Download PDF | Jonathan Harris - Byzantium and the Crusades-Bloomsbury Academic (2003).
285 Pages
Acknowledgements
Since the first edition of Byzantium and the Crusades appeared in 2003, the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Fourth Crusade has produced a particularly rich crop of publications that explore many of the same questions. This new edition aims to take as much of this new scholarship as possible into account. That said, the main theme is unchanged and certainly I do not agree with all the novel arguments that have been advanced in recent years. I remain particularly unconvinced by the theories that Alexios I was intimately involved with the planning and directing of the First Crusade, that Michael Psellos and other Byzantine intellectuals were closet pagans and that the Latin empire of Constantinople was prosperous and stable. During the rewriting process, the students who took my MA course options provided a constant flow of ideas and criticisms.
I am indebted to David Jacoby, Paul Stephenson and a number of anonymous reviewers for pointing out errors and omissions in the first edition, to Eugenia Russell for drawing the maps, to Jonathan Phillips and Károly Szelényi for permission to use their photographs, and to Rhodri Mogford for suggesting and overseeing the new edition with Bloomsbury. A succession of heads of the History Department at Royal Holloway, Nigel Saul, Justin Champion and Sarah Ansari, gave great support and encouragement to me in my work. I should also record my continuing appreciation to Martin Sheppard and Tony Morris of Hambledon Press without whom the original book would never have appeared in the first place. Finally, I should add that I have adopted a slightly different approach to the spelling of Byzantine names in the text and footnotes from that used in the first edition.
In general, I have tried to transliterate them as closely as possible to the original Greek, Tornikios, rather than Tornicius, and Eustathios rather than Eustathius, but where there is a recognized English equivalent of a Greek first name, I have used it, hence Isaac rather than Isaakios, George rather than Georgios. I have done this not because I want to anglicize the Byzantines but because I want their history to be accessible to an international audience who will be more familiar with these versions. I have made certain personal choices such as ‘Porphyrogenitos’ rather than ‘Porphyrogennetos’ for the sole reason that, to my eyes, it looks better. Royal Holloway University of London December 2013
Introduction
In May 1204, the newly crowned emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin of Flanders, wrote a letter to the pope, Innocent III. It was not an easy task, for Baldwin was one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade, which had been launched by Innocent in August 1198. The crusaders had originally planned to conquer first Egypt and then Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since its capture by Saladin in 1187. As it turned out, instead of fighting the infidel, they had turned their weapons on Christians. They had not only attacked and captured Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine empire, they had systematically looted its palaces and churches, expelled its rulers and crowned Baldwin as a new emperor of their own.
Innocent might well have been expected to be furious at this deviation from the ideals of the crusade and to have excommunicated the entire army. That was exactly what he had done two years earlier when it had perpetrated a similar outrage on another Christian city, that of Zara in Dalmatia. Surprisingly, in spite of the radical turn of events, Baldwin’s justification of the army’s actions worked. When Innocent replied in November 1204, he accepted Baldwin’s version of what had happened and did not even threaten excommunication.
On the contrary, he placed the new emperor, his lands and his people under his protection, and commanded that the crusading army, rather than going on to Egypt, should stay to protect Constantinople from any attempt by the Byzantines to retake the city. Nor did he do so grudgingly, but waxed lyrical on what appeared to be a clear indication of divine favour: Surely, this was done by the Lord and is wondrous in our eyes. This is truly a change done by the right hand of the Most High, in which the right hand of the Lord manifested power so that he might exalt the most holy Roman Church while He returns the daughter to the mother, the part to the whole and the member to the head.1 Baldwin’s letter and the readiness of the pope to respond favourably to it, pose an obvious and fundamental question.
The First Crusade had been launched in 1095 by Innocent III’s predecessor, Urban II, ostensibly with a view to helping the Byzantine empire against its Muslim enemies. Just over a century later, events had come full circle. The soldiers of the Fourth Crusade and the pope himself now considered themselves entirely justified in attacking and annexing the empire’s capital city. How had this extraordinary reversal come about? Many minds have pondered this problem and a multiplicity of theories have come and gone over the years. Historical works written before the midnineteenth century, like that of Joseph Michaud (1767–1839), presented the sack of Constantinople as the outcome of a series of accidents.
Then the trend shifted to identifying one individual or group who had deliberately plotted the diversion. French aristocrat Louis de Mas Latrie (1815–97) and German academic Carl Hopf (1832–73), for example, placed the entire blame on the Italian maritime republic of Venice and its aged but formidable doge, Enrico Dandolo. Dandolo, so the argument ran, wished to prevent the crusade from attacking Egypt, because Venice had concluded a commercial treaty with the Ayyubid regime there in 1202. The republic’s commercial interest dictated an attack on Constantinople instead, because the emperors there had been obstructing Venetian trading activities. The doge therefore cunningly manipulated the crusaders into deviating from their original destination. By tricking them into running up an enormous debt for the hire of Venetian shipping, Dandolo was able to force them to do his will and to capture both Zara and Constantinople.
The theory was discredited when the crucial treaty with Egypt, which Hopf dated to 1202, was shown to belong, in fact, to 1208 or 1212, long after the Fourth Crusade had captured Constantinople.2 Other theories have sought to blame the German imperial claimant, Philip of Swabia, the crusade leader, Boniface of Montferrat, and even Innocent III himself, only to come up against similarly cogent objections.3 With the conspiracy theories out of favour, there remain two primary schools of thought in the voluminous literature on the subject in English. The first argues that this was a classic case of the clash of civilizations. The capture and sack of Constantinople was the culmination of mounting incomprehension, intolerance and hostility between the two halves of the Christian world, the Catholic, western European Latins on the one hand, and the Orthodox, Greek-speaking, eastern Byzantines on the other.
The theory first appeared in the work of Walter Norden (1876–1937) but it was widely disseminated in the numerous writings of Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000). For Runciman, the crusades had the unfortunate effect of bringing the two societies, which had little to do with each other in the past, into much closer contact. It was this very contact which opened the way for mutual misunderstanding and mistrust: There are idealists who fondly believe that if only the peoples of the world could get to know each other there would be peace and goodwill forever.
This is a tragic delusion. It is indeed possible for men and women of education to enjoy the company and customs of foreigners and to feel sympathy for them. But simpler folk who find themselves in a country whose language and habits are unintelligible to them are apt to feel at a loss and resentful.4 Proponents of the clash of civilizations theory had only to cite the words of contemporaries to uncover what appeared to be indisputable evidence of this deep mutual antagonism. Byzantine writers often described western European crusaders as uncouth barbarians, while their Western counterparts fulminated against the effeminate and treacherous Byzantines, their schism with the Church of Rome and their supposed collusion with Muslim powers.5
The massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182, and the Norman capture and sack of the Byzantine city of Thessalonica in 1185, both seemed to be the inevitable outcome of this growing tension and to stand as milestones on a straight road which was to lead to the catastrophe of 1204. So compelling was the clash of civilizations theory that it seemed all there was left to discuss was when the tension began, and who was to blame. Some historians saw the process as starting as far back as 1054, when some papal legates had excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople and opened up the schism between the Byzantine and Western Churches. Others saw the arrival of the First Crusade at Constantinople in 1096 as the beginning of the trouble, as thousands of Western knights descended on the Byzantine empire on their way to conquer Jerusalem, raising apprehensions among the Byzantines that these armies might in fact be aiming to conquer Constantinople or other parts of imperial territory.
Still others claimed that the accession of the supposedly anti-Latin Andronicus I as Byzantine emperor in 1183 was the real beginning of the mutual antagonism.6 There was a similar disparity when it came to apportioning the blame. Some saw the wanton aggression of the crusaders towards the sophisticated and cultured Byzantines as the root of the trouble, others the xenophobia and snobbery of the Byzantines towards people whom they considered to be somehow inferior. Regardless of the precise starting point chosen or the exact apportionment of blame, the basic theory remains the same.7 Compelling though the clash of civilizations theory is, it suffers from at least three serious flaws.
The first is its claim that there was a general and escalating estrangement between Byzantine east and Latin west during the twelfth century. In spite of the frequent harsh words and occasional ugly incidents, the two societies were in fact closely intertwined. Not only did Byzantine emperors of the period of the crusades regularly intermarry with their counterparts in western Europe and the Holy Land, their empire depended on western European manpower. As the Byzantines themselves were quite prepared to admit, Latins made up the most effective and loyal part of the imperial army, and they also served the emperor as ambassadors, translators and counsellors.
The notion of two completely divided societies coming into final conflict in 1204 is therefore unconvincing. When the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade first attacked the walls of Constantinople in the summer of 1203, they did so at the behest of a Byzantine prince, Alexios Angelos, while the stiffest resistance that they encountered came not from the Byzantines themselves but from the western European troops in imperial service.8 A second flaw in the clash of civilizations theory is that it assumes not only that a complete east–west hostility had developed during the twelfth century, but also that there was a causal link between that hostility and the sack of Constantinople.
Yet when the Western strike against Constantinople came, in the shape of the Fourth Crusade, there was no premeditated plan to attack the Byzantine capital. On the way to Egypt, the crusade diverted at the request of a prince of the ruling Angelos family who needed help to restore his father to the throne. While individual leaders of the army, including Boniface of Montferrat and the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, may have welcomed the change of objective, most of the rank and file were bitterly opposed to it. A sizeable number left the army and made their own way to the Holy Land. Those who remained only agreed very reluctantly to the diversion when subjected to a mixture of financial and emotional blackmail.
Even then, many hesitated before the final attack in April 1204, and had serious doubts as to whether it was legitimate to attack a Christian city in this way.9 Finally there is what happened after 1204. If the mutual antagonism was as sharp as supposed, why were some Byzantines prepared to throw in their lot with the new regime and why were Westerners increasingly to heed the pope’s summons and to fight to maintain Constantinople under Latin rule?10 Because only small numbers of volunteers went out to help Baldwin of Flanders and his successors to defend the city, the Latin emperors suffered from a constant shortage of manpower and their hold on Constantinople lasted only 57 years. By 1261 the Byzantines had recaptured Constantinople and recovered a sizeable part of their empire, as it had been before 1204.
In view of these flaws in the clash of civilizations theory, it is hardly surprising that in recent years most scholars have discarded the idea that the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople was the culmination of mounting hostility and have come to the conclusion that no convincing overall theory can be advanced. Instead, stress has been laid on the unforeseen events which prevented the crusade from going on to Egypt as planned: the massive debt which was owed to the Venetians because not enough crusaders came forward to fill the ships that had been hired; the attack on Zara which the crusade undertook to secure a postponement of that debt; and the proposal made by Alexios Angelos that the crusade should accompany him to Constantinople. According to this view, the eventual outcome was the result of an extremely complicated mixture of factors and motives that defy easy categorization.11
Thus after a century of endeavour, to the question of why a movement originally launched to help the Byzantines ultimately stormed their capital city and divided up their empire, the existing literature on Byzantium and the crusades has yielded only either an answer which is unsatisfactory or one which avoids the problem and does not really provide an answer at all. In any case, both theories are profoundly unpalatable in their implications. If different cultures are bound to come into conflict whenever they interact closely, there is little hope for the modern world of global communication and multiracial societies.
If, on the other hand, the sack of Constantinople came about as the result of factors too numerous and complicated to reduce to any overall theory, then that would suggest that no event in human history can ever be explained. This book aims to advance another view of Byzantine interaction with western Europe, the crusades and the crusader states. It argues that the key, or at least a key, lies not in generalized hostility between peoples or impersonal chance theory, but in the nature of the Byzantine empire and the ideology which underpinned it. That ideology will be examined by looking at the influential group who ran the empire, and the methods and principles they employed in dealing with the world beyond their borders.
It will be argued that the disaster of 1204 was the result of an attempt on their part to implement and sustain their ideology and foreign policy in circumstances which left their actions open to misinterpretation. By pursuing very different ends to those of the reformed papacy and the leaders of crusade armies, and by employing methods that were often considered by western Europeans to be dishonourable, the Byzantines succeeded in giving the impression that the empire was failing to participate in the pious cause of defending Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the common Muslim foe. Western attempts after 1187 to extort what they considered to be the rightful Byzantine financial contribution to the enterprise led directly to the capture and sack of Constantinople.
That was not the end of the story. Byzantine ideology and methods of diplomacy continued to influence Byzantine relations with the West even after the events of April 1204. By a curious irony, at the moment of supreme crisis in 1282 when it looked as if a crusade fleet was about to be launched from Sicily against Constantinople under the leadership of Charles of Anjou, it was the tried and tested methods of Byzantine diplomacy that saved the day and ensured that the empire would outlive the Latin states of Syria and Palestine that were finally extinguished by the Mamluks in 1291.
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