CHAPTER VII
After the Muslims had conquered Spain in the eighth century and the greater part of Sicily in the ninth, they made no further permanent territorial acquisitions. To the Christian lands surrounding the Mediterranean, however, they seemed a more horrible threat than ever. Their unofficial colonies in the south of Italy and in southern France were the terror of their Christian neighbours; no area of the Middle Sea was safe from the danger of their pirate fleets, and there were few coastal towns or cities that did not live in fear of a surprise onslaught. Venice almost alone, secure in her shallow lagoon, had no need for vigilance. Rome itself, as we have seen, had been sacked in 846, and in the following century Genoa and Pisa suffered similar fates.
Nor was the Muslim menace confined to piracy. Egypt was also becoming increasingly dangerous. A Turkish soldier of fortune, Ahmed ibn Tulun, became governor in 868 and extended his authority through much of the Levant as far as Cilicia, in the southeastern corner of the coast of Asia Minor. Finally, in the last years of the century, the Abbasid Caliph sent a punitive fleet to Egypt and Tulunid rule ended in 905.68 Three decades of confusion followed, after which another considerably more distinguished and longer-lasting dynasty took the stage–the Fatimids, Shias of the Ismaili sect, who traced their descent to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. First coming into prominence in Tunisia, they conquered Egypt in 969 and built themselves a new capital which they named al-Qahira, ‘the Victorious’, known to us today as Cairo. By this time the Abbasid Caliphate was on its last legs, and unable to prevent the Fatimid conquest not only of Palestine and Syria but also of the Arabian heartland, the Hejaz.
In theory, from the ninth century onward, it was the Western Emperor who bore the ultimate responsibility for defending his empire from infidel attack; but the Emperor was powerless. Aachen, the imperial capital, was several weeks’ march from the Mediterranean: even when an army ventured south it was perforce confined to the land, since the few vessels that constituted the imperial navy normally found themselves in the Baltic. Poor Otto II was a case in point: in December 980 he had decided to free south Italy once and for all from the Saracen scourge. To begin with, his campaign had gone well enough, but in the summer of 982, as he was advancing into Calabria, he had been surprised by an Arab force near Stilo. His army had been cut to pieces, and he himself had escaped only by swimming to a passing ship, concealing his identity and later, as the vessel approached Rossano, jumping overboard again and striking out for the shore. His defeat was the clearest possible illustration of imperial powerlessness in the face of Islamic pressure.
Yet even then–though still almost imperceptibly–the pendulum had begun its backward swing. From the late tenth century onward we see a slow increase in Christian resistance. The Muslim settlers in the south of France were expelled by 975. Genoa and Pisa were building up navies of their own; already by 1016 these enabled them to band together to drive the Saracens from the island of Sardinia, which since 721 had suffered at least nine major raids–often accompanied by massacres of the local population. Not many years later the Arabs of North Africa were given a taste of their own medicine, as Italian ships began in their turn to threaten the coastal towns. By the end of the fifty-year rule of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer in 1025, his empire had regained control of virtually the entire Balkan peninsula, all Asia Minor, Apulia, Crete and Cyprus. The grand climacteric came in 1087, when Genoa and Pisa made another joint expedition, this time against Mahdia–the Arab capital, in what is now Tunisia–capturing the town, burning the ships in its harbour and imposing peace terms on its ruler. Four years later the Great Count Roger I completed his conquest of Sicily, and in 1092 and 1093 further expeditions from Italy and southern France joined a substantial force of Normans to reconquer much of northern Spain. On every side the Muslim world was breaking up. Politically, the Mediterranean was once again becoming a Christian sea.
But there was bad news too. In 1055 the first wave of Turkish invaders, the Seljuks, had captured Baghdad; in 1071 they had burst into Asia Minor. The Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes had personally led an army against them, but on 26 August he had been soundly defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Manzikert. The Seljuk leader, Alp Arslan–whose moustaches, we are told, were so long that he had to have them tied behind his back when hunting–had treated the Emperor handsomely and sent him back with an escort to Constantinople, but the damage was done. In the years that followed the Turks spread all over central Anatolia, leaving only parts of the coast in Byzantine hands. Fourteen years after the battle, in 1085, they captured Antioch, the third of the five patriarchates of the Eastern Church–after Alexandria and Jerusalem–to fall to the Muslims. Only Rome and Constantinople remained.
The story of this first wave of Turkish expansion in Anatolia had one important and quite unexpected consequence. The Seljuk conquest of Armenia–far to the northeast, centred on Mount Ararat–led to a huge southward exodus on the part of its people, and in 1080 a certain Roupen, a relative of the last King of Ani, founded a small principality in the heart of the Taurus in Cilicia. Gradually–though it was the best part of a thousand miles from the Armenian heartland–this grew in strength and importance until in 1199 it was to become the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia. The Armenians have always prided themselves on being the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity, which they did in about 300 AD; here, suddenly, was a Christian kingdom, virtually surrounded by Muslim states, hostile to Byzantium but shortly to give invaluable support to the Crusaders–above all those of the First Crusade–on their way through Cilicia to the Holy Land.69
In the immediate aftermath of Manzikert it was all the more to be expected that Western Christendom should turn its attention to the Muslim east. The Italian coastal cities were attracted by the obvious commercial possibilities; the Normans were as always impelled by their deep-seated urge for conquest and adventure; but militant Christians, wherever they might be, were determined somehow to stem the Muslim tide. Thus, when Pope Urban II addressed the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095 and concluded his speech with an impassioned appeal for a Crusade, he was preaching to the already half-converted, providing religious justification for an enterprise which might well have been launched without him. The continued occupation of the Holy Places–and above all of Jerusalem itself–by the infidel was, he declared, an affront to Christendom; Christian pilgrims were now being subjected to every kind of humiliation and indignity. It was the duty of all good Christians to take up arms against those who had desecrated the ground upon which Christ had trod and to recover it for their own true faith.
In the months that followed, Urban’s words were carried by the Pope himself through France and Italy and by a whole army of preachers to every corner of western Europe. The response was tremendous; from as far afield as Scotland, men hastened to take the Cross. Neither the Emperor Henry IV nor King Philip I of France70–who had recently been excommunicated for adultery–were on sufficiently good terms with Rome to join the Crusade, but this was perhaps just as well; Urban was determined that the great enterprise should be under ecclesiastical control, and nominated as leader and his official legate one of the relatively few churchmen to have already made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy. The bishop was to be accompanied, however, by several powerful magnates: Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, the oldest, richest and most distinguished of them all; the French king’s brother Count Hugh of Vermandois, who arrived severely shaken after a disastrous shipwreck in the Adriatic; Count Robert II of Flanders; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror) and his cousin Count Stephen of Blois, and Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine. With Godfrey came his brother Baldwin of Boulogne–who, as a younger son without a patrimony, had brought along his wife and children and was determined to carve out a kingdom for himself in the east. From south Italy came Bohemund, Prince of Taranto, son of Robert Guiscard, who cherished similar ambitions. True Norman that he was, he cared little for the Holy Places but looked on the Crusade as the greatest adventure of his life.
One of the most popular leaders, however, was not a nobleman at all but an elderly itinerant monk called Peter, nicknamed ‘the Hermit’ for the hermit’s cape that, so far as could be seen, he never removed. He stank to high heaven and was said to look almost exactly like the donkey that he always rode, but his personal magnetism was undeniable. According to the historian Guibert of Nogent, ‘whatever he said or did seemed like something half-divine’. He had preached the Crusade all over France and in much of Germany, and by the time his particular expedition set out he may have had a following of over 40,000. Many of these, doubtless, were sincere, God-fearing men eager to fight for the sacred cause, but there were also large numbers of sick and lame–including women and children–who hoped for miraculous cures, while the vast majority seem to have been footloose riffraff attracted only by the possibility of plunder and by the promise, to all who completed the journey, of a place in paradise.
Inevitably, considering the numbers involved and their many different points of departure, the Crusaders left at various times and took various routes to their first gathering point, Constantinople. Urban seems to have genuinely believed that they would receive a warm welcome from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus; had Alexius not himself appealed to the West for military assistance against the Turks? What the Pope failed to understand was that there is a vast difference between a regiment or two of trained mercenaries coming to swell a defence force and putting themselves unconditionally under its commanders, and a number of full-scale armies, many of them totally undisciplined, expecting to be fed and lodged but unprepared to take orders from anyone except themselves. In the short time at his disposal, Alexius coped magnificently; he organised huge supplies of provisions in all the cities through which the Crusaders were to pass, with military detachments to meet each army as it crossed the imperial frontier and to escort it to the capital. Once there, the rank and file were provided with lodgings outside the walls; visitors were allowed into the capital only in small and manageable groups of perhaps half a dozen at a time, to see the sights and worship at the principal shrines.
The Crusading armies arrived in Constantinople between October 1096 and May 1097. Before they could continue on their way, however, there was serious diplomatic work to be done. First of all, Alexius insisted that each leader should swear to him an oath of allegiance, with an acknowledgement–almost certainly in writing–of imperial claims in Asia Minor and Syria. These were given, with varying degrees of reluctance, by all but one: Raymond of Toulouse. Raymond had arrived in the middle of April, and was still intriguing to get himself recognised as commander-in-chief. If, he declared, the Emperor were to put himself at the head of the Crusade, he would be his loyal follower; if not, he would accept no suzerain other than God. His fellow-princes, fearing that his attitude might imperil the success of the whole expedition, begged him to relent, and he finally agreed to a compromise, swearing–by a form of oath common in his native Languedoc–to respect the life and honour of the Emperor and to see that nothing would be done to his detriment. Alexius, realising that this was the best he could hope for, very sensibly accepted. He made his displeasure felt only by witholding from Raymond those magnificent presents–of food, horses and sumptuous silken robes–that he showered on all the other leaders.
The Emperor’s relief, as he watched the last of the Crusaders board the vessels that were to carry them over to Asia, may well be imagined. Even he can have had no clear idea of how many men, women and children had crossed his territory in the previous nine months: the total, ranging from the rabble of Peter the Hermit–which had been predictably massacred by the Turks the previous October, having got no further than Nicaea–to the great feudal lords, cannot have been far short of 100,000. Thanks to his meticulous preparations and precautions, the Crusading armies had caused less trouble than he had feared, and all the commanders except one had sworn him their allegiance; but he had no delusions about them. Foreign armies, however friendly they might be in theory, were never welcome guests, and these dirty and ill-mannered barbarians were surely worse than most. They had ravaged the land, ravished the women, plundered the towns and villages, and yet they still seemed to take all this as their right, expecting to be treated as heroes and deliverers rather than as the ruffians they were. Their departure occasioned much rejoicing, and it was a further consolation to know that, if and when they returned, they would be considerably fewer in number than on the outward journey.
Contrary to the expectations of many, the First Crusade turned out to be a resounding, if undeserved, success. On 1 July 1097 the Seljuk army was smashed at Dorylaeum (now Eskisehir) in Anatolia; on 3 June 1098 the Crusaders recovered Antioch; and finally, on Friday, 15 July 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they celebrated their victory by slaughtering all the Muslims in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. Two of their former leaders were not, however, by then among them: Baldwin of Boulogne had made himself Count of Edessa (now Urfa) on the middle Euphrates, while Bohemund of Taranto–after a bitter quarrel with Raymond of Toulouse–had established himself as Prince of Antioch.
In Jerusalem itself, an election was held to decide upon its future ruler. Raymond was the obvious candidate, but he refused. He was too unpopular, and he knew it; he would never be able to count on his colleagues for their obedience and support. The choice eventually fell on Godfrey of Bouillon, less for his military or diplomatic abilities than for his genuine piety and irreproachable private life. He accepted, declining only–in the city where Christ had worn the crown of thorns–to bear the title of king. Instead, he took that of Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, and was always addressed as dux or princeps, never as rex. But Godfrey lived for only a year after the capture of the city, and his successors were less punctilious; they were crowned as kings, of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
That kingdom was to endure for eighty-eight years, during which time it would vary in size; at its largest extent, it reached from the head of the Gulf of Aqaba in the south to the Dog river, a few miles beyond Beirut, in the north. Its eastern frontier was the Jordan valley, its western the Mediterranean. To the Emperor Alexius, as a devout Christian, the news of its foundation could only have been welcome; the city had been in infidel hands for the best part of four centuries, and was anyway too far from Constantinople to be of major strategic importance. The situation in Antioch, on the other hand, caused him acute anxiety. This ancient city and patriarchate had also had a chequered history: it had been sacked by the Persians in the sixth century and occupied by them for nearly twenty years in the early seventh, before falling to the Arabs in 637; in 969 it had been reconquered by the Empire, of which it had remained an integral part until 1078. Its inhabitants were overwhelmingly Greek-speaking and Orthodox; in the eyes of Alexius and all his right-thinking subjects, it was a Byzantine city through and through. Now it had been seized by a Norman adventurer who, despite his oath of allegiance, clearly had no intention of surrendering it and was no longer making any secret of his hostility. He had even gone so far as to expel the Greek Patriarch and to replace him with a Roman Catholic. There was but one source of comfort: Bohemund was every bit as unwelcome to his neighbours to the north, the Danishmend Turks,71 and Alexius’s satisfaction can well be imagined when he heard, in the summer of 1100, that the Prince of Antioch was their prisoner. He was to remain a captive for three long years until he was finally ransomed by Baldwin, who had succeeded his brother Godfrey on the throne of Jerusalem.
During these first years following the Crusaders’ triumph, it became ever more clear that Bohemund was not alone in his attitude to Byzantium. After the capture of Jerusalem, the genuine pilgrims–many of them sickened by the atrocities they had seen committed in Christ’s name–had begun to trickle home; the Franks who remained in Outremer (as the Crusader lands in the Middle East had come to be called) were the military adventurers who, having taken the Holy City, were now out for what they could get. Of all the leaders of the First Crusade, only Raymond of Toulouse–who, ironically, had alone refused to swear the oath of allegiance at Constantinople–had acted in good faith and had returned to the Emperor certain conquests of what had formerly been imperial territory. The rest were proving little better than the Saracens they had supplanted. Worst of all was Bohemund. In 1104, a year after his release by the Danishmends, he sailed for Apulia, where there was work to be done on his long-neglected estates. Then in September 1105 he moved on to Rome, where he effortlessly convinced Pope Paschal II that the arch-enemy of the Crusader states of Outremer was neither the Arab nor the Turk, but Alexius Comnenus himself. So enthusiastically did Paschal accept his arguments that, when the time came for Bohemund to go on to France, he found himself accompanied by a papal legate with instructions to preach a holy war against Byzantium. Alexius and his subjects saw their worst suspicions confirmed. The entire Crusade was now revealed as having been nothing more than a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy, in which the religious motive had been used merely as the thinnest of disguises for unashamed imperialism.
The Crusader county of Edessa, in southern Anatolia not far from the Syrian border, is nearly 150 miles from the Mediterranean. Its fall on Christmas Day 1144 to the forces of Imad ed-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul, after a siege of twenty-five days and amid scenes of hideous butchery, would not therefore greatly concern us but for its direct consequence: the Second Crusade. The dreadful news had horrified the whole of Christendom. To the peoples of the west, who had seen the success of the First Crusade as a sign of divine favour, it called into question all their comfortably held opinions. How, after less than half a century, had the Cross once again given way to the Crescent? Travellers to the east had for some time been returning with reports of widespread degeneracy among the Franks of Outremer. Could it be, perhaps, that they were no longer worthy in the eyes of the Almighty to serve as guardians of the Holy Places?
The Franks knew better. The problem was, quite simply, that the vast majority of the original Crusaders had returned to their homes; the only permanent standing army–if it could be called such–was formed by the two military orders, the Knights of St John and the Templars, and they alone could not hope to hold out against a concerted offensive. The only hope was another Crusade. But Pope Eugenius III was no Urban; moreover, he had recently been obliged to flee the usual turmoil of medieval Rome and had taken refuge in Viterbo. The burden of leadership consequently fell on King Louis VII of France. Though still only twenty-four, Louis had already assumed an aura of lugubrious piety that made him look much older–and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was one of nature’s pilgrims; the Crusade was his duty as a Christian; and there were family reasons too, since Eleanor was the niece of Raymond, Prince of Antioch.72 At Christmas 1145 he announced his intention of taking the Cross; then, in order that the hearts of all his subjects should be filled like his own with crusading fire, he sent for Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux.
St Bernard, now fifty-five, was far and away the most powerful spiritual force in Europe. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain that resulted from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a blazing religious zeal that left no room for tolerance or moderation. For the past thirty years he had been constantly on the move, preaching, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy, religious or political. The proposed Crusade was a venture after his own heart. On Palm Sunday, 31 March 1146, at Vézelay in Burgundy, he made the most fateful speech of his life, King Louis standing at his side. The King was wearing on his breast the cross sent him by the Pope in token of his decision, and as Bernard spoke all those who heard him–and there were many thousands–began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of these, cut from rough cloth, had already been prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the Abbot flung off his own robe and began to tear it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.
It was an astonishing achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. And yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done.
Away in Constantinople, Manuel I Comnenus fully understood the extent of the nightmare that the First Crusade had caused his grandfather Alexius half a century before. He had no wish to see it repeated. He made it clear at the outset that he would provide food and supplies for the armies, but that everything would have to be paid for. Moreover, all the leaders would be required once again to swear an oath of fealty to him as they passed through his dominions. The German army of about 20,000 which was the first to arrive, proved to be the most irresponsible yet. Many of its leaders, too, set a poor example to their men: although Conrad, King of the Romans73–who had at first refused to have anything to do with the Crusade but had repented after a public castigation by Bernard–behaved with his usual dignity, his nephew and second-in-command, the young Duke Frederick of Swabia–better known in history by his later nickname of Barbarossa–burned down an entire monastery at Adrianople (the modern Edirne) in reprisal for an attack by local brigands, massacring a large number of perfectly innocent monks. Conrad indignantly rejected Manuel’s suggestion that his army should cross to Asia by the Hellespont–thereby avoiding Constantinople altogether–and when in mid-September 1147 the Crusaders at last pitched their camp outside the walls of the capital, relations between German and Greek could hardly have been worse.
The French army, arriving a few weeks later, was smaller and on the whole more seemly. Discipline was a little better, and the presence of many distinguished ladies, including Queen Eleanor herself, accompanying their husbands doubtless exercised a further moderating influence. Even then, however, progress was not altogether smooth. Not surprisingly, German excesses had made the Balkan peasants frankly hostile: they were now asking ridiculous prices for what little food they had left to sell. Mistrust soon became mutual and led to sharp practices on both sides. Thus, long before they reached Constantinople, the French had begun to feel considerable resentment against Germans and Byzantines alike.
Manuel flattered his chief guests with the usual round of entertainments and banquets, but even as he did so he feared the worst. Having recently returned from a campaign of his own in Anatolia, he knew that these shambling forces, already as lacking in morale as in discipline, would stand no chance against the Seljuk cavalry. He had furnished them with provisions and guides; he had warned them about the scarcity of water; and he had advised them not to take the direct route through the hinterland but to keep to the coast, most of which was still under Byzantine control. He could do no more. If, after all these precautions, they insisted on getting slaughtered, they would have only themselves to blame. He for his part would be sorry–but not, perhaps, inconsolable.
It cannot have been more than a few days after the Emperor had bidden the German army farewell that he received news that it had been taken by surprise by the Turks and virtually annihilated. Conrad himself and Frederick of Swabia had escaped and had returned to join the French, who were still at Nicaea, but nine-tenths of their men now lay dead and dying amid the wreckage of their camp. It was a bad start, and there was worse to follow. Conrad had continued only as far as Ephesus when he fell gravely ill. Manuel had immediately sailed down from Constantinople and brought him safely back to the palace. He prided himself on his medical skills, and personally nursed Conrad back to health. Finally, when Conrad was well enough to continue his journey, an imperial squadron was put at his disposal to carry him on to Palestine.
The French, meanwhile, had an agonising passage through Anatolia, where they suffered heavily at Turkish hands. Although this was entirely the fault of King Louis, who had ignored the Emperor’s warnings to keep to the coast, he persisted in attributing every encounter with the enemy to Byzantine carelessness or treachery or both, and rapidly developed an almost psychopathic resentment against the Greeks. At last in despair he, his household and as much of his cavalry as could be accommodated took ship from Attaleia (modern Antalya), leaving the rest of the army and the pilgrims to struggle on as best they might. It was late in the spring of 1148 before the sad remnants of the once great host dragged themselves into Antioch.
And that was only the beginning. The mighty Zengi was dead, but his mantle had passed to his still greater son-in-law Nur ed-Din, whose stronghold at Aleppo had now become the focus of Muslim opposition to the Franks. Aleppo should thus have been the Crusaders’ first objective, and Louis found himself under heavy pressure from Raymond of Antioch to mount an immediate attack on the city. He refused, on the ludicrous grounds that he must first pray at the Holy Sepulchre; whereat Queen Eleanor, whose affection for her husband had not been increased by the dangers and discomforts of the journey–and whose relations with Raymond were already suspected of going somewhat beyond those normally recommended between uncle and niece–announced her intention of remaining at Antioch and suing for divorce. She and her husband were distant cousins; the question of consanguinity had been conveniently overlooked at the time of their marriage, but if resurrected could still prove troublesome–and Eleanor knew it.
Louis, for all his moroseness, was not without spirit in moments of crisis. He ignored his wife’s protests and dragged her off to Jerusalem; he antagonised Raymond to the point where the Prince of Antioch refused to play any further part in the Crusade; and in May he arrived, his tight-lipped queen in tow, in the Holy City. There he remained until 24 June, when a meeting of all the leading Crusaders was held at Acre to decide on a plan of campaign. Why they chose at this moment to attack Damascus remains a mystery. The only major Arab state to continue hostile to Nur ed-Din, it could–and should–have been an invaluable ally. By attacking it, they drove it against its will into the Emir’s Muslim confederation–and they made their own destruction sure. They arrived to find Damascus strong, its defenders determined. On the second day, by yet another of those disastrous decisions that characterised the whole Crusade, they moved their camp to an area along the southeastern section of the walls devoid alike of shade and water. Louis and Conrad soon realised that to continue the siege would mean the almost certain destruction of their whole army. On 28 July, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they decided on retreat.
There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than that dark grey, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Retreating across it in the height of summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving a stinking trail of dead men and horses in their wake, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. This, they knew, was the end. Their losses had been immense, but still worse was the shame. Their once glorious army that had purported to enshrine every ideal of the Christian west had given up the entire enterprise after four days’ fighting, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. Here was the ultimate humiliation–which neither they nor their enemies would forget.
‘The failure of the Second Crusade,’ wrote Sir Steven Runciman, ‘marked a turning point in the story of Outremer.’ The Kingdom of Jerusalem was to endure for another thirty-nine years but, to any dispassionate observer after 1148, the eventual fall of the city to the Saracens must have seemed inevitable. On the Muslim side there was already one leader of genius: Nur ed-Din, whose capture of Damascus in April 1154 made him master of Muslim Syria. And there was soon to be another: Salah ed-Din–better known as Saladin–the greatest Muslim hero of the Middle Ages. Born in 1137 into a prominent Kurdish family, at the age of thirty-one he was appointed both commander of the Syrian troops in Egypt and Vizir of the Fatimid Caliph. By 1171 he had grown sufficiently strong to abolish the moribund Shia Caliphate and reintroduce Sunni Islam; he was thenceforth Egypt’s sole ruler. Just three years later, on the death of Nur ed-Din, he had quickly moved his small but strictly disciplined army into Syria and had devoted himself to the task of uniting, under his own standard, all the Muslim lands of Egypt, Syria, northern Mesopotamia and Palestine.
Against these two giants the Kings of Jerusalem stood little chance. Baldwin III and his successor, Amalric I, might conceivably have saved the situation had they lived; but they died, at thirty-two and thirty-eight respectively. The next king, Baldwin IV, was a leper, who succumbed to the disease in 1185 when he was only twenty-four, leaving the throne to his nephew, Baldwin V, who succeeded as a child of eight and was dead before he was nine. In the circumstances, his death might have been considered a blessing in disguise, but the opportunity of finding a true leader was thrown away and the throne passed to his stepfather, Guy of Lusignan, a weak, querulous figure with a record of incapacity which fully merited the scorn in which he was held by most of his compatriots. Jerusalem was thus in a state bordering on civil war when, in May 1187, Saladin declared his long-awaited jihad and crossed the Jordan into Frankish territory. Under the miserable Guy, the Christian defeat was a foregone conclusion. On 3 July he led the largest army his kingdom had ever assembled across the mountains of Galilee towards Tiberias, where Saladin was besieging the castle. After a long day’s march in the hottest season of the year this army was obliged to pitch camp on a waterless plateau; the next day, exhausted by the heat and half-mad with thirst, beneath a little double-summited hill known as the Horns of Hattin, it was surrounded by the Muslim forces and cut to pieces.
It remained only for the Saracens to mop up the isolated Christian fortresses one by one. Tiberias fell the day after the battle; Acre, Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon and Beirut capitulated in swift succession. Wheeling south, Saladin took Ascalon by storm; Gaza surrendered without a struggle. Now he was ready for Jerusalem. The defenders of the Holy City held out heroically for twelve days; but on 2 October, with the walls already undermined by Muslim sappers, they knew that the end was near. Their leader, Balian of Ibelin–King Guy having been taken prisoner after Hattin–went personally to Saladin to discuss terms for surrender.
Saladin, neither bloodthirsty nor vindictive, agreed that every Christian in Jerusalem should be allowed to redeem himself by payment of a suitable ransom. That same day he led his army into the city, and for the first time in eighty-eight years, on the anniversary of the day on which the Prophet had been carried in his sleep from Jerusalem to paradise, his green banners fluttered over the Temple area from which he had been gathered up, and the sacred imprint of his foot was once again exposed to the adoration of the faithful. Everywhere, order was preserved. There was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting. Of the 20,000 poor who had no means of raising the ransom, 7,000 were freed on payment of a lump sum by the various Christian authorities; Saladin’s brother and chief lieutenant, al-Adil, asked for 1,000 of the remainder as a reward for his services and immediately set them free. Another 700 were given to the Patriarch, and 500 to Balian; then Saladin himself spontaneously liberated all the old, all the husbands whose wives had been ransomed and finally all the widows and children. Few Christians ultimately found their way to slavery. Saladin’s restraint was all the more remarkable in that he could not have forgotten the massacre that had followed the arrival of the first Crusaders in 1099. The Christians had not forgotten it either, and they could not have failed to be struck by the contrast.
When the news of the fall of Jerusalem reached the west, Pope Urban III died of shock; his successor Gregory VIII lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take up arms for its recovery. Plans were quickly laid. Leading this Third Crusade would be the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who had succeeded his uncle Conrad in 1152. Also taking the Cross were three other western sovereigns: Richard Coeur-de-Lion of England, Philip Augustus of France, and William the Good of Sicily. The Byzantine Emperor, Isaac II Angelus, was spared many of the appalling logistical problems with which his predecessors Alexius and Manuel had had to contend, since Barbarossa, who was taking the land route, had agreed to cross into Asia by the Hellespont rather than the Bosphorus, while the three kings had all elected to travel by sea. William’s unexpected death necessitated one or two minor changes to their arrangements, but the basic plan that all three fleets should gather at Messina for the last stage of their journey remained unaltered, and in September 1190 Richard and Philip Augustus arrived, within ten days of each other, in Sicily.
Richard was in a black and dangerous mood. He bore a deep grudge against the Sicilian King Tancred. Though William the Good had died intestate, he seems at some stage to have promised his father-in-law, Henry II of England, an important legacy that included a twelve-foot golden table, a silken tent big enough to hold 200 men, a quantity of gold plate and several additional ships, fully provisioned, for the Crusade. Now, with William and Henry both dead, Tancred was refusing to honour that promise. There was also the problem of Richard’s sister, Queen Joanna: he had heard that Tancred was keeping her under distraint and wrongfully withholding from her certain revenues which she had received as part of her marriage settlement. It may be, too, that he saw Sicily as a potential new jewel in his own crown. Tancred was after all illegitimate, while Constance, thanks to her marriage to the Emperor’s heir, spelt death to the kingdom. Perhaps he too, as the late king’s brother-in-law, might be entitled to stake his claim.
Tancred had too much on his plate already to risk hostilities in yet another quarter. Clearly he must get his unwelcome guest away from the island as soon as possible, and if that meant making concessions, then concessions there would have to be. Five days after Richard’s arrival he was joined by Joanna herself, now at complete liberty and having received generous compensation for her other losses. But the Lion-Heart was not to be bought off so easily. On 30 September he set off furiously across the Straits of Messina to occupy the inoffensive little town of Bagnara on the Calabrian coast. There, in an abbey founded by Count Roger a century before, he settled his sister under the protection of a strong garrison. Returning to Messina, he fell upon the city’s own most venerable religious foundation, the Basilian monastery of the Saviour, magnificently sited across the harbour. The monks were evicted, and Richard’s army moved into its new barracks.
The predominantly Greek population of Messina had already been scandalised by the conduct of the English soldiery, in particular by their free and easy ways with the local women. The occupation of the monastery was the last straw. On 3 October serious rioting broke out, and on the following day Richard’s army burst into the city, ravaging and plundering as it went. Within hours, the whole town was in flames. Philip Augustus, who had tried hard to mediate between Richard and Tancred, was horrified when he saw Richard’s standard floating above the walls; he immediately sent an urgent message to Tancred, advising him of the gravity of the situation and offering the support of his own army if Richard were to press his claims any further. Tancred needed no such warning; but he had the long-term future to consider, and he knew that Henry of Hohenstaufen was a greater menace than Richard would ever be. Sooner or later Henry would invade; when he did so Tancred would need allies, and for this purpose the English, for all their faults, would be far preferable to the French. Richard hated the Hohenstaufen; the French king, on the other hand, was on excellent terms with Frederick Barbarossa. If the Germans were to invade now, while the Crusaders were still in Sicily, French sympathies would be to say the least uncertain. Tancred thanked Philip and sent him some suitably lavish presents; meanwhile, he sent a trusted envoy to negotiate with Richard at Messina.
The terms he offered were more than Richard could resist: 20,000 ounces of gold for his sister and the same amount for himself. In return he promised to give Tancred full military assistance for as long as he and his army remained in the kingdom, and undertook to restore to its rightful owners all the plunder that had been taken during the recent disturbances. On 11 November the resulting treaty was signed at Messina. It was sealed by an exchange of gifts; Richard’s present to Tancred purported to be King Arthur’s famous sword Excalibur, recently unearthed at Glastonbury. Not surprisingly, relations between Richard and Philip Augustus grew even chillier than before, but the French king–unlike the English–knew how to keep his temper under control. Somehow they all got through the winter without coming to any more blows, and on 30 March Philip and his army sailed for Palestine.
A few days later a ship arrived with Richard’s mother, the seventy-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine,74 bringing with her his betrothed, the Princess Berengaria of Navarre. The original plan had probably been that the two should marry in Sicily, but marriages were forbidden during Lent and Richard–whose tastes in any case did not lie in this direction–was in no hurry for matrimony. It was therefore resolved that Berengaria should sail with him to the Holy Land. Eleanor, who retained unpleasant memories of her last visit, had no wish to return; the young bride would be escorted by Queen Joanna, and a special ship was put at their disposal. On 10 April 1191, Richard–whose immense fleet, we are told, consisted of at least 200 vessels–set sail for Palestine.
On the third day out of Messina the English ships ran into one of those terrible spring storms for which the eastern Mediterranean is famous. Most of them managed to stick together–the King kept a lamp burning at his masthead as a guide to the rest–but several vessels were blown disastrously off course and a number were completely wrecked. For some time the ship carrying Berengaria and Joanna was feared lost, but it was eventually found with two others just outside the port of Limassol in Cyprus.
Apart from its brief periods of Arab occupation, Cyprus had always been part of the Byzantine Empire; just five years previously a certain Isaac Ducas Comnenus had arrived bearing documents appointing him governor of the island. These were subsequently found to be forgeries, but not before Isaac had gained control of all the principal strongholds. He then declared himself an independent ruler, assumed the title of emperor and–in order to strengthen his position against the legitimate Emperor in Constantinople–concluded a treaty with Saladin. In such circumstances, there could be no question of his giving assistance, or even shelter, to the Crusading fleet; the survivors of the shipwrecks had been stripped of everything they possessed and thrown into prison. On being told of the arrival of the two distinguished ladies, he invited them ashore; but Joanna–who had heard about his prisoners–did not trust him an inch. Her suspicions were confirmed when he refused the ships’ request for water and began to muster troops along the shore.
Word was sent quickly back to Richard, who sailed at once for Limassol and gave orders for an immediate attack. Isaac had done everything he could to fortify the beach, but his men were no match for the English archers and soon took to their heels. By evening the town was in Richard’s hands. That same night Isaac’s camp was surrounded. He himself managed to escape, but left everything behind: arms, horses, treasure–and, not least, his imperial standard, which Richard later presented to the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds. He had given the King a perfect casus belli, and Richard was not one to miss his opportunity. All Cyprus, he had now decided, should be his. There was one prior formality to be gone through: on Sunday, 11 May, in the Chapel of St George in the castle, he and Berengaria were married by the Bishop of Evreux, who went straight on to perform the bride’s coronation.75 Then he settled down to prepare for war.
The conquest of Cyprus did not take long. Richard had been joined by Guy of Lusignan, titular King of Jerusalem but now stripped of his kingdom. He entrusted Guy with part of his army, with instructions to pursue Isaac and capture him; the rest, under his own command, would circumnavigate the island–half of them sailing in each direction–capturing the coastal towns and castles and any ships they might encounter on the way. He returned to find that Guy had failed–predictably–to locate Isaac, who had taken refuge in one of the string of virtually impregnable mountain castles along the northern coast. His plan was presumably to remain there until the Crusaders had left the island; it might even have succeeded had not the fortress of Kyrenia, in which he had left his wife and little daughter, fallen to Guy’s men. After this Isaac lost heart and agreed to give himself up, stipulating only that he should not be put in irons. Richard willingly gave his promise–and had fetters specially forged in silver. By 1 June the King of England was also master of Cyprus. Two Englishmen were appointed governors to administer the island in his name, and all Cypriot men were ordered to shave off their beards as a sign of loyalty to the new regime.
On 5 June the King set sail from Famagusta, taking Isaac Comnenus with him and leaving him a prisoner in the great fortress of Margat (now Qalaat Marqab in Syria)–the blackest, grimmest and most sombre of all the Crusader castles–which had been acquired by the Knights of St John five years before. He then continued southward along the coast to Acre, being fortunate enough on the way to encounter and destroy a Saracen ship flying the French colours and bent on penetrating the Frankish blockade. (According to a widespread rumour among the Franks, this vessel was found to be carrying a cargo of some 200 particularly venomous snakes, which were destined for release in the Christian camp.) On their arrival he and his fleet were given a predictably warm welcome, but Richard immediately found himself embroiled in a diplomatic crisis that seriously threatened what remained of the Christian alliance.
Eleven months after the battle of Hattin, Guy of Lusignan had been released by Saladin on condition that he would take no further part in the fighting. Guy had agreed, but everyone knew that promises made to infidels could be safely ignored–particularly since it now emerged that he was henceforth going to have something more than just the Holy Places to fight for: his own throne was at stake. During his imprisonment a new leader had appeared: a certain Conrad of Montferrat, who had heroically defended Tyre against a Saracen attack and was now holding on to the city despite the fact that it was an integral part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Guy, deprived of Tyre, determined to show his mettle and, desperate for a city to rule from, had marched down with hardly more than a handful of men to Acre, where he started a siege. He was not, it was generally agreed, over-endowed with intelligence, but here was an act bordering on the insane. Acre was the largest town in the kingdom, larger even than Jerusalem; Guy’s army was pathetically small; there was nothing to stop Saladin bringing up a relief force and surrounding him in his turn–which indeed he did. Yet somehow Guy maintained his position until the arrival of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in the early summer of 1191.
On 12 July of that same year the Muslim garrison in Acre capitulated, and the Crusaders took possession of the city. Six weeks later Richard gave orders for the massacre of all his Saracen prisoners–2,700 of them, together with their wives and children–before leaving Acre in the hands of Guy of Lusignan. Guy’s difficulties should then have been over–but for Conrad of Montferrat, whose eyes were now firmly on the throne of Jerusalem. Guy had succeeded to it only through his wife, Sibylla, but Sibylla and her two little daughters had died of an epidemic in the autumn of 1190; did her husband still have a valid claim? Whatever the legal position might be, most of the surviving barons of Outremer saw the perfect opportunity for getting rid of a weak and generally unreliable ruler. Their own candidate for the throne was Conrad. Admittedly he had no legal title to it, but to this problem there was a simple solution: marriage to the Princess Isabella, daughter of King Amalric I. It was perhaps a minor disadvantage that she was already married, to Humphrey, Lord of Toron; but Humphrey, though a man of considerable culture and an impressive Arabic scholar, was also famously homosexual. With every semblance of relief, he unhesitatingly agreed to a divorce. On 24 November 1190 Conrad and Isabella were pronounced man and wife.
A royal marriage, however, is not a coronation; the rivalry between Guy of Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat dragged on for another eighteen months, and might well have continued for substantially longer had not King Richard–whose power and prestige in the Holy Land were far greater than theirs–received news from England that persuaded him to return at once if his own crown were to be saved. Before his departure he called a council of all the knights and barons of Outremer and told them that the question of the kingship must now be decided once and for all; whom would they choose to rule over them, Guy or Conrad? Unanimously, they chose Conrad. Guy was sent by Richard to Cyprus where–for a consideration–he was allowed to rule the island as he liked. He assumed the title of king and founded a dynasty that was to reign in Cyprus for nearly three hundred years.
On 10 June 1190, after a long and exhausting journey through the Taurus mountains in southern Anatolia, Frederick Barbarossa led his troops out on to the flat coastal plain. The heat was savage, and the little river Calycadnus (nowadays known, rather less euphoniously, as the Göksu) that ran past Seleucia (the modern Silifke) to the sea must have been a welcome sight. Frederick, who was riding alone a short distance ahead of his army, spurred his horse towards it. He was never seen alive again. Whether he dismounted to drink and was swept off his feet by the current, whether his horse slipped in the mud and threw him, whether the shock of falling into the icy mountain water was too much for his tired old body–he was nearing seventy–we shall never know. He was rescued, but too late. Most of his followers reached the river to find their Emperor lying dead on the bank.
Almost immediately his army began to disintegrate. Many of the German princelings returned to Europe; others took ship for Tyre, then the only major port in Outremer still in Christian hands; the rump, carrying the Emperor’s body preserved–not very successfully–in vinegar, marched grimly on, though it lost many more of its men in an ambush as it entered Syria. The survivors who finally limped into Antioch had no more fight left in them. By this time, too, what was left of Frederick had gone the same way as his army; his rapidly decomposing remains were hastily buried in the cathedral, where they were to rest for another seventy-eight years–until a Mameluke army under the Sultan Baibars76 burned the whole building, together with most of the city, to the ground.
Fortunately for Outremer, Richard and Philip Augustus arrived with their armies essentially intact; it was thanks to them that the Third Crusade–although, since it failed to recover Jerusalem, it can hardly be accounted a success–was at least somewhat less humiliating than the Second. Acre became the capital of the kingdom; but that kingdom, now reduced to the short coastal strip between Tyre and Jaffa, was a pale shadow of what Crusader Palestine had once been. It would struggle on for another century, and when it finally fell to Baibars in 1291 the only surprise was that it had lasted so long.
In all the history of Christendom, there is no more unedifying chapter than that which relates the story of the Crusades. The First, though militarily successful, was marked by a degree of barbarity and brutality which even by medieval standards has seldom been surpassed; the Second was a fiasco, due in large measure to the idiocy of its leadership; the Third, though somewhat less shaming than its predecessor, was a lacklustre affair that also failed hopelessly in its object. None of the three, however, apart from the amount of pointless bloodshed they involved, had much long-term historical impact; arguably by the end of the twelfth century and unquestionably by the end of the thirteenth, the Muslim Near East was little different from what it had been when Pope Urban sounded his great rallying cry at Clermont. The Fourth Crusade was to be quite unlike these. Its participants virtually destroyed the one mighty Christian bastion that they should have given their lives to uphold, Europe’s only strong defence against the Muslim tide. In doing so they changed the course of history.
The end of the twelfth century found Europe in confusion. On 8 April 1195, the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus had fallen victim to a coup engineered by his brother Alexius, who deposed and blinded him and had himself declared emperor in his stead. Isaac had indeed been a disaster; it could only be said that Alexius was a good deal worse. Then, on 28 September 1197, just as he was preparing a new Crusade, the Western Emperor Henry VI died of a fever at Messina. Germany was torn apart by civil war over the imperial succession, and both England and France were similarly–though less violently–occupied with inheritance problems following the death of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in 1199. Norman Sicily was gone, never to return. Of all the luminaries of Christendom, one only was firmly in control: Pope Innocent III.
Under Innocent, the medieval Papacy attained the height of its power and prestige. He had ascended the papal throne in 1198, and during the nineteen years of his pontificate he presided over two separate Crusades. One of them–if we are to be strictly chronological, it was in fact the later–was of relatively little international importance, being largely confined to southwestern France. Its objective was to stamp out the Albigensian heretics, otherwise known as the Cathars, who professed the Manichaean belief that the two opposing principles of good and evil are constantly struggling for supremacy. The material world is evil; man’s task is to free his spirit, which is by its nature good, and to restore it to communion with God. This could be achieved only by a life of extreme austerity, avoiding all worldliness and corruption as exemplified by the Catholic Church.
Clearly, such a doctrine struck right to the heart of orthodox Christianity and of the political and pastoral institutions of Christendom, and Innocent moved vigorously against it. In 1209 he ordered the Cistercians to preach a Crusade. It continued throughout the century, though the Cathars never recovered from the capture in 1244 of their great stronghold of Montségur in the foothills of the Pyrenees, after which they were forced underground. By the time the heresy was at last stamped out, Provence, the Languedoc and much of the southwest had been ravaged, many of the inhabitants massacred in cold blood, and the brilliant Provençal civilisation of the troubadours destroyed.
The other Crusade was that which we know as the Fourth. The lack of crowned heads to lead it worried the Pope not a jot; previous experience had shown that kings and princes, stirring up as they invariably did national rivalries and endless questions of precedence and protocol, tended to be more trouble than they were worth. Far more serious were the problems of logistics. Coeur-de-Lion, before leaving Palestine, had given it as his opinion that the weakest point of the Muslim east was Egypt, to which any future expeditions should therefore be directed. It followed that the new army would have to travel by sea, and would need transport in a quantity that could be obtained from one source only: the Republic of Venice.
Thus it was that during the first week of Lent in the year 1201, a party of six knights led by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, arrived in Venice. They made their request at a special meeting of the Maggior Consiglio, and a week later received their answer. The Republic would provide transport for 4,500 knights with their horses, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry, with food for nine months. In addition Venice would provide fifty fully-equipped galleys at her own expense, on condition that she received one-half of the territories conquered. The price would be 84,000 silver marks.
This reply was conveyed to Geoffrey and his colleagues by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo. In all Venetian history there is no more astonishing figure. We cannot be sure of his age when, on 1 January 1193, he was raised to the ducal throne; the story goes that he was eighty-five and already stone-blind, though this seems hardly credible when we read of his energy–indeed, his heroism–a decade later on the walls of Constantinople. But even if he was only in his middle seventies, at the time of the Fourth Crusade he would have been an octogenarian of several years’ standing. He carefully glossed over the fact that his ambassadors were at that very moment in Cairo negotiating a highly profitable trade agreement, as part of which they had almost certainly undertaken not to be party to any attack on Egyptian territory; it was agreed simply that the Crusaders should meet in Venice on the feast of St John, 24 June 1202, when the fleet would be ready for them.
On that day, the number gathered on the Lido under their new leader, the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, numbered less than a third of what had been expected. In some, their enthusiasm for the cause had simply evaporated; others, doubtless, had yielded to family pressures; yet others had heard of the true destination of the Crusade and, seeing Jerusalem as the only legitimate goal, had declined to waste their time anywhere else. With their numbers so drastically reduced, the Crusaders could not hope to pay the Venetians the money they had promised. They did what they could, but there was a shortfall of 34,000 marks. As soon as Dandolo had satisfied himself that there was no more to be got, he came forward with an offer. Zara (the modern Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast) had recently fallen into the hands of the King of Hungary. If the Crusaders would help Venice to recapture it, settlement of the debt might be postponed.
And so, on 8 November 1202, the army of the Fourth Crusade set sail from Venice–480 ships, led by the galley of the Doge himself, which, according to the French Crusader and chronicler Rober of Clary, was ‘painted vermilion, with a silken vermilion awning spread above, cymbals clashing and four trumpeters sounding from the bows’. A week later, Zara was taken and sacked. Fighting broke out almost at once between the Franks and the Venetians over the division of the spoils, and when order was finally restored the two groups settled in different quarters of the city for the winter. Before long news of what had happened reached the Pope; outraged, he excommunicated the entire expedition.
Worse was to follow. Early in the new year a messenger arrived with a letter to Boniface from Philip of Swabia, youngest son of Frederick Barbarossa. Philip had married the daughter of the unfortunate Emperor Isaac, who had been dethroned by Alexius III. Isaac’s young son, however–confusingly, he was also called Alexius–had escaped from the prison in which he and his father were being held and had taken refuge with Philip. Philip’s proposal was simple enough: if the Crusade would escort the young Alexius to Constantinople and enthrone him there in the place of his usurper uncle, Alexius for his part would finance the subsequent conquest of Egypt, supplying in addition 10,000 soldiers of his own and afterwards maintaining 500 knights in the Holy Land at his own expense. He would also submit the Church of Constantinople to the authority of Rome.
To both Boniface and Doge Dandolo, the scheme had much to recommend it; most of their followers, too, were only too happy to lend themselves to a plan which promised to strengthen and enrich the Crusade–enabling it, incidentally, to pay off the debt to Venice–while also restoring the unity of Christendom. So it was that on 24 June 1203, a year to the day after the rendezvous in Venice, the Crusader fleet dropped anchor off Constantinople. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who wrote a highly readable account of the whole affair, reported:
You may imagine how they gazed, all those who had never before seen Constantinople. For when they saw those high ramparts and the strong towers with which it was completely encircled, and the splendid palaces and soaring churches–so many that but for the evidence of their own eyes they would never have believed it–and the length and the breadth of that city which of all others is sovereign, they never thought that there could be so rich and powerful a place on earth. And mark you that there was not a man so bold that he did not tremble at the sight; nor was this any wonder, for never since the creation of the world was there so great an enterprise.
To begin with, the Crusaders met with remarkably little opposition. On 5 July they landed below Galata, on the northeastern side of the Golden Horn. Being a commercial settlement largely occupied by foreign merchants, Galata was unwalled; its only major fortification was a single round tower. This was, however, of vital importance, because in it stood the huge windlass for the raising and lowering of the great iron chain that was used in emergencies to block the entrance to the Horn. The Byzantine garrison put up a spirited defence, but after twenty-four hours the Venetian sailors were able to unshackle the windlass, and the chain subsided thunderously into the water. The fleet swept in, quickly destroying such few seaworthy Byzantine vessels as it found in the inner harbour. The naval victory was complete.
Constantinople, however, was not yet taken. The walls that ran along the shore of the Golden Horn could not compare with the tremendous land ramparts on the western side, but they could still be staunchly defended. The Crusaders directed their attack against the weakest point, where these two defences met, at the extreme northwest corner of the city near the imperial palace of Blachernae. The first attempt–by the Franks–to make a landing was driven back; it was the Venetians who decided the day–and, to a considerable degree, Enrico Dandolo in person. The story of his courage is told by Geoffrey himself:
And here was an extraordinary feat of boldness. For the Duke of Venice, who was an old man and stone-blind, stood fully armed on the prow of his galley, with the banner of St Mark before him, and cried out to his men to drive the ship ashore if they valued their skins. And so they did, and ran the galley ashore, and he and they leaped down and planted the banner before him in the ground. And when the other Venetians saw the standard of St Mark and the Doge’s galley beached before their own, they were ashamed, and followed him ashore.
Before long, Byzantine resistance crumbled: the Crusaders poured through the breaches in the walls into the city itself, setting fire to the wooden houses until the whole quarter of Blachernae was ablaze. That evening Alexius III fled secretly from the city, leaving his wife and all his children–except a favourite daughter–to face the future as best they might.
Byzantium, at this gravest crisis in its history, could not long be left without an emperor: old Isaac Angelus was hastily fetched from his prison and replaced on the throne. But this was by no means the end of the affair. Thanks to his brother’s ministrations he was even blinder than the old Doge, and had already shown himself to be hopelessly incompetent; and there remained the undertakings made by his son Alexius to Boniface and Dandolo. Only when Isaac had made Alexius co-emperor with him–as Alexius IV–did the Crusaders accord him their formal recognition. They then withdrew to Galata to await their promised rewards.
These rewards, however, were not forthcoming. The imperial treasury was found to be empty; the clergy, already scandalised when Alexius began to seize and melt down their church plate, were incandescent with rage when they heard of his plans to subordinate them to Rome. The continued presence of the Franks, who had no intention of leaving until the Emperor fulfilled his promises, increased the tension still further. One night a group of them came upon a little mosque in the Saracen quarter behind the church of St Irene, pillaged it and burned it to ashes. The flames spread, and for the next two days Constantinople was engulfed in the worst fire since the days of Justinian, nearly seven centuries before. This disaster brought the already fraught situation to breaking point, and when a few days later the Emperor admitted to a delegation of Franks and Venetians that there was absolutely no prospect of their ever receiving the sum owed to them, the result was war.
Ironically enough, neither the Greeks nor the Franks wanted it. The former wished only to be rid of these uncivilised thugs once and for all; the latter had not forgotten the reason why they had left their homes, and increasingly resented their enforced stay among what they considered an effete and heretical people when they should have been getting to grips with the infidel. Even if the promised money were paid in full, they themselves would not benefit; it would only enable them to settle their own outstanding account with the Venetians. The key to the whole impossible affair lay, in short, with Venice–or, more accurately, with Enrico Dandolo. It was open to him at any moment to give his fleet the order to sail. Had he done so, the Crusaders would have been relieved and the Byzantines overjoyed. The fact that he did not was no longer anything to do with the Frankish debt. His mind had turned to greater things: the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of a Venetian puppet on the throne of Constantinople.
And so Dandolo’s advice to his Frankish allies took on a different tone. Nothing more, he pointed out, could be expected of the two hopeless co-emperors. If the Crusaders were ever to obtain their due, they would have to take Constantinople by force. Once inside the city, with one of their own leaders installed on the throne, they could pay Venice what they owed almost without noticing it and still have more than enough to finance the Crusade. This was their opportunity; they should seize it now, for it would not recur. It was a cogent argument, and it gained still greater strength when, on 25 January 1204, Alexius IV was deposed and shortly afterwards murdered, his old father following him with suspicious promptness to the grave. His murderer, a nobleman named Alexius Ducas–nicknamed Murzuphlus on account of his eyebrows, which were black and shaggy and met in the middle–was then crowned in St Sophia as Alexius V, and immediately began to show the qualities of leadership that the Empire had lacked for so long. Regiments of workmen were set to work, day and night, strengthening the defences and raising them ever higher. An all-out attempt on the city, if it were to be made at all, must clearly be made at once; now that the new Emperor had not only usurped the throne but had revealed himself as a murderer, the Crusaders were morally in an even stronger position than if they had moved against his predecessor, who had been at least legitimate as well as their erstwhile ally.
The attack began on Friday morning, 9 April 1204. Murzuphlus led a desperate resistance, but in vain. He in turn fled, and on the 12th the Franks and Venetians finally broke through the walls. The carnage was dreadful; even Villehardouin was appalled. Not for nothing had the army waited so long outside the world’s richest capital; now that it was theirs and the customary three days’ looting was allowed them, they fell on it like locusts. Never since the barbarian invasions had Europe witnessed such an orgy of vandalism and brutality; never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been so wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time. A Greek eye-witness, Nicetas Choniates, wrote:
They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed to mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour…As for their profanation of the Great Church, it cannot be thought of without horror. They destroyed the high altar, a work of art admired by the entire world, and shared out the pieces among themselves…And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.
A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place…nor was there mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God…In the streets, houses and churches there could be heard only cries and lamentations.
And these men, he continues, carried the Cross on their shoulders, the Cross on which they had sworn to pass through Christian lands without bloodshed, to take arms only against the heathen and to abstain from the pleasures of the flesh until their holy task was done.
After three days of terror, order was restored and the Crusaders applied themselves to their next task: the election of a new Emperor. Boniface of Montferrat would have been the obvious candidate, but his association with the deposed Alexius IV had been too close, and he now found himself to some degree discredited. Besides, he had secret links with the Genoese, and Dandolo knew it. The old Doge had no difficulty in steering the electoral commission–half of which was made up of Venetians–towards Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, who was duly crowned on 16 May in St Sophia. But the dominions over which he was to reign were to be dramatically reduced. Already in March the Venetians and the Franks together had agreed that he should retain only a quarter of the city and the Empire, the remaining three-quarters to be divided equally between Venice and the Crusading knights. Dandolo consequently appropriated for the Republic the entire district surrounding St Sophia, down to the Golden Horn; for the rest, he took all those regions that promised to strengthen Venice’s mastery of the Mediterranean and to give her an unbroken chain of trading colonies and ports from the Lagoon to the Black Sea. They included Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and Durazzo (now Dürres); the western coast of the Greek mainland and the Ionian Islands; all the Peloponnese; the islands of Naxos and Andros, and two cities of Euboea; the chief ports on the Hellespont and the Marmara, Gallipoli, Rhaedestum and Heraclea; the Thracian seaboard, the city of Adrianople and finally–after a brief negotiation with Boniface–the all-important island of Crete. For all this the Doge was specifically absolved from doing the Emperor homage. The harbours and islands would belong to Venice absolutely, but where mainland Greece was concerned, Dandolo made it clear that as a mercantile republic Venice had no interest in occupying more than the key ports.
Thus it emerges beyond all doubt that it was the Venetians who were the real beneficiaries of the Fourth Crusade, and that their success was due, almost exclusively, to Enrico Dandolo. Refusing the Byzantine crown for himself–to have accepted it would have created insuperable constitutional problems in Venice and might even have brought down the Republic–he had ensured the success of his own candidate. Finally, while encouraging the Franks to feudalise the Empire–a step which he knew could not fail to create fragmentation and disunity and would prevent its ever becoming strong enough to obstruct Venetian expansion–he had kept Venice outside the feudal framework, holding her new dominions not as an imperial fief but by her own right of conquest. For a blind man not far short of ninety it was a remarkable achievement.
Enrico Dandolo–who now proudly styled himself ‘Lord of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Roman Empire’–had deserved well of his city; but in the wider context of world events he was a disaster. The Fourth Crusade–if indeed it can be so described, for it never entered Muslim territory–surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. Constantinople in the twelfth century was the most intellectually and artistically cultivated metropolis of the world, and the chief repository of Europe’s classical heritage, both Greek and Roman. By its sack, Western civilisation suffered a loss far greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century–perhaps the most catastrophic single loss in all history.
Politically, too, the damage done was incalculable. Although Frankish rule on the Bosphorus was to last less than sixty years, the Byzantine Empire never recovered its strength, or any considerable part of its lost dominions. It was left economically crippled, territorially truncated, powerless to defend itself against the Ottoman tide. There are few greater ironies in history than the fact that the fate of Europe should have been sealed–and half Christian Europe condemned to some five centuries of Ottoman rule–by men who fought under the banner of the Cross. Those men were transported, inspired, encouraged and ultimately led by Enrico Dandolo in the name of the Venetian Republic; and just as Venice derived the major advantage from the tragedy, so she and her magnificent old Doge must accept the major responsibility for the havoc that they wrought upon the world.