The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (50 page)

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Authors: Jonathan Phillips

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The emperor gave a narrative of events from August 1203 onwards, taking great care to illuminate Alexius IV’s lies and perjury and in particular his failure to adhere to the promises in the Treaty of Zara, which had led the crusade to Constantinople in the first instance. He was held responsible for the attack of the fire-ships (perhaps untrue) and for inflicting terrible hardships on his own people. Murtzuphlus was damned as a perjurer for failing to keep his promise to hand over the Blachernae palace in return for crusader support of Alexius. Murtzuphlus was then depicted as a traitor and murderer for his brutal removal of the young emperor. Baldwin was careful to detail the final attempt to make peace when the doge met the Greek usurper, and the letter laid stress upon Murtzuphlus’s refusal to submit the Orthodox Church to Rome, a matter of obvious importance to Innocent.
Baldwin consistently ascribed crusader successes, such as the capture of the icon of the Virgin Mary and the lack of damage wrought by the fire-ships, to the blessing of God. This divine approval was, naturally, linked to the crusaders’ proper moral purpose, and during the final assault on Constantinople the Fleming portrayed them as attacking the city ‘for the honour of the Holy Roman Church and for the relief of the Holy Land’.
34
When he described the storming of the battlements he again chose to explain the crusader victory in divinely ordained terms: ‘at the Lord’s bidding a vast multitude gives way to very few’. While Baldwin did not shy away from mentioning the killing of many Greeks, he chose to omit the more unpleasant details of rape, pillage and sack that took place. The scale of the booty (‘an inestimable abundance’) was noted as he emphasised the triumph of such a small force. Baldwin wrote: ‘we might safely say that no history could ever relate marvels greater than these so far as the fortunes of war are concerned’. This was the kind of language and hyperbole that authors used after the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 and, like the remarkable achievement of that earlier expedition, the campaign of 1204
had
to be blessed with God’s approval. Quoting from Psalms 98 and 118, Baldwin wrote: ‘Now however, we do not wrongly lay claim to this victory for ourselves because the Lord’s own right hand delivered Himself and His powerful arm was revealed in us. This was done by the Lord, and it is a miracle above all miracles in our eyes:
35
In other words, the diversion to Constantinople was justified and above reproach.
Further sections of Emperor Baldwin’s missive cast the destruction of the perfidious Greeks as a valid crusade in itself. He claimed, correctly, that some churchmen and soldiers from the Holy Land were present at his coronation and that ‘above all others their joy was incalculable and unrestrained’, and that they gave thanks to God ‘just as if the Holy City had been restored to Christian worship’. The reason for their delight was that the crusade had ended the Greeks’ enmity towards the holy warriors. Baldwin criticised the Byzantines’ alliances with the Muslims, their supplying of the infidel with arms, ships and food, and their disregard for their shared bond of faith with the westerners. He drew attention to their lack of respect for the papacy, to the various liturgical and practical differences of religious observance between the Orthodox and the Catholics, and how the former viewed all westerners as dogs. Baldwin argued that the Greeks had provoked God by their sins and, through the crusaders, He had punished them.
Having portrayed the conquest of Constantinople as a crusade against heathens, Baldwin took care not to forget the expedition to the Levant. He expressed the hope that, once the Byzantine lands were stabilised, he would travel on to the Holy Land. In the meantime he turned to Innocent for support and, making clear that he regarded his new responsibilities as a spiritual matter, Baldwin urged the pope to call for a crusade to help the nascent Latin Empire and promised that those who came would be rewarded with lands and honours according to their station. He also asked for churchmen to come and settle, having first gained the permission of their religious superiors.
Baldwin also appealed to Innocent to summon a General Church Council in Constantinople. This would enable the pope to formally demonstrate the submission of the Orthodox to the Catholics and would act as a public blessing for the capture of Constantinople. The emperor cited earlier popes who had visited the city several centuries before and implored Innocent to follow suit.
Baldwin closed his letter by commending the honest and prudent conduct of the clergy in the course of the crusade and by providing a ringing commendation of the character of Doge Dandolo and all the Venetians, ‘whom we find to be faithful and diligent in all circumstances’.
36
The fact that some of the crusader clergy had chosen to suppress papal correspondence at Zara, and that Innocent was one of many who were deeply suspicious of Venetian motives, meant that it was important for the emperor to bolster the credibility of the Italians. The letter was dispatched in the summer and would probably have reached the pope in around September or October 1204.
If Baldwin was in the happy position of explaining the capture of Constantinople from the perspective of the victor, Niketas Choniates had to comprehend the reverse. The loss of Constantinople was a’ massive personal blow; its devastation provoked pain at the outrages perpetrated against its people and fabric, as well as anger against those who committed such terrible deeds: ‘crimes committed against the inheritance of Christ’. To him, the greed, the inhumanity and arrogance of the westerners were unbearable. He constructed a coruscating indictment of their motives. Most particularly he blamed the leadership and mocked their high moral stance: ‘They who were faithful to their oaths, who loved truth and hated evil, who were more pious and just and scrupulous in keeping the commandments of Christ than we Greeks: He claimed that the crusaders had entirely abandoned their vows to cross over Christian lands without shedding blood and to fight the Muslims. He also reviled them for their sexual impurity as men ‘consecrated to God and commissioned to follow in His footsteps’.
37
His conclusion was scathing: ‘In truth they were exposed as frauds. Seeking to avenge the Holy Sepulchre, they raged openly against Christ and sinned by overturning the Cross with the cross they bore on their backs, not even shuddering to trample on it for the sake of a little gold and silver.’
38
Niketas then drew a simple parallel: when the First Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 they had shown no compassion to the Muslim inhabitants. When, 88 years later, the Muslims had taken the holy city back they had behaved far better, neither lusting after the Christian women nor ‘transforming the entranceway to the life-giving tomb [the Holy Sepulchre] into a passageway leading down into Hades’. By ransoming the defenders cheaply and letting them keep their possessions, the Muslims had dealt magnanimously with the defeated people of Jerusalem.
To draw such a damning comparison with, of all people, the Muslims was, of course, richly ironic. The analogy was also true: Saladin’s men did spare the majority of those in Jerusalem, yet the Fourth Crusaders had slaughtered their fellow-Christians. The implication here is obvious: to Niketas, the westerners’ behaviour rendered them worse than infidels. For a second time, therefore, the crusaders had been revealed as blood-thirsty barbarians. His analysis ended with a simple observation: ‘How differently ... the Latins treated us who love Christ and are their fellow-believers, guiltless of any wrong against them.’
39
This devastating analysis of the crusaders’ performance was borne out of Niketas’s anger at the events of 1203—4 although, as we have seen, the author also believed that the Byzantines contributed much to their own downfall through the lamentable actions of their leaders and the sins of their people.
40
Nicholas Mesarites, addressing himself to his fellow-Byzantines, condemned the crusaders along broadly similar lines: ‘Such was the reverence for holy things of those who bore the Lord’s Cross on their shoulders, thus their own bishops taught them to act. Then why designate them as such? Bishops amongst soldiers or soldiers amongst bishops? And why recount many things in this speech? You all know how these dreadful deeds ended, for you were not among those who practised violence, but among those who endured it:’
41
In the short term, Niketas and Nicholas had to deal with day-to-day survival, but for Emperor Baldwin there was a need to take a longer view. Aside from trying to influence the way in which the crusade was perceived in the West, he had to start the business of government. He appointed John, bishop-elect of Acre (and former chancellor of Flanders), as his new chancellor and set about gathering the money needed to run his empire.
To produce more cash would require the regime to look beyond the movable treasures already looted. They began to examine the fabric of Constantinople ever more closely and to inflict even greater destruction on the legacy of centuries of Byzantine rule. A few more items remained to be plundered and the westerners’ treatment of one of these objects crossed yet another rubicon of propriety.
The church of the Holy Apostles contained a mausoleum holding the tombs of some of the great Byzantine emperors of the past, including Justinian. Not content with pillaging all the church’s ornaments and chalices, the crusaders broke open the great imperial tombs. These mighty sarcophagi, made of the purple porphyry marble that signified imperial status, held not just corpses, but also gold, jewels and pearls. Justinian’s body was found to be in almost perfect condition; in the 639 years since his death his cadaver had barely decomposed. In medieval terms this was a sign of great sanctity and divine endorsement of a good life. While the crusaders were duly impressed, it did nothing to halt their stealing the valuables lying around the imperial body. As Niketas searingly observed: ‘In other words the western nations spared neither the living nor the dead, but beginning with God and his servants, they displayed complete indifference and irreverence to all.’
42
Precious metals were stripped from public buildings and monuments in order to create wealth: melted down and minted into coins, they allowed the westerners to start paying wages and to finance projects of their own. Many of Constantinople’s great statues were callously cast to the ground and consigned to the smelting furnaces. The bronze figure of Hera was pulled down and carted off to the fires; such was its huge size that her head was said to have needed four yokes of oxen to carry it away. Other statues, such as Paris, Alexander and Aphrodite, joined Hera in the dust. The extraordinary wind-vane, the
Anemodoulion,
a mighty equestrian statue from the Forum of the Bull, was also dragged off to feed the insatiable fires.
Constantinople was becoming transformed from the greatest city in the Christian world to a scarred and ragged shadow of its former splendour. Its fine walls were hideously misshapen by the remains of the wooden siege defences; three terrible fires had damaged buildings right across the city; and now the monuments that had commemorated and sustained the Byzantines’ cultural identity were being torn down. Pedestals stood shorn of their statues, alcoves lay bare, except where a sad stub of metal marked where finely crafted figures had once stood.
The Hippodrome was stripped of its decorations: a great bronze eagle; representations of charioteers; a massive hippopotamus with a crocodile or basilisk in its jaws; a stunning, shapely figure of Helen of Troy, who ‘appeared as fresh as the morning dew, anointed with the moistness of erotic love on her garment, veil, diadem and braid of hair’.
43
Alongside the crusaders’ continued ruination of the Queen of Cities they behaved uncouthly amongst themselves. Enriched by their new-found wealth, the conquerors engaged in endless bouts of gambling and gaming, or else they fought one another, even including their wives as part of the wager. Displaying the rather condescending superiority of a highly educated imperial official, Niketas concluded that one might expect little else of a group of ‘unlettered barbarians who are wholly ignorant of their ABCs, [and] the ability to read and have knowledge of ... epic verses’.
44
From Emperor Baldwin’s perspective, the need to generate money was an imperative that sentiment or aesthetics could not resist; his responsibilities as an anointed ruler required immediate action and it was to the wider issues of government that he now turned.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
‘For a high man—high justice!’
The End of the Fourth Crusade and the Early Years of the Latin Empire, 1204—5
 
T
HE STORY OF the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-61) is a convoluted and frustrating tale. The crusade had culminated in Baldwin’s coronation, but the attempt to consolidate this achievement meant years of warfare, brief periods of progress and peace and, for many of the main actors, a violent death. Yet the impact of the events of April 1204 went far beyond the walls of Constantinople. A change of such magnitude in the landscape of the Christian world had enormous consequences for many different peoples, not just those in and around the Byzantine Empire. The papacy, the Crusader States in the Levant, the families and countrymen of the crusaders back in western Europe, the Italian trading cities and the Muslim world: each had to calibrate and assess a political and religious topography that had never previously been conceived of. A full consideration of these issues would, however, fill another book and the main concern here is with the early years of the nascent Latin Empire.

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