The Kingdom in the Sun (63 page)

Some degree of pillage had been inevitable and expected—the recognised reward to an army after a successful siege, and one which the Greeks would not have hesitated to claim for themselves had the roles been reversed. But these atrocities were something different, and Baldwin took firm measures at once. The city had been entered during the early hours of the morning; by noon he had managed to restore a semblance of order. But then the logistical problems began. Thessalonica was not equipped to cope with a sudden influx of eighty thousand men. Such food as there was tended to disappear down Sicilian gullets, and the local population soon found itself half-starved. The disposal of the dead presented further difficulties. It was several days before the task was completed, and long before that the August heat had done its work. An epidemic ensued which, aggravated by overcrowding—and, Eustathius maintains, the immoderate consumption of new wine—killed off some three thousand of the occupying army and an unknown number of the local inhabitants.

From the start, too, there were serious confessional troubles. The Latins took over many of the local churches for their own use, but this did not stop certain elements of the soldiery from bursting into those that had remained in Greek hands, interrupting the services and howling down the officiating priests. A still more dangerous incident occurred when a group of Sicilians, suddenly startled by the sound of urgent, rhythmic hammering, took it to be a signal for insurrection and rushed to arms. Only just in time was it explained to them that the noise they had heard was simply that of the
semantron,
the wooden plank by which the Orthodox faithful were normally summoned to their devotions.
¹

¹
The beating of the
semantron
is of considerable symbolic significance. The Church represents, as we know, the ark of salvation; and the monk who balances the six-foot plank on his shoulder and raps his tattoo on it with a little wooden hammer is echoing the sound of Noah's tools, summoning the chosen to join

Within a week or so some uneasy kind of
modus vivendi
had been established. Baldwin, conceited as he may have been, showed himself a tactful commander and Eustathius, though technically a prisoner, seems to have done much to prevent unnecessary friction. His flock, for their part, soon began to discover—as peoples under occupation are apt to do—that there was money to be made out of these foreigners who had so little understanding of real prices and values. Before long we find him lamenting the ease with which the ladies of Thessalonica were wont to yield to the Sicilian soldiery. But the atmosphere in and around the city remained explosive, and it must have been a relief to Greek and Sicilian alike when the army drew itself up once more in line of battle and, leaving only a small garrison behind, headed off to the east.

By this time Andronicus had despatched no less than five separate armies to Thessalonica to block the Sicilian advance. Had they been united under a single able commander they might have saved the city; this fragmentation of his forces seems to be yet another indication of the Emperor's growing instability. As it was, all five retreated to the hills to the north of the road whence, apparently hypnotised, they watched the Sicilian advance. Baldwin's vanguard had thus pressed as far as Mosynopolis, nearly half-way to the capital, when there occurred an event that changed the entire situation— completely and, as far as Sicily was concerned, disastrously. The people of the capital rose up against Andronicus Comnenus and murdered him.

In Constantinople as elsewhere, the news from Thessalonica had brought the inhabitants to the verge of panic. Andronicus's reactions were typical of his contradictory nature. On the one hand he took firm action to repair and strengthen the city's defences. The state of the walls was carefully checked, houses built too closely against them were destroyed wherever it was considered that they might provide a means of entry for a besieging army; a fleet of a hundred ships was hastily mobilised and victualled. Though this
him. In Ottoman times, when the ringing of church bells was forbidden, the
semantron
continued in regular use. It is rarely heard nowadays, except on Mount Athos—where it remains the rule—and in a few isolated rural monasteries
was less than half the size of the Sicilian naval force—now reported to be fast approaching—in the confined waters of the Marmara and the Bosphorus it might still serve its purpose.

But at other moments and in other respects the Emperor seemed totally indifferent to the emergency, drawing back further and further into his private world of pleasure. In the three years since his accession his life had grown steadily more depraved.

He would have liked to emulate Hercules, who lay with all the fifty daughters of Thyestes in a single night;
¹
but he was nevertheless obliged to resort to artifice as a means of strengthening his nerves, rubbing himself with a certain balm to increase his vigour. He also ate regularly of a fish known as the
scincus,
which is caught in the river Nile and is not dissimilar to the crocodile; and which, though abhorred by many, is most effective in the quickening of lust.

By now, too, he was developing a persecution mania that led him to new extremes of cruelty. A day on which he ordered no one's death, writes Nicetas, was for him a day wasted; 'men and women lived only in anxiety and sorrow, and even the night afforded no rest, since their sleep was troubled by hideous dreams and by the ghastly phantoms of those whom he had massacred.' Constantinople was living through a reign of terror as fearful as any in its long, dark history—a terror which reached its culmination in September 11
8 5,
with the issue of a decree ordering the execution of all prisoners and exiles, together with their entire families, on charges of complicity with the Norman-Sicilian invaders.

Fortunately for the Empire, revolution came just in time to avert the tragedy. The spark was fired when the Emperor's cousin, Isaac Angelus, a normally inoffensive nobleman who had incurred Andronicus's displeasure when a soothsayer had identified him as successor to the throne, leaped on the imperial henchman who had been sent to arrest him and ran him through with his sword. Then, riding at full gallop to St Sophia, he proudly announced to all

present what he had done. The news spread; crowds began to

¹
Nicetas nods here. The patriarch concerned was not Thyestes but Thespius. This thirteenth labour of Hercules must surely have been the most arduous of the lot, but its success rate was remarkable: all the girls produced male children, in many cases twins.

collect, among them Isaac's uncle John Ducas and many others who, though they had had no part in the crime, knew that in the present atmosphere of suspicion they would be unable to dissociate themselves from it. Therefore, says Nicetas, 'seeing that they would be taken, and having the image of death graven in their souls, they appealed to all the people to rally to their aid'.

And the people responded. The next morning, having spent the night in a torchlit St Sophia, they ran through the city calling every householder to arms. The prisons were broken open, the prisoners joined forces with their deliverers. Meanwhile, in the great church, Isaac Angelus was proclaimed Emperor.

One of the vergers climbed on a ladder above the High Altar and took down the crown of Constantine to place it on his head. Isaac showed reluctance to accept it—not for reasons of modesty nor because of any indifference towards the imperial diadem but because he feared that so audacious an enterprise might cost him his life. Ducas, on the other hand, stepped forward at once, and taking off his cap presented his own bald head, which shone like the full moon, to receive the crown. But the assembled people cried out loudly that they had suffered too much misery from the grizzled head of Andronicus, and that they would have no more senile or decrepit Emperors, least of all one with a long beard divided in two like a pitchfork.

When the news of the revolution had reached Andronicus on his country estate of Meludion, he had returned to the capital confident in his ability to reassert his control. Going straight to the Great Palace at the mouth of the Golden Horn he had ordered his guard to loose its arrows on the mob, and finding the soldiers slow to obey had seized a bow and begun furiously shooting on his own account. Then, suddenly, he understood. Throwing off his purple buskins, he covered his head with a little pointed bonnet 'such as the barbarians wear'; and hastily embarking his child-wife Agnes-Anna and his favourite concubine Maraptica—'an excellent flautist, with whom he was besottedly in love'—on to a waiting galley, he fled with them up the Bosphorus.

Simultaneously the mob burst into the Great Palace, falling on everything of value that it contained. Twelve hundred pounds of gold bullion alone, and three thousand of silver, were carried off, and jewels and works of art without number. Not even the imperial chapel was spared: icons were stripped from the walls, chalices snatched from the altar. And the most venerable treasure of all—the reliquary containing the letter written by Jesus Christ in his own hand to King Abgar of Edessa
¹
—disappeared, never to be seen again.

The Emperor, Agnes-Anna and Maraptica were soon caught. The ladies, who behaved throughout with dignity and courage, were spared; but Andronicus, bound and fettered and with a heavy chain about his neck, was brought before Isaac for punishment. His hand was cut off and he was thrown into prison; then, after several days without food or water, he was blinded in one eye and brought forth on a scrawny camel to face the fury of his erstwhile subjects. They had suffered much from him, but nothing could excuse the brutality they now showed. As Nicetas remarks:

Everything that was lowest and most contemptible in the mob seemed to combine..
..
They beat him, stoned him, goaded him with spikes, pelted him with filth. A woman of the streets poured a bucket of boiling water on his head. . . . Then, dragging him from the camel, they hung him up by his feet. He endured all these torments and many others that I cannot describe, with incredible fortitude, speaking no other word among this demented crowd of his persecutors, but
O
Lord, have pity on me; why dost thou trample on a poor reed that is already quite broken?
...
At last, after much agony, he died, carrying his remaining hand to his mouth; which, in the opinion of some, he did that he might suck the blood that flowed from one of his wounds.

It is tempting to go on about Andronicus Comnenus—a figure, as Eustathius of Thessalonica observed, so full of contradictions that he can with equal justice be extravagantly praised or bitterly condemned; a colossus who possessed every gift save that of moderation, and who died as dramatically as he had lived; a hero and a villain, a preserver and a destroyer, a paragon and a warning. He has his place in this book, however, only in so far as his fortunes affect those of the Kingdom of Sicily; and just as his rise to power gave William II his pretext to march against Byzantium, so his fall was to bring about the Sicilian defeat.

¹
See p.
117.

Isaac Angelus, when at last he accepted the crown, inherited a desperate situation. At Mosynopolis, the invaders' advance column was less than two hundred miles from Constantinople; their fleet, meanwhile, was already in the Marmara, awaiting the army's arrival before launching its attack. Immediately on his accession, he sent Baldwin an offer of peace; when it was refused, he did what Andronicus should have done months before—appointed the ablest of his generals, Alexius Branas, to the overall command of all five armies, sending him the most massive reinforcements the Empire could provide. The effect was instantaneous; the Greeks were infused with new spirit. They saw too their enemy grown overconfident; no longer expecting resistance, the Sicilian soldiers had dropped their guard and relaxed their discipline. Carefully selecting his place and his moment, Branas swooped down upon them, routed them completely and pursued them all the way back to the main camp at Amphipolis.