The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (22 page)

To both Boniface and Doge Dandolo, the scheme had much to recommend it; most of their followers, too, were only too happy to lend themselves to a plan which promised to strengthen and enrich the Crusade–enabling it, incidentally, to pay off the debt to Venice–while also restoring the unity of Christendom. So it was that on 24 June 1203, a year to the day after the rendezvous in Venice, the Crusader fleet dropped anchor off Constantinople. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who wrote a highly readable account of the whole affair, reported:

You may imagine how they gazed, all those who had never before seen Constantinople. For when they saw those high ramparts and the strong towers with which it was completely encircled, and the splendid palaces and soaring churches–so many that but for the evidence of their own eyes they would never have believed it–and the length and the breadth of that city which of all others is sovereign, they never thought that there could be so rich and powerful a place on earth. And mark you that there was not a man so bold that he did not tremble at the sight; nor was this any wonder, for never since the creation of the world was there so great an enterprise.

To begin with, the Crusaders met with remarkably little opposition. On 5 July they landed below Galata, on the northeastern side of the Golden Horn. Being a commercial settlement largely occupied by foreign merchants, Galata was unwalled; its only major fortification was a single round tower. This was, however, of vital importance, because in it stood the huge windlass for the raising and lowering of the great iron chain that was used in emergencies to block the entrance to the Horn. The Byzantine garrison put up a spirited defence, but after twenty-four hours the Venetian sailors were able to unshackle the windlass, and the chain subsided thunderously into the water. The fleet swept in, quickly destroying such few seaworthy Byzantine vessels as it found in the inner harbour. The naval victory was complete.

Constantinople, however, was not yet taken. The walls that ran along the shore of the Golden Horn could not compare with the tremendous land ramparts on the western side, but they could still be staunchly defended. The Crusaders directed their attack against the weakest point, where these two defences met, at the extreme northwest corner of the city near the imperial palace of Blachernae. The first attempt–by the Franks–to make a landing was driven back; it was the Venetians who decided the day–and, to a considerable degree, Enrico Dandolo in person. The story of his courage is told by Geoffrey himself:

And here was an extraordinary feat of boldness. For the Duke of Venice, who was an old man and stone-blind, stood fully armed on the prow of his galley, with the banner of St Mark before him, and cried out to his men to drive the ship ashore if they valued their skins. And so they did, and ran the galley ashore, and he and they leaped down and planted the banner before him in the ground. And when the other Venetians saw the standard of St Mark and the Doge’s galley beached before their own, they were ashamed, and followed him ashore.

Before long, Byzantine resistance crumbled: the Crusaders poured through the breaches in the walls into the city itself, setting fire to the wooden houses until the whole quarter of Blachernae was ablaze. That evening Alexius III fled secretly from the city, leaving his wife and all his children–except a favourite daughter–to face the future as best they might.

Byzantium, at this gravest crisis in its history, could not long be left without an emperor: old Isaac Angelus was hastily fetched from his prison and replaced on the throne. But this was by no means the end of the affair. Thanks to his brother’s ministrations he was even blinder than the old Doge, and had already shown himself to be hopelessly incompetent; and there remained the undertakings made by his son Alexius to Boniface and Dandolo. Only when Isaac had made Alexius co-emperor with him–as Alexius IV–did the Crusaders accord him their formal recognition. They then withdrew to Galata to await their promised rewards.

These rewards, however, were not forthcoming. The imperial treasury was found to be empty; the clergy, already scandalised when Alexius began to seize and melt down their church plate, were incandescent with rage when they heard of his plans to subordinate them to Rome. The continued presence of the Franks, who had no intention of leaving until the Emperor fulfilled his promises, increased the tension still further. One night a group of them came upon a little mosque in the Saracen quarter behind the church of St Irene, pillaged it and burned it to ashes. The flames spread, and for the next two days Constantinople was engulfed in the worst fire since the days of Justinian, nearly seven centuries before. This disaster brought the already fraught situation to breaking point, and when a few days later the Emperor admitted to a delegation of Franks and Venetians that there was absolutely no prospect of their ever receiving the sum owed to them, the result was war.

Ironically enough, neither the Greeks nor the Franks wanted it. The former wished only to be rid of these uncivilised thugs once and for all; the latter had not forgotten the reason why they had left their homes, and increasingly resented their enforced stay among what they considered an effete and heretical people when they should have been getting to grips with the infidel. Even if the promised money were paid in full, they themselves would not benefit; it would only enable them to settle their own outstanding account with the Venetians. The key to the whole impossible affair lay, in short, with Venice–or, more accurately, with Enrico Dandolo. It was open to him at any moment to give his fleet the order to sail. Had he done so, the Crusaders would have been relieved and the Byzantines overjoyed. The fact that he did not was no longer anything to do with the Frankish debt. His mind had turned to greater things: the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of a Venetian puppet on the throne of Constantinople.

And so Dandolo’s advice to his Frankish allies took on a different tone. Nothing more, he pointed out, could be expected of the two hopeless co-emperors. If the Crusaders were ever to obtain their due, they would have to take Constantinople by force. Once inside the city, with one of their own leaders installed on the throne, they could pay Venice what they owed almost without noticing it and still have more than enough to finance the Crusade. This was their opportunity; they should seize it now, for it would not recur. It was a cogent argument, and it gained still greater strength when, on 25 January 1204, Alexius IV was deposed and shortly afterwards murdered, his old father following him with suspicious promptness to the grave. His murderer, a nobleman named Alexius Ducas–nicknamed Murzuphlus on account of his eyebrows, which were black and shaggy and met in the middle–was then crowned in St Sophia as Alexius V, and immediately began to show the qualities of leadership that the Empire had lacked for so long. Regiments of workmen were set to work, day and night, strengthening the defences and raising them ever higher. An all-out attempt on the city, if it were to be made at all, must clearly be made at once; now that the new Emperor had not only usurped the throne but had revealed himself as a murderer, the Crusaders were morally in an even stronger position than if they had moved against his predecessor, who had been at least legitimate as well as their erstwhile ally.

The attack began on Friday morning, 9 April 1204. Murzuphlus led a desperate resistance, but in vain. He in turn fled, and on the 12th the Franks and Venetians finally broke through the walls. The carnage was dreadful; even Villehardouin was appalled. Not for nothing had the army waited so long outside the world’s richest capital; now that it was theirs and the customary three days’ looting was allowed them, they fell on it like locusts. Never since the barbarian invasions had Europe witnessed such an orgy of vandalism and brutality; never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been so wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time. A Greek eye-witness, Nicetas Choniates, wrote:

They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed to mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour…As for their profanation of the Great Church, it cannot be thought of without horror. They destroyed the high altar, a work of art admired by the entire world, and shared out the pieces among themselves…And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.

A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place…nor was there mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God…In the streets, houses and churches there could be heard only cries and lamentations.

And these men, he continues, carried the Cross on their shoulders, the Cross on which they had sworn to pass through Christian lands without bloodshed, to take arms only against the heathen and to abstain from the pleasures of the flesh until their holy task was done.

After three days of terror, order was restored and the Crusaders applied themselves to their next task: the election of a new Emperor. Boniface of Montferrat would have been the obvious candidate, but his association with the deposed Alexius IV had been too close, and he now found himself to some degree discredited. Besides, he had secret links with the Genoese, and Dandolo knew it. The old Doge had no difficulty in steering the electoral commission–half of which was made up of Venetians–towards Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, who was duly crowned on 16 May in St Sophia. But the dominions over which he was to reign were to be dramatically reduced. Already in March the Venetians and the Franks together had agreed that he should retain only a quarter of the city and the Empire, the remaining three-quarters to be divided equally between Venice and the Crusading knights. Dandolo consequently appropriated for the Republic the entire district surrounding St Sophia, down to the Golden Horn; for the rest, he took all those regions that promised to strengthen Venice’s mastery of the Mediterranean and to give her an unbroken chain of trading colonies and ports from the Lagoon to the Black Sea. They included Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and Durazzo (now Dürres); the western coast of the Greek mainland and the Ionian Islands; all the Peloponnese; the islands of Naxos and Andros, and two cities of Euboea; the chief ports on the Hellespont and the Marmara, Gallipoli, Rhaedestum and Heraclea; the Thracian seaboard, the city of Adrianople and finally–after a brief negotiation with Boniface–the all-important island of Crete. For all this the Doge was specifically absolved from doing the Emperor homage. The harbours and islands would belong to Venice absolutely, but where mainland Greece was concerned, Dandolo made it clear that as a mercantile republic Venice had no interest in occupying more than the key ports.

Thus it emerges beyond all doubt that it was the Venetians who were the real beneficiaries of the Fourth Crusade, and that their success was due, almost exclusively, to Enrico Dandolo. Refusing the Byzantine crown for himself–to have accepted it would have created insuperable constitutional problems in Venice and might even have brought down the Republic–he had ensured the success of his own candidate. Finally, while encouraging the Franks to feudalise the Empire–a step which he knew could not fail to create fragmentation and disunity and would prevent its ever becoming strong enough to obstruct Venetian expansion–he had kept Venice outside the feudal framework, holding her new dominions not as an imperial fief but by her own right of conquest. For a blind man not far short of ninety it was a remarkable achievement.

Enrico Dandolo–who now proudly styled himself ‘Lord of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Roman Empire’–had deserved well of his city; but in the wider context of world events he was a disaster. The Fourth Crusade–if indeed it can be so described, for it never entered Muslim territory–surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. Constantinople in the twelfth century was the most intellectually and artistically cultivated metropolis of the world, and the chief repository of Europe’s classical heritage, both Greek and Roman. By its sack, Western civilisation suffered a loss far greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century–perhaps the most catastrophic single loss in all history.

Politically, too, the damage done was incalculable. Although Frankish rule on the Bosphorus was to last less than sixty years, the Byzantine Empire never recovered its strength, or any considerable part of its lost dominions. It was left economically crippled, territorially truncated, powerless to defend itself against the Ottoman tide. There are few greater ironies in history than the fact that the fate of Europe should have been sealed–and half Christian Europe condemned to some five centuries of Ottoman rule–by men who fought under the banner of the Cross. Those men were transported, inspired, encouraged and ultimately led by Enrico Dandolo in the name of the Venetian Republic; and just as Venice derived the major advantage from the tragedy, so she and her magnificent old Doge must accept the major responsibility for the havoc that they wrought upon the world.

CHAPTER VIII

The Two Diasporas

The Fourth Crusade had not only come near to destroying Constantinople; it had stirred up the entire eastern Mediterranean. The upheaval affected Greeks and Latins alike. Virtually all the noble Byzantines had fled the city–or left it in disgust–rather than submit to Frankish rule, and had gravitated to one or other of the successor states in which the Byzantine spirit and the Orthodox faith were still faithfully preserved. One of these states, the so-called Empire of Trebizond, need not concern us here, confined as it was to a narrow strip of coastline on the Black Sea. The second, the so-called Despotate of Epirus, was founded soon after the Latin conquest by a certain Michael Comnenus Ducas, an illegitimate great-grandson of Alexius I Comnenus. From his capital at Arta, Michael gradually established control over the northwestern coast of Greece and part of Thessaly. The last state to be established–but from our point of view by far the most important–was the Empire of Nicaea, of which Alexius III’s son-in-law Theodore Lascaris was recognised as emperor in 1206, being crowned there two years later. It occupied the northwestern extremity of Anatolia, extending all the way from the Black Sea to the Aegean. To the north lay the Latin Empire of Constantinople; to the south and east, the Seljuk sultanate. Although the official capital was Nicaea (Iznik), Theodore’s successor John III Vatatzes was to establish his chief residence at Nymphaeum (now Kemalpa
a, just a few miles from Izmir); for most of the fifty-seven-year period of exile from Constantinople it was from here, as a Mediterranean state, that the Empire of Nicaea was effectively governed.

Even that, however, might have been little more than a footnote to our story had it not been for the Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan, to whom the Greeks of Thrace had promised the imperial crown if he could drive the Latins from Constantinople. On 14 April 1205 Kalojan virtually annihilated the Frankish army. He failed to capture the city, but he succeeded in taking prisoner the Emperor Baldwin himself, who never regained his freedom and died soon afterwards. Just six weeks later, on 1 June, old Doge Dandolo–who, despite his ninety-odd years, had fought determinedly at Baldwin’s side–followed him to the grave. His body, rather surprisingly, was not returned to Venice but was buried in St Sophia. The sarcophagus did not survive the later Turkish conquest but, embedded in the floor of the gallery above the south aisle, his tombstone may still be seen.

Thus, just a year after the capture of the capital, the power of the Latins was broken. They remained in Constantinople; in all Asia Minor, however, only the little town of Pegae (now Karabiga) on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara remained in Frankish hands. Now at last Theodore Lascaris could concentrate on forging his new state–following the old Byzantine pattern in every detail, since he never doubted that his countrymen would be back, sooner or later, where they belonged. Thanks to him, there were now effectively two Emperors in the east and two Patriarchs, the Latin in Constantinople and the Greek in Nicaea. Clearly there was no question of their living in harmony; each party was determined to destroy the other, but neither was sufficiently strong to do so unaided. Thus it was that Baldwin’s successor, Henry of Hainault, introduced into the equation a most unlikely new agent: Kaikosru, the Seljuk Sultan of Konya.

In the long and melancholy history of the Crusades, Christian had all too frequently fought Christian. To recruit a Muslim ally against a Christian enemy, however, was something altogether new. The Seljuk Turks were by now masters of several hundred miles of Mediterranean coastline. They had come a long way since their Central Asian beginnings. In the eleventh century they had spread rapidly through Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia–where they had made themselves masters of Baghdad, ruling in the name of the Abbasid Caliphs–and their conquests had taught them much. After their invasion of Anatolia and their victory in 1071 over the Byzantines at Manzikert,
⁷⁷
they had established their capital at Konya (Iconium), and by their twelfth-century heyday they had created a remarkable state. The Sultanate of Rum, as they proudly called it–for had it not been part of the Roman Empire?–embraced at its fullest extent virtually all Asia Minor, some 250,000 square miles, with a mixed population of Turks, Greeks and Armenians. The Seljuks did not last long–their power was destroyed by the Mongols towards the end of the century–but they left behind them an extraordinary architectural heritage, much of which still survives today: superb mosques, their façades normally flanked by twin minarets and intricately carved, often with superbly ornate calligraphic inscriptions; bridges of soaring grace and elegance; fortifications and a shipyard at their summer capital of Alanya; and magnificent caravanserais–one every twenty miles along the main caravan routes–each with its own mosque, living accommodation, stabling for horses and camels and a resident cobbler who would repair shoes without charge.

It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if the Emperor in Constantinople and the Sultan in Iconium had cemented their alliance with an overwhelming victory, but they failed to do so. There were several hard-fought battles, all but one of them indecisive; during the last, in the spring of 1210 near Antioch on the Meander, Kaikosru was unhorsed and killed–if Greek sources are to be believed, by the Emperor Theodore himself, in single combat. His successor immediately came to terms, leaving Theodore free to concentrate his forces against the Franks; the situation was finally resolved only in late 1214, when the two Emperors concluded a treaty of peace at Nymphaeum. Henry, it was agreed, would keep the northwest coast of Asia Minor; all the rest, as far as the Seljuk frontier, would go to Theodore. This treaty marked the beginning of Nicaean prosperity. At last, the young empire had obtained formal recognition by its Latin rival of its right to exist.

‘I shall not pursue,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘the obscure and various dynasties that rose and fell on the continent or in the isles.’ As a historian of the Roman Empire, there is no particular reason why he should have, but for chroniclers of the Mediterranean such tasks cannot be shuffled off so easily. No one travelling through central Greece and the Peloponnese can fail to be struck by the quantity of medieval castles that crown, it sometimes seems, almost every peak and ridge of that mountainously spectacular land. For those anxious to know more, some explanation is surely required; yet few indeed, even nowadays, are the books that relate their history.

This is largely because that history is so diabolically complicated. The simple fact is that the Greek diaspora which followed the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade was matched by a still more dramatic territorial expansion on the part of the Latins. The Frankish barons who had sailed to the Crusade–together with a good many others who had not, but who had heard tell of the resulting spoils and were determined not to be left out–roamed over Greece, seizing all the land they could, carving out fiefs for themselves much on the lines of those they had known in the west, but doing so in a country where the feudal system as they understood it was virtually unknown. In western lands that system was based on a pyramid of wealth and power, with the king at its head. In the east, the Latin Empire of Constantinople was far too weak to exert any real control, and a picture therefore emerges of countless independent city-states, more often than not at war with one another, constantly intriguing and jockeying for position. In the Aegean, where the influence of Venice was paramount, the sheer quantity of islands rendered the situation more complex still. No wonder that many a would-be historian of the place and period has recoiled with a shudder and turned his attentions elsewhere.

The story of this Latin diaspora begins essentially with the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat. Already furious at having been passed over as Emperor, he had been further enraged by Baldwin’s offer of a large estate in Anatolia; instead, pointing out that his brother, on his marriage to the daughter of Manuel I Comnenus a quarter of a century before, had been given the courtesy title of King of Thessalonica, he laid formal claim to that city. Now it was Baldwin’s turn to object, and it was only thanks to the mediation of Doge Dandolo and several of the Frankish leaders–above all, the young Burgundian nobleman Otho de la Roche–that open warfare was avoided. Eventually the Emperor was forced to give his grudging consent, on the understanding that Boniface did homage to him for his still notional realm and held it as an imperial fief.

The Marquis’s next task was to conquer his new kingdom, and with this object in view he set out in the autumn of 1204 on a prolonged campaign through northern and central Greece. With him went a motley assortment of Crusaders: Frenchmen and Germans, Flemings and Lombards, all determined to carve out fiefs of their own. They included–to name but four–the Frenchman William of Champlitte, grandson of the Count of Champagne; Otho de la Roche, the Burgundian; the Fleming Jacques d’Avesnes; and the young Italian Marquis Guido Pallavicini. Moving south through Thessaly, they advanced to the pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas of Sparta had made his heroic stand nearly seventeen centuries before. On this occasion they were unopposed; but Boniface, realising the immense strategic importance of the place, there and then invested Pallavicini with the marquisate of Boudonitza to cover its southern approaches. This, with the neighbouring barony of Salona, was to last another two hundred years, and to play an important part in the history of Frankish Greece.
⁷⁸

Boeotia surrendered without a struggle, as did Attica–including Athens itself, where Boniface immediately established a garrison on the Acropolis. At that time the Parthenon was serving as the city’s cathedral, but the Frankish soldiers, it need hardly be said, showed the building scant respect. It was the same story, though on a smaller scale, as in St Sophia: the treasury looted, the gold and silver vessels melted down, the library dispersed and destroyed. The two provinces together were bestowed on Otho de la Roche, probably as a reward for his mediation during Boniface’s quarrel with the Emperor Baldwin. At first Otho styled himself, with relative modesty,
Sire d’Athènes
, a title which his Greek subjects magnified into ‘Great Lord’ or
megas kyr
. Not until 1260, well after his death, was Athens formally constituted a duchy.

Jacques d’Avesnes, meanwhile, the Flemish soldier of fortune, had left the main body of the army and strayed off to the east, where he had received the submission of the island of Euboea. (This had been allotted to Venice during the partition, but the Venetians had not yet had time to do anything about it.) He stayed there, however, only long enough to build a small fortress in the middle of the Euripos–that mysterious channel
⁷⁹
which separates the island from mainland Greece–and to leave a small garrison. Then, eager to participate in the coming conquest of the Peloponnese–and, presumably, the benefits arising therefrom–he hurried back to Boniface. The Marquis, however, had gone on to besiege Nauplia, so Jacques–with Otho de la Roche, who had joined him en route–launched a concerted attack on Corinth. With some difficulty they managed to take the lower town; the high fortress of Acrocorinth, on the other hand, proved impregnable, and its siege was still in progress when one night the defenders made a sudden sortie and inflicted serious damage on the Frankish camp, d’Avesnes himself being gravely wounded.

But the Peloponnese was doomed; and its effective conqueror was to be neither Boniface of Montferrat–who was anyway soon obliged to return to Thessalonica to face the Bulgar army of Tsar Kalojan–nor Jacques d’Avesnes, nor even Otho de la Roche. It was Geoffrey de Villehardouin, nephew and namesake of the chronicler of the Fourth Crusade. A year or two previously this young man had himself set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine, and having heard while in Syria of the Franks’ capture of Constantinople had immediately re-embarked to join them. Soon after his departure, however, his ship had been driven seriously off course by a violent Mediterranean storm and forced to take shelter in the harbour of Modone (Methoni) in the southwestern Peloponnese; and he was still there when he heard of Boniface’s siege of Nauplia. Less than a week later he was in the latter’s presence. The Morea,
⁸⁰
he told the Marquis, may technically have been Venetian, but it was a fruit ripe for the plucking. Given a few hundred men at most, the whole land could be theirs. Boniface was unimpressed, preferring to stick to his own plan of campaign, but Geoffrey found a new ally in the camp in the shape of his old friend William of Champlitte. William agreed to join him, provided only that Geoffrey recognise him as his liege lord in respect of any conquests that the two might make. As grandson of the Count of Champagne he could hardly have done otherwise, and Geoffrey made no objection. Boniface gave the expedition his blessing, and with 100 knights and perhaps 500 men-at-arms the two friends rode off into the unknown.