Constantinople, drew the reserve troops under his command away from
the battlefield and marched them westward, leaving the Emperor to his fate. By
evening the Byzantine army was destroyed and Romanus wounded and a prisoner.