A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (17 page)

At last the Latin leaders realized that so
much destruction was to nobody’s advantage. When the soldiers were exhausted by
their licence, order was restored. Anyone who had stolen a precious object was
forced to give it up to the Frankish nobles; and unfortunate citizens were
tortured to make them reveal the goods that they had contrived to hide. Even
after so much had wantonly perished, the amount of booty was staggering. No
one, wrote Villehardouin, could possibly count the gold and silver, the plate
and the jewels, the samite and silks and garments of fur, vair, silver-grey and
ermine; and he added, on his own learned authority, that never since the world
was created had so much been taken in a city. It was all divided according to
the treaty; three-eighths went to the Crusaders, three-eighths to the
Venetians, and a quarter was reserved for the future Emperor.

1204: Baldwin of Flanders crowned Emperor

The next task was to select the Emperor.
Boniface of Montferrat still hoped to be chosen. To enhance his position he had
rescued the Dowager Empress Margaret, Isaac’s Hungarian widow, and had forthwith
married her. But the Venetians would have none of him. Under their influence
the throne was given to a less controversial prince, Baldwin IX, Count of
Flanders and Hainault, a man of high lineage and great wealth, but weaker and
more tractable. His title was to be grander than his actual power. He was
indeed to be overlord of all the conquered territory, with the ominous
exception of the lands allotted to the Doge of Venice. His personal domain was
to include Thrace, as far as Chorlu, and Bithynia and Mysia as far as Mount
Olympus, and some of the Aegean islands, Samothrace, Lesbos, Chios, Samos and
Cos. But his capital was not to be entirely his own; for the Venetians claimed
their right to three-eighths of Constantinople, and took the portion that included
St Sophia, where a Venetian, Thomas Morosini, was installed as Patriarch. In
addition, they demanded those parts of the Empire that would aid their maritime
supremacy, the western coasts of continental Greece, the whole Peloponnese,
Naxos, Andros and Euboea, Gallipoli and the Thracian ports on the Marmora, and
Adrianople. To Boniface, as compensation for missing the throne, they offered a
vague dominion in Anatolia, the east and centre of continental Greece and the
island of Crete. But, having no desire to go out to conquer lands in Asia, he
demanded instead Macedonia with Thessalonica. Baldwin demurred, but public
opinion supported him, especially when he put forward a hereditary claim
derived from his brother Rainier, who had married the Porphyrogennete Maria;
and he won over the Venetians by selling them Crete. He became King of
Thessalonica under the Emperor. Lesser nobles were assigned fiefs suited to
their rank and importance.

On 16 May 1204 Baldwin was ceremoniously
crowned in St Sophia. On 1 October, after he had suppressed a bid by Boniface
for independence, he held a court at Constantinople, where he enfeoffed some
six hundred of his vassals with their lordships. Meanwhile, a constitution was
worked out, based partly on the theories of feudal lawyers and partly on what
was believed to be the practice of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A council of
tenants-in-chief, assisted by the Venetian
podesta
of Constantinople,
advised the Emperor on political matters; it directed military operations and
could countermand the Emperor’s administrative orders. A High Court, similarly
composed, regulated his relations with his vassals. He became little more than
the chairman of a house of peers. Few constitutions have been so impracticable
as that embodied in the Assizes of Romania.

Romania, as the Latins called their
Empire, had little more reality than its Emperor’s power. Many of its provinces
were still unconquered, and never would be conquered. The Venetians, in their
realism, took only what they knew that they could hold, Crete and the ports of
Modon and Croton in the Peloponnese and for a while Corfu. They set up vassal
lords of Venetian origin in their Aegean islands, and in Cephalonia and Euboea
accepted the homage of Latin princes who had installed themselves ahead of
them. Boniface of Montferrat soon overran most of continental Greece and set up
his vassals there, a Burgundian, Otho of La Roche becoming Duke of Athens and
Thebes. The Peloponnese fell to two French lords, William of Champlitte and
Geoffrey of Villehardouin, nephew of the chronicler, who founded a dynasty of
Princes of Achaea.

Nearly all the European provinces of the
Empire passed thus into Latin hands. But the Latins were mistaken in their
belief that the capture of Constantinople would give them the whole Empire. In
times of disaster the Greek spirit shows itself at its most courageous and
energetic. The loss of the Imperial capital led at first to chaos. But within
two years the independent Greek world was reorganized in three succession-states.
Away in the East, two grandsons of the Emperor Andronicus, Alexius and David
Comnenus, had with the help of their aunt, the great Queen Thamar of Georgia,
occupied Trebizond and established a dominion along the Black Sea shores of
Asia Minor. David was killed in 1206 while fighting to extend their power
towards the Bosphorus; but Alexius lived on to take the title of Emperor and to
found a dynasty that lasted for two and a half centuries, enriched by the trade
from Persia and the East that passed through its capital and by the
silver-mines in the hills behind, and famed for the beauty of its princesses.
Away in the West a bastard of the Angeli made himself Despot of Epirus and
founded a dynasty that was to extinguish the Montferrat kingdom of Thessalonica.
Most formidable of the three was the Empire set up at Nicaea by Alexius III’s
daughter Anna and her husband Theodore Lascaris.

1204-1261: The Latin Empire

The leading citizens that had escaped from
Constantinople gathered there around them. The Greek Patriarch, John Camaterus,
who had fled to Thrace, died there in 1206; and a priest already at Nicaea,
Michael Autoreanus, was elected Patriarch by the clergy exiled from the old
Imperial capital; and Michael thereupon performed the coronation of Theodore and
Anna. In the eyes of the Greeks Nicaea thus became the seat of the legitimate
Empire. Theodore soon extended his rule, over most of the lands that had been
left to Byzantium in Asia. In little more than fifty years his successors would
reign again in Constantinople.

The Latins also forgot the other races of
the Balkans. The Vlacho-Bulgarian Empire of the Asen brothers would have
willingly allied with them against the hated Greeks. But the Latin Emperor
claimed territory that the Tsar Kaloyan had occupied, and the Latin Patriarch
claimed authority over the Orthodox Bulgarian Church. Bulgaria was driven into
an unnatural alliance with the Greeks; and at the battle of Adrianople in 1205
the army of Romania was almost annihilated and the Emperor Baldwin led off to
die a prisoner in a Balkan castle. It seemed for a moment that the next Emperor
to rule in Constantinople would be the Bulgarian Tsar. But in Baldwin’s brother
Henry the Latin East produced its one great ruler. The energy and tolerant
wisdom that he showed in his ten years’ reign saved the Latin Empire from
immediate destruction; and the rivalries of the Greek potentates, their
quarrels with each other and with the Bulgarians, and the presence in the
background of the Turks kept it alive till 1261.

The exultant conquerors of 1204 could not
foresee how empty would be the results of their enterprise, and their
contemporaries were equally dazzled by the conquest. There was exultation at
first throughout the Latin world. True, the Cluniac satirist Guyot de Provins
asked in his poems why the Pope permitted a Crusade conducted against
Christians, and the Provencal troubadour, Guillem Figuera bitterly accused Rome
of perfidy against the Greeks. But when he wrote, Rome was preaching a Crusade
against his fellow-countrymen. Such dissidents were rare. Pope Innocent, for
all the misgivings that he had felt about the diversion of the Crusade to
Constantinople, was at first delighted. In answer to an ecstatic letter from
the new Emperor Baldwin boasting of the great and valuable results of the
miracle that God had wrought, Innocent wrote that he rejoiced in the Lord and
gave his approval without reserve. Throughout the West there were paeans of
praise, and the enthusiasm mounted when precious relics began to arrive for the
churches of France and Belgium. Hymns were sung to celebrate the fall of the
great ungodly city,
Constantinopolitana Civitas diu profana,
whose
treasures were now disgorged. The Latins in the East were encouraged by the
news. Surely with Constantinople in the hands of their kinsmen the whole
strategy of the Crusades would be far more effective. Rumours came that the
Moslems were struck with terror; and the Pope congratulated himself on the
alarm that the Sultan of Egypt was said to have expressed.

1204: Innocent condemns the Crusade

Second thoughts were less encouraging. The
Pope’s misgivings began to return. The integration of the Eastern Empire and
its Church into the world of Roman Christendom was a fine achievement; but had
it been done in a way that would bring lasting benefit? He received more
information, and learned to his horror of the blasphemous and bloodthirsty
scenes at the sack of the city. He was profoundly shocked as a Christian, and
he was disquieted as a statesman. Such barbarous brutality was not the best
policy for winning the affections of Eastern Christendom. He wrote in bitter
fury to Constantinople enumerating and denouncing the atrocities. He learned
too that the conquerors had blandly divided up the State and the Church there
without any reference to his authority. His rights had been deliberately
ignored, and he could see how incompetent were the arrangements made for the
new Empire and how completely the Crusaders had been outwitted by the
Venetians. Then, to his disgust, he heard that his legate, Peter of
Saint-Marcel, had issued a decree absolving all who had taken the Cross from
making the further journey to the Holy Land. The Crusade was revealed as an
expedition whose only aim was to conquer Christian territory. It was to do
nothing to help the Christian soldiers fighting against Islam.

The Franks in Syria had already realized
that they could not hope for any expedition in 1204. The summer passed with the
Crusaders still remaining at Constantinople; and in September King Amalric made
a truce with al-Adil, knowing that no reinforcements would now come. But soon
it became clear that the Latin establishments further north would do positive
harm to the establishments in Syria. The Emperor Baldwin had boasted to Pope
Innocent that many knights from Outremer had come to his coronation; and he did
his best to persuade them to stay with him. When it was discovered that there
were rich and pleasant fiefs to be had by the Bosphorus or in Greece, other
knights who had lost their lands in Syria to the Moslems hastened to
Constantinople to join them. Amongst them was Hugh of Tiberias, the eldest of
Raymond of Tripoli’s stepsons and husband of Margaret of Ibelin, Maria Comnena’s
daughter. Adventurous knights from the West now found it pointless to go so far
as the overcrowded kingdom of Jerusalem to look for a lordship or an heiress.
There were better lands to be found in Greece. The conquest of Cyprus had
already lured away settlers from the Syrian mainland. After the conquest of
Romania recruits for the Military Orders were almost the only knights to come
out from Europe to defend the Holy Land.

There was never a greater crime against
humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Not only did it cause the destruction or
dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored,
and the mortal wounding of a civilization that was still active and great; but
it was also an act of gigantic political folly. It brought no help to the
Christians in Palestine. Instead it robbed them of potential helpers. And it
upset the whole defence of Christendom. Had the Latins been able to take over
the whole Byzantine Empire as it had been in the days of Manuel, then they
could have provided powerful aid to the Crusading movement, though Byzantium run
in the interests of Latin Syria would not long have prospered. But Byzantium
had lost territory in Anatolia since Manuel’s death; and the Latins could not
even conquer all that was left, while their attack on the Greeks gave further
strength to the Turks. The land route from Europe to Syria became more
difficult as a result of the Fourth Crusade, with the Greeks of Nicaea
suspicious and the Turks hostile to travellers. No armed company from the West
was ever to attempt the journey across Anatolia again. Nor was the sea route
made easier; for Italian ships now preferred to carry passengers to the Greek
islands and the Bosphorus rather than to Acre or the Syrian ports.

1204: The Consequences of the Crusade

In the wide sweep of world history the
effects were wholly disastrous. Since the inception of its Empire Byzantium had
been the guardian of Europe against the infidel East and the barbarian North.
She had opposed them with her armies and tamed them with her civilization. She
had passed through many anxious periods when it had seemed that her doom had
come, but hitherto she had survived them. At the close of the twelfth century
she was facing a long crisis, as the damage to her man-power and her economy
caused by the Turkish conquests in Anatolia a century before began to take full
effect, enhanced by the energetic rivalry of the Italian merchant cities. But
she might well have shown her resilience once again and have reconquered the
Balkans and much of Anatolia, and her culture could have continued its uninterrupted
influence over the countries around. Even the Seldjuk Turks might well have
fallen under its sway and in the end been absorbed to refresh the Empire. The
story of the Empire of Nicaea shows that the Byzantines had not lost their
vigour. But, with Constantinople gone, the unity of the Byzantine world was
broken and could never be repaired, even after the capital itself was
recovered. It was part of the achievement of the Nicaeans to keep the Seldjuks
in check. But when a new, more vigorous Turkish tribe appeared, under the
leadership of the brilliant house of Osman, the East Christian world was too
deeply divided to make an effective stand. Its leadership was passing
elsewhere, away from the Mediterranean birthplace of European culture to the
far northeast, to the vast plains of Russia. The Second Rome was giving place
to the Third Rome of Muscovy.