The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (42 page)

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Authors: Jonathan Phillips

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BOOK: The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
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In the short term, however, the basic struggle for survival became the crusaders’ most pressing priority. Murtzuphlus withdrew all the markets upon which the westerners had relied and it was impossible to enter Constantinople itself to buy food there. Robert of Clari, as a lesser knight, was more immediately affected by such hardships than the likes of Villehardouin and the other leaders. Robert provides figures for the cost of various basic commodities: a
sestier
of wine sold for 12 or even 15 sous, an egg for two pennies and a hen for 20 sous. On the other hand, Robert noted a surfeit of biscuit, enough to supply the army for some time.
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Robert’s figures mean relatively little to us without a context, but Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gives an indication of the level of inflation. He reported that three-day-old bread worth two Parisian dinars now cost 26 dinars! Some men were even forced to devour their horses, the very basis of a knight’s standing and military strength; truly this was ‘a time of great scarcity’.
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Soon the crusaders were compelled to roam far and wide in their efforts to gather food. Henry of Flanders led a body of men (30 knights and many mounted sergeants according to Robert of Clari), including James of Avesnes and the Burgundian knights Eudes and William of Champlitte, in an attempt to secure supplies. They left in the dark of an early evening to avoid detection and rode all night and the following morning to the town of Philia on the Black Sea. They succeeded in capturing the castle and plundered enough food to last the army almost a fortnight. The crusaders seized cattle and clothing, the latter a less obvious form of booty, but nonetheless invaluable when it came to surviving the winter months. As the westerners spent a couple of days enjoying the spoils of victory, some defenders escaped and fled to Constantinople where they told Murtzuphlus of these events. With his ascendancy to the imperial throne based upon an aggressive attitude towards the westerners, the new emperor was bound to strike hard at the enemy as soon as possible and he set out to intercept them.
He took with him the icon of the Virgin Mary. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gives the only detailed description of the object: ‘On this icon the Majesty of the Lord was wonderfully fashioned, as well as an image of Blessed Mary and the apostles. And relics were set in it: Therein is a tooth that Jesus lost in childhood, and therein is contained a piece of the lance by which He was wounded on the Cross, a portion of the Shroud, and relics from thirty martyrs.’
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The presence of this enormously revered icon must have given Murtzuphlus great confidence; Niketas Choniates wrote that the Byzantines regarded the relic as ‘a fellow general’.
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It was common for Christian armies to carry relics into battle: the crusaders in the Holy Land had taken the True Cross into all their battles between 1099 and its loss at the Horns of Hattin in 1187. Murtzuphlus was aligning himself with one of the greatest icons of the Orthodox Church and claiming her protection. He was also making plain his defence of that institution and showing that he had the support of its hierarchy in his war against the Catholic aggressors. Patriarch John X Camaterus, the senior figure in the Orthodox Church, accompanied the army to emphasise this point.
Murtzuphlus gathered a substantial force of several thousand warriors (4,000, according to Robert of Clari) and set out to track down the crusaders, who were moving slowly, in part hampered by the need to drive the cattle back to their camp. Murtzuphlus soon found and briefly shadowed them. He decided to attack the rearguard first. He watched the main force pass by escorting their prisoners and the captured animals and then, just as the crusaders, led by Henry of Flanders, were about to enter a wood, he sprang into action and rushed towards his enemy.
At first, the westerners feared the worst: seriously outnumbered, they called on God and the Virgin Mary to deliver them. But they quickly pulled themselves together and turned to face their opponents. A group of eight crossbowmen were set at the front of their troops in order to take the initial sting from the Greek onslaught. This must have had some effect, but the charge was not stopped and the two forces were soon engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The crusaders threw away their lances and drew their swords and daggers to better fight at close range.
A Spanish mercenary, Peter of Navarre, headed the Greek advance guard. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gleefully records that Peter was so confident of success that he entered the fray bareheaded except for a golden crown. As the two sides locked into combat, Peter came up against Henry of Flanders, an experienced warrior and a skilled swordsman. The Fleming engaged his opponent and immediately aimed for his weak spot: with one accelerating, arcing blow, doubtless practised countless times in the court-yards of the comital castles of Flanders, he brought his sword down upon Peter’s head. The golden crown snapped and the sword buried itself to a depth of two fingers into the skull of the Navarrese. The power and discipline of the crusader cavalry again showed its superiority and soon the front ranks of the Greeks crumbled. By this time the western forces had been working together for more than a year: at Zara, Corfu, outside Constantinople, and on Alexius’s campaign in Thrace. They were polished and co-ordinated in a way that only direct battlefield experience could provide. By contrast, the Byzantine forces, a mixture of Greek nobles and mercenaries, lacked the cohesion and power to match their enemy.
As the battle intensified, the crusaders quickly penetrated to the senior men amongst the enemy. Theodore Branas was struck with a huge blow that dented his helmet and severely bruised him. Peter of Bracieux, who had already distinguished himself in the exchange outside the Galata fortress in July 1203, was again to the fore and here he decided to seek even greater glory by trying to capture the icon. Whether he saw Patriarch John from a distance and spurred towards him, or whether he simply found himself close by the Byzantine in the heat of the battle, is unknown. In either event, Peter’s heart leaped at the prospect of taking such a magnificent and important relic. The patriarch was said to be wearing a helmet and armour as well as his robes, although because Byzantine clergy were known not to bear arms this element of the story may well be untrue.
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In any case, as Peter closed in on him, he probably chose deliberately not to kill a man of such high standing. Nonetheless he dealt a fierce crack across the front of the patriarch’s helmet that caused him to fall from his horse and drop the sacred object. As it lay shining in the dust, Peter leaped from his horse to seize it and, while John knelt stunned on the ground, the crusader gathered the icon into his arms. When the other Greeks saw what had happened they howled in rage and turned all their efforts on Peter. They surged towards the Frenchman, but the crusaders reacted sharply enough, closed ranks around their comrade and then mounted a brutal counter-attack. Murtzuphlus was hit so hard that he fell over his horse’s neck; his men were thrown into disarray, and the Byzantine army broke and fled. So desperate was Murtzuphlus to escape that he threw away his shield, dropped his arms and spurred his horse into a gallop. He also abandoned the imperial standard—another humiliation for the emperor. While the Greeks had lost around 20 men, not a single crusader knight was killed in this engagement. Proudly bearing their great trophies, the westerners headed back to the camp.
News of the battle had reached the main army and a contingent of men prepared themselves to go to the help of their friends. As they hurried in the direction of the fray they were overjoyed to meet their comrades already coming victoriously towards them. Unsurprisingly the foraging party was welcomed with huge delight. When they approached the camp the bishops and clerics processed out to meet them and to receive the holy icon. Showing the deepest reverence they took it into their midst and entrusted it to Bishop Garnier of Troyes, a man who had already been to the Holy Land as a pilgrim. Garnier carried the icon back into a church in the camp and the clergy sang a divine service to celebrate its capture. In thanks for their victory, the crusaders donated the icon to the Cistercian order, whose abbots of Lucedio and Loos had provided such sterling spiritual and emotional guidance to the expedition. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines was himself a Cistercian monk writing in the county of Champagne where the abbey of Citeaux was located. He chose to record this story because he may possibly have seen or heard a detailed, or garbled, description of the object.
Not only had the foraging party secured a substantial amount of food, but it had dealt a terrible blow to the standing of the new regime. This was the crusaders’ first significant military success in months and it provided a massive and much-needed morale boost.
For Murtzuphlus, on the other hand, this was a crushing disappointment. Having looked to the Virgin for divine support and trusting in her power to defeat the crusaders, the loss of the icon was devastating. The westerners knew of its importance to the Greeks and naturally drew their own conclusions as to why Murtzuphlus had lost it. Robert of Clari commented: ‘They have so great faith in this icon that they fully believe that no one who carries it in battle can be defeated, and we believe that it was because Murtzuphlus had no right to carry it that he was defeated.’
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The emperor was painfully aware of this same possibility. The Virgin was felt to have a special affinity with Constantinople and the episode appeared to be a divine judgement on his rule.
To avoid this uncomfortable truth from being broadcast, he resorted to a desperate stratagem. In an outrageous misrepresentation of reality he asserted that he had been victorious in the battle. When asked the whereabouts of the icon and the imperial standard, he replied that they had been put away for safekeeping. After a little while it seems that this travesty gained some currency, but the purported outcome of the battle could not remain inside the walls of Constantinople for ever. Stories concerning the emperor’s claims of success and his denial of losing the icon and standard soon reached the crusader camp. The information must have provoked amazement at such bravado, and then a realisation that something had to be done to set the record straight.
The westerners had a rare opportunity to exert complete control over the situation. They decided to publicly humiliate Murtzuphlus by making plain the truth. The Venetians prepared a galley and placed the imperial standard and the icon prominently at the prow. Then, blowing trumpets to attract attention, they slowly rowed the ship up and down, alongside the city walls, displaying the objects to the astounded populace. The citizens recognised the icon and the banner: Murtzuphlus’s deception was exposed and many mocked him for his defeat and were angered by his lies. The emperor lamely attempted to explain away the episode and to rally support by promising that he would wreak vengeance on his enemies.
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Almost immediately Murtzuphlus tried to launch another attack with fire-ships, but this too failed. Recognising that his military efforts were proving bad for morale as well as inflicting little damage on the crusaders, he tried a less bellicose approach. On February he sent envoys to the crusader camp seeking a meeting with the doge. Murtzuphlus evidently regarded Dandolo as less closely bound to Alexius than, for example, Boniface of Montferrat. The doge was also widely respected for his wisdom and prudence.
Dandolo boarded a galley and was rowed up the Golden Horn to a point outside the monastery of St Cosmos and St Damian, just outside the city walls to the north. A squadron of crusader cavalry also crossed over the inlet and shadowed the negotiations. Murtzuphlus rode out from the Blachernae palace and came down to the shore where the two men exchanged views. Niketas Choniates and Baldwin of Flanders provide the two accounts of the meeting and, while both display predictably divergent viewpoints, the information they supply is fundamentally similar. Baldwin wrote that Dandolo was aware of the dangers in trusting a man who had already disregarded his oaths to his lord and cast him into prison, and who now disregarded the covenant with the crusaders. Nonetheless the doge sounded a conciliatory, if somewhat unrealistic, note by asking Murtzuphlus to free Alexius and to request his forgiveness. Dandolo also promised that the crusaders would be lenient on Alexius, attributing his foolishness to a youthful one-off lapse of judgement. Beneath this veneer of politeness lay a sense of threat, however. It was the crusaders who now seemed to be dictating the terms; it was Dandolo talking about being lenient and maintaining the peace. The westerners’ recent military successes and the extraordinary disarray within Constantinople gave them an ascendancy that a few weeks earlier would have seemed unthinkable. The real message behind the doge’s emollient tone was the crusaders’ demand that the Greeks hold firm to the agreement made by Alexius and provide the promised military support for the expedition to the Holy Land and the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome. Baldwin of Flanders stated that Murtzuphlus had no reasonable response to the doge’s propositions and that, in rejecting them, he ‘chose the loss of his life and the overthrow of Greece’.
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To Niketas Choniates, as a Byzantine, there was little that was reasonable about the offer. The repetition of these detested conditions, compounded by the demand of an immediate payment of 5,000 pounds of gold, was completely unacceptable. Niketas tersely characterised the crusaders’ terms as ‘galling and unacceptable to those who have tasted freedom and are accustomed to give, not take, commands’.
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In effect, the usurping emperor was being asked to stand down, to get his people to bow to the crusaders’ force, his city to strip itself of even more gold and his clergy to surrender their authority. It was inconceivable that Murtzuphlus could consider such concessions. If he agreed to the crusaders’ demands, his own power would probably flow back to Alexius, and the citizens of Constantinople, who had supported him on the basis of his resistance to the westerners, would simply turn against him and almost certainly kill him.

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