CHAPTER VIII

The Two Diasporas

The Fourth Crusade had not only come near to destroying Constantinople; it had stirred up the entire eastern Mediterranean. The upheaval affected Greeks and Latins alike. Virtually all the noble Byzantines had fled the city–or left it in disgust–rather than submit to Frankish rule, and had gravitated to one or other of the successor states in which the Byzantine spirit and the Orthodox faith were still faithfully preserved. One of these states, the so-called Empire of Trebizond, need not concern us here, confined as it was to a narrow strip of coastline on the Black Sea. The second, the so-called Despotate of Epirus, was founded soon after the Latin conquest by a certain Michael Comnenus Ducas, an illegitimate great-grandson of Alexius I Comnenus. From his capital at Arta, Michael gradually established control over the northwestern coast of Greece and part of Thessaly. The last state to be established–but from our point of view by far the most important–was the Empire of Nicaea, of which Alexius III’s son-in-law Theodore Lascaris was recognised as emperor in 1206, being crowned there two years later. It occupied the northwestern extremity of Anatolia, extending all the way from the Black Sea to the Aegean. To the north lay the Latin Empire of Constantinople; to the south and east, the Seljuk sultanate. Although the official capital was Nicaea (Iznik), Theodore’s successor John III Vatatzes was to establish his chief residence at Nymphaeum (now Kemalpaa, just a few miles from Izmir); for most of the fifty-seven-year period of exile from Constantinople it was from here, as a Mediterranean state, that the Empire of Nicaea was effectively governed.

Even that, however, might have been little more than a footnote to our story had it not been for the Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan, to whom the Greeks of Thrace had promised the imperial crown if he could drive the Latins from Constantinople. On 14 April 1205 Kalojan virtually annihilated the Frankish army. He failed to capture the city, but he succeeded in taking prisoner the Emperor Baldwin himself, who never regained his freedom and died soon afterwards. Just six weeks later, on 1 June, old Doge Dandolo–who, despite his ninety-odd years, had fought determinedly at Baldwin’s side–followed him to the grave. His body, rather surprisingly, was not returned to Venice but was buried in St Sophia. The sarcophagus did not survive the later Turkish conquest but, embedded in the floor of the gallery above the south aisle, his tombstone may still be seen.

Thus, just a year after the capture of the capital, the power of the Latins was broken. They remained in Constantinople; in all Asia Minor, however, only the little town of Pegae (now Karabiga) on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara remained in Frankish hands. Now at last Theodore Lascaris could concentrate on forging his new state–following the old Byzantine pattern in every detail, since he never doubted that his countrymen would be back, sooner or later, where they belonged. Thanks to him, there were now effectively two Emperors in the east and two Patriarchs, the Latin in Constantinople and the Greek in Nicaea. Clearly there was no question of their living in harmony; each party was determined to destroy the other, but neither was sufficiently strong to do so unaided. Thus it was that Baldwin’s successor, Henry of Hainault, introduced into the equation a most unlikely new agent: Kaikosru, the Seljuk Sultan of Konya.

In the long and melancholy history of the Crusades, Christian had all too frequently fought Christian. To recruit a Muslim ally against a Christian enemy, however, was something altogether new. The Seljuk Turks were by now masters of several hundred miles of Mediterranean coastline. They had come a long way since their Central Asian beginnings. In the eleventh century they had spread rapidly through Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia–where they had made themselves masters of Baghdad, ruling in the name of the Abbasid Caliphs–and their conquests had taught them much. After their invasion of Anatolia and their victory in 1071 over the Byzantines at Manzikert,⁷⁷ they had established their capital at Konya (Iconium), and by their twelfth-century heyday they had created a remarkable state. The Sultanate of Rum, as they proudly called it–for had it not been part of the Roman Empire?–embraced at its fullest extent virtually all Asia Minor, some 250,000 square miles, with a mixed population of Turks, Greeks and Armenians. The Seljuks did not last long–their power was destroyed by the Mongols towards the end of the century–but they left behind them an extraordinary architectural heritage, much of which still survives today: superb mosques, their façades normally flanked by twin minarets and intricately carved, often with superbly ornate calligraphic inscriptions; bridges of soaring grace and elegance; fortifications and a shipyard at their summer capital of Alanya; and magnificent caravanserais–one every twenty miles along the main caravan routes–each with its own mosque, living accommodation, stabling for horses and camels and a resident cobbler who would repair shoes without charge.

It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if the Emperor in Constantinople and the Sultan in Iconium had cemented their alliance with an overwhelming victory, but they failed to do so. There were several hard-fought battles, all but one of them indecisive; during the last, in the spring of 1210 near Antioch on the Meander, Kaikosru was unhorsed and killed–if Greek sources are to be believed, by the Emperor Theodore himself, in single combat. His successor immediately came to terms, leaving Theodore free to concentrate his forces against the Franks; the situation was finally resolved only in late 1214, when the two Emperors concluded a treaty of peace at Nymphaeum. Henry, it was agreed, would keep the northwest coast of Asia Minor; all the rest, as far as the Seljuk frontier, would go to Theodore. This treaty marked the beginning of Nicaean prosperity. At last, the young empire had obtained formal recognition by its Latin rival of its right to exist.

‘I shall not pursue,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘the obscure and various dynasties that rose and fell on the continent or in the isles.’ As a historian of the Roman Empire, there is no particular reason why he should have, but for chroniclers of the Mediterranean such tasks cannot be shuffled off so easily. No one travelling through central Greece and the Peloponnese can fail to be struck by the quantity of medieval castles that crown, it sometimes seems, almost every peak and ridge of that mountainously spectacular land. For those anxious to know more, some explanation is surely required; yet few indeed, even nowadays, are the books that relate their history.

This is largely because that history is so diabolically complicated. The simple fact is that the Greek diaspora which followed the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade was matched by a still more dramatic territorial expansion on the part of the Latins. The Frankish barons who had sailed to the Crusade–together with a good many others who had not, but who had heard tell of the resulting spoils and were determined not to be left out–roamed over Greece, seizing all the land they could, carving out fiefs for themselves much on the lines of those they had known in the west, but doing so in a country where the feudal system as they understood it was virtually unknown. In western lands that system was based on a pyramid of wealth and power, with the king at its head. In the east, the Latin Empire of Constantinople was far too weak to exert any real control, and a picture therefore emerges of countless independent city-states, more often than not at war with one another, constantly intriguing and jockeying for position. In the Aegean, where the influence of Venice was paramount, the sheer quantity of islands rendered the situation more complex still. No wonder that many a would-be historian of the place and period has recoiled with a shudder and turned his attentions elsewhere.

The story of this Latin diaspora begins essentially with the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat. Already furious at having been passed over as Emperor, he had been further enraged by Baldwin’s offer of a large estate in Anatolia; instead, pointing out that his brother, on his marriage to the daughter of Manuel I Comnenus a quarter of a century before, had been given the courtesy title of King of Thessalonica, he laid formal claim to that city. Now it was Baldwin’s turn to object, and it was only thanks to the mediation of Doge Dandolo and several of the Frankish leaders–above all, the young Burgundian nobleman Otho de la Roche–that open warfare was avoided. Eventually the Emperor was forced to give his grudging consent, on the understanding that Boniface did homage to him for his still notional realm and held it as an imperial fief.

The Marquis’s next task was to conquer his new kingdom, and with this object in view he set out in the autumn of 1204 on a prolonged campaign through northern and central Greece. With him went a motley assortment of Crusaders: Frenchmen and Germans, Flemings and Lombards, all determined to carve out fiefs of their own. They included–to name but four–the Frenchman William of Champlitte, grandson of the Count of Champagne; Otho de la Roche, the Burgundian; the Fleming Jacques d’Avesnes; and the young Italian Marquis Guido Pallavicini. Moving south through Thessaly, they advanced to the pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas of Sparta had made his heroic stand nearly seventeen centuries before. On this occasion they were unopposed; but Boniface, realising the immense strategic importance of the place, there and then invested Pallavicini with the marquisate of Boudonitza to cover its southern approaches. This, with the neighbouring barony of Salona, was to last another two hundred years, and to play an important part in the history of Frankish Greece.⁷⁸

Boeotia surrendered without a struggle, as did Attica–including Athens itself, where Boniface immediately established a garrison on the Acropolis. At that time the Parthenon was serving as the city’s cathedral, but the Frankish soldiers, it need hardly be said, showed the building scant respect. It was the same story, though on a smaller scale, as in St Sophia: the treasury looted, the gold and silver vessels melted down, the library dispersed and destroyed. The two provinces together were bestowed on Otho de la Roche, probably as a reward for his mediation during Boniface’s quarrel with the Emperor Baldwin. At first Otho styled himself, with relative modesty, Sire d’Athènes, a title which his Greek subjects magnified into ‘Great Lord’ or megas kyr. Not until 1260, well after his death, was Athens formally constituted a duchy.

Jacques d’Avesnes, meanwhile, the Flemish soldier of fortune, had left the main body of the army and strayed off to the east, where he had received the submission of the island of Euboea. (This had been allotted to Venice during the partition, but the Venetians had not yet had time to do anything about it.) He stayed there, however, only long enough to build a small fortress in the middle of the Euripos–that mysterious channel⁷⁹ which separates the island from mainland Greece–and to leave a small garrison. Then, eager to participate in the coming conquest of the Peloponnese–and, presumably, the benefits arising therefrom–he hurried back to Boniface. The Marquis, however, had gone on to besiege Nauplia, so Jacques–with Otho de la Roche, who had joined him en route–launched a concerted attack on Corinth. With some difficulty they managed to take the lower town; the high fortress of Acrocorinth, on the other hand, proved impregnable, and its siege was still in progress when one night the defenders made a sudden sortie and inflicted serious damage on the Frankish camp, d’Avesnes himself being gravely wounded.

But the Peloponnese was doomed; and its effective conqueror was to be neither Boniface of Montferrat–who was anyway soon obliged to return to Thessalonica to face the Bulgar army of Tsar Kalojan–nor Jacques d’Avesnes, nor even Otho de la Roche. It was Geoffrey de Villehardouin, nephew and namesake of the chronicler of the Fourth Crusade. A year or two previously this young man had himself set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine, and having heard while in Syria of the Franks’ capture of Constantinople had immediately re-embarked to join them. Soon after his departure, however, his ship had been driven seriously off course by a violent Mediterranean storm and forced to take shelter in the harbour of Modone (Methoni) in the southwestern Peloponnese; and he was still there when he heard of Boniface’s siege of Nauplia. Less than a week later he was in the latter’s presence. The Morea,⁸⁰ he told the Marquis, may technically have been Venetian, but it was a fruit ripe for the plucking. Given a few hundred men at most, the whole land could be theirs. Boniface was unimpressed, preferring to stick to his own plan of campaign, but Geoffrey found a new ally in the camp in the shape of his old friend William of Champlitte. William agreed to join him, provided only that Geoffrey recognise him as his liege lord in respect of any conquests that the two might make. As grandson of the Count of Champagne he could hardly have done otherwise, and Geoffrey made no objection. Boniface gave the expedition his blessing, and with 100 knights and perhaps 500 men-at-arms the two friends rode off into the unknown.

From the start they carried all before them. The city and castle of Patras were the first to fall. They then headed south, meeting practically no resistance until they reached the neighbourhood of Kalamata in the province of Messenia. By this time the Greeks had amassed their own army of some four or five thousand, which included a considerable force under Michael Ducas, Despot of Epirus; and in 1205, among the olive groves of Koundoura in the northeastern corner of the province, the two armies stood face to face. The Greeks, fully aware of their overwhelming superiority in numbers, were supremely confident of victory; but they were also disastrously inexperienced, and the Franks went through them like butter. From that day on, the Peloponnese was effectively Frankish territory. Greek folklore is full of stories of local heroism: of the great warrior Doxapatres, for example, whose mace no man could lift and whose cuirass weighed more than 150 pounds; and of his daughter, who hurled herself from the castle tower rather than submit to the lust of the conquerors. And indeed there were several pockets of resistance still remaining, among them Acrocorinth, Nauplia (whose siege Boniface had been forced to abandon), the great rock of Monemvasia, and the dark fortresses of the Taygetus in the Mani. But as early as 19 November 1205 a letter from Pope Innocent III already describes William de Champlitte as ‘Prince of all Achaia’⁸¹–and so, to all intents and purposes, he was.

Thus it came about that, within three years of the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Frankish Crusaders had effectively and almost effortlessly mopped up nine-tenths of continental Greece and the Peloponnese. Their success had been due less to their own courage than to the pusillanimity of the local populations, who had seldom put up more than a token show of resistance. In Macedonia, on the other hand, it had been a different story. The Emperor Baldwin, as we have seen, had been captured by the Bulgarian Tsar and disappeared into a prison from which he was never again to emerge. Boniface, on hearing the news, had abandoned the siege of Nauplia to defend his northern dominions, and had been killed in a minor skirmish some weeks later. After his death his head was cut off and sent as a present to the Tsar. Just when firm and confident leadership was needed, his throne passed to his infant son, but the situation was saved when soon afterwards Kalojan was murdered in his turn (at the instigation of his wife) and the power of Bulgaria was effectively broken.

So much for the successes and failures of the Franks. What, it may be asked, about the Venetians? Thanks to the negotiating skills of old Dandolo, they had won the lion’s share of the spoils; they had soon realised, however, that that share was far too large to be easily digested, and were accordingly a good deal slower than their Frankish allies to occupy their new territories–a delay that had already cost them the Peloponnese. There was also a difference in their two philosophies. The Franks, raised as they had been in the feudal system, saw their new dominions as fiefs, their tenants as vassals. But the feudal system was based on the ownership of land–a commodity which Venice, being a sea republic, had never possessed. The Venetians were merchants and traders, and for them foreign colonies were of use only insofar as they advanced their own commercial interests. It was for this reason that Dandolo had limited his claims, apart from the Peloponnese, to coastal areas and islands; even then, his eyes–such as they were–had been too big for his stomach. He did not lift a finger when Jacques d’Avesnes moved into Euboea, or when Champlitte and Villehardouin forged their Principality of Achaia; all he really cared about were the twin ports of Modone and Corone at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, and in 1206 he sent his son with a small fleet to recover them for the Republic. The job was quickly done, and the two ports were to remain Venetian for several centuries to come.

As for the quantities of Aegean islands–including all the Cyclades–that had fallen to them, the Venetians were once again obliged to admit to themselves that, despite the considerable resources of the Serenissima, the task of administering them all directly was unmanageable. It was therefore agreed that the majority of the islands should be occupied and governed, in the name of Venice, by numbers of her private citizens. As it turned out, the Venetian contingent to the Crusade had included Doge Dandolo’s nephew, a certain Marco Sanudo, and on hearing the news he had lost no time. Equipping eight vessels at his own expense, he had quickly assembled a group of like-minded young Venetians with a taste for adventure and had sailed with them to stake their several claims. There, on Naxos, Andros, Paros and Antiparos, Melos, Ios, Amorgos, Santorini and a dozen other islands, they would carve out their individual domains, holding them in fief to Sanudo as Duke of the Archipelago.⁸² With Corfu and the other Ionian Islands off the Adriatic coast, similar arrangements were made.

There remained only Crete, the largest and most important of all the Greek islands, for which Dandolo had had to drive a bargain with Boniface. Once again, however, the problem was Genoa. Even before the Venetians got possession of the island the Genoese had established a trading colony there, and it was plain from the outset that they would not give it up without a fight. Venice accordingly despatched a sizable fleet, which succeeded in temporarily driving out the dashing Genoese corsair commander Enrico Pescatore, Count of Malta; he, however, appealed to Pope Innocent, and the struggle was to continue for another five years until 1212, when he and his compatriots were at last compelled to withdraw. Thenceforth and for the next four and a half centuries the island was ruled by a Venetian governor bearing the title of Doge–a clear indication of the importance attached to it by the Serenissima.

With the death of Henry of Hainault in 1216 at the age of forty, the Frankish Empire embarked on its long decline. Henry had been a remarkable ruler. The only Latin Emperor to have shown genuine statesmanship, he had inherited what seemed already to be a lost cause and within barely a decade had transformed it into a going concern. Had his successors possessed a fraction of his ability, there might never again have been a Greek ruler on the throne of Constantinople; but once his hand was no longer on the helm, it was plain that the eventual recovery of the Empire’s true capital would be only a matter of time. The Empire of Nicaea, meanwhile, under Lascaris’s son-in-law John Vatatzes, went from strength to strength. By 1246 his dominions extended over most of the Balkan peninsula and much of the Aegean, his rivals were crippled or annihilated, and he stood poised to achieve at last the purpose to which he had dedicated his life.

It was John Vatatzes who deserved more than anyone else to lead a Byzantine army in triumph into Constantinople. Alas, his health had long been giving cause for concern. He was an epileptic, and as he grew older the fits became increasingly frequent and severe, at times seriously affecting his mental stability–and, in particular, making him insanely jealous of his leading general, Michael Palaeologus. More tragic still, he passed the disease on to his son and successor, Theodore II, in an even more acute form; and when in August 1258 Theodore died at the age of thirty-six after a reign of just four years, leaving only a small child to succeed him, a palace revolution bestowed the throne on Palaeologus. Though still only thirty-four, the young general had already had a somewhat chequered career. He had been obliged, first of all, to cope with a hostile Emperor, who in 1252 had even had him excommunicated and imprisoned; and his problems continued after his accession, when he was called upon to face an alliance comprising the Despotate of Epirus, the Crusader Principality of Achaia in the Peloponnese and young Manfred of Sicily, the bastard son of the Western Emperor Frederick II. Here was a formidable enemy indeed; but when the two armies met at Pelagonia (now Bitolj) in the early summer of 1259, the coalition simply disintegrated.

Determined to keep up his momentum, early in 1260 Michael marched on Constantinople. At this first attempt he failed. A secret agent inside the city was unable to open a gate as arranged, and an alternative plan to attack Galata on the further side of the Golden Horn proved equally unsuccessful. That winter, however, Michael scored a diplomatic triumph: on 13 March 1261 he signed a treaty with Genoa, by the terms of which, in return for their help in the struggle to come, the Genoese were promised all the concessions in Constantinople hitherto enjoyed by the Venetians, including their own quarter in both the city and the other principal ports of the Empire, and free access to those of the Black Sea. For Genoa this was a historic agreement, laying as it did the foundations for her commercial empire in the east; for Byzantium it was ultimately to prove a disaster, since the two Italian sea republics would gradually usurp all that remained of her naval power and pursue their centuries-old rivalry over her helpless body. But that was in the future. In the spring of 1261, the Genoese alliance must have seemed to Michael Palaeologus and his subjects like a gift from heaven.

The eventual recovery of Constantinople came about almost by accident. In the high summer of 1261, Michael had sent one of his generals, Alexius Strategopulus, with a small army to Thrace. When he reached Selymbria (the modern Silivri), some forty miles from Constantinople, Alexius learned that the capital’s Latin garrison was absent, having been summoned by the Venetians to attack the Nicaean island of Daphnusia, which controlled the entrance to the Bosphorus from the Black Sea. He was also told of a postern gate in the land walls, through which armed men might easily pass into the city. That night a small detachment put this information to the test. Slipping in unobserved, they took the few Frankish guards by surprise and threw them from the ramparts. Then they quietly opened one of the city gates. At dawn on Monday, 25 July 1261, the rest of the army poured into Constantinople, meeting scarcely any opposition.

The Emperor Baldwin II, asleep in his palace, was awakened by the tumult and fled for his life, finally chancing upon a Venetian merchantman on which he escaped to Euboea. Meanwhile, Alexius Strategopulus and his men set fire to the entire Venetian quarter of the city so that the sailors on their return from Daphnusia, finding their houses destroyed and their terrified families huddled homeless on the quayside, would have no spirit for a counter-attack and no choice but to sail disconsolately back to their lagoon. Among the remaining Franks there was widespread panic, gleefully described in the Greek chronicles. But they need not have worried; the expected massacre never occurred. Soon they emerged from their various hiding places, gathered up all the possessions that they could carry and staggered down to the harbour, where some thirty Venetian ships were waiting. The moment they were all aboard, this fleet too left for Euboea–not, apparently, even pausing to take on sufficient provisions, since it is recorded that many of the refugees died of hunger before reaching their destination.

Two hundred miles away in his camp at Meteorum in Asia Minor, the Emperor Michael was also sleeping when the great news arrived. His elder sister Eulogia–who when he was a child had regularly lulled him to sleep by singing of how he would one day become Emperor and enter Constantinople through the Golden Gate–woke him (according to one authority, by tickling his toes) and told him the news. At first he refused to believe it; only when he was handed the crown and sceptre that Baldwin had left behind in the palace was he finally convinced. Three weeks later, on 15 August, he duly passed through the Golden Gate and proceeded on foot the length of the city to St Sophia. There a second coronation ceremony was performed by the Patriarch for both himself and his wife Theodora, their baby son Andronicus being proclaimed heir presumptive.

From the start, the Latin Empire of Constantinople had been 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. Of its seven rulers only one, Henry of Hainault, rose above the mediocre; none of them seem to have made the slightest attempt to understand their Greek subjects or to adopt their customs, let alone to learn their language. And the empire’s fall was, if anything, even more ignominious than its beginning–overpowered in a single night by a handful of soldiers on the spur of the moment.

If this pathetic travesty could only have confined its misdeeds to itself, we might have passed it over with little more than a pitying glance. Alas, it did not. The dark legacy that it left behind affected not only Byzantium but all Christendom. The Greek Empire never recovered from the damage it sustained during those fateful years, damage that was spiritual as well as material. Nor, bereft of much of the territory that had 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. And it had been robbed of something else also. Before the Latin conquest it had been one and indivisible, under a single ruler standing halfway to heaven, Equal of the Apostles. Now that unity too was gone. True, the Empire of Nicaea was no more, subsumed–as it had always longed to be–in that of Constantinople. But there were the Emperors of Trebizond, still stubbornly independent in their tiny Byzantine microcosm on the rainswept shore of the Black Sea, and there were the Despots of Epirus, forever struggling to recapture their early years 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 polarised. For centuries before and after the Great Schism of 1054, relations between the Eastern and Western Churches had fluctuated between the politely distant and the bitterly acrimonious; their differences, however, had been essentially theological. After the sack of Constantinopole by the Western Crusaders, this was no longer true. In the eyes of the Greeks, these 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. How now could they ever agree to the idea of union with Rome? ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat,’ they used to say; and they meant it.