Decline and fall byzan.., p.29
Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03, page 29
part #3 of Byzantium Series
From the start, the Latin Empire of Constantinople was a monstrosity. The miserable offspring of treachery and greed, in the fifty-seven years of its existence it achieved nothing, contributed nothing, enjoyed not a single moment of distinction or glory. After 1204 it made no territorial conquests, and before long had shrunk to the immediate surroundings of the city that had been ruined and ravaged in giving it birth. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. Of its seven rulers, only Henry of Hainault - if we leave aside the octogenarian John of Brienne – rose
1Pachymeres records that Eulogia, who was several years older than her brother, used to lull him to sleep as a child by singing of how he would one day become Emperor and enter Constantinople through the Golden Gate.
2He was confined in the fortress of Dakibyze, on the southern shore of the Marmara, where he remained until his death nearly half a century later, in 1305.
above the mediocre; not one seems to have made the slightest attempt to understand his Greek subjects, let alone to learn their language. Meanwhile its Frankish knights trickled back to the West, its allies turned away, its treasury lay empty. And its fall was, if anything, even more ignominious than its beginning - overpowered in a single night by a handful of soldiers, while its defenders were engaged on an exercise of almost unimaginable pointlessness and futility.
If this pathetic travesty of an Empire could only have confined its misdeeds to itself, it might have been passed over with little more than a pitying glance; and the reader would have been spared a long and unedifying chapter of this book. Alas, it did not. The dark legacy that it left behind affected not only Byzantium but all Christendom - perhaps all the world. For the Greek Empire never recovered from the damage that it had sustained during those fateful years, danger that was spiritual as well as material. Nor, bereft of much of the territory that remained to it after the disaster of Manzikert, with many of its loveliest buildings reduced to rubble and its finest works of art destroyed or carried off to the West, did it ever succeed in recovering its former morale. Henceforth the Byzantines might continue to look back with pride on the glories of their past; but they would contemplate their future with trepidation and fear.
They had been robbed of something else too. Before the Latin conquest their Empire had been one and indivisible, under a single basileus who stood above them, half-way to heaven, Equal of the Apostles. Now, that unity was gone. So magnificent a conception was no longer tenable. There were the Emperors of Trebizond, still stubbornly independent in their tiny Byzantine microcosm on the Black Sea shore. There were the Despots of Epirus, for ever struggling to recapture their early days of power, always ready to welcome the enemies of Constantinople and to provide a focus of opposition. How, fragmented as it was, could the Greek Empire continue to perform the function that it had fulfilled for so long - that of the last grand eastern bulwark of Christendom against the Islamic tide?
But Christendom too had been changed by the Fourth Crusade. Long divided, it was now polarized. For centuries before and after the Great Schism of 1054, relations between the Eastern and the Western Churches had fluctuated between the politely distant and the bitterly acrimonious; their differences, however, had been essentially theological. After the sack of Constantinople by the Western Crusaders, this was no longer true. In the eyes of the Byzantines, those barbarians who had desecrated their altars, plundered their homes and violated their women could no longer be considered, in any real sense of the word, Christians at all. On more than one occasion in the future, attempts would be made to force the Orthodox Church back into union with Rome; some, like that of Michael Palaeologus himself in 1274, would even be briefly successful. But such attempts could never succeed for long, simply because in the end the eventualities that they were designed to avoid always appeared to the Greeks preferable to the idea of submission to Rome. 'Better the Sultan's turban than the cardinal's hat,' they were to say; and they meant it.
14
The Angevin Threat
[1261—70]
Michael Palaeologus, the schismatic, having usurped the name of Emperor . . . has seized the imperial city of Constantinople and the whole Empire, and has expelled the Emperor Baldwin and the Latins residing there . . . We therefore are ready with God's help to undertake the pious task of restoring the noble limb severed by the schismatics from the body of our common mother, the Holy Roman Church.
Second Viterbo Treaty, 27 May 1267
The basileus was back in his capital; and among the small Greek population who had remained in occupied Constantinople the rejoicings continued far into the night, with all the bells of the city pealing in jubilation and littie groups of monks and nuns hurrying from one church or monastery to the next, decorating each in turn as if for some great religious feast. Michael Palaeologus, however, took no part in these festivities. His first sight of the city from which he was to rule had affected him profoundly. Everywhere was desolation: churches in ruins, palaces razed, once-prosperous residential areas now reduced to piles of blackened timber. Even among those houses that had escaped the conflagration of 1204, many had subsequently been demolished and used for firewood. There had been no attempt at rebuilding; much of the debris still lay where it had fallen more than half a century before. After his coronation Michael had quietly withdrawn to the Great Palace on the Bosphorus - that of Blachernae, though newer and a good deal more comfortable, he felt to be tainted by the presence of the Latin Emperors1 - to ponder the formidable problems that faced him.
The most immediate was the defence of the capital. The larger part of
1 Pachymcrcs tells us that 'it was filled with thick smoke and Italian fire, which the servants of the uncouth Baldwin had allowed to permeate it'.
Greece, after all, was still under Frankish domination; Epirus and Thessaly, though Greek, remained implacably hostile, as did Serbia and Bulgaria. Venice and Genoa controlled Byzantine waters and much of the eastern Mediterranean. Pope Urban IV - a certain Jacques Pantaleon, the son of a leather-merchant in Troyes and former Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem who had been raised to the Papacy a fortnight after the recovery of Constantinople - could not be expected to accept without a struggle the collapse of the Latin Empire of the East; and Manfred, now back in Sicily, would be only too glad of an excuse to return to the offensive. An alliance of some or all of these Western and Balkan powers, efficiently organized and properly led, could kill the newly-restored Empire at its birth. Among the Emperor's first priorities, therefore, was to make a thorough examination of the land and sea walls, improving and strengthening them wherever necessary. The weakest section, as he well knew, was that running along the banks of the Golden Horn; it was this that the Crusaders had breached in both 1203 and 1204. Eventually he was to give it a whole new inner rampart, thus presenting any attacking fleet with a double range of fortifications; for the moment, however, he contented himself with raising a giant wooden screen, seven feet high, the entire five-mile length of the wall, covered with hides to make it at least partially fireproof.
Ideally, of course, no enemy should be able to enter the Horn in the first place. The Emperor accordingly renewed the great iron chain that had formerly extended across the entrance to provide a barrier against all hostile shipping. But this chain could never be entirely impregnable and was certainly no substitute for a strong and effective fleet; hence the intensive programme of shipbuilding which Michael inaugurated during the first months after the reconquest. Meanwhile he had no alternative but to put his faith in the Genoese - his only Western allies - transferring to them the former palace of the Venetians1 and taking every opportunity to remind them of their obligations under the Treaty of Nymphaeum, signed only a few months before.
Next, there was the transfer of the government to be effected - and this was no easy matter. The Byzantine bureaucratic machine was complex and often unwieldy; to rehouse all its various departments - to say nothing of all the officials who administered them - in a largely
1 Formerly the Byzantine monastery of the Pantocrator. The Genoese immediately demolished it to the sound of triumphant musical fanfares, sending several of its stones back to Genoa, where they were incorporated into the famous Bank of St George.
devastated city was an awesome task. It was made possible only by the fact that Constantinople had also suffered a dramatic reduction of its population. Many Greeks had left when the Crusaders arrived, and many more had trickled away during the intervening years. A considerable number had inevitably been replaced by Latins, but now most of these had also disappeared, leaving whole sections of the city silent and abandoned. One of the new Emperor's first actions was to summon all former refugees back to the capital, and in 1262 to introduce a whole new community of tsakones - Greeks from the region around Monemvasia in the south-eastern Peloponnese, which was formally ceded to him in that year by the Prince of Achaia.
Meanwhile the imperial army was set to work on an ambitious programme of rebuilding. Living accommodation was a primary need, but Michael concentrated also on the ravaged churches and monasteries, realizing as he did their vital importance to popular morale. The Latins, seeing these as monuments of a detested heresy, had shown them scant respect — stripping the lead from their roofs, defacing their mosaics and frescos, robbing them of their treasures and sacred vessels. For the Byzantines, on the other hand, the reawakening of their religious life simultaneously revived their feelings of patriotism and national pride - while ensuring the greatest possible degree of ecclesiastical support for Michael's policies. Nor did the Emperor forget the public buildings of the capital: law-courts and theatres, market-places and forums. Finally, to symbolize all that he had done, he erected before the church of the Holy Apostles a tall column bearing a statue of his patron St Michael. At its foot stood another statue representing the Emperor himself, holding in his hands a model of Constantinople and offering it in the traditional manner to the Archangel. He had deserved well of his city and his people; and he was determined that they should not forget it.
Michael Palaeologus had been right in his assessment of Pope Urban; but he had no wish to antagonize him unnecessarily. After his first coronation at Nicaea he had punctiliously sent an embassy to the Holy See, giving it official notice of his accession to the throne; now, after his second, he did so again, loading his two envoys - though Greeks, both had been members of Baldwin's secretariat — with rich presents for the Pope. But if he had hoped thus to turn away the worst of the papal wrath, he was to be disappointed. However difficult it may be to believe Pachymeres when he tells us that one of the envoys was flayed alive while the other barely escaped with his life, there can be no doubt that they were given a distinctly hostile reception.
Urban, meanwhile - urged on by Baldwin - was pressing for a new Crusade to recover Constantinople for the West, and had already excommunicated the Genoese for casting in their lot with the Eastern Empire. The Venetians on the other hand were predictably giving him their fullest support, even going so far as to offer free passage to all who were prepared to take up arms against the Emperor. Elsewhere, to the Pope's disappointment, there was little enthusiasm. The crusading zeal that had been such a feature of the previous century was gone. In France, St Louis sensibly maintained that the purpose of Crusades was to fight the infidel and not one's fellow-Christians, however schismatic they might be. Germany had been in a state of confusion ever since the death of Frederick II in 1250. The Kingdom of Aragon was keeping a covetous eye on Sicily, but was little interested in anything further afield. As for England, despite its distinguished crusading record, the Pope seems simply not to have bothered about it. That left Frederick's son Manfred, who would have asked nothing better; apart from the rich territories to be gained, an alliance with Rome would almost certainly have achieved the papal recognition of his throne that he had so long desired. He and Baldwin did everything they could think of to effect a reconciliation with the Pope, but in vain. To Urban, who had inherited in full measure his predecessors' hatred of the Hohenstaufen, such an alliance would have been anathema. The King of Sicily, as he well knew, had ambitions of his own where Constantinople was concerned; and even if Baldwin were to be reinstated, the prospect of owing his return to Manfred was one too ghastly to be contemplated.
Michael Palaeologus - who had already built up for himself a formidable intelligence service - was well aware of these approaches to the Pope, which he looked upon with grave concern. He had long tried, without success, to reach some accommodation with Manfred; in the summer of 1262 he made another attempt. It happened that Manfred's half-sister Anna, widow of John Vatatzes, was still living at the imperial court; Michael now proposed to divorce his wife Theodora and marry her. Historians, ancient and modern alike, seem uncertain as to how to interpret this curious offer. Such a marriage could indeed hardly have failed to bring the two rulers closer together; on the other hand it would have provoked a major scandal at court and would almost certainly have resulted in the Emperor's excommunication by Patriarch Arsenius, who had already publicly censured his treatment of little John Lascaris.
George Pachymeres claims that Michael's real motive was 'burning love' for Anna. There is nothing inherently improbable in the idea; Michael (who had already sired two illegitimate daughters) might easily have succumbed to the charms of a woman who was still only thirty and - as far as we can judge - a good deal more attractive than her late husband's behaviour towards her might have suggested. But none of our other sources provide any corroboration for the theory, any more than does Michael's own subsequent decision to return her to her brother when he was persuaded to abandon the project under pressure from the Patriarch, Anna herself and his wife Theodora - who had no desire to end her days in a convent. In exchange, Manfred sent back the Caesar Alexius Strategopulus, who had been captured by the Despot of Epirus and handed over to him at his request; but Michael's long-desired political alliance remained a dream.
He was not unduly discouraged. There was plenty of work to be done nearer home, where he was determined to restore to the Empire the frontiers that had existed before 1204. He began in the Peloponnese, in 1262 releasing Prince William of Achaia from the prison in which he had languished during the three years since his captivity after the battle of Pelagonia, and receiving in return the all-important fortresses of Monemvasia, Mistra, Maina, Geraki and the district of Kinsterna - a significant first step in the re-establishment of imperial power in the peninsula. He and William then took solemn oaths never again to go to war against one another, the agreement being sealed by William's becoming godfather to the Emperor's son Constantine and being accorded the rank and title of Grand Domestic of the Empire.
The oaths, it need hardly be said, were broken almost as soon as they were made. In May 1262 at Thebes, William entered into an alliance with the Venetians against the Empire; and only two months later, at Viterbo,1 he was party to a further agreement between Pope Urban, Baldwin, Venice and all the Latin barons of the Peloponnese, by the terms of which the Pope formally released him from his pledges to the 'Greek schismatics'. For Michael PalaeoTogus, this was provocation enough. In the first months of 1263 an imperial fleet of newly-built ships sacked the Frankish-held islands of Cos, Naxos and Paros, attacked the cities of Oreos and Karystos at the opposite ends of Euboea and finally
1 Viterbo, some sixty miles from Rome, had been chosen by Pope Alexander IV in 1257 as his principal place of residence. It was to continue in papal favour for the next twenty-eight years, until the death of Martin IV in 1285.
descended on the south-eastern Morea, where it seized much of the coast of Laconia; meanwhile an army of some fifteen thousand men - a third of whom were Seljuk mercenaries — under the command of the Emperor's brother, the sebastocrator Constantine, was carried by Genoese ships directly to Monemvasia, whence it advanced north-west to besiege Lacedaemon, the ancient Sparta. William of Achaia — now seriously alarmed - hurried to Corinth in an attempt to mobilize his fellow-princes, whereupon Constantine abandoned his siege and led the army in a series of forced marches across the Peloponnese to William's capital at Andravida.
For a moment it looked as though all Achaia was doomed; the situation was saved only by the courage of the bailli whom William had left in charge, a local Greek named John Katavas. Despite his advanced age and a bad attack of gout, Katavas hastily assembled the three-hundred-man garrison and led it out to a narrow defile near the imperial camp. When a quick reconnaissance revealed that the invaders were still resting after their long journey, he immediately gave the order to attack. Constantine and his men, taken off their guard, could offer little resistance. Many of them were slaughtered; the remainder sought refuge in the neighbouring forests. The sebastocrator himself, narrowly escaping with his life, fled back across the peninsula to Mistra.
Only a month or two later, off the little island of Spetsai, a mixed fleet of forty-eight imperial and Genoese ships sailing southward to Monemvasia encountered a substantially smaller Venetian force of thirty-two galleys. Precise details of the engagement that followed are unclear, but it ended in a crushing defeat for the Genoese, whose fleet - more than half of which had refused to fight - was ignominiously scattered. They lost one of their admirals and, we are told, up to a thousand of their men.1 It was to be several years before they were once again a significant force in the eastern Mediterranean; more important still, they surrendered the respect of Michael Palaeologus, who paid for their naval patrols and demanded better returns for his money.
The Emperor had other reasons, too, for dissatisfaction. Since the Nymphaeum pact and the expulsion of the Venetians, the Genoese had been flooding into Constantinople, where they were now settling in such numbers - and trading so aggressively - as to constitute a serious threat to the native merchant community. Fully conscious of the extent to
