72
When twice six hundred years and fifty more
Are gone since the blessed Mary’s son was born,
Then Antichrist shall come full of the devil.
The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew of Paris predicting the Sixth Age.
A fever for relics overtook Europe in the thirteenth century. It may have been due to a consistent feeling running though society from top to bottom that the Sixth Age was coming which ended Christological history as interpreted from the Bible. Alternatively, as I have suggested above, it was an awakening idea that Jerusalem and the Holy Land was in fact a spiritual realm that was more locally European and solidly Catholic than the ephemeral Holy City far away over the seas.
The springing-up of cities such as San Sepolcro in Tuscany, where relics taken from Jerusalem in the late eleventh and early twelfth century formed the nucleus of new towns, was not that uncommon but there was an acceleration in the thirteenth century with entire buildings being built to house one relic, as with this delightful chapel in Bruges built to house a phial of Christ’s blood.
The Fourth Crusade was a reflection of all this, but it also created a Latin Empire in Greece that was doomed to fail from the outset. Throughout its brief life it was chronically short of manpower and money and appears to have been unattractive even to adventurers from the West. Pope Gregory IX even resorted to pleading with the Count of Brittany to Crusade for the Latin Emperor rather than for Outremer. Henry of Romania neatly summarised the situation, ‘there is nothing lacking to complete possession of the Empire save an abundance of Latins’.
Any actions of the Latin Emperor were also hampered by a constitution that favoured the Venetians and fief holders far more than the central authority. The Latin Empire failed to gain the support of the emerging Balkan states such as the Bulgars because of what we might today term confessionalism but what was to the medieval mind a much more straightforward question of faith, salvation and identity. Identity was a potent concept in the Middle Ages and particularly so in the Balkans. The sometimes vicious attempts to suppress religious dissent in this period make sense as long as we keep this idea of identity in mind. Mediaeval communities were defined by their religion, and religion also demarcated each community’s political allegiances. Leaders who deviated from their faith risked losing all allegiance from their lords and from the populace. As we will see a little later, it was not for nothing that Thomas Aquinas compared those who slipped from the true faith to counterfeiters, as both eroded the secular foundations of society.
One slightly odd consequence of the Latin Empire of Constantinople was that it actually strengthened the Byzantines in Anatolia as many of the aristocratic families fleeing the capital relocated to Trebizond and took their monies and feudal levies with them. This pushed back the advances of the Saljuq Turks who had been pressuring the border since the Battle of Myriokephalon. This proved to be an effective buffer for the city of Constantinople when Anatolia collapsed into chaos with the coming of the Mongols in 1241, perhaps the relic collectors of Western Europe were correct, holy objects did need to be saved before the coming of the Antichrist.