CHAPTER SEVEN
‘It is your duty to restore their possessions to those who
have been wrongfully dispossessed’
IN LATE DECEMBER 1202, with the army settled down to winter at Zara, ambassadors arrived seeking an audience with the doge and the crusade leaders. The envoys represented Philip of Swabia and Prince Alexius and they put forward an intriguing proposition, artfully phrased and carefully calculated to fulfil the wishes of the Byzantine prince, the crusaders and, by association, Pope Innocent III. Also present was Boniface of Montferrat who had now joined his fellow-crusaders at Zara. The envoys’ message began:
Since you are on the march in the service of God, and for right and justice, it is your duty to restore their possessions to those who have been wrongfully dispossessed. The Prince Alexius will make the best terms with you ever offered to any people and give you the most powerful support in conquering the land overseas ... Firstly, if God permits you to restore his inheritance to him, he will place his whole empire under the authority of Rome, from which it has long been estranged. Secondly, since he is aware that you have spent all your money and now have nothing, he will give you 200,000 silver marks, and provisions for every man in your army, officers and men alike. Moreover, he himself will go in your company to Egypt with 10,000 men, or, if you prefer it, send the same number of men with you; and furthermore, so long as he lives, he will maintain, at his own expense, 500 knights to keep guard in the land overseas.1
Clearly the young Alexius was not deterred by his earlier rebuttals from Boniface and Pope Innocent and now continued in his efforts to convince the westerners to help him. The prince’s approach was based on a combination of moral justification—linking the purpose of the crusade in restoring Christian lands to the recovery of his own claim to the Byzantine inheritance—and the prospect of material and political advantages.
Undeniably, on the surface, these were hugely attractive inducements that seemed to answer the needs and aspirations of almost all the parties involved in the expedition. The first part of the offer concerning the recognition of the primacy of Rome was primarily aimed at the pope. Prince Alexius and his advisers knew of Innocent’s profound hostility to deploying the army against the Christians of Zara; they were also aware of his earlier rejection of the idea of removing Emperor Alexius III. To overcome this opposition would require something of singular allure. The prince had just such an idea: if the usurper were deposed, he indicated that the long-desired acknowledgement of papal authority over the Orthodox Church would follow. Perhaps Prince Alexius had already made this suggestion to Innocent at their meeting in early 1202. At Zara, however, he was hoping to persuade the crusader churchmen to agree to the plan, counting on the fact that the material advantages for the expedition could help to win them over. The prince might have calculated that the need to keep the crusade going, coupled with the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome, formed an irresistible combination. If the churchmen at Zara could be convinced, might not Innocent too be persuaded? Or, more cynically, if the agreement was already a fait accompli, Innocent could have little hope of preventing the deal going through—in the same way that his pronouncements on Zara had been ignored.
Gunther of Pairis pointed to a more aggressive undercurrent to the envoys’ offer to the crusaders: ‘It helped that they knew that this very city [Constantinople] was rebellious and offensive to the Holy Roman Church, and they did not think its conquest by our people would displease very much either the supreme pontiff or even God.’2 While this was not Innocent’s position thus far stated, it is interesting that he was perceived as having such a viewpoint and it might help to explain the envoys’ chosen line of approach.
For the French crusaders, Prince Alexius held out a tantalising prospect: relief from the debts that had crippled their expedition for so long. The capture of Zara had not alleviated their financial position—it had only been intended as a means to defer payment - and, as the envoys so candidly pointed out, the crusaders had nothing. Thus the sum of 200,000 silver marks, plus provisions for the entire army, would remove these worries in one sweep. Coupled with this financial bonanza, the addition of 10,000 men to the crusader army would do much to make up for the initial shortfall at Venice and would help replace those who had slipped away from the army en route. The terms of Prince Alexius’s offer had an eye to the future as well: the notion of a fully financed garrison of 500 knights to help sustain the Christian hold on the Holy Land was also highly desirable. Experience had shown that after completing their vows most crusaders returned home, leaving only the limited resources of the Frankish settlers in the Levant to face the inevitable Muslim counter-attack. An extra 500 knights would massively strengthen the army of the Holy Land and do much to secure the Christian presence in the eastern Mediterranean.
In return for all of this, however, there was the need to restore the prince to power, an enterprise that required the crusade to divert to, and possibly attack, the Christian city of Constantinople. For a second time therefore the expedition would have to turn its weapons against people of its own faith, rather than the infidel. The envoys assured their audience that they had full power to conclude such an agreement and closed their address by pointing out that ‘such favourable conditions have never been offered to anyone, and the man who could refuse to accept them can have little wish to conquer anything at all’.3 The doge and the crusade leaders could not be rushed into a decision of this importance. They realised that a wider assembly of the nobles and leading churchmen had to debate the matter and a meeting was called for the following day.
The Fourth Crusade had already endured a series of crises: the death of Thibaut of Champagne, the lack of men arriving at Venice, the decision to attack Zara and the papal bull of excommunication. This new proposal was, however, potentially the most inflammatory and destructive of all. The deficit in men and money at Venice continued to exert a terrible grip on the crusade and the continuing requirement to redress these issues was the prime reason why the expedition found itself in such an invidious position.
‘There was a great divergence of opinion in the assembly.’4 With masterly understatement, Villehardouin opened his account of the meeting: the lines of argument were familiar and the manner in which each side expressed its case as unbending and forceful as ever. The events at Zara had shown that there were already sharp divisions amongst the crusaders and, here again, it was Abbot Guy of Vaux-Cernay who opened the debate by emphasising the most basic reason for his opposition to any agreement with the prince - that ‘it would mean marching against Christians. They [the crusaders] had not left their homes to do any such thing and for their part they wished to go to Syria [as the Holy Land is sometimes called].’5 ‘We must insist,’ came the fairly predictable response ‘that only by way of Egypt and Greece [in other words, Constantinople] can we hope to recover the land overseas.’6
So deep were the differences amongst the crusaders that even the Cistercian abbots on the crusade disagreed with one another. Guy of Vaux-Cernay found a bitter opponent in his fellow white monk, Abbot Simon of Loos. Simon was a close associate of Count Baldwin of Flanders and represented those who wished to keep the expedition going. He preached to the crusaders and exhorted them to accept the agreement because ‘it offered the best chance of winning back the lands overseas’. Guy of Vaux-Cernay was unmoved - this plan was flawed and the expedition should go to Syria to achieve something of worth.
Those in favour of the campaign could claim that the crusade was not, in a formal sense, being directed against the Greeks but, according to Prince Alexius’s reasoning, was a morally justifiable war to reinstate the rightful ruler of Byzantium. To their opponents, the distinction was not so plain and the image of men bearing the cross of Christ fighting their way into another Christian city - particularly one of the five great patriarchal seats of the faith (the others were Jerusalem, Rome, Antioch and Alexandria) - was utterly repugnant and abhorrent.
Some may have raised questions about the validity of Prince Alexius’s claim. He was born before his father’s reign began and not, therefore, ‘in the purple’ (a reference to the colour of the purple chamber in the Bucoleon palace where the consorts of reigning emperors gave birth to their children) and so by custom had no legitimate right to the throne. Innocent himself demonstrated his awareness of the issue in a letter of November 1202 and knowledge of this point was probably widespread.7
The prince’s emphasis on the wrongful deposition of his father was, however, a stronger basis to claim redress. Some opponents of the diversion, however, might have remembered that Alexius’s father, the blinded Isaac Angelos, had been supportive of Saladin at the time of the Third Crusade. Why should the army of Christ assist Isaac and his son now? Alexius would argue, of course, that he was not party to that agreement and now desired to help the crusaders. Underlying this high-level debate were the opinions of the lesser men, illuminated for us by Robert of Clari. Unlike Villehardouin, Robert’s first concerns during the winter in Zara were not matters of high politics, but of an immediate and practical nature. Their stay in the city was cutting into the crusaders’ supplies and, for all the descriptions of Zara’s apparent prosperity, it seems that the conquest had yielded little real profit to those in the lower ranks. Robert describes the crusaders talking anxiously with one another and fretting because they had insufficient money to get to Egypt or Syria, or indeed to accomplish anything of value anywhere. All these needs might be answered, however, if they accepted Prince Alexius’s offer. On the other hand, there still remained the moral dimension to the debate. These men had taken the cross out of a fervent desire to help recover the Holy Land for the Christian faith. The balance between what was necessary to keep the crusade going and the outright distortion of that vow was proving extraordinarily difficult to achieve and required the men to make some very uncomfortable choices. The other source from around the camp-fire, the Devastatio Constantinopolitana, shows that for some the two issues could not be reconciled and a section of ‘the rank and file ... swore that they would never go [to Constantinople]’.
For those less dogmatic there was still a need to justify the diversion to Byzantium. Robert of Clari gives his own account of this, although his chronology is confused because he places the main debate about the diversion on Corfu, the crusaders’ next destination after Zara. Nonetheless, he provides some interesting views of what he - as a lesser knight - perceived as the ideas of several key players. For example, he credits the doge and Marquis Boniface with encouraging Alexius’s offer. Dandolo acknowledged the crusaders’ poverty and made the point that Greece [Byzantium] was a wealthy land and that if ‘we could have a reasonable excuse for going there and taking the provisions and other things ... then we should well be able to go overseas’.8 The need for a ‘reasonable excuse’ echoed Pope Innocent’s earlier prohibition on attacking Christian lands unless ‘a just or necessary cause should arise’. By an uncanny coincidence, Boniface was on hand to provide this and he described meeting Prince Alexius at Hagenau and how Emperor Isaac had lost the throne by treason. He argued that it would be right to reinstate him and that this in turn would release the much-needed supplies.
Robert represents Boniface of Montferrat as a particularly passionate advocate of the deal with the prince. He explains the marquis’s motivation thus: ‘he wanted to avenge himself for an injury which the emperor of Constantinople ... had done to him’. Boniface was said to ‘hate’ Emperor Alexius III.9 The episode at issue dated from 1187 when, as we saw earlier, Boniface’s brother Conrad had married Theodora of Constantinople and had helped the emperor to fight off a rebellion, only to be poorly rewarded and hounded into leaving the city for the Holy Land. In fact, Robert was seriously mistaken because the emperor at the time was Prince Alexius’s father, Isaac Angelos. Some of the lesser crusaders clearly saw Boniface as motivated by personal revenge in wanting to direct the crusade to Constantinople: a proportion of the French crusaders at least seemed rather suspicious of their north Italian leader.
The doge, too, was suspected by some (often with the benefit of hindsight) of advocating the move to Constantinople for purely financial reasons. Gunther of Pairis felt that the Venetian interest view was based ‘partly in the hope of the promised money (for which that race is extremely greedy), and partly because their city, supported by a large navy, was, in fact, arrogating to itself sovereign mastery over that entire sea’.10
Venetian involvement in Constantinople dated back centuries and encompassed close political, economic and cultural ties.11 The period leading up to the Fourth Crusade had witnessed several turbulent episodes in the relationship between the two cities and this formed a difficult background to the campaign. As far back as 1082 the Venetians had been granted generous privileges across most of the Byzantine Empire and this had resulted in a flourishing community based in Constantinople, exporting oil and pepper. Under Emperor John Comnenus (1118-43) the concession of rights on Crete and Cyprus boosted trade with North Africa and the Holy Land and led to a substantially increased investment in the Byzantine Empire. Theban silk came to be an important part of Venetian trade. It is difficult to ascertain why, on 12 March 1171, Emperor Manuel Comnenus ordered the arrest of all Venetians in his empire and the seizure of their property. A dispute between Venetians and their Genoese rivals in Constantinople was the immediate reason for tension, but there were other causes lying beneath the surface. The Greek sources hint at friction over the status of Venetians settled and intermarried in Byzantine lands. This gave them even greater privileges and created a powerful, but effectively independent, group of people within Manuel’s territory. The wider politics of the complex relationship between Manuel, the German Empire, the papacy and the Italian trading cities was also a contributory factor in the violence between Genoese and Venetians in Constantinople.
The Venetian response was to send a fleet led by Doge Vitale Michiel to ravage the Byzantine island of Euboea and then to spend the winter of 1171 on Chios. There the Italians were struck with plague, which ruined their military strength and led them to make several attempts to find a diplomatic solution to the problem. In the end, Vitale Michiel was compelled to return home where an angry mob murdered him on account of his failure to avenge the damage to Venetian interests in Constantinople. A treaty was eventually settled upon, which assessed compensation at 1,500 pounds of gold (or 108,000 coins) for the Italians’ losses in Constantinople. The post-Comneni regime endorsed these arrangements and in 1187 and 1189 Isaac confirmed and enlarged the Venetians’ old privileges, although he also offered good terms to the Pisans and Genoese.12 In 1195 the pro-Pisan Emperor Alexius III raised tensions with the Venetians and another round of embassies agreed to pay the 400 pounds of gold still owed. Yet in reality, by the turn of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Greeks and the Venetians, which by treaty had seemed to restore much of the latter’s good standing, was probably damaged beyond repair. This background, unsurprisingly, led men such as Gunther of Pairis to look upon Dandolo’s actions as motivated by the prospect of commercial advantage.
Whatever the masses thought, and regardless of the discord that would inevitably follow, a core of the crusader elite was determined to accept Prince Alexius’s offer and to push ahead with the expedition to Constantinople. Gunther of Pairis astutely grasped the reality of the situation, recognising the cumulative effect of these different interests: ‘Through the union of all of these factors and, perhaps, of others, it happened that all unanimously found in favour of the young man and promised him their aid.’13 Doge Dandolo expressed his support for the proposal; Boniface, Baldwin of Flanders, Louis of Blois and Hugh of Saint-Pol concurred and summoned the envoys to the doge’s quarters in Zara, where they swore to the agreement and signed and sealed charters confirming the covenant.14 The crusade was headed for Constantinople.
The unswerving resolve of these men was plain. Baldwin, Louis and Hugh had been the driving force of the crusade since the tournament at Écry in November 1199. They had been bound together by the fateful agreement of April 1201 (with Venice), through which Dandolo and Boniface became tied in with them. For these crusaders, a sense of honour and obligation required them to continue the expedition at all costs, to try to bring succour to the Holy Land and to preserve their vow to assist the Christian cause. The allure of Prince Alexius’s wealth was such that his offer could not be resisted, but his position as a wrongfully deposed heir also struck a deep chord with the ruling families of Europe. A usurpation was an upset to the natural order of things and it was for this very reason that the prince’s envoys laid such emphasis on the matter. A number of the crusading bishops ruled that to help the prince would be ‘a righteous deed’, which doubtless helped to smooth over the concerns of some about the morality of their actions.15
The leadership needed every morsel of justification because, outside the inner group of nobles, very few supported the decision to go to Constantinople. Once again, the unity so crucial to a successful crusade was being eroded. Villehardouin offers this candid comment: ‘I must tell you that only twelve persons in all took the oaths on behalf of the French; no more could be persuaded to come forward.’ This was a desperately small number from those available and was a blunt demonstration of the limited enthusiasm for this plan.16 The tensions amongst the senior nobles themselves, and the strain of a part of the leadership trying to impose its will on a divided and disconcerted army, created enormous pressures in the crusader camp. The marshal noted: ‘I can assure you that the hearts of our people were not at peace, for one party was continually working to break up the army and the other to keep it together.’17 In addition to these anxieties, there was a constant fear of attack by King Emico of Hungary, who was understandably angered at the loss of Zara.
The corrosive effects of the decision to assist Prince Alexius soon touched every part of the camp. Villehardouin wrote that many of the lower ranks took ship and, when one sank, 500 men were lost. Others tried to march north through Slovenia, but were attacked by locals and the survivors were compelled to return to Zara. The Bavarian noble, Werner of Boland, stole away on a merchant ship, much to the contempt of those who remained. Even more seriously, a contingent of several senior French knights, led by Reynald of Montmirail (a cousin of Count Louis of Blois, no less), begged leave to go on a mission to Syria, apparently to inform those in the Levant of what was happening and to visit the holy sites as pilgrims. These men swore on the Bible that they would remain in the Holy Land for no longer than two weeks and that they would then return to the main host. They duly departed, but in spite of their oaths, they did not reappear at the siege of Constantinople, although Reynald rejoined his colleagues after the capture of the Byzantine Empire and fought and died in its defence in April 1205.18 Villehardouin summarised the position at Zara: ‘Thus, our forces dwindled seriously from day to day.’19 In one sense these desertions had a positive effect on those who remained because they banded together even more closely - a kinship born of adversity. While the crusader force shrank, its resolve to continue grew ever stronger. According to Villehardouin, only divine favour allowed the remains of the army to stay firm in the face of its trials.
One ray of hope appeared to lie in the news that the Flemish fleet under John of Nesles had reached Marseille and, after wintering there, awaited orders as to where to meet the main force. The French nobles and the doge counted greatly on the manpower and logistical support that this contingent would provide. They ordered John to leave Marseille in late March 1202 and to rendezvous with the Venetian fleet at the port of Methoni on the westernmost finger of the Peloponnese peninsula. Evidently, however, John and his fellow-crusaders cared little for the plan to attack Constantinople and they sailed directly to Syria to join the growing number of men who preferred to fight in the Holy Land.20 Without the immediate pressure of debt to the Venetians, the persuasive presence of Alexius’s envoys or the iron determination of the leadership, these Flemings plainly disapproved of the new direction of the crusade.
In parallel to the disturbing events at Zara was the ongoing mission to Rome. The envoys begged Innocent for absolution from his ban of excommunication and the removal of the crusaders’ spiritual rewards. The embassy argued that the men had no choice in the matter and that the fault lay with those who had not arrived in Venice. Those who did assemble and went on to fight at Zara had acted out of the need to keep the army together.
In February 1203 Innocent sent a letter back to the crusader force. The envoys seem to have done much to mollify him. He still expressed anger that ‘although you bore the Cross of Christ, you later turned your arms against Him. And you, who should have attacked the land of the Saracens, occupied Christian Zara.’ The pope noted the crusaders’ explanation that they were compelled to act out of necessity, although he said that this did not excuse their cruelty. Nevertheless, he acknowledged their wish to perform penance and told them (meaning particularly the Venetians) to return all the spoils gained at Zara. He ruled that the absolution granted by the bishops on the crusade was invalid and ordered Peter Capuano or his representative to perform this properly. Innocent also demanded oaths —in by now familiar terms - that required the crusaders to guarantee that in future they would ‘neither invade nor violate the lands of Christians in any manner, unless, perchance, they wickedly impede your journey or another just or necessary cause should, perhaps, arise, on account of which you would be empowered to act otherwise according to the guidance offered by the Apostolic See’.21
This latter clause is intriguingly ambiguous; what constituted ‘just and necessary cause’? Although the requirement of papal approval was some attempt to guard against a self-interested interpretation of this, there was, perhaps, room for a generous understanding of the papal mandate to suit a variety of situations.
Innocent himself faced a difficult time as the city of Rome underwent one of its frequent periods of civil unrest. He was forced to flee to nearby Ferentino where he reflected on the progress of the crusade. The pope recognised the problems created by the limited size of the armies that had assembled at Venice. He recalled his original conception of the campaign as being led by the rulers of England (now King John) and France, and in letters sent to these men he expressed his frustration that their continuing conflict was making a major crusading expedition impossible. He linked the Anglo-French struggle directly to problems in the Levant, where the Muslims rejoiced in Christian discord because it allowed them to grow ever stronger. He also connected the enemy’s optimism to the crusaders’ diversion to Zara and hinted that they ‘have planned to try worse things’ - a possible reference to the proposed diversion to Constantinople. Once again, the pope’s mention of the content of these rumours (as they were at the time) shows his problems in exercising genuine influence over the expedition.22
A little later the crusade leaders sent a letter to Innocent reporting that Cardinal Peter’s nuncio had visited them and absolved them of their sins, although the Venetians refused to repent and had been formally placed under a bull of anathema. The letter also pleaded with the pope to view leniently Boniface of Montferrat’s suppression of this bull, which was done to keep the fleet together and so help the cause of the Holy Land.23
Boniface himself wrote a letter in the same vein, again arguing for the need to conceal the bull in order to hold the army together. While this was true, it is also plain that the publication of a bull excommunicating the Venetians would give considerable ammunition to those who argued against the diversion to Constantinople.24
As spring drew on the crusaders began to prepare to leave Zara and they refettled their ships, packed their equipment and loaded up their horses. The Venetians, however, had neither forgiven nor forgotten the Zarans’ repeated efforts to escape their overlordship. As a gesture of their strength and a dire warning to the Zarans not to forget their new oaths of fealty, they razed the city to the ground, including all its walls and towers; only the churches were spared.
Before the fleet embarked there was one final, if predictable, twist of events. Simon of Montfort and his associates, including Abbot Guy of Vaux-Cernay, declined to join their colleagues and went over to King Emico of Hungary’s lands. Simon was a senior figure and this represented a serious desertion, but it did at least remove the most vocal critics from the crusader force.
Just before the doge and Marquis Boniface departed from Zara, Prince Alexius himself arrived. The prince’s appearance was well timed - possibly deliberately - to coincide with St Mark’s Day (25 April); a moment likely to find the Venetians in particularly good spirits. The young man was given a warm reception and the Venetians provided him with galleys and crew.25
The main crusader fleet planned to sail south and reassemble at Corfu. As the prince and the Venetians followed the bulk of the force, they passed the city of Durazzo, located on the north-western edge of the Byzantine Empire. Here, encouragingly, the citizens immediately gave their town over to Prince Alexius and swore allegiance to him. Whether this was simple prudence, particularly given the crusaders’ recent actions at Zara, or a genuine enthusiasm for the pretender is unclear. The young man must have been cheered by this development and it probably heartened the crusade’s leaders that Alexius’s people seemed to welcome his appearance - perhaps Constantinople would embrace the prince equally quickly.
Ultimately, such hopes would prove to be without foundation, although at first all seemed to be progressing to plan. Because Prince Alexius reached Zara after the majority of the French crusaders had sailed southwards, his first encounter with most of them took place on Corfu. The crusaders had already pitched their tents and pavilions and were giving their horses much-needed exercise when the news of his arrival began to spread. Knights, nobles and ordinary crusaders hurried to the port, curious to see the man in whom their leaders had vested so much and who promised to answer so many of their needs. Initial impressions were positive: the prince was greeted with great ceremony and honour and his tent was erected in the centre of the crusader army, right next to that of Boniface of Montferrat in whose charge Philip of Swabia had placed his young brother-in-law.
Because the deal struck between the nobles and the Byzantine envoys had not commanded full support, the controversy had rumbled on. The presence of Prince Alexius inevitably reopened the festering issue of advancing on Constantinople. Now yet another section of the army threatened to fracture away. Alexius would soon be left in the company of such a small force that his hope of forcing his way back into Constantinople would be extinguished.
A letter written by Hugh of Saint-Pol to various acquaintances in the West in the summer of 1203 described Alexius as making a personal plea to the crusaders that they should not be swayed from his cause. Again, the prince emphasised the unjust usurpation of his father and his offer of generous assistance. Notwithstanding the welcome given to Alexius when he first reached Corfu, it seems that the battle for the support of the rank and file needed to be won as well. Hugh wrote of the disquiet: ‘a good deal of disagreement was engendered in our army and there was an enormous uproar and grumbling. For everyone was shouting that we should make haste for Acre, and there were not more than ten who spoke in favour of Constantinople.’26 These men again included Hugh himself, Baldwin of Flanders, Villehardouin and Bishop Conrad of Halberstadt. As Hugh argued: ‘we all clearly demonstrated to the entire army that the journey to Jerusalem was fruitless and injurious for everyone insofar as they were destitute and low on provisions, and no one amongst them could retain the services of knights and pay the men-at-arms or could provide for the employment of petraries or the introduction of other weapons of war. Well, at last, they barely gave in to us ...’27 Alexius probably repeated the offer he had made to the leadership back at Zara and the terms were again agreed by the named individuals, although as events were about to reveal, they represented only a fraction of the entire army.
A group of senior French crusaders, including Odo of Champlitte, Jacques of Avesnes, and Peter of Amiens (Robert of Clari’s patron) - all influential men of high rank - decided that they would prefer to remain on Corfu when the Venetian fleet sailed. They planned to send messengers across to Brindisi in southern Italy, where Walter of Brienne, another important crusader, was known to be based and to ask him to dispatch shipping for them so that, presumably, they could continue on to the Holy Land. Villehardouin hinted that these men feared the likely duration, as well as the danger, of an attack on Constantinople. He allowed that while some hid their true feelings, ‘more than half the army were of the same mind’.28 A division of this magnitude would obviously mean the end of the crusade. Boniface, Baldwin, Louis and Hugh were aghast at this development and realised that they had to take immediate and decisive action. Villehardouin reports an unattributed speech from amongst this group: ‘My lords, we’re in a pretty desperate position. If these men leave us, as so many have already done on different occasions, the army’s doomed, and we’ll never conquer anything. So why don’t we go and beg them, for God’s sake, to show some consideration for themselves and for us, and not disgrace themselves, nor deprive us of the chance of delivering the land overseas.’29 The marshal chose to portray the issue as one of chivalric honour, combined with the need to assist the Holy Land - a plain demonstration of the necessity to keep one’s word and not lose face. The crusade leaders acted immediately and rushed off to meet the other group who were assembled in conference in a nearby valley.
What followed was one of the most dramatic incidents of the entire crusade. Boniface, Prince Alexius and the bishops and abbots sympathetic to them mounted their horses and rode away at a gallop. When they saw their comrades gathered in discussion, they halted and approached them on foot, perhaps as a sign of humility, perhaps to convey no sense of threat. On seeing the frenzied approach of the leadership, Odo, Jacques and Peter had saddled up, fearing an attack, but when the others dismounted, they followed suit. The two parties drew close and then, in what could only have been a last-ditch effort to sway the hearts and minds of their fellow-crusaders, Boniface, Baldwin, Louis and Hugh threw themselves at the feet of their friends. They cried out for help, they wept and sobbed that they would not move until the others promised to stay and fight alongside them.30
Modern diplomacy rarely extends to such graphic and emotional displays but, as with the scene in Basel cathedral, such a lachrymose performance was not at all unfamiliar in the medieval period. This episode on Corfu was a volatile mixture of genuine feeling, utter desperation and emotional blackmail. With friends, relatives and lords lined up opposite one another, a direct appeal of this nature was almost certain to hit home. The would-be deserters duly burst into tears as well and everyone was overcome with emotion. They were not so carried away as to agree to help the prince on the spot, however, and once everyone had regained their composure they asked for some privacy to discuss the matter.
Withdrawing from the others, they debated the terms of their continued participation in the expedition to Constantinople. They undertook to stay with the army until Christmas 1203, but demanded that any time thereafter the leaders had to provide them with ships to go to Syria within two weeks of making such a request. The agreement was confirmed by oath. A sense of relief flooded through the army; for the immediate future at least, the direction of the campaign was confirmed.
Even then, the crusaders’ stay on Corfu was not trouble-free. The island was part of the Byzantine Empire and while the inhabitants of Durazzo had dutifully acknowledged Alexius’s authority, the prince’s reception from others of the islanders was much more hostile. The city of Corfu refused to open its gates and the inhabitants declared their opposition to Alexius by using catapults and petraries to compel the crusader fleet to withdraw from the harbour. It seems unlikely that there was a formal siege of the citadel, largely because the crusaders realised that it was too strong to take quickly and that their priorities lay elsewhere, but this antipathy towards the young pretender made clear that he could not count on a friendly welcome throughout the empire and that loyalty to the existing regime was not as brittle as he would have liked.
A second episode on this island revealed another of the potential flaws in Alexius’s promises to the crusaders. As the army camped outside the city of Corfu, the local archbishop invited over some of the Catholic churchmen for lunch. While the opposing armies fought using swords and missiles, their churchmen warred with words and ideas. This was no relaxing, drawn-out affair to demonstrate local hospitality, but an intense and passionate debate about important theological issues, particularly the Catholic Church’s endless claims for the primacy of Rome over the Greek Orthodox Church. With delicious irony, the Orthodox archbishop observed that ‘he knew of no basis for the Roman See’s primacy other than the fact that Roman soldiers had crucified Christ’ - a perfect response to the ambitions of the crusader churchmen.31 Underlying this observation was the more serious point that, in this instance at least, a senior member of the Orthodox clergy was not prepared to submit to the papacy - an ominous hint (for those who chose to heed it) that Prince Alexius might struggle to deliver this particular strand of his offer to the crusaders.
As the expedition prepared to leave Corfu, the prince encouraged the crusaders to ravage the island as a signal that his wishes should be respected: a gesture to those ahead that he was determined to reclaim the throne.