Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (1) by John Julius Norwich (1995)

In February 1130 on the banks of the river Pyramus in Cilicia [the Emir Ghazi, ruler of the Danishmends] destroyed the army of young Bohemund II of Antioch in a total massacre. Bohemund’s head was brought to Ghazi, who had it embalmed and sent it as a gift to the Caliph in Baghdad. (p.72)

Raymond of Poitiers, on 28 June 1149, allowed himself and his army to be surrounded by the forces of the Emire Nur ed-Din. The consequence was a massacre, after which, Raymond’s skull, set in a silver case, was sent by Nur ed-Din as a present to the Caliph in Baghdad. (p.120)

Introduction

Lots of skulls are cut off and decorated. Lots of imperial pretenders are blinded. Lots of armies are massacred, populations sold into slavery and towns razed to the ground. Yes, this is the third and final volume in Norwich’s weighty and famous three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire which, in total, covers from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to the fall of the city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The second volume in the series ended soon after the catastrophic Battle of Manzikert of 1071, in which the Byzantine army was massacred by the new power in the Middle East, the Seljuk Turks, who had stormed out of central Asia to seize the territory of the old Persian Empire and replace the Abbasid Caliphate in 1055. This final volume takes the story from soon after that catastrophe on to the final collapse and conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

This is the longest of the three volumes (488 pages including index and lists of emperors, popes and sultans) for two reasons:

1. we have more sources for this period, including some book-length biographies of leading figures, so there’s more material to choose from
2. this book covers the period of the crusades (1st crusade 1096 to 1099, Second 1147 to 1149, Third 1189 to 1192, Fourth 1202 to 1204 etc through to the ninth crusade 1271 to 1272) and there are lots of sources about them, too

Permanent war

What struck me more than ever about this final instalment of the series is the complete and total dominance of war. It is all about war. There is never a year when the Byzantine Empire is not at war with at least one and often three or four major enemies. The book is, in effect, one long litany of wars, packed with details of key battles and sieges. In between actual campaigns, the time is filled with unending diplomatic manoeuvres and jockeying for power. Ceaseless.

Even within Constantinople, in the precincts of the imperial palace, relations between the emperor and empress and their respective families are seen, analysed and described solely in terms of power politics. Relations between husbands and wives and children and dubious uncles and scary guardians are told purely in terms of the endless struggle for power.

There is next to nothing in these books about Byzantine art or architecture, writing or poetry, let alone analysis of the empire’s economy, trade or technology. The emperors are continually giving away vast tributes to northern barbarians or huge sums of silver and gold to keep the Turks at bay, like Alexius Comnenus giving a vast bribe to the Holy Roman Emperor.

The first crusaders who were allowed into Constantinople were awed by the wealth and lavish lifestyle of the aristocrats, the beautiful buildings, the bustling markets packed with oriental goods and spices. And yet, after reading all three books, I’ve no real idea where all this wealth really came from.

In the introduction Norwich makes it clear that he is neither a scholarly nor an academic historian. He is a well-educated amateur setting out to write a gripping, exciting and entertaining story, ‘skating over the surface’ of this vast subject.

Fair enough but the endless warfare eventually made me start to question the very definition of ‘a good story’ and why it seemed to involve endless war. I assume that he and most of his readers, including me, think of a good political leader as one who avoids war and promotes the prosperity of their people. So it is oddly askew with modern values and morality, that Norwich again and again praises, as the best Byzantine emperors, the ones who diverted all available state monies to build up the army and navy and led them to ‘great’ victories. Big, tall, and strong, handsome and warlike, clever in diplomacy, resolute in war – this is the paradigm of the good emperor which Norwich holds out before us. And these are almost identical with the medieval values of the time.

Norwich’s definition of the great emperors is the ones who Made Byzantium Great Again. I know it’s anachronistic but… these are pretty much the same values espoused by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and numerous other ‘strong man’ politicians of our time.

There is something bizarre about the sight of a presumably peace-loving old buffer and devotee of Byzantine art and culture, again and again singing the praises of the most ruthless, strong-minded and militarily successful emperors… And I felt odd, as a reader, being continually exhorted to admire the victor of this or that great battle, to admire the big strong Varangian Guard who fought to the last man, to admire the efficient reorganising of the Empire’s finances to allow massive investment in the navy and army. Isn’t this precisely the kind of thing we criticise modern leaders for?

Timeline 1071 to 1204

The period is so dense with people and events I am only going to cover the first half in this review.

1054 The Great Schism The Latin Roman Church and the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicate each other.

1055 Loss of southern Italy to the Normans.

1071 May – Loss of Bari on the south-east coast of Italy, last Byzantine holdout, to the Normans.

1071 August – Byzantine army led by Romanus Diogenes defeated by the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan at the Battle of Manzikert. Permanent loss of most of Asia Minor.

1075 Loss of Syria to Muslims.

1087 Byzantines, under Michael VII, defeated in Thrace.

1095 Alexius Comnenus appeals to Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza for help against the Turks. Sows the seed of the First Crusade which the pope proclaims at the Council of Clermont.

1096 Crusaders arrive at Constantinople before crossing Anatolia and entering the Holy Land. Conflict, tension, and even low-level fighting between Latins and Greeks.

1099 The crusaders take Jerusalem, nominal goal of the expedition and proceed to establish four or so crusaders kingdoms – Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem – which collectively become known as Outremer.

1121 Byzantine reconquest of southwestern Asia Minor.

1144 Fall of Edessa to the Muslim army of Imad ad-Din Zengi, which prompts…

1145 to 1149 The Second Crusade announced by Pope Eugene III, and led by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany. The Second Crusade is a farce and a fiasco (‘a disgrace to Christendom’ p.101) in which the German army is massacred in Anatolia (nine-tenths were killed, p.96), and the survivors unite with the French army to besiege Damascus for five days, before giving up and going home, embittered.

1179 Byzantine Army defeated by the Sultanate of Rum at Myriocephalon. Hopes of regaining Asia Minor are lost.

1187 An Outremer army is massacred by Muslim Turks at the Battle of Hattin, after which Saladin reconquers Jerusalem and a swathe of other Crusader towns, leading to…

1189 to 1192 The Third Crusade, which results in a negotiated peace between the crusaders and Saladin.

1190 With the establishment of the kingdoms of Serbia and Hungary, the Balkans are effectively lost to Byzantium.

1202 The Fourth Crusade assembled at Venice.

1204 The Fourth Crusade captures and devastates Constantinople, leading to eighty years of rule by Latin emperors. The capture of Constantinople in 1204 was a blow from which the Byzantines never fully recovered.

Empires, migration and the movements of people

The other big thought this book prompts (apart from the constant warfare) was about the movement of peoples during this period, during the entire period of the empire and, indeed, during the entire period of the ancient and medieval world.

I have read quite a few modern accounts of the British Empire which highlight the ridiculousness of one nation or people ruling another one thousands of miles away, pointing out the absurdity of British soldiers from Scunthorpe and Sauchiehall Street policing the streets of Kuala Lumpur or Kenya – as if it was always against the natural order of things for soldiers from one land to police the streets of another, as if it’s always been natural that the people who live in a region should always rule themselves within mutually agreed and fixed national border.

But of course this is the wrong way round. A reading of history, especially classical and medieval history, shows you that the whole idea of the nation state is a relatively recent invention (and one which is still fragile and vulnerable in many parts of the world). Classical and medieval history show that the astonishing far-flungness of empires and the extraordinary and often bizarre transposition of peoples from one place to another within them are more like the historical norm than the exception.

Take the Roman Empire. Visiting Hadrian’s Wall a few years ago, I learned that it was policed by troops from Syria and Egypt. People of Italian stock guarded the border with Persia. People from the Middle East traded all along the north African coast, to Iberia and even up the coast of France to Britain. Saint Paul was able to travel all round the Mediterranean shore unimpeded.

Nearly a millennium earlier settlers from Phoenicia had established colonies all along the north Africa coast, including their greatest colony, Carthage, which grew to run an empire of its own and send armies up through Spain and over the Alps into Italy.

In the classical Greek period, the Athenian empire and other powerful city states conquered and set up Greek colonies all along the coast of Asia Minor and southern Italy. The dazzling ten-year career of Alexander the Great led to ethnic Greeks ruling Persia and Egypt for centuries.

Closer to the period covered by this book, I’ve always found it mind-boggling that it was the Vikings, during their period of sudden violent expansion in the 800s, who formed the nucleus of the kingdom of Russia:

Vikings between the 9th and 11th centuries, ruled the medieval state of Kievan Rus’ and settled many territories of modern Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. According to the 12th century Kievan Primary Chronicle, a group of Varangians known as the Rus’ settled in Novgorod in 862 under the leadership of Rurik. Rurik’s relative Oleg conquered Kiev in 882 and established the state of Kievan Rus’, which was later ruled by Rurik’s descendants.

And that a select group of Vikings was to form the original membership of the emperor’s legendary Varangian guard. And that a leading member of that Varangian guard was the same Harald Hardrada who, in 1066, led Danish forces in an invasion of northern England, to be defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. What extraordinary distances they travelled, and foreign lands they conquered or settled!

But it was news to me that in the 1080s the Varangian Guard was largely made up of Anglo-Saxon warriors who had been forced out of Britain by William the Conqueror. Which adds piquancy to the fact that, in 1081, the Guard was called upon, along with the rest of the emperor’s army, to do battle once again against the Normans – not the exact same Normans who had thrown them out of Britain, but relatives of the Conqueror who had, by now, seized control of Sicily and were being led by Robert Guiscard on an invasion of Illyria, what we now call the coast of Albania.

The Normans in Sicily

Yes, during the period of this book it is an important fact that Frenchmen from northern France (themselves originally descended from Viking invaders from Scandinavia) conquered Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean and only 40 miles from Africa.

They started off by fighting as mercenaries for local warlords and capturing scattered territories on the mainland until they had a base for the prolonged struggle to take Sicily from its Muslim overlords. This lasted from the time of the Norman Conquest until the eve of the First Crusade (1061-1091), such that at least one historian refers to it as the other Norman Conquest.

Eventually these Normans from the chilly climate of the English Channel would rule not only Sicily but all Italy south of Rome, such that Pope Innocent III confirmed the creation of a united Kingdom of Sicily on Christmas Day 1130 under its ruler King Roger II.

The Kingdom of Sicily (in green) in 1154, representing the extent of Norman conquest in Italy over several decades of activity by independent adventurers (source: Wikipedia)

But did these devout Christians, blessed by the pope, turn their attention to helping and supporting the Byzantine Empire, permanently threatened as it was by barbarian tribes from the north and the various types of Muslim (Arabs and an array of newly-arrived Turks) from the East?

Robert Guiscard attacks the Byzantine Empire 1081

No. They tried to invade and conquer the empire, sailing the short distance (50 miles) to the western Balkans (what we now call Albania) with the ultimate goal of seizing Constantinople and taking control of the whole Byzantine Empire. The Normans defeated the army of Alexius Comnenus at the siege of Dyrrhachium but then their leader, Robert Guiscard, was forced to delegate leadership and return to Italy because his patron, pope Gregory VII, was being besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome by the army of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Moreover, Alexius had allied with the Venetian Republic which didn’t need much prompting to realise that, if the Normans held both sides of the narrow strait of Otranto, they would be able to strangle Venice’s maritime trade. And so the Venetians sent a fleet to ally with the Byzantine fleet and attack the Norman one.

The book is like this on every one of its 488 pages, a dense jungle of military campaigns, diplomatic alliances, power politics and geostrategic planning, by a continually shifting cast of states and kings and emperors.

For the rest of the duration of the Kingdom of Sicily, it was just one more threat and enemy which the embattled Emperor of Byzantium had to factor into his diplomatic calculations and periodically fight off.

The Reconquista

Meanwhile, at the far west of the Mediterranean, north European knights were being led into the Iberian Peninsula to engage in the prolonged struggle to liberate Spain from Muslim rule. No historian I’ve read seems to question the right of Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula to set up a kingdom in central Spain, nearly three thousand miles away from their homeland (distance from Mecca to Madrid 2,800 miles) but it is, when you step back to consider it, every bit as bizarre as Syrians in Scotland or – 1,500 years later – Scottish soldiers in Delhi and Malaya.

In fact, wasn’t the Arab conquest of Persia, Egypt, North Africa and Spain every bit as violent, imperial and unjustified as the British conquest of India or Africa? The locals didn’t invite them in, didn’t ask to be forced to convert to an alien religion at sword-point, didn’t ask to be made to wear special clothes marking them out as inferior citizens. For some reason the Muslim invasion and conquest of the Middle East and North Africa is never questioned, and is passively accepted to this day.

Asian immigration

And behind the immense disruption caused by the Muslim invasions of the 600s and 700s, looms the even bigger Fact of medieval history from the 300s through to the 1500s – which was the wave after wave of invasions by violent, illiterate barbarians from the East –

• Germanic peoples like the Vandals, Huns and Alans, the Goths who split up into the Visigoths and Ostrogoths and conquered Spain and North Africa
• Slavic peoples like the Bulgars, the Hungarians, the Serbs, the Rus who seized modern Russia and the Balkans
• and then the Turkish peoples from central Asia, especially the Seljuk Turks who loom large in this story, not least because it was they who won the seismic battle of Manzikert
• but the Turks, in their eastern base at Baghdad, were themselves to be menaced by the arrival of Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes around 1200
• and then the whole region was to be scarified by the terrifying arrival of Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God, in the late 1300s

Endless war

At countless moments during the thousand-year saga of Norwich’s history, Byzantium feels like a rubber dinghy trying not to capsize in the face of wave after wave after wave of invaders and attackers. Non-stop war. Total war. Endless war, from the city’s birth in 300 until it was finally taken by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. As Norman Stone says, in his Short History of Turkey, the Turks have a lot of words for fighting, but then so, apparently, did everyone else: at one stage or other the emperor of Byzantium is at war with (from west to east):

• the Pope – at various points the pope in Rome supported military expeditions against Byzantium
• the Holy Roman Emperor – saw himself as rightful ruler of the entire Roman Empire so was always predisposed against Byzantium
• the Sicilian Normans – having conquered all south Italy, the natural extension was to cross the Adriatic and seize imperial territory, which they tried repeatedly to do in to 1000s, 1100s and 1200s
• the Venetian Republic – rival in maritime commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean and, eventually, Constantinople’s nemesis
• the Serbs – seize control of the west Balkans
• the Hungarians – continual threat from the central Balkans
• the Pechenegs – a semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia speaking the Pecheneg language and were threatening the empire by the 900s
• the Danishmends – a Torcomen dynasty (whose founder, the Emir Danishmend, appeared in Asia Minor about 1085) ruled in Cappadocia for about a century and disappeared after their defeat by the Seljuks in 1178
• the Armenians – after Manzikert the Seljuk Turks invaded Armenia, at the far eastern end of the Black Sea, so many Armenian refugees fled south and created the Armenian Kingdom of Cicilia at the point where the east-west coast of Anatolia turns sharply south into the coastline of Palestine. In this map from Wikipedia, note the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum to the north, the coastal strip of Byzantine territory (and Cyprus) to the west, the crusader County of Edessa to the east, and the crusader principality of Antioch to the south, the rest of the south-east belonging to the Muslim Turks.

The Barony of Cilician Armenia, 1080-1199 (source: Wikipedia)

• the Seljuk Turks – from their homelands near the Aral Sea, the Seljuks advanced first into Khorasan and then into mainland Persia, before eventually conquering eastern Anatolia. Here the Seljuks won the battle of Manzikert in 1071 and conquered most of Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire, which became one of the reasons for the first crusade (1095-1099). From c. 1150-1250, the Seljuk empire declined, and was invaded by the Mongols around 1260.
• the Crusaders – as described, presented a threat when they arrived at Constantinople en route to the Holy Land and then spent the next 200 years forming complexes of alliances with, or against, Constantinople, until the so-called Fourth Crusade devastated the city
• the Fatimid Dynasty – a Shia Islamic caliphate that spanned a large area of North Africa, from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and based in Egypt
• Saladin trying to establish his new dynasty

Reading this book made me think, ‘You know what would be interesting to read?’ A History of Peace. There must be thousands of books about this, that or the other war, and there are whole series of books about the weapons and uniforms and military tactics of particular armies, throughout history.

What about the idea of peace? Where did it come from? What thinkers have elaborated on it? Which leaders supported it? Where and why has it been most successful? What is the best way to preserve it?

The crusades

Norwich’s account of the crusades is riveting because it goes into such detail. There are broadly two types of history, the superficial and the detailed, and the superficial is always deceiving. It’s almost better not to read any history than to read a superficial account. Only detailed accounts really help you to understand the complexity of human activity so as to make it a) comprehensible b) less easy to judge. Like us, the people of the past were operating in difficult times, with limited knowledge and resources, and no idea how things would pan out.

Most other accounts of the Crusades I’ve read tend to skip over Constantinople’s role in order to get on to describing how the crusaders, having arrived in the Holy Land, set about fighting the Muslims (not, as I learned from Michael Haag, Muslim Arabs, but a changing array of Muslim forces including the Seljuk Turks who had recently arrived from Transoxiana and had taken over the region, as well as occasional forays up from Egypt which was ruled by the Fatimid Dynasty).

In contrast, Norwich’s account describes each successive crusade a) in great detail and b) from the point of view of the Byzantines which was simple: the Greeks really didn’t want hordes of barbarian Franks and Germans traipsing across Thrace, often raiding, sometimes ravaging the land, before arriving at Constantinople in a very threatening mood.

Norwich’s account shows how cannily the great emperor Alexius Comnenus (reigned 1081 to 1118) handled the First Crusade (1096-99) – using all his diplomatic finesse with the Western kings and princes (who each led a different contingent of crusaders by different routes as far as Constantinople) and, in particular, Alexius’s forethought in organising sufficient food and water to be available to his unwelcome guests.

Alexius wanted them to pass through Byzantine lands with as little disruption, raiding and looting, as possible. What they did when they got to the Holy Land i.e. the area around Jerusalem in the far south of Palestine, was up to them as long as they made obeisance to him and acknowledged his suzerainty of the Holy Land (for over a thousand years a Roman-controlled territory). Inevitably, many of the crusader leaders rejected the emperor’s authority, or acknowledged it while being hosted to lavish dinners in Byzantium, and then completely forgot it once they’d fought their way through Turks to the Holy Land.

One of the most revealing and interesting aspects of Norwich’s account is the way he shows how what are generally described as the First or Second or Third etc Crusades – as if they were well-organised, centralised, homogenous missions – in reality consisted of ill-assorted smaller armies led by very different rulers from very different parts of Catholic Europe, who often violently disagreed with each other.

For example the First Crusade consisted of four distinct forces, each of which led by kings who proceeded to have varyingly difficult relations with the empire. These separate armies travelled at different times, via different routes (some by land, some by sea), often getting massacred on the long land route across Anatolia, or caught and captured at sea by Muslim pirates. Even if they made it to the Holy Land, they squabbled and plotted against each other, conspiring and sometimes even fighting each other, and peeling off to set up their own independent counties and kingdoms (see map below).

Also, Norwich’s account makes clear that there were often other straggling armies which appeared in between the specific and numbered ‘crusades’ blessed by the pope – in 1101 a further four European armies turned up, which were not part of the ‘official’ crusade but had come for the same general purpose: a Lombard army of 20,000 under archbishop Anselm of Milan; a large group of French knights; a French army led by Count William of Nevers; and an immense Franco-German force under the command of William, Duke of Aquitaine and Welf, Duke of Bavaria. The Lombards joined up with the French knights, under the command of Raymond of Toulouse, marched into Anatolia where they captured Ancyra but soon afterwards were ambushed by Danishment Turks at a place called Mersivan where four-fifths of the army was massacred, and all the women and children (their families) accompanying them, were taken off as slaves (p.45).

Because this wasn’t part of any of the ‘official’ crusades, this kind of event isn’t mentioned in high-level histories – but it’s precisely the type of event which is vital for understanding the chaotic helter-skelter of events, and the conventions of the times – the very high level of massacring both in battles and sieges, and the universal acceptance of slavery – which run throughout the story. A detailed history always shows that human affairs are more chaotic than you expect, and than superficial, moralising histories can handle.

And there was, in addition, a continuous flux of conflict with enemies who may or may not have been blessed by the pope, for example the Sicilian Normans.

Alexius and all the succeeding Byzantine emperors were correct in their analysis that the Franks (the generic name given to anyone from the Latin-speaking West) didn’t come to bring peace and establish Christian hegemony, but, despite all their lofty rhetoric, behaved just like any other tribe or armed group, adding to the already complex mix of traditional Arabs (divided into the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt), the newly-arrived Seljuk Turks, the Turkish group known as the Danishmeds, the marauding nomadic Bedouin, alongside other warlike peoples such as the Armenians, or violent religious groups like the Druze and Alawites – all contributing to a continually changing matrix of alliances and enmities which have lasted, arguably, right up to the present day.

Norwich shows how the crusaders failed to establish one unified realm in the Holy Land, even after their famous capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Instead they divided the region up into separate kingdoms based on Jerusalem, Antioch and Edessa. These promptly started having dynastic quarrels and plotting against each other, exactly as their brothers and cousins were doing in in France, Germany and Italy.

This map (from Wikipedia) shows the Christian states which the crusaders set up, namely: the County of Edessa in the north, the Principality of Antioch (in blue), the slim County of Tripoli and then the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the south.

A political map of the Near East in 1135 CE. Crusader states are marked with a red cross (source: Wikipedia)

You can see how the crusader states were always literally surrounded by Muslim enemies (in shades of green), but also that the Muslims were divided into at least three entities: the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum to the North, which by now owned most of central Anatolia, the Great Seljuk Empire to the East, and the Fatimid Empire to the South.

The crusades were one among countless migrations and warlike expeditions

The point I’m making is that, if you read Norwich’s history of Byzantium from 300 to 1453, the biggest single impression it makes is of ceaseless conflict across the entire area of the Mediterranean and beyond, in fact across the entire known world – an endless chronicle of empire making and empire breaking, as waves of conquerors wash over all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea in which, every single year, some group or tribe or kingdom or principality or other is continually making war, invading, conquering and annexing other peoples.

In this context, the Franks from Paris or London or Mainz were just one more exotic group among many, many such groups, fighting and conquering their way around the great Inner sea, no more far-flung than the Roman Egyptians who fought in Scotland, or the Muslim Arabs who seized Visigothic Spain three thousand miles from their homeland, or the men from Normandy who ended up conquering Sicily and southern Italy, or the tribes from central Asia who ended up settling in Anatolia thousands of miles from their homes, or the Turks or the Mongols who all poured out of central Asia to conquer the Middle East and beyond.

Extraordinarily adventurous journeys of conquest were absolutely par for the course throughout this entire period. And if the Crusaders came blessed by their pope that wasn’t very different from Saladin declaring his wars of conquest to be a holy jihad in order to gather support from other Muslim dynasties who were (rightfully) suspicious of his motives.

And as to all the other rampaging armies of the time, most of them didn’t need or pretend to any highfalutin’ purposes. They just wanted to conquer, loot, rape and pillage and so, ironically, end up not being judged at all by our modern censorious age which reserves all its righteous ire and heavy moralism for the Christians alone.

The sack of Jerusalem in context

Western historians appear to judge the crusaders harshly, a criticism which focuses on the massacre which took place when the crusaders finally took Jerusalem after a siege in 1199. They are said to have massacred every Muslim and rounded the Jews up into the synagogue which they set on fire.

In his book on the Knights Templars Michael Haag makes the point that medieval chroniclers are not to be trusted when it comes to numbers. On numerous occasions chroniclers will give ludicrously inflated figures. This was because they wanted to make their chronicles exciting and gory. More seriously, most were religious men, monks, and considered history not a forensic examination of the truth, but a series of morality stories and lessons, generally about human folly compared to the wisdom of God. Therefore massacres in which the Christians suffered tended to be exaggerated in order to show the vanity of human wishes, while massacres the forces of God carried out tended to be exaggerated in order to show how the enemies of the Lord were righteously punished. In both cases the numbers are likely to be exaggerated.

But there’s another factor which, for me, tended to downplay the Jerusalem massacre which is that it is just one of many massacres of the period. This book is full of towns besieged and then, once finally stormed, put to the sword in which almost everyone is killed or sold into slavery. This happens scores of times, it appears to have been routine for the age, as well as the number of times a vengeful conqueror razes an entire town or city to the ground.

If you read widely in the history of this era, the so-called atrocities carried out by the crusaders at Jerusalem do not stand out but are just one more example of the general mayhem.

Devastation of the Balkans

In the 1090s Emperor Alexius was criticised because ‘first the Normans and then the Pechenegs had devastated an immense area of the Balkan peninsula, burning down towns and villages, killing thousands of their inhabitants and rendering many more thousands homeless’ (p.50)

The Norman sack of Rome

In 1084, the Norman warlord Robert Guiscard marched on Rome after receiving a plea for aid from his ally Pope Gregory VII, who was under siege by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Guiscard easily captured the city and rescued the Pope, but his soldiers were greeted as enemies by the Roman citizenry, many of whom had thrown their support behind Henry. When the people rose up against him, Guiscard crushed the revolt and allowed his men to indulge their lust for rape and plunder. Fires broke out across the city, and many of its inhabitants were butchered or sold into slavery. Some historians would later blame Guiscard and his Normans for demolishing many of Rome’s most priceless ancient monuments.

Devastation of Cyprus

In 1156 Reynald of Chatillon, Prince of Antioch, launched an attack on (Christian, Byzantine) Cyprus. The garrison was swiftly overcome and the Franks and Armenian soldiers carried out a three-week ‘orgy of devastation and desecration, of murder, rape and pillage such as the island had never known before.’ All the ships were filled with as much plunder as they could carry, the leading citizens had to ransom themselves and, if they couldn’t raise the fund, were carried off to imprisonment in Antioch, several Greek priests had their noses cut off and were sent to Constantinople in mockery of the emperor. ‘The island, we are told, never recovered’ (p.121)

Massacre at Edessa

Imad ad-Din Zengi (1085 – 1146) the Oghuz Turkish atabeg who ruled Mosul, Aleppo and Hama besieged the crusader city of Edessa in 1144. After the Muslims breached the walls ‘Zengi’s troops rushed into the city, killing all those who were unable to flee to the Citadel of Maniaces. Thousands more were suffocated or trampled to death in the panic, including Archbishop Hugh. Zengi ordered his men to stop the massacre, although all the Latin prisoners that he had taken were executed.’ (Wikipedia) Two years later the former crusader ruler of Edessa, Joscelin II, attempted to retake the city, and then to punch a hole in the Muslim forces to allow the Armenian population of the city to escape. This failed and the Muslim ‘troops massacred the fleeing Armenians and forced the survivors into slavery.’

The destruction of Brindisi

In 1156 the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I had despatched an army to conquer Norman-held southern Italy but the coalition fell apart and the force got stuck besieging Brindisi on the south-east coast. King William of Sicily counter-attacked and relieved Brindisi. The garrison which had held out bravely against the Byzantines was rewarded, but all his subjects who had joined the Byzantines were hanged, blinded or tied with heavy weights and thrown into the sea. The nearby city of Bari had surrendered to the Byzantines without a fight, and so King William gave the inhabitants two days to clear out their belongings and then razed the entire city to the ground, including the cathedral (p.115).

The mass arrest of Venetians

In early 1171 the large Venetian population in Constantinople attacked and largely destroyed the Genoese quarter in the city, whereupon the Emperor Manuel I Komnenos retaliated by ordering the mass arrest of all Venetians throughout the Empire and the confiscation of their property. There were also mass rapes and the burning of houses. Venice was furious, the authorities levied a forced loan which they used to build and man a fleet of 120 ships which sailed to attack Constantinople in September 1172 led by the Doge Vitale Michiel. However, while docked in Greece en route, the fleet was met by ambassadors from Constantinople who said their master had no wish for war and that a negotiated settlement could be reached. The Doge accepted and sent representatives of his own to the capital, sailing the fleet on to anchor at Chios. Here the crowded insanitary conditions helped foment a deadly plague which spread like wildfire killing thousands and leaving the survivors too weak to fight. Meanwhile his ambassadors returned to say they had been badly treated and spurned by the emperor who obviously had no intention of making a deal. Shattered and humiliated the Doge returned with what remained of his fleet to Venice. Unfortunately, the plague spread from his crews into the city itself. When he presented himself to the Venetian assembly it rose against him while a mob gathered outside baying for his blood. He slipped out a side door and made for the church of Saint Zaccaria but never made it. The mob set upon him and hacked and stabbed him to death. (p.131)

The Massacre of the Latins 

This was a large-scale massacre of the Roman Catholic (Latin) inhabitants of Constantinople by the Eastern Orthodox population of the city in April 1182. The Roman Catholics of Constantinople at that time dominated the city’s maritime trade and financial sector, breeding resentment, which came to a head when the emperor Manuel died and power moved to his widow, the Latin princess Maria of Antioch, who acted as regent to her infant son Alexius II Comnenus. Maria’s regency became notorious for the favouritism shown to Latin merchants and the big aristocratic land-owners, and was overthrown in April 1182 by Andronicus I Komnenus, who entered the city in a wave of popular support. Almost immediately, the celebrations spilled over into violence towards the hated Latins, and after entering the city’s Latin quarter a mob began attacking the inhabitants. The ensuing massacre was indiscriminate: neither women nor children were spared, and Latin patients lying in hospital beds were murdered. Houses, churches, and charities were looted. Latin clergymen received special attention, and Cardinal John, the papal legate, was beheaded and his head was dragged through the streets at the tail of a dog. The entire Latin community, estimated at 60,000 at the time by Eustathius of Thessalonica, was wiped out or forced to flee. The Genoese and Pisan communities were also decimated, and some 4,000 survivors were sold as slaves to the (Turkish) Sultanate of Rum.

The Sack of Thessalonica

In 1185 the Normans of the Kingdom of Sicily landed in Illyria and marched through northern Greece arriving at Thessalonica, the empire’s second city, in August was one of the worst disasters to befall the Byzantine Empire in the 12th century. The city governor failed to make sufficient preparations (food and water) for the siege while relief armies failed to co-ordinate, with the result that the Normans opened a breach in the walls and quickly entered the city, fighting degenerating into a full-scale massacre of the city’s inhabitants, with some 7,000 corpses being found afterwards. Coming on the heels of the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182, the massacre of the Thessalonians by the Normans deepened the rift between the Latin West and the Greek East. It also directly led to the deposition and execution of the unpopular Andronicus I Comnenus by the Latins and the rise to the throne of Isaac II Angelus. (p.149)

I’m not defending the Crusader sack of Jerusalem in 1099. I’m just saying that if you read this book, the sack of Jerusalem ceases to be a special and unique event, and takes its place as just one more among the horrifying list of massacres, pogroms, burnings, blindings, hangings and destruction of entire cities, which occur on virtually every page.

The one accusation you can make against the crusades in general and the sack of Jerusalem in particular is that they were carried out with the blessing of the pope, under high-minded and lofty claims of Christian superiority etc. But that is a playground accusation. Once again, a really thorough reading of the history of the period shows you that:

1. Christian values weren’t worth the paper they were written on – this is demonstrated by the repeated times when Christian states attacked other Christians states, when eye witnesses express disbelief that one set of Christians could be so cruel to another set, and ransack and desecrate their churches etc.

2. The famous crusades, the ones we read about, are not as unique as we’re led to believe. As well as the expeditions to the Holy Land, the pope also blessed ‘crusades’ against the Muslims in Spain, against the Sicilian Normans, and then against heretics, most notoriously the Cathars in the south of France. He also blessed ‘crusades’ against pagans in the Baltic and north-east Europe, such as the Wendish Crusade, and the crusading Teutonic Order which created a Crusader state in Prussia.

3. The question of the pope’s endorsement of these military adventures is also not unique or straightforward for three obvious reasons:

• throughout the period the papacy itself was a very troubled institution, with various opponents kidnapping popes or setting up alternative anti-popes who, at various points, excommunicated each other
• and this was because, although the papacy and its propagandists liked to present itself as unique authority, inspired by God etc, the actual institution was deeply mired in the power politics of the day, with the pope acting just as deviously as all the other kings and emperors of the time, in forging and breaking alliances to suit its own worldly purposes
• throughout the period the papacy was trying to establish itself as the sole source of Christian authority in the world, but this was never accepted by the entire Eastern church, let alone the splinter groups like the Jacobite church of the Copts who had survived the Muslim invasions.

4. And the pope – with such authority as he had – often deeply disapproved of crusader strategies and aims, going so far as to excommunicate crusader leaders when they obviously turned to purely worldly goals.

Therefore, to accept the ‘crusades’ as somehow uniquely representations of Christian ideology or culture, as representative of ‘the West’ or Western values, is to ignore their deeply complicated reality, and their always profoundly compromised nature.

To this reader, at any rate, the crusades were just arbitrary, mismanaged and quarrelsome military expeditions blessed by a religious leader who was only one among several sources of Christian authority, who was himself a deeply compromised, worldly, figure, which from the start were based on all kinds of worldly considerations (like the quest for land and wealth), and which – to repeat myself – do not stand out from, but fit seamlessly into, the world of endless wars and continual military expeditions, raids and wars of conquest which were going on every year, all across the Mediterranean, throughout the entire period.

Marriage as a diplomatic tool

One of the most basic ways of forging an alliance, of clinching an agreement between two alien peoples or nations, was through intermarriage. I’ve read feminists who claim that this embodied typical misogyny and sexism, and there’s no doubting that it was a fiercely male culture which valorised masculine virtues of warlike aggression and military success, and that daughters and adult women were married off by scheming male leaders of families.

On the other hand, it obviously takes two to make a marriage, and quite a few unfortunate sons also found themselves being married off to complete strangers from foreign lands who didn’t speak the same language, and who might not even be Christians. In other words – men could be used just as cynically as women were in marriage alliances.

For example, Robert Guiscard pledged his daughter to marry the young son of the Emperor Michael VII, Constantine, so she was packed off to Constantinople where she was renamed Helena and commenced a Greek education. All of which came to nothing when Michael was overthrown by Nicephorus III Botaneiates who was himself swiftly replaced by Alexius Comnenus. Feminists feel sorry for young Helena. Who is there to feel sorry for young Constantine?

I made a note of these marriage alliances.

• Michael VII wrote, rather desperately, to Robert Guiscard offering the hand of is new-born baby son, Constantine, to any of Robert’s daughters which he chose
• Alexius Comnenus marries Irene Ducania, granddaughter of the Caesar John Ducas, the uncle of Michael VII

Immersing yourself in the era begins to change your perceptions (which, for me, is part of the point of reading history) and began to make me appreciate the importance of these marriage arrangements and then, of wider family ties.

At some point I had a sort of epiphany and realised that – there was actually nothing else by which to organise states. There was no framework of international law, there was no United Nations signed up to commonly agreed protocols and standards, there was no one to appeal to.

In this sense medieval rulers lived in a much more existential condition than most of us realise. Abandoned on the planet, surrounded by enemies, with absolutely no international bodies to appeal to… they had only their wits and the resources to hand to defend themselves… and family ties emerge as the most solid, enduring ties which could be understood by all sides. In a sense, family connections were to the medieval ruler what international treaties and agreements are in our age – an internationally understood language which transcended all boundaries.

Taking this idea further, I realise that, in the complete absence of anything like democracy, in the absence of the complex paraphernalia of the democratic state which has taken us in the West getting on for 200 years to evolve, and which still doesn’t work perfectly – in the complete and utter absence of any other notions of how to validate rule and authority – then the concept of family becomes absolutely central. Authority is best passed down through what anthropologists call ‘kinship ties’, ties of blood or marriage.

And the concept of ‘family’ actually turns out to be very flexible. The relationship of marriage is easy for us to grasp, and similarly the notion of direct, blood family. But it was a feature of pre-modern societies that they also had the strategy of ‘adoption’ in a different sense from ours. Rulers could ‘adopt’ people from completely different bloodlines in order to incorporate them into the line of authority.

This had begun way back with the first Roman emperors. Thus, after Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, his will revealed that he had adopted Gaius Octavius Thurinus as his adopted son and heir. Octavius (who assumed the title Augustus) formally adopted his stepson and son-in-law Tiberius to succeed him.

One thousand years later the basic idea remained the same. Empires were run by families who went to great lengths to establish dynasties by having sons they could pass power on to but, if no sons appeared, by legally ‘adopting’ suitable heirs. Thus the odd sight of the empress of Byzantium, Maria of Alania (1054-1118) who was first married to Emperor Michael VII Ducas and, then to his usurper, Nicephorus III Botaneiates, adopting the promising young general Alexius Comnenus even though he was only five years younger than her. Indeed, when he came to power and installed Maria in the imperial palace, most observers thought he had taken her (his ‘mother’) as his mistress, which caused not only popular discontent, but caused a confrontation with his mother, the powerful Anna Dalassene. She pointed out that Alexius had already made a tactical marriage to Irene Doukaina, granddaughter of the Caesar John Ducas, the uncle of Michael VII, whose support had been vital in Alexius’s coup against Nicephorus III Botaneiates. His relationship with the empress Maria was now alienating the very powerful Ducas clan and so – faced with political reality – Alexius began his (long and successful reign) by backing down, packing Maria off to a convent, installing Irene in the palace and having her formally crowned new empress by the Patriarch. Ducas family honour was restored. Alexius resecured the backing of his supporters.

In our modern Western democracies change is mostly effected via the ballot box at elections (although not always: in recent times both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, when in power, have changed leaders without consulting the broader population (the handover from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, and from David Cameron to Theresa May, or Theresa May to Boris Johnson) and this and a great deal of other political manoeuvring and backroom politicking come down to exactly the same calculations and scheming as we read about in the Roman and Byzantine Empires.)

The massive difference is that modern political scheming is limited by a) the rule of modern law (which prevents assassination, exile, ritual blinding and so on) and b) the rules governing how power is acquired and administered in complex, bureaucratic modern democracies.

To read a book like Norwich’s you have to have a reasonable feel for the rules and conventions of modern society – and then throw them all out. Make the imaginative leap to a world where absolutely none of those rules or conventions applied. The only really limiting factors on the emperor’s power were:

1. The strictures of the church, of the Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople who often, as a result, ended up being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, banished and sometimes murdered if he didn’t agree with the ruling emperor.
2. The people – having no formal mechanism to express their opinion (no free press, no votes) discontent had only one way of expressing itself which was in rioting.

Anyway, the conclusion is that all the palace politicking, and coups, and overthrows weren’t because people in the East or the Middle Ages were different from us, they weren’t the result of especially notable Machiavellianism and cruelty – they came about because it was the only system they had. It was the only way of managing power (if you had it) and scheming to get power (if you didn’t).

And the real point I’m making is that people in the Middle Ages were no different from us. They just operated in a political, religious and cultural world which was vastly different, which they were acculturated to, which they took for granted. Just like we take our modern world and its values for granted. But none of this is fixed and stable.

The point of studying history is that, really grasping this fact helps us to both understand them and their times, but also sheds new light and depth to understanding our own times and what makes our time so distinctive and special.

And – one of my perennial themes – the study of history underlines again and again that human nature does not change: it is just the rules and conventions under which humans behave which change. And this fundamental datum explains why, when the rule of law collapses, people immediately revert to the most barbaric ‘medieval’ behaviour – in Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Syria, in Ukraine.

It is because the Middle Ages are always with us, but just suppressed. Long may they stay suppressed.

Women in the Byzantine empire

Women played a key role in this power politics but it is too simplistic to say they were victims. The empress Maria was, after the death of her first husband, Michael VII, in 1090, the most powerful figure, especially in adopting young Alexius. But then power shifted to Alexius’s mother, Anna Dalassene, who proceeded to show him what was what, regarding the powerful Ducas clan. Norwich’s narrative is, in fact, liberally dotted, with surprisingly strong and powerful women (surprisingly, if you buy modern feminist propaganda that all women, ever, in all of history, have been helpless victims of the patriarchy).

A selection of the strong, independent women mentioned in the text:

Sichelgaita (1040 to 1090)

A Lombard princess, daughter of Guaimar IV, Prince of Salerno, and second wife of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia. She frequently accompanied Robert on his conquests and commanded troops in her own right, for example at the Battle of Dyrrhachium in 1081 where Anna Comnena tells us that Sichelgaita wore full armour and rallied Robert’s troops when they were initially repulsed by the Byzantine army and were in danger of losing cohesion.

Anna Comnena (1083 to 1153)

Alexius’s daughter, Anna wrote the verse epic praising her father, The Alexiad, which is one of the prime sources of information for the period. She led several conspiracies to have her brother, John, who succeeded from her father, Alexius, as emperor, overthrown in favour of Anna’s husband, Nicephorus Bryennios in 1118. The conspiracy was discovered by John who only sent his sister to a convent.

Anna Dalassene

Alexius’s mother.

The empress Maria

The one who adopted young Alexius.

Alice

Daughter of King Baldwin of Jerusalem, was married off to Bohemond II, Prince of Antioch. When he died in 1130 fighting against Danishmend Emir Gazi Gümüshtigin during a military campaign against Cilician Armenia (and Gümüshtigin sent Bohemond’s embalmed head to the Abbasid Caliph), Alice should have waited for her father, Baldwin, to appoint a successor. Instead, she appointed herself regent. When she learned that her furious father was marching north to Antioch, Alice sent a message to Imad el-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul, offering him a prize horse and homage in return for being allowed to be princess of Antioch. The messenger was intercepted and executed and Baldwin arrived outside Antioch whose doors Alice refused to open. Eventually, one night, some of Baldwin’s supporters opened the gates and let the army in whereupon Baldwin, forgave Alice and banished her to her country estates.

Eleanor of Aquitaine

One of the legendary queens of the Middle Ages, accompanied her super-religious first husband Louis VII of France on crusade but then decided he was too stiff and pious and so secured a divorce from him and married Henry II of England – ‘one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe during the High Middle Ages’.

How things were done in the twelfth century i.e. cruelly and brutally

How popes were elected

Just as Cardinal Roland of Siena… was being enthroned in St Peter’s as pope Alexander III, his colleague Cardinal Octavian of S. Cecilia suddenly seized the papal mantle and put it on himself. Alexander’s supporters snatched it back; but Octavian had taken the precaution of bringing another, into which he now managed to struggle – getting it on back to front in the process. He then made a dash for the throne, sat on it, and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV. (p.132)

How emperors were overthrown

After Manuel Comnenus died in 1180, his widow Maria of Antioch ruled as regent for their son, but was unpopular because she was from the Latin West. Several coups were attempted and foiled until the emperor’s cousin, Andronicus Comnenus, who was well into his 60s, raised troops and marched on Constantinople being welcomed as saviour in 1182, his arrival at the city sparking celebrations which degenerated into a pogrom against all the Latins the mob could get their hands on.

Andronicus swiftly eliminated all his rivals, having the dowager empress imprisoned and strangled, and then arranging for young Alexius to be ‘accidentally’ shot to death with arrows. His reign degenerated into a rule of terror, turning the population against him. In summer 1185 King William of the Norman Sicilians invaded Illyria and began marching east on the capital. Characteristically, instead of organising an army to match the Normans Andronicus’s first reaction was to order the execution of all prisoners, exiles, and their families for collusion with the invaders. When his lieutenant moved to arrest Issa Angelus, Angelus resisted arrest, fled to Santa Sophia and rallied a crowd of supporters which set out to overthrow the tyrant.

Andronicus tried to escape with his young wife but was caught by the mob and for three days he was exposed to their fury and resentment, being tied to a post and beaten. His right hand was cut off, his teeth and hair were pulled out, one of his eyes was gouged out, and boiling water was thrown in his face, punishment probably associated with his handsomeness and life of licentiousness. At last he was led to the Hippodrome of Constantinople and hung by his feet between two pillars. Two Latin soldiers competed as to whose sword would penetrate his body more deeply, and he was, finally, torn apart.

Thus ended the Comnenus dynasty.

Latins versus Greeks

Simmering resentment against the commercial success and diplomatic machinations of the Venetian Republic came to a head in 1171, when the emperor Manuel Comnenus passed a decree placing all Venetian citizens under arrest and confiscating all their property.

The real hatred the Venetians now harboured for the Byzantines completely explains the shambles of the so-called Fourth Crusade, when the Venetians were contracted to build a huge fleet to ferry the crusaders to attack the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt. When only a quarter of the promised number turned up the Crusaders refused to pay the amount promised to the Venetians and things might have turned nasty… until the Venetians proposed a compromise: they would write off the crusaders’ debt if the crusaders helped them attack and seize ports on the Adriatic coast opposite Italy, a region still nominally under the control of the Byzantine Empire. Although the pope threatened to excommunicate them if they did so, and many crusader leaders had doubts or pulled out of the expedition, the leaders on the spot agreed and so the crusade turned into a war of conquest of byzantine Dalmatia. It was only a small step from there to persuading the crusaders (with offers of money and arms) to fulfil the Venetians’ dream and attack Constantinople itself. Which is what took place, under the absurd guise of the ‘fourth crusade’.

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Posted by Simon on June 2, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/02/byzantium-the-decline-and-fall-john-julius-norwich/