CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘The incendiary angel of evil’
THOSE CRUSADERS WHO remained in Constantinople settled down for the autumn and winter, waiting for their colleagues to return and preparing for new adventures in the spring. In theory, this should have been a relatively uneventful time, but the westerners were soon to witness a most terrible event - and one largely triggered by their presence. In spite of incidents such as the anti-western purge of the 1180s and other occasional attacks on outside groups over the previous decades, a sizeable number of Europeans still lived and worked in Constantinople. Some, like the Pisans, had shown loyalty to the imperial regime during the siege, but in the aftermath of Alexius III’s demise they prudently changed policy and came to terms with Isaac and his son. Clearly this opportunism upset many Byzantines, and Niketas reports that Greek hostility towards the Pisans and a colony of Amalfitans led a Constantinople mob to burn the westerners’ dwellings, which in turn prompted most of them to move over the Golden Horn to ‘share a table and a tent’ with their fellow-Catholics.1
The crusaders’ overt responsibility for imposing a change of regime on the Greeks and their continued presence as a blunt instrument of the young emperor fuelled resentment towards all aliens. On 19 August 1203 a brawl started between a group of Greeks and a party of indigenous westerners, in the aftermath of which someone started a fire—‘out of malice’, according to Villehardouin. Other sources indicate that the conflict was between crusaders and the Greeks and that the former, lacking any other way to defend themselves, set fire to a building. Niketas Choniates, who was present in the city at this time, gives a different and more detailed version. He makes plain that the crusaders initiated what became a catastrophic series of events and that their voracious desire for money lay at the root of the incident. Intriguingly, their initial target was not the Byzantines, but the occupants of a mosque located just outside the city walls, across the Golden Horn from the crusader camp. This building was not the only mosque in the city (there had been such buildings in Constantinople for centuries), but the others lay comfortably behind the walls. Its construction probably dated from the period of Isaac’s rapprochement with Saladin. Almost certainly as a response to the recent anti-western activity in Constantinople, a group of Flemish crusaders, along with a few Pisans and Venetians, commandeered a group of local fishing boats and ferried themselves over to the mosque.
They fell upon the building and started to seize its possessions. Taken completely by surprise, the Muslims defended themselves as best they could and used whatever came to hand to resist the drawn swords of the crusaders. They called for help from the Greeks, who came running, eager to fight back against the hated invaders. The combined efforts of the Muslims and the locals put the crusaders on the back foot, but as the Venetians did during the first siege, they resorted to arson to protect their withdrawal and as a way of inflicting retribution upon their opponents.
Not content with destroying the infidels’ place of worship, the westerners spread out to several other locations and set them ablaze, too. What Niketas describes to us, therefore, is a serious effort to avenge the earlier anti-western riots. It is doubtful whether this was sanctioned by the crusade leadership because they would not have wanted to damage the already fragile relationship with the Greeks any further, and certainly not in such a dramatic and destructive manner. The presence of Pisans, as recent victims of the mob, and the use of local rather than crusader shipping also indicate an unofficial and unauthorised raid. Notwithstanding his aversion to the westerners, Niketas provides sufficiently compelling detail for us to regard his account as the most accurate account of the incident.
In any event, the consequences were appalling. While the fire of 17 July had caused quite a lot of damage, this new conflagration was very much worse. In the dry summer heat the blaze quickly gripped the densely packed wooden houses that lay inland from the Golden Horn, about one-third of a mile from the easternmost tip of the city. No one could control the flames, let alone quell them. To Niketas it was ‘a novel sight, defying the power of description’. There had been fires in the city before, but this one ‘proved all the others to be but sparks’.2 The first two days and nights witnessed the worst damage as the north wind carried the blaze across the city towards the Forum of Constantine. At times the breeze must have turned and the fire twisted and meandered like a starving beast gorging itself on everything in its path. It was not just the wooden buildings that fell prey to the inferno. The great Agora (market place) was consumed and its elegant porticoes toppled to the ground, while mighty columns were ensnared and licked to destruction by the flames.
The crusaders, based on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, could only watch as the fire devoured great churches, huge private houses and wide streets, packed with merchants’ shops. Smoke billowed into the sky as the flames leaped from building to building. Screams of the trapped and dying pierced the air. The crackle of burning wood, the abrasive rattle of disintegrating stonework, the percussive thud of falling masonry pierced by the sharper, staccato crack of shattering roof tiles, all generated a truly hellish noise.
For day after day the blaze rolled onwards, its front now hundreds of yards long and swallowing huge areas of the most densely populated parts of the city. The fire reached down towards the harbour and even clawed towards the great Hagia Sophia itself. Niketas reports that the nearby Arch of the Milion (this was the point in Constantinople from which all roads were measured) was burned, as was the ecclesiastical court complex known as the Synods, whose baked brick walls and deep foundations failed to resist the heat - ‘everything within was consumed like candle-sticks’. 3
The fire had torn a huge strip across the city, stretching from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. Constantinople was rent by ‘a great chasm or river of fire flowing through her midst’, and people with relatives at the opposite end of the city had to sail around the flames to reach them.4 While the Great Palace escaped unscathed, the Hippodrome and the Forum of Constantine were slightly damaged. A westerly wind pushed the blaze towards the Port of Theodosius, where it leaped over the walls and the sparks even ignited a ship passing close by.
Finally, after three days the fire satiated itself and began to subside. Water from the cisterns and aqueducts helped to quell what remained, leaving no fewer than 440 acres of land a charred and smoking ruin. Niketas—a man with a deeply engrained love of, and pride in, his city - lamented the pitiful scene that confronted him: ‘Woe is me! How great was the loss of those magnificent, most beautiful palaces filled with every kind of delight, abounding in riches and envied by all’5
The locals firmly believed that the westerners were responsible for the conflagration. From that time on, Villehardouin informs us, it was not safe for any to remain in Constantinople and, he estimated, 15,000 men, women and children fled, carrying all that they had managed to save, across to the crusader camp. In one sense, with more mouths to feed, these people caused a short-term problem. However, they were also a potential source of fighting strength and skilled labour: ‘one army was fashioned from all’, as theDevastatio Constantinopolitana summarised.6 In any event, aside from the loss of life and property, the fire created a suppurating rift between the Byzantines and the crusaders, something that would do much to create further tensions in an already difficult relationship.
Ignoring the crusaders’ likely culpability for the fire and the huge financial hardships that many thousands of the citizens now faced, Isaac continued to gather up sacred treasures in order to make the financial payments required by the westerners. Niketas fulminated at the emperor’s apparent failure to respond to the fire and his continued defilement of religious artefacts. He condemned Isaac as ‘the incendiary angel of evil’, a play on the old emperor’s family name of Angelos that clearly indicated the writer’s anger.7In spite of the continued plundering, the losses caused by the fire meant that the flow of money to the crusaders now began to dry up, which inevitably caused ill-feeling.
Soon, with or without imperial direction, the Greeks rebuilt the section of wall that had been demolished at the crusaders’ request. The absence of around half of the western army, and the anger they felt after the fire, gave the Byzantines the incentive to execute such a confrontational move and showed how the popular mood was growing ever more militant. Frustrated by these developments, Baldwin sent messengers to the army with Emperor Alexius to inform his colleagues of the cessation of payments and urging them to return to Constantinople as soon as possible. On 11 November 1203 the expedition arrived back at the city, in part satisfied with the way in which the new emperor had been received, but also grimly worried at the deteriorating relations with their nominal allies.
For Alexius this was a rare moment of triumph - he had imposed his authority on at least one section of his lands. As befitted a returning emperor, the people of Constantinople received their ruler in style and it was essential for the senior families of the city to pay him the appropriate respect. The leading lords and ladies donned their finest robes and rode out to meet the emperor and escort him back into the city. The crusaders also came out to meet their friends, doubtless relieved to be able to greet their colleagues and to see that all had returned safely.
As they drew close to Constantinople, Alexius and the crusaders would have seen the tremendous devastation wrought by the great fire. While the westerners stopped at their camp on the northern side of the Golden Horn and the emperor carried on across the inlet to the Blachernae palace, the terrible black scar left by the blaze would have been evident to all. News of the conflagration had reached Alexius and his allies as they moved around Thrace, but the huge scale of the damage was stunning. The emperor must have been chastened by the loss of so many fine buildings, and to see his people living as squatters amongst their ruined houses. To realise that his western allies were held responsible for this atrocity probably took much of the satisfaction away from his achievements in the empire. The crusaders would have appreciated this too and must have recognised that a long, tense winter lay ahead before the expedition could leave for the Levant.
Once settled back in Constantinople, Emperor Alexius was a changed man: the acclamation of the provinces and his welcome back into the city acted as a massive boost to his self-confidence. Before, he had been in the shadow of his father, but now, as an anointed emperor with a successful campaign under his belt, he sought to stand free and assert his own independence.
On returning from campaign one of his first acts was to order the hanging of all those who had been involved in the deposition and blinding of his father in 1195. The removal of these potential plotters was a sensible move given the unpredictable situation in Constantinople. But of much greater impact on the stability of the Byzantine Empire was a calamitous deterioration in the relationship between Alexius and his father. Put simply, their familial bond was not strong enough to overcome the desire of each man to exercise ultimate power. Alexius had, with his allies, managed to remove the usurper from Constantinople and now he had just toured the nearby imperial territories and been recognised as emperor. These were the actions of a young and successful ruler. While it was prudent that Isaac had stayed in Constantinople, his blindness, the fact that he had already been deposed, and the presence of his son as a co-emperor meant that he was experiencing a very different form of imperial authority to that which he had enjoyed in 1195.
Niketas Choniates reports that people looked increasingly towards Alexius as the senior figure in the imperial partnership. The young man’s name began to appear first in public pronouncements, while Isaac’s followed ‘like an echo’.8 With his blindness a constant reminder of his limitations, the older emperor felt the reins of power slipping from his hands and he grew bitter and resentful. He began to murmur of Alexius’s lack of self-control and started to spread rumours about the younger man’s sexual preferences, suggesting that ‘he kept company with depraved men whom he smote on the buttocks and was struck by them in return’.9
During the first few weeks after his return from Thrace, Alexius stayed in close contact with the crusaders. They had worked together now for more than a year and had built up a reasonable affinity. The emperor enjoyed socialising with the westerners - he had, after all, spent several months at the courts of Europe, too - and he frequently went to the crusader camp where he passed the day drinking heavily and playing at dice. So relaxed was the atmosphere that Alexius was happy for his companions to remove the golden and jewelled diadem from his head and replace it with a shaggy woollen headdress. To Niketas Choniates such behaviour was disgraceful and brought shame to the imperial name and sullied the glory of the Byzantine Empire.10
The Greek chronicler also notes a sharp decline in Isaac’s political skills. Earlier he had been characterised as a mild and unwarlike man, but now, perhaps worn down by his suffering and feeling pressured by his weakening authority, he sought respite in the company of seers and astrologers. To Niketas, these men were simply scroungers who exploited the situation and only looked to gorge themselves on imperial hospitality. The blind emperor had always been attracted to divination and fortune-telling, but now he turned to such practices even more; it was, perhaps, a way of shielding himself from the realities of his own incapacity and the rise of his son.
Under the influence of the fortune-tellers, Isaac began to imagine himself as the sole ruler of Byzantium and then, incredibly, his ambitions stretched even further to encompass uniting the Eastern Empire (Byzantium) with the Western (the German imperial title) in his own person. While Manuel Comnenus, for example, had sought to assert his pre-eminence over Frederick Barbarossa, he had never seriously entertained the notion of taking over and joining the two empires together to form one mighty unit. For an ageing, blind man, penned in a city with a determined and desperate foreign army outside its walls, the conception of such an idea revealed an abject failure to grasp reality. Isaac also believed that he would rub his eyes and his blindness would go, the gout that so plagued him would abate and he would be ‘transformed into a godlike man’.11 Certain monks with beards grown ‘full like a deep cornheld’ spurred Isaac on in his delusions while they indulged in the finest food and wine the imperial palace could offer. The credulous emperor was hugely receptive to the prophecies of these men and delighted in their alluring predictions.
In one of his more eccentric decisions, Isaac ordered the removal of the famous Boar of Kalydon, a creature from Greek mythology, from its pedestal in the Hippodrome.12 This fearsome beast—complete with hair bristling up its back - was now placed in front of the Great Palace in order to protect the emperor from the rabble of the city. While this constituted some recognition of the dangers posed by the mob, it was hardly a serious way to protect his hold on the throne. To a modern reader these seem like the actions of a feeble figure, far distant from reality and heading inexorably towards calamity. Isaac’s physical sightlessness was matched by a blindness to any sense of political awareness and, like his son, he was soon despised by the people of Constantinople.
A more astute political operator could have exploited the overt links between Alexius and the crusaders to his own advantage. Given Isaac’s desire for power and his growing dislike of his son, there was an opportunity to harness the genuine groundswell of opposition to the outsiders. Although the westerners undoubtedly posed a serious military threat, had the older Greek leader taken the battle to the crusaders in the way that Alexius III had failed to, or had he taken advantage of the crusaders’ total reliance on the Byzantines for food, then Isaac might have been able to seize the supremacy that he so desired. In reality, both father and son were so wrapped up in their personal obsessions and the political machinations of the palace that they marginalised themselves from the fundamental wishes of the people of Constantinople. The imperial name was being damaged and sullied in every way: the cowardice of Alexius III, followed by the remoteness and unpopularity of his two replacements. The aura and dignity of the Byzantine throne - built up over the centuries and an essential element in the self-image of the people of Constantinople - was in grievous decline. The monolith of power had been severely eroded and this in turn meant that loyalty to the individuals who held the title was fragile and, at times, barely existent. Isaac and Alexius needed to wake up and act to bring their own interests in line with those of Constantinople. The alternative was a predictable, and probably painful, political exit.
The patent lack of leadership encouraged unrest amongst the citizenry. The people of Constantinople, angered at the desertion of Alexius III, humiliated by the crusaders’ strength and enraged by the destruction wrought by the great fires, sought answers to their predicament. One victim of the ‘wine-bibbing portion of the vulgar masses’ (as Niketas Choniates so elegantly described them) was a statue of the goddess Athena that stood on a pedestal in the Forum of Constantine. Niketas rhapsodised over the beauty of this 10-foot-high bronze creation and his description lingeringly traced the statue’s body from foot to head. He lovingly recalled the deep folds in the robe that covered her body, the tight girdle around her waist and the goatskin cape, decorated with the Gorgon’s head, that covered her prominent breasts and shoulders. He delighted in the sensuality of her long bare neck and suggested that her lips were so fair that, if one stopped to listen, a voice would be heard. So lifelike was this creation that Athena’s veins seemed dilated as if filled with blood and the body seemed infused with the bloom of life. The eyes were said to be full of yearning, her helmet topped by a horsehair crest, while her own hair was braided tightly into tresses at the back of her head and fell in braids around her face. Athena’s left hand was folded into her dress, but it was the bearing of her right hand that sealed her fate from the mob. According to Niketas, her head and right hand were directed southwards, but the masses (ignorant of the points of the compass) believed the goddess to be looking to the west and, therefore, beckoning the crusader army to the city. For this perceived act of treachery the statue was dragged from its pedestal and broken into pieces.To Niketas this was akin to an act of self-mutilation and to turn against a patroness of war and wisdom was a foolish mistake. He was careful, of course, not to grant her divine status and referred to her only as a symbol of these virtues.13
Alongside such open manifestations of unrest, the emperors continued their remorseless extraction of money to satisfy the demands of their allies; naturally an unenthusiastic populace resisted all demands to pay. Faced with a potentially explosive situation, the imperial administrators turned to softer targets, namely the Church and the wealthy. Some of the treasures that could be moved from the Hagia Sophia were taken away and melted down - the dozens of silver lamps that hung from the ceiling of the great church were gathered together and cast into the flames. Citizens of means (probably including Niketas himself) were required to contribute. The author contemptuously dismissed this as throwing meat to dogs and wrote of ‘an unholy mingling of the profane with the sacred’.14
The money-gatherers used informers to lead them to sources of wealth and ceaselessly sought out new objects of value. The crusaders also began to apply pressure to gather resources and paid visits to the prosperous estates and religious institutions that lay near Constantinople to take the money they needed.
By the winter of 1203 the situation in Constantinople had reached crisis point. Niketas Choniates paints a vivid and compelling picture of a great civilisation rotting from within. The sense of internal decline and disintegration in Constantinople was palpable. The Queen of Cities, with all its great buildings and symbols of power, was being brought to its knees by incompetent rulers, its own febrile citizenry and its uncompromising enemies.
Of the Byzantines, Alexius was, of course, the key figure. With each passing day the young ruler became boxed into an ever-tighter corner. He owed his position entirely to the crusaders and had promised them large sums of money. His political survival depended on their military strength and he had evidently formed a close friendship with several of their number. He also recognised as early as August—when he asked the crusaders to move their camp to Galata - that his allies were acutely unpopular. The great fire and the continued exactions of money salted the wound further. Put simply, the people of Constantinople wanted the westerners gone. The young emperor therefore had to achieve a balancing act: he had to remain in power until their departure and, meanwhile, he had to use the crusaders’ presence to try to build up his own position so as to stand a chance of surviving once they did leave in March 1204.
He had to placate his people while taking their gold; at the same time, he could not risk alienating his allies by failing to pay them or by appearing to sanction any military aggression towards them. A contemporary oration in favour of Alexius praised the emperor, as convention dictated; more interestingly it omitted any reference to Isaac (suggesting that his son held practically full power) and displayed an overt hostility towards the westerners: ‘Just because they conveyed you, emperor, who have come hither by God’s will, let them not grow wanton, but because they, restoring the lord emperor, have fulfilled servants’ roles, let them be bent to servile laws.’ The speech warned against the greed of the ‘old’ Rome trying to renew its youth at the expense of the ‘new’ Rome.15
Alexius Ducas, the nobleman known as Murtzuphlus, was prominent in the anti-crusader party in Constantinople and castigated the emperor for paying so much money to them, for mortgaging so many lands. He urged Alexius to ‘make them go away’.16
The crusaders, of course, relied on Alexius for food and wanted his financial and military support in the spring. Yet, as the ferocious arguments on Corfu had shown, a large proportion of the army was lukewarm in their support of the emperor and had little patience with broken promises. The longer Alexius failed to pay over the money he owed, the greater the sense of dissatisfaction that stirred in the crusader army. Mistrust of the Greeks grew like a canker.
Boniface of Montferrat tried to use his close personal relationship with Alexius to persuade him to restore the proper flow of cash. He visited the emperor to point out the moral debt he owed the crusaders for restoring him to the throne and urged him to keep his promises. Given the pressures Alexius faced in Constantinople, he had little choice but to continue his policy of appeasement, staving off Boniface with requests for patience and giving assurances that he would indeed honour his commitments.17 Yet soon the delivery of funds dried to a trickle and then stopped altogether. By this time of year, late November, the emperor knew that the crusader fleet could not set sail onto the winter seas and he may have believed that this enforced immobility, along with their vulnerability over food, would have been enough to dissuade the westerners from war. In addition, he hoped that by ending payment to them he would earn himself a breathing space in Constantinople.
On 1 December the antipathy between the westerners and the Byzantines spilled over into open violence. The mob set upon any outsiders and brutally murdered them and burned their corpses. The Greeks tried to attack the crusaders’ ships, but were quickly beaten off and lost many of their own vessels.
The smouldering tensions between the two sides now seemed poised to burst into outright war. The crusader leadership had to decide upon its next move and resolved to establish with absolute clarity the emperor’s intentions towards his allies. They chose to send Alexius a formal delegation to remind him once again of his contractual obligations to them and to demand that he fulfil them. If he refused, then the crusaders would tell him that they would ‘do everything in their power to recover the money due’.18
Inevitably, given their diplomatic experience and oratorical skills, Conon of Béthune and Geoffrey of Villehardouin were chosen as two of the six envoys. The Frenchman Milo of Provins and three senior Venetians formed the remainder of the party. They girded their swords and rode along the Golden Horn, across the Blachernae bridge, to the nearby palace.19 They dismounted at the gate, as envoys were required to do, and went into one of the great halls. There, enthroned at the head of the room sat the two emperors, bedecked in their magnificent robes. Also present was Margaret, Isaac’s wife and Alexius’s stepmother, who again attracted Villehardouin’s approving eye as a ‘good and beautiful lady’.20 To emphasise the importance of the occasion the hall was filled with senior Byzantine nobles. Both sides knew that this was not one of the crusaders’ social calls, but a decisive face-to-face meeting that would either result in conflict or would succeed in calming a dangerously volatile situation.
Conon presented the westerners’ familiar case: the crusaders had done a great service to the two emperors, and in return Alexius and Isaac had promised to fulfil their covenant, but had failed to do so. The crusaders displayed the sealed documents that embodied the original agreement. Then came an ultimatum: if the Byzantines fulfilled their obligations, the crusaders would be content; if they did not, ‘they will no longer regard you [Alexius] as their lord and friend, but will use every means in their power to obtain their due. They ask us to tell you that they will not do anything to injure either yourself or any other person without fair warning of their intention to commence hostilities.’21 Conon’s closing comments carried an undercurrent of venom towards his hosts, for after his assurances of due warnings before a war, he said: ‘For they [the crusaders] have never acted treacherously - that is not the custom of their country.’22 This barbed aspersion against the Greek character reflected the westerners’ long-held prejudices and signified their growing mistrust of Alexius. It was also, of course, calculated to give extreme offence.
Uproar greeted the end of Conon’s speech. His words outraged the gathered Byzantine nobles. All their resentment against the western barbarians swelled up; Villehardouin reported that they declared that no one had ever had the temerity to come into the imperial palace and dictate terms to the emperor in such a way. The hall was filled with shouts and cries; men gestured violently towards the small group of westerners. Even if Alexius had wanted to offer a more conciliatory response to the envoys, the mood inside the hall meant that this would have been suicidal. Provoked and cornered, the young emperor scowled fiercely at the envoys.
To Villehardouin and his colleagues the message was plain. No amount of diplomacy was going to change the mood in the palace. In spite of their nominal security as envoys, such was the sense of rage within the room that the crusaders feared for their lives. To an experienced man such as Villehardouin who, as we have seen, was accustomed to acting in such a capacity, this was a new and obviously terrifying ordeal. The westerners must have felt extraordinarily isolated and threatened. Hastily they turned to leave and hurried back along the corridors to the courtyard outside and their waiting horses. ‘There was not a man amongst them who was not extremely glad to find himself outside.’23 Hugely relieved to have survived, they rode at high speed back over the Golden Horn. As they entered the crusader camp the tension on their faces must have made plain to all the reception they had received. The nobles were summoned and informed of the events in the palace. ‘Thus the war began’ was Villehardouin’s succinct and emotionless comment.24
Robert of Clari records one further interesting episode from this period, although it proved to have little effect on the overall outcome of events. He reports that on hearing of Alexius’s reaction to the crusader envoys, Doge Dandolo decided to make a last-ditch personal appeal to the emperor. He sent a messenger asking that they meet at the harbour. The Venetians sent four heavily armed galleys to convey their leader to the rendezvous. Alexius rode down to the shore and the two men exchanged words. Dandolo must have had a reasonably cordial relationship with Alexius to believe that such an approach might be worthwhile. Perhaps the doge hoped that, away from the pressured environment of the Byzantine court, the young emperor might recognise his responsibilities to the crusaders more clearly.
‘Alexius, what do you mean by this?’ he asked. ‘Take thought how we rescued you from great wretchedness and how we have made you a lord and have had you crowned emperor. Will you not keep your covenant with us?’25 The emperor’s response was uncompromising: ‘I will not do any more than I have done.’ Dandolo was furious that the man upon whom the crusaders had expended so much time and energy now appeared to be abandoning them. The old man lost his temper: ‘Wretched boy, we dragged you out of the filth and into the filth we will cast you again. And I defy you, and I give you warning that I will do you all the harm in my power from this moment forwards.’26
From early December onwards there was desultory fighting between the two forces. Neither side launched a major offensive: on the one hand, the crusaders were unwilling to provoke the outright enmity of the Greeks and, on the other, Alexius was reluctant to mount an open assault on the powerful western armies. The imperial entourage seems to have become ever more remote. Isaac urged his son to ignore the talk of the vulgar masses, while courtiers refused to fight against the crusaders—‘being quicker to avoid battle with [them] than an army of deer with a roaring lion’, in Niketas’s contemptuous words.27
The most serious threat to the western forces came on 1 January 1204. In the months since the crusader army had set up camp at Galata, normal trading and fishing had taken place, with Greek, Venetian and other vessels mingling in the waters of the Golden Horn. The Byzantines could see that the crusaders’ most precious lifeline was their fleet. Without it the westerners would be trapped and would have to surrender - or march away, across the hostile territories of Bulgaria, or be ferried over the Bosphorus to face the winter in the inhospitable mountains of Asia Minor. If the crusader fleet were destroyed the hated westerners would be at their mercy. The Greeks took 17 vessels and filled them with logs, wood shavings, pitch, discarded hemp and wooden barrels. Fire-boats had been used in naval warfare in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries; the famous Battle of Salamis in 480 BC had featured burning ships, and the details of this legendary fight were doubtless remembered and repeated by many in the medieval world. One evening, at midnight, when the wind blew from the south-west, the Greeks unfurled the sails of the ships, ignited the boats and set them loose towards the crusader fleet. They had prepared the vessels well; the cargo rapidly ignited and the flames soared up to the sky as these ghostly, crewless incendiaries glided inexorably towards the Venetians’ ships.
The tension between the two sides meant that the crusaders had posted sentries and guards and, as the enemy ships came across the Golden Horn, bugles sounded the alert and everyone rushed to arm themselves. The Venetians ran to their ships and did whatever they could to row, tow or sail them to safety. Villehardouin himself witnessed the attack and vouched that ‘no men ever defended themselves more valiantly on the sea than the Venetians ever did that night’.28 Some of their sailing boats could not be readied quickly enough to be moved and so a more direct strategy was needed. The most manoeuvrable of their vessels were the oar-powered galleys and longboats. Quickly crewed, they were rowed out towards the enemy and grappling irons were slung over the lethal vessels, which were then heaved into the Bosphorus, where the current carried them away to burn and disintegrate harmlessly at sea. The Greeks did not just abandon their fire-ships and commit them to the vagaries of battle, however. Thousands gathered on the shore of the Golden Horn to howl and yell their hostility against the westerners, while others boarded any available boats to shadow and bombard those trying to tow the burning vessels away.29 Many crusaders were wounded in this struggle and the men laboured on through the night to repel this threat to their precious navy.
In the main camp the call to arms went out. Some feared the seaborne attack was a prelude to a land assault and the crusaders rushed to don their armour and saddle their horses. The noise from the Golden Horn and the dark of night gave them little opportunity to form up in their usual good order and a rather ramiform crusader force poured out onto the plain in front of the camp to meet any impending Greek advance. By first light, however, only one Pisan merchant ship had been lost - an incredible achievement on the part of the Venetian mariners and yet another demonstration of their superb skill as seafarers. They were well aware of just how crucial their endeavours were; Villehardouin noted: ‘we had all been in deadly peril that night, for if our fleet had been burned we should have lost everything, and could not have got away either by sea or by land’.30
It is unclear who amongst the Greeks was responsible for the fire-fleet. In spite of his cold response to the recent diplomatic missions, it was perhaps unlikely that Alexius would have initiated such an overtly hostile move. More likely, the attack was the work of a party bent upon the destruction of the crusaders—in which case it showed how the young emperor’s authority had weakened. Such political nuances were irrelevant to the crusaders, however; so far as they were concerned, the blame lay firmly with Alexius himself. As Villehardouin sarcastically observed: ‘Such was the return Alexius had wanted to make for the services we had rendered him.’31 Thus the westerners’ estimation of the emperor was damaged still further, and such was the antipathy towards the Greeks as a whole that any previous warmth between the two parties was almost entirely a thing of the past.