71
To its initiators it seemed that one part of the army should be sent to the eastern regions, another to Spain and a third against the Slavs …
Helmond of Bosau, writing as a contemporary of the Second Crusade on the idea of a universal Crusade.
The Crusades were launched to bring succour to Eastern Christians, but the relationship between Byzantines and Latins had been acrimonious from Bohemond and Alexius’ intrigues and confrontations through to the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182. The Normans, major players in the Crusades, continually assaulted the Empire, with Roger of Sicily invading Greece in 1147. Venice overtook Byzantium as the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean before the Crusades, and by 1082 the emperor was compelled to create a toll-free harbour for the Venetians. In 1125 and 1175 the Byzantines hesitated to renew the lease and the Republic ravaged their coastline and islands until the emperor conceded. Outremer also took away trade, and revenue, from Constantinople.
There was also in Western Europe a new confidence and perhaps evena a conscious feeling of ‘destiny’ that had been growing since the beginning of the eleventh century. The threats of the Vikings, the Muslims of North Africa and the Hungarians were fading, and Outremer gave an entry point into the Near East trade system. The rise of centralised monarchies, of internal trade, and the taming of the worst excesses of the feudal system were matched by a technological evolution in agriculture that brought large tracts of land under the plough. The Fourth Crusade was therefore a microcosm of the wider action of the Crusades period: a period that saw the usurpation of Greek power in the Eastern Mediterranean by Western European powers, Polish-German expansion into Eastern Europe with settlements in Prussia, and the pushing back of Muslim Spain.
Then there were the claims of Holy Roman Emperors like Henry VI to universal rule over Christendom, and of popes who now held four of the five patriarchates: Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome. Only Constantinople remained outside of their grasp.
The papal indulgence was also changing its nature. Indeed, the format of the indulgence for the Fourth Crusade differed markedly from that of previous expeditiones. The notion of pleasing God through meritorious martial works rather than simply liberating the Holy Sepulchre was introduced, and this allowed for an even greater degree of flexibility in the use of the Crusade weapon. This was soon applied to internal enemies of the Church in the Albigensian Crusade of 1208.
The Crusader Villehardouin tells us that many men took the cross for the Fourth Crusade because the indulgence was so great, but this would have been devalued by the hugely increased cost of Crusading in the early thirteenth century. It did not take much for the Venetian Doge, Dandolo, to convince the knights of the Crusade that supplementing their funds by a raid on Constantinople on the way to the Holy Land would benefit everyone.
The notion of being ‘God’s people’ diminished the importance of pilgrimage to the Holy Places, and replaced it with the ‘holy right’ of Latins as holders of the one true Catholic faith to conquer unbelievers. Robert of Clari later justified the sack of Constantinople by the need to remove the relics from the schismatic Greeks to the safety of the West. Byzantium was about to fall victim to this universal Crusade.