The Great Betrayal (17 page)

On January 25th the confusion and anarchy reached such a peak that the court officials, nobles and clergy came to the unanimous decision that some action must be taken to restore order. The reins of power, which in any case had hardly ever been within the hands of Alexius, must be handed to a real emperor. A man must be found who was capable of exercising some firm control. “A great crowd gathered together in Santa Sophia, the whole senate and the high dignitaries of the Church. But when we had collected their votes,” Nicetas tells us, “no conclusion could be reached as to who should be made Emperor if Alexius was deposed…”

The wrangling between one party and another went on for three days. The names of many members of the nobility were proposed, all of them for one reason or another being rejected. Murtzuphlus seems to have made no attempt to press his claims, He was preparing to take the power into his own hands. Finally, on the third day, a compromise was reached between the rival factions. A young nobleman, Nicholas Canobus, was elected emperor much against his will. This obscure figure who emerges for a brief moment on to the stage of history was wise in trying to repudiate so doubtful an honour. Only an ambitious, bold and resolute man would have been willing to be Emperor of Constantinople at such a moment.

Alexius was well aware of the meetings that were daily taking place in Santa Sophia, and sought his own safety by despatching a message to Boniface of Montferrat. He implored Boniface to come to his rescue and send troops to the palace to maintain him on the throne. This was the moment for which Murtzuphlus had been waiting. While the bulk of the court and all the officials were busy in Santa Sophia concluding the election of Nicholas Canobus, and while Alexius was waiting in fear to see whether the Crusaders would come to his rescue, Murtzuphlus struck.

Knowing that of all the troops in Constantinople only the Warings would be faithful to the death in defence of the Emperor, Murtzuphlus decided that before anything else he must make sure the imperial bodyguard had been withdrawn from their post. As
Protovestiarius
he had easy access to the imperial quarters, and as a confidant of Alexius the bodyguard assumed that he had the Emperor’s interests at heart. Accordingly, Murtzuphlus entered the palace and told the Warings that a mob was on its way to dethrone and kill the Emperor. It was their duty, he said, to take up their stations outside and prevent the mob entering. The guards withdrew at the double. Murtzuphlus made his way to the Emperor and told him the same story, adding that he had come to help him escape. In his fear, Alexius forgot that the only people upon whose fidelity he could rely were the Warings.

Muffling himself in a cloak so as not to be recognised, he stole out of the palace along with his ‘saviour’. Murtzuphlus conducted him to a meeting-place that had been arranged with the other conspirators. Once there, Alexius, protégé of Philip of Swabia and Emperor of Constantinople, was hurled to the ground and stripped of his insignia. He had been a pawn in the game from the very beginning and now, loaded with chains, he was ‘removed from the board’ and despatched to a dungeon. Murtzuphlus assumed the embroidered, pearl-studded, scarlet buskins and was hailed Emperor by his followers. So sudden and dramatic a
coup d’état
left the other nobles and ecclesiastics (who were even then electing Canobus Emperor) completely dumbfounded. Nicholas Canobus, reluctant recipient of an office he had never sought, was immediately abandoned. He passed out of the limelight into which he had been so unwillingly forced and retired into private life—almost certainly with some relief.

Murtzuphlus had acquired the throne by cunning and
force majeure
. But now that he had seized power, he was (by the peculiar nature of the Byzantine constitution) immediately accepted by the people as their rightful sovereign. Although, so long as he ruled, an emperor was supreme and not subject to human law, the moment that his office had been assumed by another it was an accepted fact that “Allegiance was automatically transferred.
‘Le roi est mart; vive le roi’
was never truer than in the Byzantine world, even though the former occupant of the throne might have been most foully disposed of by his successor”.
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Power belongs to him who holds it. Murtzuphlus was crowned in Santa Sophia with all the formality of Byzantine tradition. The Patriarch anointed him with the consecrated oil. The people acclaimed him as Emperor, ‘King in Christ’, and vice-regent of God on earth.

In the meantime the old co-Emperor, Isaac, had died. “He was overcome,” according to Villehardouin, “by grief and illness brought on at the news of his son’s arrest.” De Clari says that he was strangled. Nicetas who, as a member of the court, was in a better position to know the true facts, agrees with Villehardouin that he died of old age and grief. Now if Nicetas could have found any further charges to lay at Murtzuphlus’s door he would certainly have done so, for the office of Great Logothete (Lord Chancellor and Minister for Foreign Affairs), which Nicetas had held under Alexius, was now taken away from him.

Murtzuphlus was determined not to have any members of the former regime in position of power. All the historians are agreed about one aspect of this
coup d’état
—the fate of the unfortunate young Alexius. “…In the sixth month and eighth day of his reign he was strangled on the orders of Murtzuphlus.” The new Emperor had no intention of making the same mistake that his predecessor had done. He was not going to leave a potential source of rebellion alive in the imperial dungeons. There could no longer be any possible argument for the Doge and the Crusaders that they were bent on restoring the legitimate ruler of Constantinople. Any further action that they took would have to be made openly—and on their own account.

11

THE CITY IN SPRING

The news that Murtzuphlus had seized power, and that their protégé Alexius was imprisoned, caused consternation among the Venetians and Crusaders. With the removal of Alexius from the throne, any chance of his debts being paid had vanished. No one in Constantinople had any obligation for these. It was not as if he had been the chosen emperor of his people, for even Villehardouin could hardly convince himself that Alexius had been anything more than a puppet in the hands of Boniface and the Doge. During all these months the conspirators had at least been able to produce as excuse for the invasion of Byzantine territory that they were determined to restore the rightful emperor. Once they had restored him, there had been good reason for them all to remain outside Constantinople until such time as Alexius had discharged his debts. Now that he was dethroned and imprisoned (for they did not yet know that he was dead) it was quite clear that they could only recoup their losses by capturing the city.

Enrico Dandolo was never in his life “one of those sorry souls who”, as Dante wrote, “live without either infamy or renown, displeasing both to God and his enemies”. He was a man whom the great Florentine would have recognised—active, ambitious and prepared to die in battle rather than sink into an obscure and peaceful old age. He held the Crusaders in the palm of his hand, and he knew now (as they would learn shortly) that the only solution to their problems was to seize Constantinople and elect their own emperor.

Murtzuphlus, meanwhile, showed that the energy and audacity which had brought him to the throne were now at the service of the city.
^[1]
He was a harsh and difficult man, never popular, and yet he managed to command an almost unwilling respect from the citizens of Constantinople during those dark days. Had he managed to achieve the throne at an earlier date—before the accession of Alexius and his father Isaac—it is quite possible that the Crusaders and the Venetians would have failed utterly in their object. He arrived too late to prevent the final catastrophe and yet, even at this moment in the history of the city and the Empire, he showed something of that spirit which had kept the barbarians at bay for so many centuries.

“The barons said that they would never abandon the siege until they had taken their revenge and captured the city a second time—and had complete payment of Alexius’s debts to them. When Murtzuphlus heard their intention he gave orders for the walls and towers to be manned, and to be further strengthened…” He would not permit any of the citizens to shirk their obligations, levying further taxes on the rich (although, unlike those of young Alexius, these were not to pay the enemy but to defeat him), and compelling everyone to work night and day on the fortifications. The weak points of the defences, the harbour walls facing the Golden Horn which the Venetians had managed to storm, were the first major consideration. Gangs of labourers were set to work raising the level of the battlements, so that the Venetian drawbridges would no longer be able to reach the top of the walls. Above the seaward towers themselves Murtzuphlus had two- to three-storied wooden stages erected, so that the archers and crossbowmen would have additional advantage over any Venetian attempts to run up scaling ladders from the bows of their galleys.

Everywhere—and for the first time since the Crusading fleet had been seen off the walls of the city in June the previous year—a sense of purpose and urgency existed. Murtzuphlus was a man of action. He did not spare himself but was to be found during the course of a day, now at the head of the cavalry as they cut off parties of Crusaders foraging for fuel and food in the nearby country, and now among the workmen on the walls of the city. His conduct and his spirit won the grudging respect of his people. For the first time for many years they felt that they had a man of character to lead them. But if the ordinary citizens admired and followed him, the nobility (and Nicetas the historian was very typical of them) disliked him intensely. They felt the pinching pressure of his tax-collectors and resented it. Grown soft under the rule of indulgent and corrupt emperors, they objected strongly to the curtailment of their privileges and to the constant reminder that they too must live under siege conditions.

Murtzuphlus had indeed taken on an almost impossible task. The treasury was exhausted; a large and important part of the city lay in ruins; and almost the last of their shipping had been lost in the ill-fated fireship raid. Furthermore, the army was disorganised, and largely unpaid. It was little wonder that Murtzuphlus had no time to indulge the privileged nobles, and that they for their part grew to hate the sight of him. His attitude towards them was tyrannical but, under the circumstances, realistic. As Nicetas tells us, “They feared his voice like that of death.”

The party which was all for peace at any price—so long as their own comfort could be maintained—wanted to see Boniface of Montferrat made emperor. Whether they were in fact faint-hearts or realists, these members of the rich and merchant classes had long ago given up any hope of defeating the Venetians and Crusaders. They longed for normal conditions to return, and they thought that the best way of securing this would be to enthrone the man who had been the protector of young Alexius, and who was the leader of the Crusaders.

This group contrived to hamper Murtzuphlus in every way they could, and to prepare for the day when they could unseat him and hand over the throne to Boniface. But if Murtzuphlus did not command the following of the wealthy, he had managed to win the Waring guard to his side. Infuriated at first by the discovery of how he had tricked them in order to seize the Emperor Alexius, they had now given him their entire confidence. For one thing, they respected the fact that this emperor was a man of action, and for another they now learned how Alexius had been preparing to call in the Normans to protect him at the moment that Murtzuphlus had struck. One authority also stated categorically that the failure of the fireship raid was due to the fact that the Emperor Alexius had secretly warned the enemy in advance.
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When the Warings heard of this piece of treachery, they gladly espoused the cause of Murtzuphlus, an emperor who was clearly determined to do all that lie could to keep the Franks and Normans out of the city.

In the early spring of that year, as the winter receded and far north across the Black Sea the snows withdrew, the city began to quicken with a renewed life. The small craft were creeping up from the islands of the Aegean, from the coastal villages of Thrace and from the Morea. Spring is slower to reach Constantinople than the Peloponnese, the mainland of Greece or the islands. Although few merchants put to sea in Greek waters until the ‘prodoms’—those forerunners of the northern winds of midsummer—began to blow, yet there were always some who were prepared to risk their craft and dodge up the coast in order to arrive early at the city. Quite soon the traders would be coming down from the Black Sea, from the ports of Heraclea, Amastris, Sinope and Trebizond. The overland route from the north would reopen and the merchants from Mesembria and Varna, from Wallachia beyond the Danube and from Russia itself would start to arrive. Amber would come from the distant Baltic, furs and skins from Petchinak and Wallach trappers, and soon by the overland Asian route spices, perfumes, ivory and raw silk would filter through from India and China. Despite the Seljuk Turks lying athwart the roads to Persia and Syria, precious stones, cotton and sugar still made their way to the ancient capital from the Levant.

The city was not only a consumer but an exporter of many manufactured goods—woven silks, carved ivories, enamelled jewellery, ceramic wares and metal goods of all kinds. As an important centre of the re-export trade Constantinople, even at this period in its history, was an invaluable link between the cultures and the mercantile centres of Asia and Europe. Turkish merchants as well as other Moslems were frequent visitors (as witness the ‘Saracen’ mosque that had caused the recent riot and led to the disastrous fire). One chronicler of the Crusades went so far as to say that: “It would have been right to have razed the city to the ground, for it was polluted by mosques which its treacherous emperor had allowed to be built in order to strengthen his trade with the Turks”.