Download PDF | (Medieval World) Michael Angold - The Fourth Crusade_ Event and Context-Routledge (2014).
304 Pages
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
On 12 April 1204 the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade and their Venetian allies sacked the city of Constantinople. Heart and symbol of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople — the Queen of Cities — was the largest, richest Christian city of that era. Its sack attracted the attention of people of that day as much as of this. Was this event, which shattered a civilisation but did not end an empire, one of the ‘events which make history”?
In this incisively written book, Michael Angold offers us a fresh and cogent approach. His theme is the complexity of an ‘event’ such as this. It was, he suggests, an accident with a certain logic behind it. He explains how we can view it as a combination of long-term structural trends and very short-term political decisions. But, he argues, we must pay equal attention to the attitudes, knowledge and cultural assumptions of all participants. An event such as this is not merely what happened but what people believed to have happened. Michael Angold also demonstrates how the meaning and significance attributed to this event is by no means the same thing as its consequences.
The first part of this book thus explores what happened from a range of viewpoints, Byzantine, Venetian, French, papal. It pays as much attention to the opinions which westerners and Byzantines held about each other as to the sequence of political decisions and miscalculations which led the crusaders to such an uplanned outcome. The medieval politics of competing interest groups, financial exigency and prejudice are shown for what they were. Its second part turns to the aftermath of the city’s sack. Differing perspectives on what had happened make clear how deep western ambivalence was. While some participants faced strategic decisions, others found the occasion for opportunistic profiteering. In drawing up the cultural balance sheet, Michael Angold brings his great expertise in Byzantine history to bear. He assesses the both the psychological and the political impact on Byzantium, and explores the economic and religious consequences for all parties. He explains why, although western rule of Constantinople itself lasted no later than 1261, the restored Byzantine empire was never able to recover fully. With the city stripped by the French of many of its most precious religious relics and its population plummeting, the very heart had been ripped out of the empire.
As his analysis unfolds, Michael Anglod reflects on the historian’s purpose. The historians he scrutinises are the chroniclers and commentators of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as the distant but not dipassionate scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What’s in an event? Who, or what, makes an event? These are his guiding questions throughout. I welcome this sparkling contribution to the Longmans Medieval World as much for its valuable reflections on the historian’s craft as for its wealth of new insight into the gripping story of the Fourth Crusade.
Julia M. H. Smit
PREFACE
This book is not intended as a conventional narrative of the events surrounding the conquest of Constantinople in April 1204 by the Venetians and the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. I do not believe that there is a need for another narrative of the history of the Fourth Crusade. In his The Fourth Crusade. The conquest of Constantinople, Donald Queller has provided a definitive catalogue of events. What happened after the crusader conquest is covered in admirable fashion by Peter Lock in his Franks in the Aegean 1204-1500. What I aim to do is to provide the anatomy of an event. This centres on how the course of events took shape, which is essentially a dialogue between the forces, long term and short term, which played on the leading figures of the crusade, and the decisions that they made. It is also an examination of the consequences — again long term and short term — produced by the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade.
1204 is an event that has been hanging over me ever since many years ago I embarked on a study of the Nicaean Empire, the creation of which was one of the immediate consequences of the fall of Constantinople to the crusaders. I was interested in how the Byzantines reacted to a ‘cosmic cataclysm’ and wondered how it had changed the course of Byzantine history. I concentrated on administrative history. It struck me that despite many continuities the institutional changes effected during the period of exile marked a decisive change in the structure of the Byzantine Empire. After the return of the seat of empire to Constantinople the new administrative system was not capable of sustaining old imperial ambitions with the result that ‘imperial authority became increasingly illusory’. That still seems to me a fair judgement.
On this reading, the fall of Constantinople in 1204 was a decisive turning point. But this flies in the face of a powerful current of modern historical thinking that does not rate events and personalities as significant factors in the process of historical change: they are merely involved in surface change. To quote Fernand Braudel, they ‘fade from the picture when we contemplate these vast phenomena, permanent or semi-permanent, conscious and subconscious at the same time’. He is referring to those underlying structures shaped ‘by geography, by social hierarchy, by collective psychology and by economic need’.' Braudel’s assumptions seem to suit the fall of Constantinople. On the surface, it seemed to make little difference. Byzantine civilisation survived — not much changed. The Latin regime established in the aftermath of the crusade at Constantinople lasted a bare fifty years and left scarcely a trace behind. If the Byzantine Empire as an institution emerged, as I believe, greatly weakened, this, it could well be argued, was the result of long-term developments, not the impact of a single event. Were important changes not taking place before 1204 in the structure of the Byzantine Empire? Had not the emergence of localised power structures and the infiltration of western commercial and political interests already gone a long way towards undermining the institutional strength of the Byzantine Empire? It is these quite plausible assumptions that I wish to test. But it soon becomes clear that this is just one approach — and a rather traditional one at that — to an event of considerable complexity.
It is based on the assumption that the event can be established as objective fact. This is easier said than done. The event is in the end a construct based on the information available. But this, whether it comes in documentary or narrative form, has been shaped with particular ends in view. But it is exactly this process which creates the event which only exists because it was recorded in the way that it was. This might be used as an argument to invalidate the study of events on the grounds that they can never be established in a truly objective fashion. I have preferred a different approach: to accept this process as central to the event for the good reason that much of the impact of an event depended on how it was remembered; on how it was shaped by historians. It means paying particular attention to the sources, not so much as a quarry for facts, but as part of the process of the creation and assessment of the meaning of the event. It was largely through recollection of the past that the participants and the opponents of the Fourth Crusade reacted to those forces, long term and short term, with which they had to contend. Equally, their successes and failures would be remembered in ways designed to influence succeeding generations.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION OF PROPER NAMES
It is difficult to be entirely consistent. Where Greek names are reasonably familiar I have preferred to use the Latin or Latinised form, e.g. Nicaea and not Nikaia, Adrianople and not Hadrianoupolis, Cantacuzene and not Kantakouzenos. But where Greek names are relatively unfamiliar I have preferred a Greek form, so Kamateros and not Camaterus. With French surnames I have usually translated ‘de’ by ‘of’. I have anglicised French first names, so Gautier becomes Walter; Thibaut Theobald. I have usually been guided by the system of transliteration adopted by the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.
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