CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Our excessive disagreement allowed for no humane
feeling between us’
IN EARLY 1204 Murtzuphlus took the fight directly to the crusaders. The Devastatio Constantinopolitana recorded that on 7 January a body of Greek horsemen came out of the city to confront the western forces. They were met by the marquis of Montferrat who routed his opponents, killing or capturing a number of wealthy Byzantine nobles at the cost of two knights and a squire. Niketas Choniates described the same incident, but from his perspective it was important to show Murtzuphlus as the lone Byzantine noble prepared to ignore Alexius’s ban on such actions. Unsurprisingly, his bravery won favour with the general populace, although at one point in the struggle Murtzuphlus’s horse slipped and collapsed to its knees. The Greek may well have been trapped under his mount and, had the crusaders managed to capture or kill him, then the Byzantine contingent would have been routed entirely. Fortunately for Murtzuphlus, a group of young archers appreciated the danger and quickly rallied to defend their leader, which allowed him to escape.1 As the horsemen fought up near the Blachernae palace, the Venetians launched their ships and menacingly prowled up and down the Golden Horn and along the sea walls that faced the Sea of Marmara. They harassed the shoreline and snatched any booty they could lay their hands on. Once again the crusaders’ land and sea forces worked in close co-ordination and their combined strength was more than the Greeks could cope with.
By way of reprisal for this incident, once the Byzantine land forces were beaten back, the crusaders mounted a large raid up to two days’ journey from their camp. Ravaging expeditions, known as chevauchées, were very common in western Europe and involved inflicting maximum damage on enemy lands and seizing all possible booty, whether it was prisoners, herds of cattle or sheep, or valuables. There was no attempt to engage in full-scale fighting—the process was simply designed to break the economy and the morale of an opponent and to demonstrate to the hapless victims that their lord was incapable of offering proper protection. The Devastatio suggests that this episode was the final straw for those who detested Alexius’s former allies: it was this incident that created a powerful desire to break the man who had brought the barbarians to the walls of Constantinople.2
In fact the crusader chevauchée did not provoke the actual murder of Alexius, but probably led to a terminal dissatisfaction with his rule. Niketas Choniates related that on 25 January 1204, ‘like a boiling kettle, to blow off [a] steam of abuse against the emperors’, the mob took over the Hagia Sophia and compelled the senate, the assembly of bishops and the senior clergy to gather to elect a new ruler. They had had enough of the western-loving Alexius and, with Isaac in chronic physical decline and no longer a significant figure, they wanted an emperor of their own choosing. As a senior court official and renowned orator, Niketas was present at the meeting and described the crowd urging an attack on Alexius and demanding that a name be put forward to replace him. Niketas and his colleagues took a longer view, however. They recognised that such an action would simply push Alexius and the crusaders back together again and they feared that the westerners would use their military strength to defend their protege. The senate and the churchmen continued to stonewall in the hope that the energy of the crowd might dissipate, but they were to be disappointed. Niketas wept as he foresaw that disaster would follow. Name after name was put forward from the ranks of the Byzantine nobility, but no one was prepared to accept. Even senior administrators were suggested: ‘Thou hast raiment, be our ruler’, as Niketas cuttingly dismissed such a prospect. Finally, after three days of debate the senate and the mob settled upon Nicholas Kannavos, a hapless young noble, and, against his will, he was anointed emperor on 27 January.3
Alexius was appalled at the emergence of a rival emperor. Now that the opposition had an overt figurehead, he feared a military coup and - as Niketas Choniates anticipated - he again looked to the crusaders for help. Regardless of the poor relations between the Greek masses and the crusaders, both the emperor and the westerners could still find common ground in their opposition to the vast, seething mob of Constantinople that was so bent on destroying them both. Alexius asked the crusaders to drive out Kannavos, in return for which he offered, according to a letter of Baldwin of Flanders written in May 1204, the Blachernae palace itself as a security until he fulfilled his other promises. The surrender of an imperial residence was a remarkable gesture and showed how desperate Alexius had become. In an attempt to conciliate another of his enemies he chose Murtzuphlus as his envoy, and the noble conveyed the proposition to the crusader camp. Although the vast majority of the westerners despised Alexius, they were aware that while he still needed them, he would provide food for their army. Furthermore, he was more likely to discharge the Byzantines’ moral and financial debts to the crusaders than any other emperor. For these reasons, along with the near-certainty that an aggressively anti-western regime would take over from him, he had to be given help.
On 27 January, Boniface of Montferrat went into the city to see Alexius and discuss the plan. According to Baldwin of Flanders, the emperor mocked the marquis and scorned to fulfil his own promises. This seems incredible, given that Alexius had been the one to initiate this proposal and the emperor must have realised that keeping his oaths was central to winning the crusaders’ goodwill. Baldwin was probably just sniping at Alexius’s character, and it is Niketas Choniates who offers a more realistic account of a relatively amenable meeting in which it was agreed that crusaders had to enter the imperial palace to expel Kannavos and the mob who had elected him.4
This was the decision that really precipitated Alexius’s fall. The demands of the crusaders and the political pressures within Constantinople were so contradictory that eventually it was inevitable that the emperor would run out of alternatives and one or other of his conflicting tormentors would try to remove him. It was from the Byzantine court that this threat ultimately emerged. Many there had no wish to restore relations with the crusaders and, indeed, wanted to expel them. The election of Nicholas Kannavos was one manifestation of this, but it was Murtzuphlus - the man originally freed at the crusaders’ request and recently trusted as an envoy by Alexius - who now stepped forward as leader of the anti-western faction from his position high in the Byzantine hierarchy.
Both Niketas Choniates and Baldwin of Flanders recorded that it was Alexius’s offer to install the crusaders in the Blachernae palace that provoked Murtzuphlus to denounce the emperor and to call for his overthrow. 5 Robert of Clari places Murtzuphlus in a more proactive role in which he offered to rid his people of the crusaders within a week if they made him emperor. The Greek hierarchy agreed to the idea and the conspirators stepped into action. Murtzuphlus had calculated that the presence of westerners inside the walls of Constantinople would bring the full imperial machinery behind him in a way that the popularly elected Nicholas Kannavos lacked. So Murtzuphlus acted quickly. First he secured the treasury by offering the eunuch in charge whichever titles the man wished. Then he called the Varangian Guard together and told them of Alexius’s plan to bring crusaders back into the city. He pointed out how unpopular this was with all the Greeks - surely the guards should support the wishes of the people. The logic was inescapable: Alexius had to be removed.
On the night of 27-8 January, as the young man slept in his chambers, Murtzuphlus and the palace guards crept into his room, surrounded his bed, snatched him away and hurled him into a dungeon. Niketas gives a detailed account of the betrayal, glossing Murtzuphlus’s treachery with one final act of duplicity. The writer describes Murtzuphlus rushing into the imperial bedchamber and telling Alexius of a terrible uprising. Members of the Angeloi family, the mob and, most seriously, the Varangian guard were said to be pounding the doors of the palace, set upon tearing the emperor limb from limb because of his close friendship with the crusaders. Half asleep, Alexius struggled to comprehend the extent of the danger. He turned for salvation to Murtzuphlus, the one man who still seemed loyal to him. His visitor threw a robe over the young man and together they slipped out of the chamber towards a pavilion in the palace complex, the emperor offering profuse thanks to his saviour. Perhaps this was the moment when Murtzuphlus revealed his true intentions; his lie had meant that Alexius had left the bedchamber quickly and without fuss. Now, in the palace grounds, he was at the mercy of his challenger. As the emperor reeled under the revelation of Murtzuphlus’s treachery, the guards bundled him down to a prison cell where his legs were cast into irons.
The pretender assumed the imperial insignia, donning the scarlet buskins (calf-length boots) that symbolised his office, and proclaimed himself ruler. Within hours he was crowned in the Hagia Sophia—the fourth emperor present in Constantinople and certainly the one with the strongest power base. (Murtzuphlus should really be known as Emperor Alexius V - his proper name was Alexius Ducas - but most contemporary authors use his nickname and we should be thankful that yet another ‘Alexius’ does not appear in the narrative.) A position at the pinnacle of political and secular life gains much of its aura of power from its exclusivity. There were many kingdoms in the Christian world, but only two imperial regimes: those of Germany and Byzantium. When more than one person claimed one of those titles it was devalued: for four men to assert a right to the same honour was absurd and showed the almost complete disintegration of the imperial dignity.
The quartet would not last long, however. Men from the new regime rushed to the apartments of Emperor Isaac and told him the dramatic news. Certain sources report that the old man was so overcome by fear for his own safety and that of his son that he became ill and very soon died. In real political terms Isaac had become such a feeble figure that he was no longer a credible ruler. There is some suggestion that he may already have been dead, but if this was not the case, it was undeniably convenient that he passed away so quickly. It is also possible that he received more direct assistance in his death. Robert of Clari wrote of strangulation, although this may have been just one of many rumours in the crusader camp.
The removal of Alexius and the emergence of Murtzuphlus polarised opinion in Constantinople. The palace officials and the Varangian Guard stood by the latest holder of the imperial title, while the masses continued to acclaim their own favourite, Nicholas Kannavos, a man whom Niketas Choniates described as gentle and intelligent and an experienced warrior. The tone of Niketas’s comments indicates that he felt Kannavos to be a superior man to Murtzuphlus, but soon the mood of the mob swung in favour of the latter: ‘Inasmuch as the worst elements prevail among the Constantinopolitans, Ducas [Murtzuphlusj grew stronger ... while Kannavos’s splendour grew dim like a waning moon.’6
In spite of his positive qualities, Nicholas quickly slipped from grace: it seems that Murtzuphlus’s control over the key elements of the hierarchy gave him a political base that his rival could not match. The Chronide of Novgorod relates that Murtzuphlus tried unsuccessfully to win Nicholas over to his side by promising him a prominent role in his administration if he were to step down. Perhaps Nicholas did not trust the other imperial claimant, or else he hoped that his own popularity with the people was sufficient to preserve his position. Faced with this rejection, Murtzuphlus soon acted to displace Nicholas. He offered rewards and honours to those who would endorse his claim and in the first week of February, as the fickle citizenry of Constantinople began to sense where the real power lay, he ordered the Guard to arrest his rival. Nicholas had remained in the Hagia Sophia, symbolically the heart of his authority. Murtzuphlus’s troops forced their way into the building, and the masses, who had so recently forced the imperial title on Nicholas, dissipated; no one defended him and a second emperor was cast into prison. The Devastatio Constantinopolitana reports that Nicholas was later decapitated. He had paid a heavy price for being a pawn of the capricious mob and had ruled for less than a week.
Murtzuphlus immediately signalled his aggressive stance towards the westerners by issuing a threat that they should depart within seven days or risk death. This was, in part, posturing to satisfy his own people and was unlikely to intimidate the crusaders unduly. Their hostile reply accused Murtzuphlus of treacherously murdering his lord (such rumours had evidently begun to circulate already) and warned him that they would not abandon the siege until Alexius was avenged and the full payment due to them was delivered.7
Murtzuphlus started his reign by reorganising the imperial administration : he swept away many of the officials who had worked under the Angeloi and rewarded his own supporters. One of those dismissed was Niketas Choniates himself, and this, together with the subsequent fall of Constantinople, does much to explain the writer’s largely hostile portrayal of the latest ruler of Byzantium. Niketas characterises Murtzuphlus as highly intelligent, but arrogant, deceitful and someone who worked in a way ‘that nothing that needed to be done escaped him and that he had in hand all issues’; in today’s language, he was, therefore, a control-freak.8 Niketas was especially critical of Philokales, Murtzuphlus’s father-in-law and the man who took over his own post of logothete of thesekreta,essentially the head of the Byzantine civil service. The author scathingly observed that his replacement did not sit with men of high rank and, by pretending to be afflicted with gout, he thoroughly neglected his duties - a performance that evidently horrified such a devoted and status-conscious bureaucrat as Niketas.
The new regime also inflicted financial hardship on Niketas. Because the imperial treasury was completely empty, Murtzuphlus turned to the leading families and officials of the Angeloi dynasty to provide cash. These people lost huge sums of money, simply confiscated by the emperor and applied to the defence of the city.
The Greeks feared that the crusaders would mount a second attack on Constantinople in the spring and Murtzuphlus therefore ordered that the fortifications be considerably strengthened. The Greeks also assembled forty petraries, stone-throwing machines, and placed them in the areas where they believed the assault was most likely to come from.
While Niketas had an intense dislike of Murtzuphlus, he was sufficiently conscientious as an historian to acknowledge the man’s personal bravery. On several occasions, armed with a sword in one hand and a bronze mace in the other, the emperor sallied forth to confront his enemies. There is little doubt that Murtzuphlus led from the front and did much to reinvigorate the imperial army.9 On one such occasion he captured three of the doge’s knights. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, our only source for this episode, relates how these men met a particularly gruesome fate. By way of trying to intimidate the crusaders, Murtzuphlus ordered the Venetians to be suspended from iron hooks on the walls. Psychological tactics were an important part of medieval warfare, and the firing of decapitated heads over the battlements of an enemy city was a familiar practice. The First Crusaders even catapulted captured spies over the walls of Jerusalem in 1099.10 Outside Constantinople comrades of the Venetians tried to win their freedom through offers of ransom and prayers for mercy, but to no avail. To demonstrate his abhorrence and contempt for the westerners, the emperor himself set them on fire—an act of shocking barbarity. The screams of the dying men and the stench of burning flesh pervaded the air and such a hideous spectacle must have stoked an implacable desire for revenge.11
In the short term, however, the basic struggle for survival became the crusaders’ most pressing priority. Murtzuphlus withdrew all the markets upon which the westerners had relied and it was impossible to enter Constantinople itself to buy food there. Robert of Clari, as a lesser knight, was more immediately affected by such hardships than the likes of Villehardouin and the other leaders. Robert provides figures for the cost of various basic commodities: a sestier of wine sold for 12 or even 15 sous, an egg for two pennies and a hen for 20 sous. On the other hand, Robert noted a surfeit of biscuit, enough to supply the army for some time.12 Robert’s figures mean relatively little to us without a context, but Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gives an indication of the level of inflation. He reported that three-day-old bread worth two Parisian dinars now cost 26 dinars! Some men were even forced to devour their horses, the very basis of a knight’s standing and military strength; truly this was ‘a time of great scarcity’.13
Soon the crusaders were compelled to roam far and wide in their efforts to gather food. Henry of Flanders led a body of men (30 knights and many mounted sergeants according to Robert of Clari), including James of Avesnes and the Burgundian knights Eudes and William of Champlitte, in an attempt to secure supplies. They left in the dark of an early evening to avoid detection and rode all night and the following morning to the town of Philia on the Black Sea. They succeeded in capturing the castle and plundered enough food to last the army almost a fortnight. The crusaders seized cattle and clothing, the latter a less obvious form of booty, but nonetheless invaluable when it came to surviving the winter months. As the westerners spent a couple of days enjoying the spoils of victory, some defenders escaped and fled to Constantinople where they told Murtzuphlus of these events. With his ascendancy to the imperial throne based upon an aggressive attitude towards the westerners, the new emperor was bound to strike hard at the enemy as soon as possible and he set out to intercept them.
He took with him the icon of the Virgin Mary. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gives the only detailed description of the object: ‘On this icon the Majesty of the Lord was wonderfully fashioned, as well as an image of Blessed Mary and the apostles. And relics were set in it: Therein is a tooth that Jesus lost in childhood, and therein is contained a piece of the lance by which He was wounded on the Cross, a portion of the Shroud, and relics from thirty martyrs.’14 The presence of this enormously revered icon must have given Murtzuphlus great confidence; Niketas Choniates wrote that the Byzantines regarded the relic as ‘a fellow general’.15
It was common for Christian armies to carry relics into battle: the crusaders in the Holy Land had taken the True Cross into all their battles between 1099 and its loss at the Horns of Hattin in 1187. Murtzuphlus was aligning himself with one of the greatest icons of the Orthodox Church and claiming her protection. He was also making plain his defence of that institution and showing that he had the support of its hierarchy in his war against the Catholic aggressors. Patriarch John X Camaterus, the senior figure in the Orthodox Church, accompanied the army to emphasise this point.
Murtzuphlus gathered a substantial force of several thousand warriors (4,000, according to Robert of Clari) and set out to track down the crusaders, who were moving slowly, in part hampered by the need to drive the cattle back to their camp. Murtzuphlus soon found and briefly shadowed them. He decided to attack the rearguard first. He watched the main force pass by escorting their prisoners and the captured animals and then, just as the crusaders, led by Henry of Flanders, were about to enter a wood, he sprang into action and rushed towards his enemy.
At first, the westerners feared the worst: seriously outnumbered, they called on God and the Virgin Mary to deliver them. But they quickly pulled themselves together and turned to face their opponents. A group of eight crossbowmen were set at the front of their troops in order to take the initial sting from the Greek onslaught. This must have had some effect, but the charge was not stopped and the two forces were soon engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The crusaders threw away their lances and drew their swords and daggers to better fight at close range.
A Spanish mercenary, Peter of Navarre, headed the Greek advance guard. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines gleefully records that Peter was so confident of success that he entered the fray bareheaded except for a golden crown. As the two sides locked into combat, Peter came up against Henry of Flanders, an experienced warrior and a skilled swordsman. The Fleming engaged his opponent and immediately aimed for his weak spot: with one accelerating, arcing blow, doubtless practised countless times in the court-yards of the comital castles of Flanders, he brought his sword down upon Peter’s head. The golden crown snapped and the sword buried itself to a depth of two fingers into the skull of the Navarrese. The power and discipline of the crusader cavalry again showed its superiority and soon the front ranks of the Greeks crumbled. By this time the western forces had been working together for more than a year: at Zara, Corfu, outside Constantinople, and on Alexius’s campaign in Thrace. They were polished and co-ordinated in a way that only direct battlefield experience could provide. By contrast, the Byzantine forces, a mixture of Greek nobles and mercenaries, lacked the cohesion and power to match their enemy.
As the battle intensified, the crusaders quickly penetrated to the senior men amongst the enemy. Theodore Branas was struck with a huge blow that dented his helmet and severely bruised him. Peter of Bracieux, who had already distinguished himself in the exchange outside the Galata fortress in July 1203, was again to the fore and here he decided to seek even greater glory by trying to capture the icon. Whether he saw Patriarch John from a distance and spurred towards him, or whether he simply found himself close by the Byzantine in the heat of the battle, is unknown. In either event, Peter’s heart leaped at the prospect of taking such a magnificent and important relic. The patriarch was said to be wearing a helmet and armour as well as his robes, although because Byzantine clergy were known not to bear arms this element of the story may well be untrue.16 In any case, as Peter closed in on him, he probably chose deliberately not to kill a man of such high standing. Nonetheless he dealt a fierce crack across the front of the patriarch’s helmet that caused him to fall from his horse and drop the sacred object. As it lay shining in the dust, Peter leaped from his horse to seize it and, while John knelt stunned on the ground, the crusader gathered the icon into his arms. When the other Greeks saw what had happened they howled in rage and turned all their efforts on Peter. They surged towards the Frenchman, but the crusaders reacted sharply enough, closed ranks around their comrade and then mounted a brutal counter-attack. Murtzuphlus was hit so hard that he fell over his horse’s neck; his men were thrown into disarray, and the Byzantine army broke and fled. So desperate was Murtzuphlus to escape that he threw away his shield, dropped his arms and spurred his horse into a gallop. He also abandoned the imperial standard—another humiliation for the emperor. While the Greeks had lost around 20 men, not a single crusader knight was killed in this engagement. Proudly bearing their great trophies, the westerners headed back to the camp.
News of the battle had reached the main army and a contingent of men prepared themselves to go to the help of their friends. As they hurried in the direction of the fray they were overjoyed to meet their comrades already coming victoriously towards them. Unsurprisingly the foraging party was welcomed with huge delight. When they approached the camp the bishops and clerics processed out to meet them and to receive the holy icon. Showing the deepest reverence they took it into their midst and entrusted it to Bishop Garnier of Troyes, a man who had already been to the Holy Land as a pilgrim. Garnier carried the icon back into a church in the camp and the clergy sang a divine service to celebrate its capture. In thanks for their victory, the crusaders donated the icon to the Cistercian order, whose abbots of Lucedio and Loos had provided such sterling spiritual and emotional guidance to the expedition. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines was himself a Cistercian monk writing in the county of Champagne where the abbey of Citeaux was located. He chose to record this story because he may possibly have seen or heard a detailed, or garbled, description of the object.
Not only had the foraging party secured a substantial amount of food, but it had dealt a terrible blow to the standing of the new regime. This was the crusaders’ first significant military success in months and it provided a massive and much-needed morale boost.
For Murtzuphlus, on the other hand, this was a crushing disappointment. Having looked to the Virgin for divine support and trusting in her power to defeat the crusaders, the loss of the icon was devastating. The westerners knew of its importance to the Greeks and naturally drew their own conclusions as to why Murtzuphlus had lost it. Robert of Clari commented: ‘They have so great faith in this icon that they fully believe that no one who carries it in battle can be defeated, and we believe that it was because Murtzuphlus had no right to carry it that he was defeated.’17 The emperor was painfully aware of this same possibility. The Virgin was felt to have a special affinity with Constantinople and the episode appeared to be a divine judgement on his rule.
To avoid this uncomfortable truth from being broadcast, he resorted to a desperate stratagem. In an outrageous misrepresentation of reality he asserted that he had been victorious in the battle. When asked the whereabouts of the icon and the imperial standard, he replied that they had been put away for safekeeping. After a little while it seems that this travesty gained some currency, but the purported outcome of the battle could not remain inside the walls of Constantinople for ever. Stories concerning the emperor’s claims of success and his denial of losing the icon and standard soon reached the crusader camp. The information must have provoked amazement at such bravado, and then a realisation that something had to be done to set the record straight.
The westerners had a rare opportunity to exert complete control over the situation. They decided to publicly humiliate Murtzuphlus by making plain the truth. The Venetians prepared a galley and placed the imperial standard and the icon prominently at the prow. Then, blowing trumpets to attract attention, they slowly rowed the ship up and down, alongside the city walls, displaying the objects to the astounded populace. The citizens recognised the icon and the banner: Murtzuphlus’s deception was exposed and many mocked him for his defeat and were angered by his lies. The emperor lamely attempted to explain away the episode and to rally support by promising that he would wreak vengeance on his enemies.18
Almost immediately Murtzuphlus tried to launch another attack with fire-ships, but this too failed. Recognising that his military efforts were proving bad for morale as well as inflicting little damage on the crusaders, he tried a less bellicose approach. On February he sent envoys to the crusader camp seeking a meeting with the doge. Murtzuphlus evidently regarded Dandolo as less closely bound to Alexius than, for example, Boniface of Montferrat. The doge was also widely respected for his wisdom and prudence.
Dandolo boarded a galley and was rowed up the Golden Horn to a point outside the monastery of St Cosmos and St Damian, just outside the city walls to the north. A squadron of crusader cavalry also crossed over the inlet and shadowed the negotiations. Murtzuphlus rode out from the Blachernae palace and came down to the shore where the two men exchanged views. Niketas Choniates and Baldwin of Flanders provide the two accounts of the meeting and, while both display predictably divergent viewpoints, the information they supply is fundamentally similar. Baldwin wrote that Dandolo was aware of the dangers in trusting a man who had already disregarded his oaths to his lord and cast him into prison, and who now disregarded the covenant with the crusaders. Nonetheless the doge sounded a conciliatory, if somewhat unrealistic, note by asking Murtzuphlus to free Alexius and to request his forgiveness. Dandolo also promised that the crusaders would be lenient on Alexius, attributing his foolishness to a youthful one-off lapse of judgement. Beneath this veneer of politeness lay a sense of threat, however. It was the crusaders who now seemed to be dictating the terms; it was Dandolo talking about being lenient and maintaining the peace. The westerners’ recent military successes and the extraordinary disarray within Constantinople gave them an ascendancy that a few weeks earlier would have seemed unthinkable. The real message behind the doge’s emollient tone was the crusaders’ demand that the Greeks hold firm to the agreement made by Alexius and provide the promised military support for the expedition to the Holy Land and the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome. Baldwin of Flanders stated that Murtzuphlus had no reasonable response to the doge’s propositions and that, in rejecting them, he ‘chose the loss of his life and the overthrow of Greece’.19
To Niketas Choniates, as a Byzantine, there was little that was reasonable about the offer. The repetition of these detested conditions, compounded by the demand of an immediate payment of 5,000 pounds of gold, was completely unacceptable. Niketas tersely characterised the crusaders’ terms as ‘galling and unacceptable to those who have tasted freedom and are accustomed to give, not take, commands’.20 In effect, the usurping emperor was being asked to stand down, to get his people to bow to the crusaders’ force, his city to strip itself of even more gold and his clergy to surrender their authority. It was inconceivable that Murtzuphlus could consider such concessions. If he agreed to the crusaders’ demands, his own power would probably flow back to Alexius, and the citizens of Constantinople, who had supported him on the basis of his resistance to the westerners, would simply turn against him and almost certainly kill him.
The usurper’s reluctance to give ground was communicated to the doge’s land escort, and the crusader knights suddenly charged at the emperor to try to capture him—not in itself an act of temperate high diplomacy. Murtzuphlus managed to wheel his horse around and escape back into the city, although a number of his companions were less fortunate and fell prisoner.
The situation had, therefore, reached an impasse. Mistrust and mutual antipathy brought war ever closer. Niketas assessed the relationship between the Greeks and the crusaders thus: ‘Their inordinate hatred for us and our excessive disagreement with them allowed for no humane feeling between us.’21
The breakdown of this attempt to find a peaceful solution to the struggle meant a slow, but inevitable, descent into a new and horrifying vortex of violence. The crusaders’ continued insistence on the reinstatement of Alexius illuminated Murtzuphlus’s most telling source of vulnerability Even in prison, Alexius still posed a potential threat to his rival emperor. In these circumstances the young man had to be eliminated: three times he was offered poison, three times he refused. Perhaps an innate sense of self-preservation prevented him from taking the hemlock, or perhaps he nursed a vain hope that his supporters might persuade the crusaders to rescue him. Nothing of the sort happened and, in the end, Alexius was slain. Murtzuphlus himself was said to have gone on 8 February to the dark prison cell in which Alexius lay and to have squeezed the life out of his rival, either with a cord or with his own bare hands.22 Baldwin of Flanders’s letter adds the gruesome details that, as the emperor was expiring, Murtzuphlus took an iron hook and ripped open the sides and ribcage of the dying man. This particularly colourful version of events may have been a rumour circulating in the crusader army—perhaps in an attempt to further blacken the name of the usurping emperor (or Judas, as Baldwin called him).23
Thus ended a brief but complex life. Alexius IV had been the catalyst for the most seismic changes in the Byzantine political system for centuries, but the forces that he had unleashed were impossible to control and now he had forfeited his life against his imperial ambitions.
Alexius’s death had to be explained to the people at large. Murtzuphlus spread word that the emperor had succumbed to an accident, and to try to bolster this impression he organised a state funeral in accordance with Alexius’s proper standing. Murtzuphlus performed splendidly at this event, as he mourned and showed the sorrow of a man regretting the passing of his former leader. It was, of course, all an act and once the ceremony was over he could get on with the business of planning how to deal with the crusaders.
To some the news of Alexius’s death was an immediate cause of suspicion, and Robert of Clari reported that a letter attached to an arrow was fired into the crusader camp informing them that it was murder. Some of the nobles professed indifference to Alexius’s fate because he no longer wanted to keep faith with them; others, more sympathetically, expressed regret that he had died in such a fashion. For Murtzuphlus, the price of killing his most important rival was to make himself even more detested by the westerners and provide an irrefutable justification for his removal.