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The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009) (1)

Because it comes with the bright orange and white spine of the new-style Penguin histories, and because it said ‘New Edition’ on the front cover, I hadn’t quite grasped that the main body of this hefty 700-page history of Latin America was completed by 1990. The new edition is ‘new’ because it adds a 40-page chapter at the end, summarising events in Latin America between 1990 and 2008.

The text is divided into three big parts:

  • The Age of Empire pp. 3-192 (189 pages)
  • The Challenge of the Modern World pp. 195-310 (115 pages)
  • The Twentieth Century pp. 313-566 (253 pages)

Note how the section on the 20th century, plus the forty pages of the ‘new’ chapter, is as long as the first two parts put together. Here, as everywhere, the more recent the history, the more of it there is, the more people there have been (the higher the population) and the more records have been kept, until we reach the present age where every phone call, every text and every photograph anyone in the world takes is recorded and stored.

Conquest of the Aztecs and Incas

Williamson dives right in with the early, legendary history of the Aztecs, when they were a group of nomads traipsing round central Mexico, before they established the largest empire in pre-Colombian America around 1400. Their only rival was the Inca Empire, down in modern-day Peru.

There is, of course, a lot to say about both, but the thing that struck me was the way both of them were empires carved out by one particular tribe or ethnic group which subjugated all their neighbours, and demanded tribute in food, precious metals and slaves (some devoted to grisly human sacrifices).

Both generated complex religious ideologies accompanied by fascinating and complex theories of time – that it moved in cycles and was marked by moments of great significance – but the bottom line was that both the Aztec ruler and the Inca emperor believed they derived their authority from the gods, and were backed up in this conviction by the class of priests and the warrior castes which surrounded and defended them.

Of course the vast majority of the population was peasants, mostly living in abject serfhood, who slaved away for their entire short, unhealthy lives, producing the surpluses which paid for the elaborate costumes and rituals and treasures passed up to their rulers. And the entire populations of conquered tribes, for both the Aztecs and Incas lived by war, and by conquering, subjugating and exploiting neighbouring peoples.

The other striking thing was their backwardness. Both Aztecs and Incas, and all the hundreds of other tribes scattered across central and south America, were illiterate. The Aztecs and Incas had no written language, just a primitive system of markers, and so the important knowledge about the stars and the gods was handed down by word of mouth, and hence the semi-divine regard for the caste of priests who, alone, knew this vital celestial information.

They didn’t have the wheel, nor beasts of burden – no horses or donkeys or camels or bullocks. Therefore they had to carry everything by hand. It is staggering to realise that the awesome Inca city of Machu Picchu was built by massive stones, carried 2,430 metres above sea level, by human power alone.

All this was doomed to come crashing to an end when the Europeans arrived. Williamson describes in detail the four successive voyages of Christopher Columbus, his first landfall in 1492, the chaotic mismanagement of the first islands he and his men settled – Hispaniola – the slow, establishment of colonies and extension of Spanish rule onto neighbouring island, and then, 27 years later, Cortez’s expedition to the mainland against the Aztecs (1519-21).

The eeriest thing about Cortes’s conquest of the Aztec Empire, and then Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in 1532, is the theory that the rulers of both empires were too puzzled and confused by the invaders to respond adequately. They couldn’t believe these little gangs of a few hundred men were serious about planning to overthrow their empires of tens of thousands of warriors – but they couldn’t figure out what it was they really wanted. Williamson attributes the conquistadors’ success partly to guns and horses but shows that in both cases, the conquerors really had very few – when Pizarro finally met with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in nothern Peru, he had a force of just 110-foot soldiers, 67 cavalry, three arquebuses and two falconets.

More decisive was the Europeans’ superior grasp of strategy, in particular realising that the empires they were encountering were themselves highly stressed, riven by faction fights or stretched by the continual need to control their subject peoples. The Spanish made alliances with enemies and groups wishing to be liberated. They were good at building coalitions.

He doesn’t say it in so many words, but the idea emerges that the Europeans triumphed because they were just more intelligent about strategy and warcraft.

The role of European diseases

Then there’s our old friend disease. As explained at length in Jared Diamond’s classic 1997 study Guns, Germs and Steel, wherever European explorers went they took with them the infectious diseases which, over thousands of years, we had built up immunity to – but which ravaged native populations which had no immunity to them.

This view is reinforced by the revisionist history of America told by Alan Taylor in American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001). In this Taylor explains how the entire native civilisation of the Mississippi valley was wiped out by diseases, most probably smallpox, brought by a few shipwrecked Spanish sailors to the mouth of the Mississippi delta but which then spread catastrophically so that when, a century later, the first Anglo-Saxon explorers entered the region, they discovered entire cities with complex layouts, large palaces and temples and canals… all abandoned and overgrown by forest.

Indeed, Pizzaro’s job of conquering the Incas was made easier because the Incas were themselves in the middle of a bloody civil war, which was complicated by the fact that not one but two rival claimants to the throne had died from smallpox. Over the decades after the Spanish arrived, there was a catastrophic collapse in native populations caused by the invaders’ diseases. Some experts estimate as much as 90% of the native population of Mexico was killed by European disease within fifty years.

Still, Williamson is always at hand to say that in this, as in everything else, the reality on the ground, and across such vast areas as all of Mexico, Central America and Peru, were far more complex and uneven that contemporaries and many historians realise. Many many other areas of the continent remained relatively untouched and life went on in the same old way, only now you had to pay a tribute of your produce to a new boss, who wore armour and rode a horse.

The geographic limits of Spanish settlement

The book is packed with thought-provoking ideas and insights. I was fascinated to understand more about the geographic limits to the spread of Spanish rule.

When the Anglo settlers arrived in North America in the 1600s they found it relatively easy to spread out into New England and all along the Atlantic coast. But the Spanish, having established their key centres of administration in Mexico City and Lima a century earlier, with waystations and ports in the Caribbean, found it difficult to expand beyond them. Why?

North of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which the invaders had renamed Mexico City, lies a vast area of arid desert – the territory which centuries later would become Arizona and New Mexico – where the Spanish explorers discovered nothing but impoverished villages of Indians surviving on subsistence agriculture.

Over to the east there were repeated attempts to explore the peninsula they named ‘Florida’, but the Spanish found it consisted of endless everglades with few settlements and nothing to plunder.

Heading south, the Spanish took over the coastal strip west of the Andes, conquering the Inca empire, but found the Andes mountains themselves too high to settle. Only a handful of expeditions went over the Andes to explore east. Williamson describes these expeditions, which got lost in the vast Amazon rainforests, and encountered only the most primitive tribespeople, if, indeed, they lived to tell the tale.

So, in a nutshell, central and south America were more difficult for the Spanish to settle than North America would turn out to be for the Anglos. And this explains the quite startling fact that some parts of South America – Williamson singles much of the interior of what is now called Argentina – weren’t really settled at all until the 20th century.

The other factor which limited the area of settlement was the Spaniards’ motivation. The conquistadors were adventurers, often from the very lowest parts of society. No nobles or aristocrats ventured their lives in the New World. Poor youngest sons of noble families led gangs of criminals and proles. None of them were the type of people who wanted to stake a claim and build a farmhouse and work the land – as the Anglo settlers were to do up north a hundred years later.

Instead, the Spanish wanted to exploit and loot as much wealth as they could from the New World before returning home and buying land, a house and a title. They came to loot. And here’s the important thing – you can only loot people who are already rich. The Spanish took over the two big empires, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru, because an infrastructure was already in place whereby the native emperors and the upper class exploited large numbers of peasants in a well-organised system. The Spaniards simply took over the system, co-opting the best of the agricultural produce and all the treasure and artefacts for themselves.

It is this factor – the Spanish approach to colonisation – which explains the limited and very patchy nature of Spanish settlement. In the deserts of north Mexico, and in the south of the area they named California, were only desert dwellers, scraping a subsistence living from the soil by dint of elaborate water works. Nothing to steal. In Florida, endless swamps inhabited by scattered villagers. Nothing to steal, and no ‘society’ worth taking over. Ditto the Amazon rainforests. Nothing like an organised society whose power structures and tributes they could simply appropriate.

The Spanish only settled where there were established and relatively advanced societies which they could parasite onto.

How the Reconquista mindset was applied to the New World

Williamson lays out with beautiful logic and clarity just how that imperialist approach to colonisation had arisen in Spain.

It is an enormous historical coincidence that the year that Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, 1492, just happened to be the very same year that – after nearly 800 years of war and crusade – the Spanish finally kicked the very last Muslim Moorish presence out of the south of Spain. (Muslim forces had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to seize Spanish territory way back in 711 – the fightback is traditionally dated to their first defeat by Christian forces, in 718 – and it took nearly another 800 years, of slow painstaking battles and piecemeal conquest, for native Christians, sometimes fighting alongside Christian warriors from the rest of Europe attracted by the periodic ‘crusades’ against the Muslim –  to finally expel all the Muslim chiefs, emirs and so on from the final southern enclaves.

The point of this historical background is that expelling the Muslims from Spain wasn’t achieved by a modern-style mass army, and in a few years of continuous campaigning – but by ad hoc campaigns led by local Spanish warriors and adventuring knights, which liberated bits and pieces of territory, over a very long period of time.

As and when they seized territory from the Muslims, they applied to the king to rule it. (Spain itself was a very fractured entity, with a number of different kingdoms. It was only as the Reconquista reached its conclusion that the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon with Queen Isabella of Castile united most of Spain’s territory to form the basis of one unified Spanish monarchy.)

Sometimes large areas of land would be conquered and the new lords were granted what were known as latifundia, originally a Roman word describing a vast agricultural estate. The new owners co-opted the existing inhabitants as serfs to work the land, but often much of the original or Muslim population had fled and so the lords had difficulty filling them with workers and had to advertise for new workers to come in.

The point is that the Reconquista established a model for settling new lands, freshly conquered from the infidel, which was then applied wholesale to the new territory discovered by Columbus and his Viceroys across the ocean, and by the conquistadors and adventurers who followed them.

The Reconquista established the pattern of the monarch granting complete control over large swathes of territory, and all the people on it to, the conqueror or adelantado who had seized it. This resulted in a handful of rich swaggering lords riding among the large population of impoverished peasants working vast areas of land. In the New World it became known as the encomienda system and the grant holders encomenderos.

In fact it was a bit more complicated than that: the native Indians remained, nominally, free subjects of the Crown, which awarded encomenderos the right to enforce labour from the natives, but not complete power of life and death over them. That was the theory, anyway.

Williamson – once he has reported the main military and political events of the conquest – moves briskly on to discuss in considerable detail, this and all the other legal and administrative measures which the Spanish implemented in their new lands.

In fact, the ‘excitement’ of the narrative of Columbus’s voyages and the initial conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas which open the text, might give the reader quite a misleading impression of the book. Williamson is much more a historian of constitutional and administrative systems than he is a chronicler of exciting battles and against-the-odds expeditions. A lot of this book is quite dry. But he develops the constitutional and legal aspects of the conquest in such detail that, to my surprise, the conflicts between the settlers, and in particular between the Viceroys appointed to govern the new provinces and the monarchy back in Spain – and between both of them and Catholic church – at moments become quite gripping.

The Crown protects the Indians One counter-intuitive learning is that the Spanish crown, right from the start, was concerned about protecting the rights of the native Indians, indeed became their chief protector.

As Spanish adventurers opened up new territory and conquered more and more native peoples, the monarchs became concerned to make sure they were not simply enslaved. Queen Isabella personally forbade the enslavement of the natives, and a series of ‘Laws of the Indies’ tried to stem abuses wherever they were found. Encomenderos may have enjoyed almost complete power over the populations of their vast estates, but Spanish laws commanded them to also set up schools and hospitals, to educate the Indians, protect them from wars and raids, and to enact justice. This effort continued for the rest of the 16th century, for example with the ‘New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians’ of 1547, which explicitly forbade all forms of enslaving the native population. The New Laws prompted violent opposition among the oligarchies of Spanish settlers.

The Church takes the Indians’ side It’s also surprising to read about the broadly sympathetic line taken by the Catholic Church. The Pope and the Catholic organisations which sent cohorts of missionaries out to the New World took the line that these were people made in God’s image, like us, with souls that needed saving. Certainly, some of the first cohort of priests accompanying the conquistadors helped in the wholesale destruction of priceless documents and artefacts which they considered pagan and devilish. But within a generation, a new wave of clerics began for all kinds of reasons to take the native Indians’ side, deploring their brutal exploitation by amoral Spanish lords.

On a pragmatic note, they also realised they couldn’t convert the natives by preaching at them in Latin or Spanish, and undertaking ‘mass baptisms’ where the Indians didn’t have a clue what was going on. So a whole project was undertaken to learn more about the natives’ languages, which quickly extended into documenting their histories and beliefs. Most of what we know about native Indian religion and history derives from these records taken down by Christian missionaries.

The classic figure of this type was Bartolomé de las Casas, initially a coloniser himself, who became a Dominican friar and spent the last 50 years of his life fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of indigenous peoples. He was appointed by the Spanish crown the first ‘Protector of the Indians’, an administrative office responsible for attending to the wellbeing of the native populations, a function he enthusiastically carried out and which included speaking on their behalf in law courts and even reporting back to the King of Spain in person.

In 1550, Bartolomé participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (the noted Spanish Renaissance “humanist”, philosopher, theologian, and… er… proponent of colonial slavery) argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that the Indians were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was morally, legally, and theologically, unjustifiable. Las Casas is a hero (not a perfect hero, but by the standards of his own time a d brave and determined protector of the people.)

Williamson gives a long and detailed account of the numerous legal initiatives launched by the Crown to try and protect the Indians from exploitation, but in the end they all failed. No amount of legal or theological argumentation could avoid the fact that the Spanish remained the ruling caste with one law for them, while the Indians remained a separate caste, subject to completely different laws. Williamson calls them the Republic of the Spaniards and the Republic of the Indians.

And nothing could alter the simple fact that, on the ground, most of the laws designed to protect the Indians were ignored by the settlers, who looked after each other’s interests.

Theories of conquest and bureaucratic structures

I could have done with more about where the silver was discovered in the New World, and the technology of how it is mined and purified. We are told that mercury was vital to the purification process, but not really how or why. I had to google it to find out. He does eventually have three pages on the silver mines (two on gold-mining), but in general Williamson is light on that kind of thing, on technology, and on the diverse resources of the region.

Instead, as the book settles into its stride, you realise that Williamson is going to devote most of his energy to the legal and theological justifications of Spanish rule along with detailed descriptions of the bureaucratic structures the Spanish set up.

Thus there is a long passage explaining how the theory of monarchy evolved in Spain from its late-medieval form to the theory which underpinned the role of Philip II as head of an empire which stretched from California to Sicily. He explains the role of the Catholic Church as a vital prop to royal authority, and gives long explanations of the laws and the administrative structures set up to run the colonies.

He explains the main theories by which the Spanish justified their conquests, both to themselves and to the rest of the world (especially to their critical opponents in the Protestant world). There were two main ones:

  1. The well-established Law of Conquest, by which one ruler conquers another and is allowed to seize his land and titles, which had been worked out over long centuries of theological and legal debate during the Middle Ages.
  2. The more modern notion that the Crown of Spain had a ‘right’ to rule the Indians because the Europeans would convert the natives to Christianity and so save their souls. This was accompanied by a kind of sub-argument, which many missionaries put forward: that the New World represented an opportunity for Christianity – which had, by the early 1500s become widely associated with corruption and worldly ambition – to start again. Here, in the Garden of Eden, were a new kind of Adam and Eve, a First People uncorrupted by the Old World, and one thread of early colonisation is the devout wishes of the early missionaries to create a Christian Paradise on earth. Of course it was not to turn out that way; the secular settlers – and the terrible European diseases – made sure of that.

How the silver was squandered

Williamson does, however, clarify something which has always puzzled me, which is – if the Spanish monarchy began receiving ever-increasing amounts of silver from the New World (as the result of great silver strikes in North Mexico and Peru in the 1540s), how come Spain steadily declined in power and influence in the century and a half after the conquest?

Indeed, Williamson points out that by the death of Philip II in 1598, Spain was technically bankrupt and had experienced state bankruptcies (i.e been unable to repay its debts) in 1557, 1560, 1569, 1575, and 1596!

Where did the Spanish silver go? The answer turns out to be simple: Paying for Spain’s wars.

Even though it never accounted for more than 20 per cent of imperial revenues, silver was the fuel that drove the Spanish war machine. (p.106)

Philip II’s father had been Holy Roman Emperor and when Philip came to the throne in 1556, he inherited responsibility for territory in every continent known to Europeans – from the extensive empire in Central and South America to the newly conquered territory of the Phillippines, from the kingdom of Naples and Sicily in Italy, to the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands which began a protracted war of independence against Spanish rule in 1568. Not only this, but Philip saw himself as the defender of all Christendom in its wars against the Ottoman Turks in the East. He it was who organised ‘the Holy League’, bringing together ships from Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta, to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1567.

Philip also saw himself as the defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the shocking new Protestant heresy. Thus Philip gave large financial support to the Catholic League fighting the Protestants in France, and then went directly to war with the French King Henry IV, an intervention which secured the future of France as a Catholic country.

Last but not least, as we Brits know, Philip II built, armed, provisioned and manned an enormous armada which was designed, with the blessing of the pope, to conquer England, overthrow the Tudor dynasty and the Church of England, and impose Philip as the Catholic ruler of a Catholic Britain.

So that’s where the silver, hacked out of dangerous and unhealthy mines in the New World by Indian slaves and serfs, ended up being spent. Funding the impossible ambitions of the over-extended Spanish monarchy.

Spain went into decline because of proliferating military commitments for which it could not pay. (p.116)

Related links

Related reviews, mainly about Mexico

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by Simon on August 9, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/penguin-history-of-latin-america-edwin-williamson/

Collecting histories: Solomon Islands @ the British Museum

The Asahi Shimbun displays

As you walk up the stairs and into the main entrance of the British Museum it’s easy to miss the room immediately on your right, hidden behind the tide of visitors pouring in and out.

Officially room number three, since 2005 this smallish room has been devoted to displays sponsored by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun.

The idea is to showcase single or small groups of objects from the Museum’s vast collections, focusing right in on a particular object or set of objects or region or era. It’s a kind of lucky dip into the Museum’s bottomless store of treasures and wonders. Since 2005 the room has hosted more than 40 displays. My favourite was the mummified crocodile from ancient Egypt, which was displayed along with a fascinating explanation of the place of crocodiles in Egyptian mythology.

The Solomon Islands

The current Asahi Shimbun Display focuses on the Solomon Islands. There’s a map showing you their location in the Pacific, and wall labels describing their history before Europeans arrived, the story of their conquest and colonial administration, and then events since independence from Britain in 1978.

We learn that the Solomon Islands is an independent country of six large and many small islands, home to about 80 ethnic groups whose distinctive cultures are represented in many colonial collections around the world.

I was surprised to learn that, although the islands became steadily more enmeshed in patterns of global trade during the 19th century, it was only in 1890 that they became a British Protectorate. After 90-odd years of British governance, Christian missions and colonial plantations, the Solomon Islands became independent in 1978.

Many people these days have moved from the remote islands to the capital Honiara on Guadalcanal Island to take advantage of its jobs and facilities. Most Solomon Islanders are now Christians, children and grand-children of pagans successfully converted by European missionaries – but still very close to their tribal histories and traditions.

It’s because of this British imperial connection that the British Museum has such an important collection of native objects and historic photos from the Solomon Islands.

Objects from the Solomon Islands

The maps of the islands are good, the old photos are sort of interesting, but it is the half dozen or so native objects which fire the imagination. These include:

A bird net float The Lau people, living on islands in the coastal lagoons, used consecrate bird floats on special nets to catch fish for festivals celebrating the ancestors. After use these powerful and dangerous objects were hung up in the priest’s house. Priest Kailafa of Ferasubua Island gave this bird float to Anglican missionary Arthur Hopkins in 1903, who later sold it to a collector, who then bequeathed it the museum.

Bird net float from the Solomon Islands, late 19th century

A large carved ‘figure of an ancestor’ This image of an ancestor belonged to a shrine at Munda in the New Georgia group of western Solomon Islands. People prayed to these ancestors for spiritual support and protection, so their memorials were sacred and precious. This figure was among artefacts taken from homes and shrines by the crew of HMS Royalist in 1891. The captain later sold it to the British Museum.

Figure of an ancestor, 1890s

Carved wooden canoe figurehead During the colonial period the islands continued to export its a fairly narrow range of raw materials including plantation crops, timber and fish. But it was interesting to learn that before, during and after the British Protectorate, the islanders also made a healthy living selling visitors their hand-carved and decorated artefacts.

Trade boomed after the Second World War which saw the rise and rise of speciality tourism and then mass tourism. The islanders responded by producing increasing numbers of masks and sculptures carved in the traditional way and inlaid with pearl shell, to create striking designs such as this canoe figure-head. This example, made by the craftsman named Bala of Butana, was bought by a British Museum curator in an art shop in 2004.

Canoe figure-head (nguzunguzu) of wood with pearl shell inlay, 2004

This, in a way, was the most interesting learning. We all know that a lot of the artefacts in the British Museum were looted, stolen or swindled off the original owners. It’s a surprise, and goes against that whole narrative of colonial guilt and imperial injustice which is now received opinion, to learn that some of them were just — bought at gift shops 🙂

Summary

The display is not really worth a trip in and of itself. But if you’re passing nearby, or certainly if you’re visiting one of the museum’s big exhibitions, it’s always worth taking a moment to pop into Room 3 to find out what random objects and subjects the Asahi Shimbun display has pulled out of the British Museum’s bottomless trove of treasures.

Related links

Reviews of other British Museum exhibitions

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by Simon on July 29, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/29/collecting-histories-solomon-islands-the-british-museum/

Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Good God this is one of the most wonderful, uplifting, informative and visually fabulous art exhibitions I’ve ever been to!

In 1925 Scottish wood engraver Iain Macnab set up the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, a private British art school, in his house at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico, London. He ran it with Claude Flight and, although it taught many skills, including composition, design and dance, it was Flight’s course in making prints from linotype which made it famous and, eventually, gave rise to the term the ‘Grosvenor school’ of prints.

Linoleum was regarded as a cheap, industrial material, and the technique of printing with it seen as an introductory skill, useful for teaching children, maybe, but no more. But Flight thought it presented the opportunity to create simplified and stylised images which reflected the speed and angularity of modern life. He is quoted as saying it had no tradition behind it, unlike traditional methods of print-making, where the artist was always looking over their shoulder worrying how Dürer or Rembrandt would have done it.

Carving lino was easier and cheaper than carving wood, requiring far fewer specialist tools. And, in line with the school’s bohemian principles, Flight thought lino could be used to create prints cheap enough for the working man and woman to afford, that it could and should be ‘an art of the people for their homes’.

Usually two to four blocks are cut, each containing different elements of the design, and then printed in sequence onto fine Japanese paper, each block printing a different element and colour in the final design.

It was the 1920s – the Jazz Age – and the school operated amid the heady mix of Art Deco in design and architecture, combined with the Modernist impulse in art which had found its purest expression in the short-lived Vorticism and Futurism from just before the Great War.

Vorticism was invented by the artist Percy Wyndham-Lewis and the poet-publicist Ezra Pound, and combined the formal experiments of French cubism with the dynamic machine-worship of Italian Futurism. The first room of the exhibition includes some prime examples of Vorticism from during the Great War, by leading exponents like Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Flight had studied alongside Nevinson at the Slade School of Art, so there is a direct biographical and stylistic link, with Flight absorbing Futurist ideas about how to convert the movement, energy and speed of urban life into images characterised by simplification, stylisation and dynamic lines and curves.

It was almost worth the price of admission to see these Vorticist works alone. I nearly swooned. I love to distraction their depiction of angularity and energy. Seeing not the skull beneath the skin, but the machine-like aspects of the human anatomy, men marching to war like robots, townscapes morphing into geometric patterns, everything becoming hard, technological, everything organic turning into engineering.

Tempting to show an example, but this exhibition is about the Grosvenor school. What Flight and his two lieutenants and then a suite of students did, was take the really mechanistic hardness of Vorticism-Futurism and give it a human face, somehow making it feel warmer, more likeable. Many of their designs became instant classics.

This exhibition brings together 120 prints and sketches, posters, woodcuts and lithographs, along with magazines, articles, exhibition programmes and some of the tools used in carving the lino, to create a joyous overview of the Grosvenor school tradition of lino printing, to show us the range of subject matter they covered, and to introduce us to the ten or so main exponents of lino print-making, displaying many of their greatest hits, and helping us learn to distinguish between their subtly different styles.

The Big Three

Claude Flight pioneered the new approach and look. Here’s a very early example, from before the school was even founded, of his style. Regent Street is turned into simplified curving architecture, and the passing buses are linked by curvilinear lines which emphasise the dynamism of their movement.

Speed (1922) by Claude Flight © The Estate of Claude Flight. Photo © Elijah Taylor

Cyril Power lectured in architecture but also became a prolific and characteristic lino printmaker. Each colour in this design will have been carved on a different block. Look at the amazingly dynamic effect created by the swirling lines both above and below the merry-go-round, and by the whizzing effect of the passengers closest to us whose bodies have been changed by their speed, from vertical humans to horizontal blurs of movement.

The Merry-Go-Round (c.1930) by Cyril Power © The Estate of Cyril Power. Bridgeman Images/ photo The Wolfsonian–Florida International University

Sybil Andrews worked as the school secretary but was already a craftswoman and artist in her own right. Andrews emerges as very nearly the star of the entire show. Good God, she had an extraordinary eye for converting everyday scenery and activities into Art Deco stylised images of extraordinary vim and energy!

Concert Hall (1929) by Sybil Andrews © The Estate of Sybil Andrews. Photo: the Osborne Samuel Gallery, London

These three have the most prints on display and sustained activity throughout the 1920s, 30s and into the 1940s, when Power and Andrews were commissioned to create poster for London Transport, creating images of Epsom Races, Wimbledon or racing at Broadlands, which are gloriously on display in the final room of the show.

More peripheral figures

Most of the prints on display are by Flight, Power or Andrews. But they are set among works by half a dozen others.

The Australian women Three young women artists travelled from Australia to Pimlico to study with Flight and power. They were: Ethel Spowers (1890 – 1947), Eveline Syme (1888-1961) and Dorrit Black. Their works are scattered throughout the exhibition, and are generally slightly softer and less angular. Slightly. It varies. Here’s Spowers.

Wet Afternoon (1929-30) by Ethel Spowers © The Estate of Ethel Spowers. Photo: Osborne Samuel, London

Eveline Syme recorded a visit to Italy in prints. There was a wall of these and they were very pretty but – to my mind – lacked the fizz and energy of the pictures set in London or England. They could be illustrations from a straight travel book.

Outskirts of Siena (1930-1) by Eveline Syme. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Spowers, Black and Syme returned to Australia and became instrumental in organising exhibitions and promoting the school in their homeland. The exhibition includes some prints depicting the vast, open spaces of the Outback in the Grosvenor school style.

Lill Tschudi (1911–2004) Tschudi was Swiss. Although she depicted activities, work and sport as much as the others, Tschudi’s images have a distinctive quality of their own. From the evidence here, they were less curved and dynamic, and a little more blocky and static, the colours a little more pastel.

Gymnastic Exercises (1931) by Lill Tschudi © The Estate of Lill Tschudi, courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery New York. Photo: Bonhams

Tschudi has half a dozen works on display. Much less well represented, fleeting presences among the main participants, are a handful of works by two men, William Greengrass (1898 – 1972: a wood engraver, sculptor and became a curator at the V&A) and Leonard Beaumont.

Greengrass is represented by this picture of a young family on a beach holiday. It certainly is stylised, it has an abrupt angularity. But it doesn’t – to my eye anyway – have any of the energy and dynamism of the classic Power and Andrews works.

Windmills and Balloons (1936) by William Greengrass. Photo: Bonhams/ © The Estate of William Greengrass. All rights reserved, DACS 2018

Beaumont is represented by a small number of works which seem to owe more to Art Deco vibe than many of the others, in the straightforward way they depict women’s bosoms.

Whereas nudity is conspicuous by its absence in the works of Flight, Power and Andrews, in both the most memorable works by Beaumont on show here, lithe, nubile women are lender and athletic, like countless thousands of other slender, topless, female sculptures and statuettes during the Art Deco heyday.

Nymphs, Errant by Leonard Beaumont (1934) Photo Museums Sheffield/ © The Estate of Leonard Beaumont

Work and sport

In one of the most interesting wall labels I’ve ever read, the curator – Gordon Samuel, one of London’s leading specialists in Modern British painting – explains major social changes which took place in the 1920s and 1930s. This was the passage of legislation which limited the length of the working day, and of the working week, and created a number of bank holidays when all workers were allowed to down tools and relax.

The direct result of this legislation, and the seismic change it brought about in the work habits of most of the working population, was to create leisure industries.

Cinemas and dance halls saw a boom in business and were built across the land. But just as significant was the explosion of interest in sports of all kinds. These ranged from the posher end – tennis and horse racing – through new motor sports like motor racing and speedway racing, through to a surge of health and fitness activities among the young. I live near a lido, in fact I’m going swimming there later this afternoon. Like most of Britain’s lidos it was built in the 1930s, in a wonderful Art Deco style, as part of the boom in sports and healthy activities. (This was the decade when the Ramblers Association was founded [1935], from which we have many photos of healthy young chaps with walking socks and hiking boots and knapsacks and pipes heading off into the Lake District.)

The energy and competitiveness of sport naturally played to the Grosvenor School style, and there are numerous examples here of dynamic, colourful depictions of exercise, sport and fitness.

Speed Trial (c.1932) by Claude Flight © The Estate of Cyril Power. Photo Osborne Samuel Gallery London / Bridgeman Images

Not only sport and leisure, though. The 1930s was a highly politicised decade when many artists and intellectuals responded to the Great Depression by adopting socialist or communist politics, and by creating all kinds of works which explored the hitherto occluded world of the working classes. Think of George Orwell travelling to Wigan Pier and going down a coalmine, or the work of the Mass Observation sociological movement, or the poetry of W.H. Auden which celebrates machines and work.

Flight wanted to create ‘an art of the people… an art expressed in terms of unity, simplicity and of harmony’, and he, Power and Andrews created some striking images of hard, manual, physical labour – particularly well done in a sequence of five magnificent prints by Sybil Andrews.

Sledgehammers (1933) by Sybil Andrews

I like dynamic, semi-abstract art of the Vorticist, Futurist type. But I also respect art which manages to capture the reality of work, the kind of hard physical labour which men and women have spent so much of their lives performing, for so many millennia.

Andrews and Power emerge as the most consistent creators of strong, striking designs, with Andrews probably the better of the two – very close – a fun topic to discuss after seeing the show. But the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi also created some really bold images of men at work. (Note the obvious contrast between the studied angularity of Tschudi’s figures and the razor straight telegraph wires, and the dynamic curves of the figures in the Andrews, and the way the background is entirely stylised to emphasise the energy and activity of the working men.)

Fixing the Wires by Lill Tschudi (1932)

The exhibition culminates with two rooms dedicated to London and its transport system, with a suite of vibrantly evocative images of the Tube, with its escalators, lifts, winding staircases and dynamically curved platforms. Power and Andrews were commissioned by Frank Pick, the Managing Director of London Underground in the 1920s and ‘30s, to create a set of posters publicising sporting events people could reach by Tube. Most of the resulting posters are on display here, along with preliminary sketches and draft works, giving you a fascinating insight into the works in progress.

God, this is an absolutely brilliant exhibition, not only because of the consistent quality of the works on display – all of them are good, and many of them are outstanding – but also because of the fascinating light it sheds on London and English social history between the wars. What’s not to love?

The Tube Station (c.1932) by Cyril Power. Photo: Osborne Samuel Gallery, London © The Estate of Cyril Power

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The Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward (1978)

There is full many a man that crieth “Werre! Werre!”
That wot full litel what werre amounteth.

(Geoffrey Chaucer, captured in France on campaign with Edward III in 1359 and ransomed – with a contribution of £16 from the king)

The hundred years war lasted more than a hundred years

The Hundred Years War did not last a hundred years, it was really a sucession of conflicts between successive kings of France and England which are generally agreed to have started in 1337 and trundled on until a final peace treaty in 1453 (same year that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks).

It see-sawed between prolonged periods of war, and long periods of truce

The ‘war’ was periodic, blowing hot and cold, with long periods of peace or truce – for example, there was peace between the Treaty of Brétigny of October 1360 and a new outbreak of hostilities in June 1369, and an even longer lull between 1389 – when Richard II signed a peace treaty with Charles VI of France – and the renewal of hostilities by Henry V and continued by his successors from 1415 until the final collapse of English possessions in 1453. Modern accounts divide the war into three distinct periods of conflict:

  1. Edwardian phase (named for English King Edward III) 1337-1360
  2. Caroline phase (named for French King Charles V) 1369-89
  3. Lancastrian phase (named for the House of Lancaster which came to the throne with Henry IV, and renewed the war at the wish of his son Henry V) 1415-53

What gives the long sequence of battles and campaigns a conceptual unity is that between 1337 and 1453 the King of England made a formal, legal claim to the crown of France. For much of that period successive English kings styled themselves King of England and of France. 

Historical origins of the war

The deep background to the war is of course the fact that William of Normandy invaded and conquered England in 1066, and his successors ruled not only England but Normandy and an ever-changing constellation of states, duchies and princedoms scattered round northern France.

It was Henry II who, by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, expanded the northern realm by bringing this huge area of south-west France under ‘English’ rule, thus expanding the so-called Plantagenet Empire to its fullest extent. In this map everything in pink was controlled by the Plantagenet king and amounted to just over half the nominal territory of France.

Plantagenet possessions in France in 1154 (source: Wikipedia)

Alas, Henry’s second son, King John, managed to throw away almost all this territory, through mismanagement, bad alliances and military defeats, and his successors – notably Henry III (1216-72), Edward I (1272-1307), and Edward II (1307-27) – lived in the shadow of the loss of the empire’s once-huge extent in France, and made spasmodic attempts to revive it.

Edward III’s claim to the throne of France

It was King Edward III, who ascended the throne as a boy in 1327 but then seized power from his guardians in 1330, who took the bull by the horns.

When the French king Charles IV died in 1328 without a son and heir the nobles of France had to decide who to succeed him. Edward’s claim was that he was the son of Isabella, sister to Charles IV. However, the French nobles, understandably, did not want to hand the crown to the English and chose to emphasise that the French crown could not be handed down through the female line – so they chose instead Philip VI, a cousin of the recently dead Charles IV.

Philip’s father had been a younger brother of a previous king, Philip IV, and had had the title Charles of Valois. Thus the throne of France passed to the House of Valois (having previously been the House of Capet).

Edward, only 16 when all this happened, was under the complete control of his mother and her lover, Roger Mortimer, who were allies with the French crown, who had indeed needed the support of the French king to overthrow Edward’s ill-fated father, Edward II, and so who made no protest and didn’t promote boy Edward’s claim.

It was only once he had himself overthrown Mortimer and banished his mother, and securely taken the reins of power, only in the 1330s, that Edward III got his lawyers to brush up his claim to the French throne and make a formal appeal for it. But it was, of course, too late by then.

Relations between the two kings deteriorated, and the road to war was marked by numerous provocations, not least when Edward happily greeted the French noble Robert of Artois who had, at one point been a trusted adviser of Philip VI, but then was involved in forgeries to secure the duchy of Artois, and forced to flee for his life.

This offensive gesture led King Philip to declare that Guyenne (another name for Aquitaine, which the English had held on and off ever since Henry II married Eleanor) was now forfeit to Edward i.e. no longer his. This triggered a formal letter from Edward III objecting to the forfeiture of Guyenne, and in which Edward  formally lay claim to the throne of France.

A maze of powers and alliances

Almost any summary of the war is likely to be too simplistic for two reasons. One, it went on for a very long time with hundreds of battles, sieges, campaigns, on land and sea, each of which deserves a detailed account.

But – two – I was also struck by how many kingdoms, dukes and princes and whatnot got involved. Just in the early stages in the 1330s and 1340s, you need to know that Edward sought alliances with the Count of Flanders up in the north-east of France, and also tried to ally with the dukes of Burgundy on the eastern border. He also tried to get on his side the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. Early on (1341) there was a civil war in Brittany between two claims to the title of Duke of Brittany, one backed by Edward, one by the French, and this degenerated into a civil war which went on for decades. Normandy – once the base of the Plantagenet empire – was, and then was not, allied with Edward.

In other words, France was far more fragmented an entity than the England of the day, and this made for a very complex kaleidoscope of shifting alliances. It’s broadly correct to speak of the king of England trying to secure the crown of France but that doesn’t begin to convey the complexity of the situation.

And that’s without Scotland. The king of England was always worried about what the Scots were doing behind his back which was, basically, to invade the north of England whenever the king of England was busy in France. It didn’t take much brains for the French to renew a sequence of pacts and alliances with Scotland to provide men and munitions to encourage their repeated invasions, renewing the ‘Auld Alliance’ which had first been made during the time of the aggressive ‘Hammer of the Scots’, Edward I, in 1295.

The same goes, to a lesser extent, for Wales and Ireland, which periodically rebelled against English rule, and which required armed expeditions, for example the large army which Richard II led in person to put down Irish rebellion and force Irish chieftains to submit to English overlordship in 1394.

And Spain. Spain also was divided into warring kingdoms and these, too, got drawn into the complex alliances north of the Pyrenees, which explains why, at various moments, the kingdoms of Castile or Navarre became involved in the fighting. Castile, in particular, allied with the French king and provided ships to the French fleets which repeatedly harried and raided ports on the south coast and attacked English merchant shipping going back and forth from Flanders (wool) or Guyenne (wine).

Famous highpoints

For the English the high points are the early, Edwardian phase of the war, featuring the two great battles of Crécy (26 August 1346) and Poitiers (19 September 1356) where we heartily defeated the French, plus the sea battle of Sluys (24 June 1340) where we destroyed an invasion fleet anchored off modern-day Holland, and the Battle of Winchelsea (29 August 1350) where a British fleet just about defeated a Castilian fleet commanded by Charles de La Cerda.

The Caroline phase 1369-89 marked the slow disintegration of the English position in France, latterly under the unpopular King Richard who, in 1389, signed a long-term peace.

Then, after a very long lull, Englishmen like to remember the Battle of Agincourt in 25 October 1415, fought as part of a prolonged raid of northern France undertaken by King Henry V, but this was just part of Henry V’s sustained campaign to conquer France, which was continued after his early death in 1422 by his brother John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, and others, until England had complete control of all Normandy and even Paris.

But this is, of course, is to forget the various achievements of successive French kings during this period, and to underestimate the importance of the fact that France descended into civil war (the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War) from 1407 to 1435, partly because it was ruled by a completely ineffectual king, Charles VI, also known as ‘the Mad’ (1388-1422). It was only because France was completely divided and that we allied with the powerful Burgundians, that we managed to seize and control so much of northern France.

As soon as Philip of Burgundy defected from the English cause by signing the Treaty of Arras with Charles VII and recognising him (and not the English Henry VI) as king of France, the rot set in and the period from 1435 to 1450 marks to steady decline of English landholdings and influence in France, ‘a protracted rearguard action by the English in France’ (p.235).

Famous characters

The protagonists of the Hundred Years War are among the most colourful in European history: King Edward III who inaugurated the Order of the Garter, his son the swashbuckling Black Prince, and Henry V, who was later immortalized in the play by Shakespeare. In the later, Lancastrian phase, I was impressed by Henry V’s brother, John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, who took over control of the war and acted as regent to the baby Henry VI, and to the great commander of the day, Sir John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, known as ‘Old Talbot’, ‘the English Achilles’ and ‘the Terror of the French’.

On the French side there were the splendid but inept King John II who was taken prisoner at Poitiers and died a prisoner in London; Charles V, who very nearly overcame England; Charles VI who went spectacularly mad; and the enigmatic Charles VII, who at last drove the English out – not to mention Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, who died aged just 19 but whose legend was to grow enormous.

The war also features walk-on parts from King David II of Scotland, who was captured when the Scots army was defeated at the Battle of Neville’s Cross on 17 October 1346, and spent the next 11 years in captivity in England. And Peter the Cruel, king of Castile and León from 1350 to 1369 who lived up to his nickname, and whose daughter married Edward’s son, John of Gaunt, who thus became heir to the crown of Castile.

And Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, who proved a thorn in the side of the French crown because of ancestral lands he owned near Paris. The deeper you read, the more complex the web of personalities and players becomes.

Seward’s account

Seward’s book is a good, popular account, which includes family trees explaining the complex genealogical aspects of the war and is dotted with black and white reproductions of paintings, tomb effigies and brass rubbings of the main protagonists.

He describes all the military campaigns and diplomatic manoeuvrings behind them. The book includes interesting sections about the arms and ammunition of the day (English longbows versus French crossbows) and brings out the uniqueness of the English tactics which lay behind our early victories, namely the tactic of having mounted archers who were able to ride into position, dismount, and then release volleys of arrows at such a rate (ten per minute!) that the sky turned dark and the attacking French was slaughtered.

But I just happen to have read Dan Jones’s account of the Plantagenet kings and, although Jones’s book is also popular in intent, I felt it gave me a much clearer sense of the machinations going on in English politics at the time. Take the reign of Richard II (1377-99). Once you start looking into this 22 year period, it reveals a wealth of issues which lay behind the two big political crises of 1386–88 and 1397–99. Only by reading the 40 or so pages that Jones devotes to it did I develop a feel not only for why Richard was against war with France and signed the peace treaty of 1389 and married his child bride (Isabella of Valois, aged just seven when she married Richard), but why there continued to be a powerful War Party among the top aristocracy, which continued to promote raids and attacks on France.

Seward conveys some of this, but his account of Richard’s period of the war lacks the depth and detail of Jones’s account – he skims over the first crisis in Richard’s rule without even mentioning the so-called ‘Merciless Parliament’, which seized control from the king and oversaw the systematic arraignment for treason and execution of most of his council.

This, I suppose, is reasonable enough if we grant that Seward’s account is focused on the war and deliberately gives no more about the domestic situation of the English (or French) kings than is strictly necessary. But comparison with the Jones brought out the way that it is not a full or adequate account of the period as a whole, and begs the question: how much of the domestic political, economic and social situations in England, France (and the numerous other countries involved, from Scotland and Burgundy to Castile) do you need to understand, to fully understand the Hundred Years War?

What is a full understanding of a historical event or era? Is such a thing even possible?

From what I can see, the fullest possible account of not only the war but all the domestic politics behind it in both England and France and further afield, is Jonathan Sumption’s epic, multi-volume account:

The chevauchée – death and destruction

Instead the main thing that came over for me was the scale of the destruction involved in the war.

Obviously war is destructive but I hadn’t quite grasped the extent to which the English pursued a deliberate scorched earth policy, a conscious policy of systematically devastating all the land they passed through, as their main military strategy, sustained for over one hundred years.

Some campaigns the English launched had little or no strategic value, their purpose was solely to destroy as many French towns and villages as possible, to loots and burn, to rape and pillage, to steal everything worth stealing and to murder all the inhabitants over really significant areas of France – from Gascony and Aquitaine in the south-west, up through the Loire valley, in Brittany, in Normandy and right up to the walls of Paris itself.

What makes the 1339 campaign of particular interest is the misery inflicted on French non-combatants. It was the custom of medieval warfare to wreak as much damage as possible on both towns and country in order to weaken the enemy government. The English had acquired nasty habits in their Scottish wars and during this campaign Edward wrote to the young Prince of Wales how his men had burnt and plundered ‘so that the country is quite laid waste of cattle and of any other goods.’ Every little hamlet went up in flames, each house being looted and then put to the torch. Neither abbeys and churches nor hospitals were spared. Hundreds of civilians – men, women and children, priests, bourgeois and peasants – were killed while thousands fled to fortified towns. The English king saw the effectiveness of ‘total war’ in such a rich and thickly populated land; henceforth the chevauchée, a raid which systematically devastated enemy territory, was used as much as possible in the hope of making the French sick of war… (p.38)

Thus:

  • in autumn 1339 English ships raided Boulogne burning thirty French ships, hanging their captains and leaving the lower town in flames
  • in September 1339 Edward invaded into France from the Low Countries, ‘he advanced slowly into Picardy, deliberately destroying the entire countryside of the Thiérache and besieging Cambrai’
  • in 1339 the pope was so appalled by the ruin the English were inflicting that he sent money to Paris for the relief of the poor, and the envoy who distributed it wrote back a report describing the 8,000 utterly destitute peasants forced to flee their land, and of 174 parishes which had been utterly laid waste, including their parish churches
  • in 1340 Philip’s army invaded Aquitaine and ‘laid waste the vineyard country of Entre-Deux-Mers and Saint-Emilion’

In 1346 Edward landed with a huge force in Normandy and proceeded to rampage through the countryside.

The following day the king launched a chevauchée through the Cotentin, deliberately devastating the rich countryside, his men burning mills and barns, orchards. haystacks and cornricks, smashing wine vats, tearing down and setting fire to the thatched cottages of the villagers, whose throats they cut together with those of their livestock. One may presume that the usual atrocities were perpetrated on the peasants – the men were tortured to reveal hidden valuables, the women suffering multiple rape and sexual mutilation, those who were pregnant being disembowelled. Terror was an indispensable accompaniment to every chevauchée and Edward obviously intended to wreak the maximum ‘dampnum‘ –  the medieval term for that total war which struck at an enemy king through his subjects. (p.58)

On this campaign the English burnt Cherbourg and Montebourg and Caen. In Caen, after the garrison surrendered, the English started to plunder, rape and kill. The desperate townsfolk retaliated by taking to the rooves throwing down bricks and tiles onto the English soldiers, killing several hundred at which Edward went into a rage and ordered the massacre of the entire population, men, women and children. Later persuaded to rescind the order, but the sack lasted three days and some 3,000 townsfolk were murdered. Nuns were raped, religious houses looted, the priory of Gerin was burned to the ground, and so on.

This chevauchée took the army right to the walls of Paris where they burnt the suburbs of Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain before retreating northwards and burning the town of Mareuil, along with its fortress and priory.

After the famous victory at Crécy, the English went on to besiege the port of Calais for over a year, which involved the systematic destruction of the entire countryside for thirty miles around.

In 1355 the Black Prince rode out of Bordeaux with a force of 2,600 and carried out a 600-mile chevauchée across Languedoc to Montpelier and almost to the Mediterranean burning as many villages and hemlet as they could, burning mills, chateaux and churches. His forces took by storm and then burned to the ground Narbonne, Carcassone, Castlenaudry, Limousin and many other settlements large and small.

When war broke out in 1369 John of Gaunt led a chevauchée through Normandy, employing mercenaries and criminals. In 1370 the mercenary leader Sir Robert Knolly led a chevauchée through the Ile de Paris, burning and looting villages and towns right up to the walls of Paris, so that the king of France could look out over the burning and devastated landscape surrounding the capital.

In 1373 John of Gaunt led 11,000 men out of Calais on a chevauchée through Picardy, Champagne, Burguny, the Bourbonnais, the Auvergne and the Limousin, ‘cutting a hideous swathe of fire and destruction down central France’ (p.114).

During such a chevauchée the English killed every human being they could catch (p.85)

It is shocking to read that even the ‘great’ Henry V pursued exactly the same policy. The Agincourt campaign was in fact an attempt to take the walled city of Harfleur and then march up to the Seine to capture Paris. This completely failed because Harfleur held out for over a month during which a third of Henry’s expensively assembled army died of disease. Once the town was finally taken he decided to retreat north towards Calais, burning and laying waste to everything in sight, in the by-now traditional English way. Henry is quoted as saying that was without fire was like sausages without mustard.

Indeed Seward is at pains to deconstruct the image of the Shakespearian hero. Seward emphasises the ruthlessness of the young king – a man of ‘ruthless authority and cold cruelty’ (p.154) – and compares him, somewhat shockingly, to Napoleon and Hitler, in his single-minded self-belief, religious fanatacism and obsession with war and conquest. The account of his short reign is quite harrowing, involving the massacre of the entire population of Caen after it fell to an English siege in 1417, and the deliberate starving of the besieged population of Rouen later that year. All his sieges are marked by brutal treatment of the losers.

As late as 1435, when the English began to slowly lose control of their territory, an experienced soldier like Sir John Fastolf suggested that two small forces of 750 men be created who, twice a year, in June and November, would invade a different part of France and burn and destroy all the land they passed through, burning down all houses, corn fields, vineyards, all fruit and all livestock. The aim? To create famine. To starve the French unto submission.

Loot

Throughout this period the main motivation for ordinary soldiers to go and fight was loot. Everything of value in enemy territory was stolen. The English confiscated all the food and drink from every farm they despoiled and then burnt.

In the towns they stole gold, silver, jewels, fur coats. The king took possession of the best spoils and from each chevauchée sent convoys of carts bearing clothes, jewels, gold and silver plate and cutlery and much else lumbering back to the coast and to ships which bore it all back to England.

The English now regarded France as a kind of El Dorado. The whole of England was flooded with French plunder (p.81)

In the countryside they took all the livestock and stole all the grain then burned everything else. Many areas took decades to recover. Seward quotes contemporary chroniclers describing mile upon mile of devastated landscape, every building, cottage, manor house and church gutted and burnt to the ground, with no survivors to prune the vines or plough and sow the land, the sheep and cattle all killed and eaten by the English, the roads empty in every direction.

No wonder the English came to be hated like the Devil, like the Nazis were 600 years later.

Mercenaries

A crucial aspect of the war was the employment of mercenaries. Warriors for hire had, of course, existed through the ages. In post-Conquest England they flourished during the Anarchy i.e. the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda from 1135-1153. Later, King John used mercenaries in his wars against the barons in the early 1200s, leading to the hiring of foreign mercenaries being specifically banned by Magna Carta.

But not abroad. The reappearance and flourishing of mercenaries was particularly associated with the Hundred Years War. By the 1340s the English king was finding it difficult to pay his own or foreign troops and license was given to soldiers to ‘live off the land’.

This opened the road to hell, for soldiers, English and foreign, quickly took advantage of the new liberty to a) take all the food and drink from every farm or village they passed b) terrorise and torture the natives to hand over not just foodstuffs but anything of value c) to create protection rackets: pay us a regular fee or the boys will come round and burn everything to the ground. This became known as the pâtis, or ‘ransoms of the country’.

For example, in 1346 the Earl of Lancaster captured Lusignan, a fortress near Poitier. When he moved on he left a garrison under the command of Bertrand de Montferrand. Many of his troops were criminals and misfits. Despite a truce between 1346-1350, the garrison laid waste to over fifty parishes, ten monasteries, and destroyed towns and castles throughout southern Poitou. One story among thousands.

It is easy, reading the countless examples of blackmail, threat, looting, ravaging, burning, stealing and extorting, to see the entire era as one in which the English and their mercenaries mercilessly terrorised, attacked and looted the French people for over a hundred years. The Hundred Years Extortion.

After the Treaty of Brétigny, signed between England and France in October 1360, which brought the first phase of the war to an end, thousands of mercenaries and low-born vassals, serfs and miscellaneous crooks from  a number of nations, were left jobless. They didn’t want to go back to slaving on the land, so they set up their own mercenary groups.

In French these groups became known as routes and so the mercenaries acquired the general name of routiers (pronounced by the barbarian English ‘rutters’).

But in English they came to be referred to as the Free Companies, ‘free’ because they owed allegiance to no king. The Free Companies included all nationalities including Spaniards, Germans, Flemings, Gascons, Bretons and so on, but collectively the French chroniclers refer to them as ‘English’ because of the terrors the English chevauchées caused throughout the period (p.135).

Many of the routier groups were well organised, with administrative staff, quartermasters, and army discipline. They continued to be available for hire to the highest bidder. One scholar has identified 166 captains of mercenary groups during the period. The largest bands became notorious along with their leaders, such as the notorious Bandes Blanches of the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole. Some routier groups even defeated the national armies sent to suppress them.

Many of the leaders became very rich. In an intensely hierarchical society, one of the chief motivations for fighting, for joining up with an army, was the incentive to make money. Really successful mercs were extremely useful to the sovereigns who paid them, and quite a few were given knighthoods and ‘respectability’, allowing them to retire back to England where they built mansions and castles, many of which survive to this day.

For example, plain Edward Dalyngrigge enlisted in the Free Company of Sir Robert Knolles in 1367 and over the next ten years accumulated a fortune in loot and plunder, returning to Sussex in 1377, marrying an heiress and building the splendid Bodiam Castle in Sussex, which is today a peaceful National Trust property. Built with money looted and extorted abroad by a mercenary soldier. Possibly a fitting symbol of this nation, certainly a classic example of the money, power and rise in social status which was possible during the Hundred Years War.

Other examples include Ampthill Castle built by Sir John Cornwall with loot from Agincourt, and Bolton and Cooling castles, as well as Rye House near Ware, built with French money by the Danish mercenary Anders Pedersen, who rose through the ranks of the English army and found respectability as Sir Andrew Ogard MP.

This helps explain the unpopularity of Richard II’s policy of peace with France.

[The English] had been fighting France for over half a century; almost every summer ships filled with eager young soldiers had sailed from Sandwich to Calais or from Southampton to Bordeaux. War was still the nobility’s ideal profession; the English aristocracy saw a command in France much as their successors regarded an embassy or a seat in the cabinet. Moreover, men of all classes from [the Duke of] Gloucester to the humblest bondman, regarded service in France as a potential source of income; if the war had cost the English monarchy ruinous sums, it had made a great deal of money for the English people… (p.141)

Why are there wars? At the top level, because of the strategic and territorial greed or nationalistic fervour, or simple mistakes, of dim leaders. But if you ask, why do men fight wars, this sociological explanation must be taken into account. It’s because wars are a way of escaping from poverty and being trapped in the lower levels of society and offer the opportunity of escape, foreign travel, adventure, testing yourself as a man, and 1. raising your social status and 2. making money – in the case of the Free Companies of the Hundred Years War, lots of money.

The war was long remembered as a time to rise in the world. The fifteenth-century herald, Nicholas Upton, wrote that ‘in those days we saw many poor men serving in the wars in France ennobled.’ (p.119)

Conclusion

Looking beyond the boys’ adventure aspects of the great military victories, and the supposedly dashing figures of the Black Prince or Henry V, the distraction of the girl saint Joan of Arc (who was burned to death by the English aged just 19), mad King Charles who thought he was made of glass, or the long rearguard action by John Duke of Bedford – it is, I think, difficult for a modern reader not to feel oppressed by the sheer scale of the deliberate wanton destruction the English visited across huge areas of rural France and the ultimate futility of all those lives wasted, all that treasure expended, all that land and buildings and carefully built farms, manors, churches, priories and so on burnt to the ground. Human folly.

By 1453 all the English had to show for over a century of oppressive taxation, countless deaths and the expenditure of vast fortunes paying for weapons and mercenaries, was to end up pathetically clinging on to tiny little Calais. Meanwhile, France had become unified as a nation and emerged as the strongest state in Europe. And a long legacy of mutual mistrust which, arguably, lasts right up to the present day, as Seward points out in the very last sentences of his book.

France suffered horribly when England escaped unharmed – every local historian in northern and western France will show the tourist a château or a church which was sacked by the English. There is a strong case for maintaining that the origin of the uneasy relationship between the two peoples can be found in the battles, sieges and the chevauchées, the ransoming and the looting, the pâtis, the burning and the killing by the English in France during the Hundred Years War. (p.265)

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Posted by Simon on July 8, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/the-hundred-years-war-desmond-seward/

The Plantagenets (2) by Dan Jones (2012)

Part two of my summary of Dan Jones’s rip-roaring, boys-own-adventure, 600-page-long account of the history of the Plantagenet kings and queens (1154-1400).

Episodes

It becomes clearer in the second half of the book that each of the book’s short chapters (average length 9 pages) begins with a dramatic moment or colourful scene which grabs our attention. And then Jones goes back a bit to explain how it came about, what led up to it and what it meant.

This helps explain why the book feels so popular and gripping, because, on one level, it supplies a steady sequence of 85 (there are 85 chapters) dramatic, exciting or colourful moments. This became particularly obvious in a sequence of chapters about the early reign of Edward III:

When Parliament met in March 1337, a hum of excitement and agitation settled over Westminster… (New Earls, New Enemies)

On 26 January 1340, Edward III entered the Flemish city of Ghent, with his entire household accompanying him, including his heavily pregnant queen, who was carrying the couple’s sixth child in ten years… (The Hundred Years War Begins)

As dusk approached on the evening of 24 June 1340, six months after he had declared himself king of the best part of western Europe, Edward stood aboard his flagship, the cog Thomas… and watched the sea offshore from Sluys, in Flanders, churn with the blood of tens of thousands of Frenchmen… (Edward at Sea)

Violent seas threw the king’s boat about for three days as it stuttered from the coast of Flanders to the mouth of the Thames. It was the very end of November 1340, and with winter approaching it was more dangerous than usual to venture a Channel crossing… (The Crisis of 1341)

In the heat of July 1346 the English army marched through a broken, hell-bright landscape of coastal Normandy. All around them fields were lit up in ghastly orange by marauding bands of arsonists… (Dominance)

The English summer of 1348 was wet, but in defiance of the weather the country fairly blazed with glory. The king had returned to England in October the previous month in triumph… (The Death of a Princess)

You get the idea. The way the chapters don’t have numbers but snappy or sensational titles also helps give you the impression that what you’re reading is less like a traditional history and more like a poolside thriller.

Henry III and Prince Edward

We left our heroes in the last days of the weak and malleable king, Henry III – years which saw the rise of his tough, warrior son, Prince Edward (b.1239).

Prince Edward led the Royalist army at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, the first set piece battle on English soil in a century. The rebels won, capturing the King, Lord Edward, and Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother and the titular King of Germany. This led to the Great Parliament of 1265 (also known as Montfort’s Parliament). For the first time representatives were invited from all the counties and selected boroughs of England. Voting rights were discussed. All this was the seeds of modern democracy, more accurately part of the ongoing detailed process whereby successive Plantagenet kings found themselves forced to consult, first with the barons and nobles and then, by the reign of Richard II (1377-99) with the ‘commons’, the knights and justices of the shires.

But Prince Edward managed to escape from captivity and rallied royalist nobles as well as Welsh rebels and this led to a pitched battle with de Montfort’s forces at Evesham, which was a decisive royalist victory. Jones describes how a 12-man hit squad was commissioned to roam the battlefield, ignoring everything, with the sole task of finding and killing de Montfort. They succeeded. His body was mutilated, his testicles, hands and feet cut off. To later generations he became a sort of patron saint of representative government. Today De Montfort University in Leicester is named after him.

Henry III was once again titular king but he was a broken, dithering old man. The real power in the land was his forceful and energetic son, Edward (named after Henry’s icon, Edward the Confessor) who turned out to be a very different character from the saintly Saxon.

Edward I (1272-1307) ‘a great and terrible king’

Edward’s career divides into roughly four parts:

1. Growth to maturity under his father Henry (1239-1272). This involved him in the complex problems caused by his father’s weakness and the malign influence of his mother’s foreign relations, the de Lusignan family, all of which climaxed in the Barons Wars, in which rebels against royal authority were led by Simon de Montfort. These forces won the battle of Lewes in 1264 and de Montfort was for a few years effectively ruler of England, but were then comprehensively crushed and de Montfort killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. The civil war dragged on for a few more years, with individual rebels being picked off or offered concessions and peace.

2. Crusade (1270-74). Edward mulcted the country to raise the money to go on the Ninth Crusade and, unlike his immediate forebears, actually managed to leave, but the crusade proved to be a fiasco in several ways. For a start the leader, French King Louis IX of France allowed himself to be persuaded by his brother, Charles of Anjou, who had made himself King of Sicily, to sail not to Palestine but to attack his enemies in the coast of Tunisia, who were harrying Sicily. By the time Edward arrived Louis had signed a peace with the emir leaving Edward and his army with nothing to do. Undeterred they sailed for the Holy Land.

Here the situation was poor. Jerusalem had fallen 50 years earlier leaving Acre the centre of the diminished Crusader state and this was menaced by the overwhelming force of Baibars, leader of the Mamluks. After a few feeble sorties Edward had to stand by while Hugh III king of Jerusalem made a treaty with the Mamluks, who were themselves menaced by the encroaching Mongols in the north. The only notable event of Edward’s crusade is when an assassin was allowed into his private chambers and stabbed him. Edward managed to kill the attacker but was seriously wounded and took months to recover.

With the signing of the peace treaty there was little more to do, so he reluctantly packed up and headed back to England. En route he learned that his father had died but instead of rushing back took nearly a year to return, attending to business in his province of Gascony, then having an audience with the French king at which he renewed his vows of fealty i.e. that he held Gascony as a servant of the French King.

Wales Edward is famous for his wars of conquest in Wales and Scotland. Wales came first. It was ruled by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd who had benefited from the Barons Wars and slowly intimidated his way to rule over more and more of the other Welsh princes from his base in the northern province of Gwynned. Eventually, Llywelyn’s aggressive policies triggered a response from Edward who invaded with an overwhelming force in a carefully calculated campaign. In less than a year he had forced Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to retreat. Edward built enormous castles to act as permanent English powerbases as he and his army progressed through north Wales. After Llywelyn sued for peace he was made to perform fealty to Edward, hand over hostages, pay fines, and then travel to Westminster to perform submission, again.

In 1284 Edward issued the Statute of Rhuddlan that annexed Wales and made it a province of England. The title Prince of Wales was handed to Edward’s eldest son, Prince Edward (later Edward II) – a tradition that continues to this day.

Scotland Edward was so relentless in his attacks against the Scots that after his death he became known as ‘Scottorum malleus’ – the Hammer of the Scots. In 1287 Alexander III, King of Scots, died suddenly after falling from his horse. The succession crisis that followed presented Edward with a golden opportunity to expand on his conquest of Wales. In the absence of an obvious heir, the Scottish crown looked set to pass to Alexander’s infant grand-daughter, Margaret, the daughter of the King of Norway, hence the folk name she acquired, the ‘Maid of Norway’. But all elaborate plans centring on her collapsed when she died en route to Scotland.

With rival claimants vying for the crown Edward was invited by the senior nobles of Scotland to judge the claims and make the choice. This was a golden opportunity and Edward exploited it insisting that he be recognised as feudal overlord of the Scots before a new Scots king be appointed. The two strongest claimants were Robert Bruce and John Balliol. After much machination Balliol was appointed king, but on the understanding that he did so as vassal to Edward.

Edward rode Scotland hard, demanding high taxes and soldiers for his wars in Wales and Gascony. In 1295 the Scots signed a mutual aid treaty with France, an alliance which was to last centuries and come to be known as ‘the Auld Alliance’.

Edward launched a brutal attack, taking Berwick, which the Scots had occupied, slaughtering the inhabitants before pushing on into Scotland and decisively defeating the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar 1296. Balliol was captured, stripped of his ceremonial trappings, and sent to prison in England, while Edward’s army returned south laden with loot including the legendary stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, which was placed under the throne in Westminster Abbey.

However the Scots, like the Welsh, refused to accept defeat, and rebellions broke out in the highlands and lowlands, the latter led by William Wallace who managed to defeat the army Edward sent against him at the Battle of Stirling Bridge 11 September 1297. At which point Edward marched north with another army and defeated Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk. Wallace was later captured and sent south to London where he was brutally tortured and executed.

However Robert Bruce, who lost the contest for the crown in 1295, won support among the Scots nobles and had himself crowned King of Scotland in 1306. As he hadn’t asked permission of Edward, the English king once again marched north, defeated the Scots in a series of battles and forced Robert to flee. However, the Bruce refused to admit defeat, gathered his forces, and made renewed attacks on isolated English garrisons in 1307. Not even the capture and execution of key Bruce supporters (including members of Bruce’s own family) could reverse the tide.

Yet again Edward marched north but on 7 July 1307, within sight of Scotland in sight, the 68-year-old king died at Burgh-on-Sands. The campaign for the conquest of Scotland passed on to his son, Edward II who was, to the Scots’ relief, and shadow of his brutal and implacable father. In 1314 Bruce was to rout a larger English force at Bannockburn. Recognition of Scotland’s sovereignty came at the start of the reign of Edward’s grandson, Edward III, in 1328.

The Jews Usury i.e. lending money out at interest, was banned to Christians, but kings and merchants needed funds so money-lending tended to be a specialist activity of England’s small Jewish community of maybe 2,000. This activity and their status as outsiders to the laws of the land made them vulnerable to victimisation. In 1275 Edward issued the Statute of Jewry that imposed severe taxation on the Jewish population of England. The Statute proved both lucrative and popular, so Edward extended the policy and in 1290 expelled the entire Jewish community from England – minus their money and property. The money raised went directly into his expensive campaigns in Scotland and Wales.

Edward II (1307-27)

The revelation for me was how unpopular Edward II was even before he became king. Edward I fathered no fewer than 14 children but with the deaths of most of the older ones, young prince Edward of Carnarfon emerged as the heir and favourite. But even by the time he was a teenager he was already proving a disappointment. There are records of numerous violent arguments between father and son, not least as Edward fell under the hypnotic spell of the charismatic Piers Gaveston.

It is difficult to establish at a distance of eight hundred years just what their relationship really amounted to but Jones points out that the accusations of homosexuality which later gathered round the relationship only really appear in the chronicles after Edward’s death in 1327. From Edward’s recorded words and writings during his reign, it seems that he regarded Gaveston more as a beloved adopted brother, who he blindly hero worshipped. Gaveston joined Edward’s household in 1300 and was tried and executed in 1312 and during this time caused havoc. He was dilettantish and rapacious, greedy for titles.

Gaveston stage-managed Edward II’s coronation, shocking the assembled nobility of England by rudely sidelining Edward’s queen, Isabella, daughter of the powerful King Philip IV of France. His behaviour alienated numerous groups and noble families who first protested and forced the king to send him into exile, then, when Gaveston returned, and then rose against the king. Edward II’s reign comes to its first climax with the seizure and execution of Gaveston by a kangaroo court led by the Earl of Lancaster, in 1312. The polarisation of the aristocracy led to several years of confrontation between the armed camps and it was during this period that the Scots won their great victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314.

The sense of ill omen about Edward’s reign was compounded by the Great Famine of 1315-17. For three years in a row there was unusual amounts of rainfall in the spring and summer which ruined crops. There was widespread famine and reports of cannibalism. It is thought that population had been rising since the time of the Norman Conquest but now it came to a dead halt and declined. The famine undermined belief in the church and the efficacy of prayer, and also in the secular authorities who proved hopeless at alleviating starvation.

But having eliminated Gaveston did not change Edward II’s dependence and he switched his allegiance to the Despenser family, in particular Hugh Despenser the Younger with whom he became close friends. The same problems arose again, which is that the king gave disproportionate amounts of land and favours and honours to the Despensers and their extended family, perpetuating the party opposed to Edward.

In 1321, once again led by the Earl of Lancaster, the rebellious barons seized the Despensers’ lands and forced the king to exile them. Edward led a short military campaign, capturing and executing Lancaster and restoring Despensers grip on power. The cabal set about executing their enemies and confiscating their estates, particularly of the Mortimer family who had become one of the leading opponents and now fled to France.

The French king took advantage of the turmoil in England to make attacks on Plantagenet territory in France, particularly Aquitaine. Lacking the money or support from his nobles to launch any kind of military campaign, in 1325 Edward sent his queen, Isabella, to negotiate a peace treaty but by now she had had quite enough of a king who did nothing but snub her and load his favourites with wealth and honour. Isabella not only refused to return but quickly fell into league with the exiled noble Roger Mortimer and scandalised opinion by taking him as her lover.

In 1326 they landed with a small army in East Anglia and, as they marched across the country, more and more local nobles rallied to the cause. As his regime collapsed around him, Edward was forced to flee to Wales where he was captured in November. The king was forced to relinquish his crown in January 1327 in favour of his 14-year-old son, Edward III, and he died in Berkeley Castle on 21 September, probably murdered on the orders of the new regime.

Edward III (1327-77)

In Jones’s account Edward’s reign falls into roughly three periods. For the first three years, as a boy, he was under the guardianship of his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, who proved every bit as rapacious as the former king had been. As soon as he was old enough, in 1330 Edward launched a coup against them. Isabella was exiled to a provincial castle but Mortimer was formally tried for arrogating royal power, found guilty and hanged at Tyburn.

Part two of his life is the central period from 1330 to 1360, during which Edward emerged as possibly the greatest of all the Plantaganet kings. He:

  1. conducted successful campaigns to restore or establish English control of Wales, Scotland and key territories in mainland France, namely Aquitaine
  2. fathered a huge brood of children (ten), with three or four of the sons growing up to become powerful and successful soldiers, political figures and leaders in their own right, namely Edward the Black Prince b.1330
  3. realising the English aristocracy had been depleted by deaths in battle and also what had been in effect the civil war of Edward II’s reign, Edward cannily set about creating new earls and awarding them land around the kingdom, along with a new order of ‘dukes’, this creating a special bond between himself and the nobles of England
  4. Edward was fascinated by the legend of King Arthur and spent a fortune commissioning a room to hold a Round Table at Windsor, as well as instituting the noble Order of the Garter, as another way of binding together the English aristocracy

Edward was determined to seize back the territories in continental France which had been held by Henry II at the peak of the Plantagenet Empire. Over the next thirty years he launched a series of campaigns which led to the two ‘famous’ victories over French armies, at Crecy on 26 August 1346 and Poitiers on 19 September 1356. The latter battle was so decisive the English captured the French King John II and took him, and numerous other nobles, back to England to be ransomed.

Jones explains how Edward set about carefully allotting each of his adult sons a territory within his ’empire’ to manage, with the Black Prince being awarded Aquitaine, the duchy belonging to his great grandfather Richard the Lionheart. However, the Prince’s rule was troubled by three factors. He chose to get dragged into the affairs of Spain, taking the side of Don Pedro of Castile against his half-brother Henry of Trastámara. The Prince defeated Henry only to discover that Pedro was completely broke and couldn’t pay anything towards the huge loans the Prince had taken out to pay his mercenaries. This led directly to the second bad decision which was that the Prince was forced to impose onerous taxes on the nobles and people of Aquitaine, managing to alienate all of them. When the king of France came probing around the border of Aquitaine, towns opened their gates to him without a fight.

The third piece of bad luck was that during the campaign against Henry of Trastámara, the Prince picked up a recurrent fever, maybe malaria, which undermined the physical energy which had made him such a legend at Crecy and Poitiers. Increasingly enfeebled – having to be carried around in a sedan chair – he reacted savagely to his mounting problems. After the town of Limoges capitulated to the French king without a struggle, but was then retaken by English forces, the Prince ordered an indiscriminate slaughter of the civilian population in 1370. The Black Prince returned to England in 1371 and the next year resigned the principality of Aquitaine and Gascony. He lingered on, increasingly infirm, for five more years and died in 1376, the year before his father.

As the 1360s progressed, King Edward himself grew more infirm. Many of the close knit circle of contemporaries passed away. In 1364 King John II of France passed away and was succeeded by the vigorous and aggressive Charles V. Edward sent his son John of Gaunt with an army against Charles but the campaign was a failure. With the Treaty of Bruges in 1375, the once-great English possessions in France were reduced to the coastal towns of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne.

Edward’s beloved wife Philippa of Hainault died in 1369. Grief-stricken, Edward took comfort in a long-running affair with a mistress, Alice Perrers. Discontent at home led to the convocation of the so-called Good Parliament in 1376, which was the longest parliament up to that time. As so often it was called to raise taxes for the crown, but was an opportunity for critics to vent their grievances and in particular gave voice to the so-called commons more than any previous meeting.

But the real power in the land at the end of Edward’s reign was his son John of Gaunt.

The Black Death

Plague came to England in 1348, arriving at Weymouth in Dorset, from Gascony in June 1348. By autumn, the plague had reached London, and by summer 1349 it covered the entire country, before dying down by December. The best current estimate is that, depending on region, between 40 and 60 percent of the population perished. Not so well known is that the plague returned in 1361–62 this time causing the death of around 20 percent of the population.

Leaving aside the horror and the despair the surprising thing, in Jones’s account at any rate, is how little impact this astonishing holocaust had on the economic, political, military or social structures of the day. The best known is that is resulted in a shortage of labour which lasted generations and, in effect, led to the end of feudal servitude.

Because he is interested in political history and, more precisely, in the stories of the kings conceived as Hollywood blockbusters, the plague makes remarkably little difference to Jones’s narrative. In 1356 England and France are back at war as if nothing had happened.

Richard II (1377-1399)

Richard was the second ill-fated king of the 14th century, destined, like Edward II, to be overthrown and, oddly, after nearly the same length of reign, 20 years for Edward II, 22 years for Richard II.

Richard was the son of Edward III’s oldest surviving son, Edward the Black Prince and so heir to the throne even though his father died before his grandfather. Having been born in 1367 he was only ten when he came to the throne and Jones gives a vivid description of his coronation and the surrounding festivities which – he speculates – deeply marked the boy, convincing him of his divine right to rule.

The common people, and the nobles, all hoped the arrival of a new young king would mark a turnaround from the sombre final years of Edward III’s reign. They also crowned him in a hurry because many feared that the mature and forceful John of Gaunt was himself scheming to seize the throne.

Early on he was controlled by a series of Regency Councils dominated by his uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, though their influence was contested. The ruling classes imposed a series of three poll taxes to raise money for continuing the war with France, and this was one of the spurs which led to a sudden outbreak of violence among serfs in Essex and Kent which quickly escalated into the Peasants’ Revolt. The revolt was a really serious violent revolution. The rebels took London, burning and looting, seized the Tower of London and murdered many leading notables including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was also Lord Chancellor, and the king’s Lord High Treasurer, Robert Hales.

Richard played an astonishingly central role in quelling the revolt, personally intervening to meet the rebel leaders and organise an ambush whereby the main leader Wat Tyler was pulled from his horse and stabbed. When the mob surged forward Richard rode among them and shouted ‘I am your leader, follow me’, and they did follow him away from the scene of the murder and Richard’s militia was then able to disperse them.

Richard married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, on 20 January 1382, the empire being seen as potential allies against France in the ongoing Hundred Years’ War, but the marriage was unpopular, the alliance didn’t lead to a single military victory, and the marriage was childless. Anne died from plague in 1394, greatly mourned by her husband.

Richard’s reign was marked by two political crises, in 1386-88 and the final one in 1397-9.

First crisis 1386-88

Favourites Very like Edward II, Richard appointed a handful of devoted favourites who he lavished with honours and lands and positions. The fact that they came from merchant families without true aristocratic forebears, created great resentment among the rest of the nobility. There were Michael de la Pole, created chancellor in 1383 and Earl of Suffolk two years later. Worse was Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who Richard raised to the new title of Duke of Ireland in 1386. Their relationship was so close that later chroniclers speculated it was homosexual.

Failure in France and Scotland An expedition to France to protect English possessions was a failure. Richard decided to lead an expedition against Scotland but this also was a miserable failure as the Scots evaded a set-piece battle. Rumblings against the king was led by the Duke of Gloucester and Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel.

The Wonderful Parliament (November 1386) Parliament was called in November 1386 and the unpopular chancellor, Michael de la Pole, asked for an unprecedented level for taxation to cover these military expeditions. The parliament blamed Richard for the military failures and said it couldn’t consider the issue till de la Pole was removed. The king dismissed their threat but was in the end forced to sack de la Pole. Parliament appointed a ‘continual council’ to supervise the king’s rule, a direct and humiliating attack on Richard’s royal prerogative.

As soon as the parliament had closed, Richard denounced all its actions and in the new year went on a prolonged tour of the country to drum up support and appointed de Vere Justice of Chester to build up a powerbase in Cheshire. Here he put great pressure on seven senior judges to annul the decisions of Parliament and denounce its leaders as traitors.

Radcot bridge 19 December 1387 On his return to London, the king was confronted by the Duke of Gloucester, Arundel and Thomas de Beauchamp, 12th Earl of Warwick, who brought an appeal of treason against de la Pole, de Vere, Tresilian, and two other loyalists, the mayor of London, Nicholas Brembre, and Alexander Neville, the Archbishop of York. Richard played for time and ordered de la Pole to bring loyalist forces from Chester.

Jones opens the relevant chapter with a wonderfully atmospheric account of the loyalist forces advancing under cover of fog towards the Thames but being confronted at Radcot Bridge by overwhelming rebel forces and being forced to swim his horse out into the Thames and escape downstream, ultimately fleeing to France.

The Merciless Parliament (February to June 1388) Parallel to his efforts to raise loyalist forces and seize back London, Richard had been involved in lengthy negotiations with the king of France whereby he would relinquish all England’s territory in France except for Aquitaine, for which he would proclaim himself the French king’s vassal. Rumours of these negotiations leaked out and led to fears that Richard might be prepared to countenance a French invasion of England, so long as he was returned to the throne.

Richard’s original opponents were now joined by John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, and Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham and the group became known as the Lords Appellant because, with de Vere out of the way, they now made legal demands (or appeals) designed to dismantle the apparatus of Richard’s rule. Having dispersed the loyalist army at Radcot, the rebels now marched back to London where they found the king barricaded in the Tower of London which, however, they entered and confronted the king in person with accusations of treason. Apparently the Lords debated executing the king there and then – it came that close, executing their liege king to whom they were all related and who they were negotiating with – but decided against it and called another parliament.

The parliament convened in February 1388 and became known as the Merciless Parliament because the Lords revealed Richard’s treacherous plans with France, won over the Houses of Lords and the Commons and pushed ahead with legal actions to have almost all of Richard’s advisers convicted of treason. Two key figures in the administration, Brembre and Tresilian, were condemned and executed, while de Vere and de la Pole – who had both fled the country – were tried for treason and sentenced to death, then the Appellants went on to arraign, try and execute most of the rest of Richard’s inner circle.

It reads like something from the Terror of the French Revolution. Not only the leading nobles but retainers, clerks, chaplains, and secretaries to Richard were summarily condemned and executed. The seven judges who had been terrorised into denouncing the Lords Appellent, the year before in Chester, were all arrested, tried and executed. Richard’s chamber knights were tried and executed. Richard’s intermediaries who had been negotiating with France, were discovered and executed. No wonder it ended up being called the Merciless Parliament.

Restoration Amazingly, given that their power had been so absolute and the terror so thorough and Richard’s humiliation so complete, Richard returned to personal rule in 1389 and ruled more or less successfully for the next eight years. He was helped by the fact that, once the Lords Appellant had liquidated so many of their enemies, as a group they fell apart, reverting to their individual interests. One of the things which united them had been opposition to Richard’s peace policy with France but when they requested another round of taxation to further their war policy, Parliament baulked and the tide of opinion turned against them.

France and Ireland Richard therefore spent the next few years trying to finalise a peace treaty with France. Meanwhile the Anglo-Irish lords were begging for help against the insurgent Irish and in the autumn of 1394, Richard left for Ireland, where he remained until May 1395. His army of more than 8,000 men was the largest force brought to the island during the late Middle Age, the invasion was a success, and a number of Irish chieftains submitted to English overlordship.

Second crisis 1397-99

The last few years of Richard’s rule are referred to as the ‘tyranny’. The king had Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick arrested in July 1397. After years or reasonably peaceful rule, and bolstered by success in Ireland, Richard felt strong enough to safely retaliate against these three men for their role in events of 1386–88 and eliminate them as threats to his power. Arundel’s brother Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was exiled for life. Richard then set about persecuting his enemies around the regions of England. All the allies of the former Lords Apellant were arrested, tried and released only on payment of enormous fines.

The policy was made possible by the support of old John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and a suite of powerful magnates who Richard awarded with new titles and lands including the former Appellants Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, who was made Duke of Hereford, and Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, who was created Duke of Norfolk, John and Thomas Holland, the king’s half-brother and nephew, who were promoted from earls of Huntingdon and Kent to dukes of Exeter and Surrey respectively, the King’s cousin Edward, Earl of Rutland, who received Gloucester’s French title of Duke of Aumale, Gaunt’s son John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, who was made Marquess of Somerset and Marquess of Dorset and so on.

The Shrewsbury parliament In 1398 Richard summoned a packed Parliament to Shrewsbury – known as the Parliament of Shrewsbury – which declared all the acts of the Merciless Parliament to be null and void, and announced that no restraint could legally be put on the king. It delegated all parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners chosen from the king’s friends, making Richard an absolute ruler unbound by the necessity of gathering a Parliament again.

The house of Lancaster John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, brother of Richard’s father the Black Prince, and so Richard’s uncle, had cast a long shadow over Richard’s reign. In the 1390s he had gone to Spain to pursue claims, through his wife, Constance of Castile, to the titles of King of Castile and León, but had returned in 1397. Next to the king he was the largest, richest landowner in the country and had a virile, aggressive son, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford.

Bolingbroke versus Mowbray In December 1397 a bitter quarrel broke out at the core of the courtly circle when Bolingbroke accused Thomas Mowbray of saying that, as former Lords Appellant, they were next in line for royal retribution. Mowbray denied the claim and it was decided the quarrel should be settled the old fashioned way through a joust. Jones vividly paints the scene as the setting for a mounted joust was assembled and the two warriors arrived on horseback in full knightly array.

Bolingbroke exiled However, just as they were gearing themselves to ride at each other Richard intervened and cancelled the joust, deciding that Mowbray should be exiled for life, Bolingbroke for ten years. Aristocratic and public opinion was dismayed, John of Gaunt complained but was by now very ill. When Gaunt died in February 1399 Bolingbroke should have succeeded to his father’s vast lands and wealth. However, Richard extended his exile to life and proceeded to sequester the Lancaster estate, parcelling it out to loyal followers.

Bolingbroke’s return Amazingly, Richard chose this moment to lead an army back to Ireland in May 1399. Bolingbroke saw his opportunity and landed with a small force at Ravenspur in Yorkshire at the end of June 1399. What follows reads almost as a fairy story as men of all ranks rallied to Bolingbroke’s flag, because they thought he had been treated badly, because they were sick of the king’s erratic and tyrannical behaviour, because they thought it was time for a change.

Also Richard had taken most of his household knights and the loyal members of his nobility with him to Ireland so there was no-one to organise opposition. Bolingbroke met with the powerful Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and persuaded him that he didn’t seek the crown, merely the rightful return of his patrimony and Percy decided to support him.

By the time Richard returned from Ireland, landing in Wales on 24 July, it was all over. Bolingbroke had conquered England without a battle. He was astounded to realise that all the leading men of the realm had gone over to Bolingbroke without a struggle. On 19 August Richard II surrendered to Henry at Flint Castle, promising to abdicate if his life were spared. Richard was taken back to London and  imprisoned in the Tower of London on 1 September.

Deposing Richard Henry had by now realised he could become the next king, but exactly how to manage it presented problems. Henry wasn’t even the next in line to the throne: the most direct heir was Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, great-grandson of Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel. Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, had been Edward’s third son to survive to adulthood. The problem was solved by emphasising Henry’s descent in a direct male line, whereas March’s descent was through his grandmother, Philippa.

Psychodrama These final chapters of Jones’s history overshadow all the preceding adventures because what happened to Richard is so weird that the modern reader can’t help envisioning it as a play or movie. Henry and Richard were related. They had a common history having, for example, both survived the Peasants revolt back in 1381, and the rights and wrongs of the king’s policies vis-a-vis the House of Lancaster were both intimately personal and of national political importance. And then, how did Henry square the age’s religious-ideological belief in the divinity of the king, with the reality of leading a broken, tearful young man (Richard was just 32) to the Tower and locking him up while powerful barons decided just how to get rid of him and whether or not to execute him.

Parliament decides In the end, tellingly, Henry worked through parliament. The Archbishop of Canterbury read out to an assembly of lords and commons at Westminster Hall on Tuesday 30 September that Richard willingly renounced his crown.  A few days later parliament met to discuss Richard’s fate and the Bishop of St Asaph read thirty-three articles of deposition that were unanimously accepted by lords and commons. On 1 October 1399, Richard II was formally deposed and on 13 October, the feast day of Edward the Confessor, Henry Bolingbroke was crowned king.

Starved to death Richard was imprisoned but, as you would expect, his continued existence proved the focal point of various plots to release and restore him to the throne. Bolingbroke realise he had to be liquidated and – although no definitive account survives – it is thought he was starved to death in Pontefract castle and was dead by Valentine’s day 1400. In order to dispel rumours that he was still alive, Henry had Richard’s emaciated body carried on open display from Pontefract and put on show in the old St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 February before burial in King’s Langley Priory on 6 March.

The Plantagenet Legacy

Jones has a ten-page epilogue where he trots through the legacies of the Plantagenet kings who reigned from 1154 to 1400, in the arts, economy, culture, in military terms especially vis-a-vis the endless wars with France, and in terms of the steady growth of parliamentary democracy. These are fine but a bit throwaway, analysis not being his thing, dramatic scenes, conflict, battles and the endless scheming of medieval politics being his strong point.

What came over to me from this 600-page book was the extraordinary violence of it all. Almost none of the 250 or so years in the book are not marked by conflict at home or abroad or both. England, like just about every ‘nation’ in Europe, seems to be involved in more or less non-stop conflict. War was a way of life for kings and princes, wars of conquest to expand their empires, or to maintain them, or to retrieve lost land, make up the dominant theme of this book.

And the extreme fragility of the political realm. This is a vast subject, covered by thousands of historians but it all tends to remind me of Karl Popper’s great insight into the nature of ‘democracy’. Popper said democracy is not about voting for this or that politician or political party on the basis of their manifesto (well, it is, a bit) – far more importantly, democracy exists so we can throw out politicians we are fed up with. It is mechanism to prevent tyranny by regularly getting rid of rulers.

That seems to me the nub of so many of the issues described in this big gripping book. The nobles couldn’t get rid of the king and the king couldn’t get rid of the nobles – at least not without commencing the machinations, the arraignments for treason and beheadings etc which tended to kick off cycles of violence which soon escalated out of control.

Now we have mechanisms to vote for our equivalent of local ‘nobles’ – MPs – and for our ruler – the Prime Minister – on a fairly regular basis, and all parties concerned can appeal to this validation or mandate for their behaviour which, if it is queried seriously enough, will prompt another election.

God knows modern ‘democratic’ societies still experience extremes of social tension and conflict – having lived through Mrs Thatcher’s premiership and its polarising Miners Strike and then the Poll Tax riots – but there are mechanisms for just about managing them by changing rulers and ruling parties: it was the widespread unpopularity of the poll tax which led to the overthrow of Mrs Thatcher and the election of her anodyne successor John Major.

So all this just makes me imagine what it must have been like living in a world where this kind of peaceful changeover of ruler, and of ruling class (which, in a sense, modern MPs are) is impossible. Both the king and his barons find themselves trapped for all eternity with each other. Their conflicts have nowhere to go. The king cannot resign after a military failure. The barons cannot quit public life in disgust, as modern politicians can.

Both were trapped in their positions, forced by notions of nobility and duty to act out roles which time and again led to armed conflict, to the collapse of dialogue and civil wars. One of the surprising aspects of Jones’s book is the number of occasions on which the nobility took up arms against their kings, not just overthrowing Edward II and Richard II, but taking up arms against King John and, repeatedly against Henry III, and even against tough King Edward I.

Jones’s book is a gripping, hugely readable account of this big chunk of English history, but it also prompts all kinds of thoughts about the nature of power and politics, about the nature of what is possible in politics has changed and evolved, which shed light on the political struggles which are going on right now.

The Wilton Diptych

The Wilton Diptych is thought to have been a portable altarpiece made for the private devotion of King Richard II by an artist now unknown. On the left Richard is kneeling in the foreground and being presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and a company of eleven angels on the right. Nearest to Richard is his patron saint John the Baptist, to the left are Saint Edward the Confessor and Saint Edmund, earlier English kings who had come, by Richard’s time, to be venerated as saints.

The Wilton Diptych, artist unknown, so-called because it was discovered in Wilton House

This wonderful work can be seen FOR FREE in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London.

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Posted by Simon on June 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/the-plantagenets-2-dan-jones/

The Sack of Constantinople in 1204

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade.
(Sir Steven Runciman, 1954)

Until I read John Julius Norwich’s account of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the devastating sack of Constantinople in 1204, I hadn’t appreciate what a seismic and unmitigated disaster it was.

Norwich’s account of the Latins’ destruction of the biggest, richest city in the world was so harrowing I was depressed for days and found it difficult to continue reading the book in which he describes it, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall.

Like reading detailed accounts of Hiroshima, I just felt that…. after seeing humanity revealed in such appalling colours, why… why go on with anything?

For me, personally, the reason to go on is to understand better. Not to understand perfectly, which I am confident, or acknowledge, is beyond human wit. But just because perfect understanding is an impossible platonic absolute, doesn’t mean that some understanding isn’t better than none. And, for me, personally, understanding things brings sweet mental joy.

And so, just like Norwich’s detailed description of the Sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, a detailed description of the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople makes it so much more comprehensible. Only if you follow the events in the most detailed way possible do you realise that a distant event which is often treated as a single thing – the Sack of Constantinople – was in fact a complex concatenation of accidents and misunderstandings and misjudgments and bad agreements. It took the malevolence of some people (the doge of Venice), the chancer’s gamble of the pretender to the Byzantine throne Alexius III, and then the passive acquiescence of the majority of the crusaders, to take place. Reading the details makes you realise that a) this is how ‘history’ i.e. human events, work, in complex unexpected ways, where all kinds of spokes are stuck into the machine and b) makes you realise how the nature of human life, human experience, human societies, and big political events, doesn’t change much. I’m thinking of the sequence of events which brought about Brexit, and which we are still in the middle of. The results aren’t as murderous and destructive as the sack of Constantinople – but they are recognisably the product of the same confused, chaotic species.

In other words, reading about the sack itself is grim and depressing, but the knowledge and insight it gives you into human nature and how human affairs operate, are powerful and liberating.

Summary

This is the short version you’re likely to read in books focusing on other subjects, such as the crusades as a whole, or the Middle Ages.

In April 1204 the Latin, Western soldiers of the Fourth Crusade laid siege to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. On 12 April the crusader armies breached the city’s defences and stormed the city. Attacking Venetian forces tried to use fire as a defensive shield but it quickly got out of control and burned unchecked through the city. As if that wasn’t catastrophic enough, once the crusaders had established a bridgehead, they proceeded to spend three days pillaging and looting the city.

The Greek emperor fled and leaders of the ruling families were driven into exile, so the crusaders chose a Latin ruler – Baldwin of Flanders – who was crowned Emperor Baldwin I and inherited about a quarter of the territory his Greek predecessors had ruled This Latin rule of the Byzantine Empire was to last just under 60 years, before a Greek ruler and army re-established Greek power.

After the city’s sacking, most of the Byzantine Empire’s territories were divided up among the Crusaders, but Byzantine aristocrats also established a number of small independent splinter states, one of them being the Empire of Nicaea, which would become the kernel of Greek resistance and – after a long series of small wars, setbacks and struggles to reunify Greek leadership – would eventually recapture Constantinople in 1261 and restore the Greek tradition and religion to the city of Constantine.

But the restored Byzantine Empire never managed to reclaim all its former territorial or economic strength, and eventually fell to the rising Ottoman Sultanate in 1453.

Background

The Latin West and Greek East of Christendom had been growing apart for centuries, with the pope in Rome arrogating more and more power and authority to himself, insisting the Eastern church submit to his authority, and Western clerics as a whole coming to regard the Eastern Orthodox church as schismatic and in error on a wide range of theological and procedural issues. Norwich’s three volumes of Byzantine history are littered with theological, administrative and geopolitical arguments between the papacy and the emperor or Patriarch (head of the Eastern Church) of Constantinople. This helps explain the indoctrination of western crusaders that the Byzantines were exotic, untrustworthy, almost heretics.

But the real focus of the story is the growing rivalry between the maritime republic of Venice, whose wealth was based on shipping and trading across the Muslim Middle East to the ‘Indies’ where spices and pepper came from, and Byzantium as the established power in the region. Successive emperors of Byzantium had been obliged to make trade treaties with Venice and given Venetian merchants extensive privileges in the city, such as an entire quarter down by the docks for their use and trading rights across the Empire’s territories and islands.

The sack had three causes:

  1. long-term mistrust between Latin Westerners and Greek Byzantines
  2. the long-term rivalry with Venice which wished to supersede Byzantium as the main power in the eastern Mediterranean
  3. a short-term, proximate cause which was a string of accidents to do with the mismanagement of the Fourth Crusade, which were ruthlessly exploited by the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, to fulfil point 2.

East-West relations

1. Mass arrest of the Venetians 1171

Latin Catholics from the rival cities Venice and Genoa dominated the city’s maritime trade and financial sector, having secured concessions from successive Byzantine emperors, which resulted in a virtual maritime monopoly and stranglehold over the Empire by the Venetians.

Rich Italian merchants grew very rich and so did the Byzantine aristocrats who allied with them, leading to popular resentment among the middle and lower classes in both the countryside and in the cities.

The Venetians resented that their main Italian rivals, the Genoese, also had extensive quarters in Constantinople, and in 1171 the Venetians attacked and largely destroyed the Genoese quarter. The Emperor retaliated by ordering the mass arrest of all Venetians throughout the Empire and the confiscation of their property (a move he had probably been meditating for some time – the Genoese attack gave him a pretext). As with all civil unrest, there were also rapes and the burning of houses. Infuriated, the Venetians launched a naval expedition to attack Byzantine interests, which failed, but the encouraged the Empire’s enemies, specifically the Serbs – to take advantage of the unrest and launch land attacks.

Relations were only gradually normalized, reaching an uneasy peace in the mid-1180s.

2. The massacre of the Latins

But the simmering resentment didn’t go away and burst out anew in the Massacre of the Latins which took place in Constantinople in April 1182.

After the death of Emperor Manuel I in 1180, his widow, the Latin princess Maria of Antioch, acted as regent to their son and became notorious for the favoritism she showed to Latin merchants and the big aristocratic land-owners.

In April 1182 she was overthrown by the ageing general Andronicus I Comnenus. He marched on Constantinople and entered the city in a wave of popular support. But the celebrations quickly got out of hand and escalated into mob violence against the hated Latins. The ensuing massacre was indiscriminate: Latin men, women and children were attacked in the street, their houses burnt down, 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 dragged through the streets at the tail of a dog.

Andronicus finally took control and curtailed the rioting, but the massacre obviously left profound bad feeling. The Normans under William II of Sicily in 1185 sacked Thessalonica, the Empire’s second largest city, while over the next decade or so, the German emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI both tried to get papal approval to mount an attack on Constantinople.

The Fourth Crusade

Henry VI’s failed expedition

This fraught relation between East and West, and especially between Byzantium and Venice, was the difficult background to the Fourth Crusade and largely explains what happened next.

The Third Crusade had ended in 1192 with a treaty signed between Richard I of England and Saladin, leader of the Saracen forces, agreeing that Jerusalem would remain under Muslim rule but that Christian pilgrims and traders would be assured safe passage to visit the city.

Almost immediately the failure to liberate Jerusalem led to calls for a new crusade to finish the job. In 1195 there was one of those large-scale western incursions into the area which aren’t included in the canonical ‘crusades’ but which Norwich describes in just as much detail – the steady rumble of expeditions, wars, raids, alliances and defeats which fill Norwich’s pages and help put the crusades into a broader context of unending conflict.

Henry VI, the second son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, organised a new Eastern expedition and in the summer of 1197 a large number of German knights and nobles, headed by two archbishops, nine bishops, and five dukes, sailed for Palestine. There they captured Sidon and Beirut, but then the army heard that Henry himself had died at Messina in Sicily on his way to the Holy Land and many of the nobles and clerics returned to Europe. Deserted by much of their leadership, the rank and file crusaders panicked before the advance of a Muslim army from Egypt, and fled to their ships in Tyre. Thus ended this brief Western foray.

Pope Innocent III preaches the fourth crusade

Pope Innocent III succeeded to the papacy in January 1198 and immediately began preaching a new crusade. The kings of Germany, France and England were all distracted by dynastic squabbles, but the pope managed to get a leader in the shape of Count Thibaut of Champagne who, in 1199, committed to the crusade and began rallying knights. In the event, Thibault himself he died in 1201 and was replaced by an Italian count, Boniface of Montferrat.

Richard the Lionheart’s advice – attack Egypt

Now, on his return from the third crusade in 1192, King Richard of England had given his opinion that the main goal of any future crusade should be to seize Egypt. Jerusalem is far to the south of the east Mediterranean coastline and experience had shown that, going the land route through Anatolia (modern Turkey) tended to focus the military efforts of the crusaders on the territory they passed through – on Cilicia and Syria and Antioch and so on, in the north of Palestine – whereas Jerusalem is far to the south, much closer to the heart of what had been the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt.

The idea being that whoever held Egypt would find it easy to secure Jerusalem as a strategic add-on and would have a strong secure hinterland. The leaders of the fourth crusade took all this on board and planned from the beginning to launch a naval campaign against Muslim Egypt.

The deal with Venice

However, an invasion of Egypt would require ships and the only Christian kingdom with the maritime capacity to help was Venice. Thus Boniface and the other leaders sent envoys to Venice, Genoa, and other city-states in 1200 to negotiate a contract for transport to Egypt.

Venice agreed to help. Specifically, Venice agreed to build the ships necessary to transport 33,500 crusaders across the Med. The agreement made for a full year of preparation on the part of the Venetians to build numerous ships and train the sailors who would man them. All this would take place at the cost of her own commercial activities. Venice also negotiated for permanent possession of ports seized in the Holy Land. The crusade was to be ready to sail on 24 June 1203 and make directly for the Ayyubid capital, Cairo. The agreement was ratified by Pope Innocent, with a solemn ban on attacks on Christian states.

However, nobody had enforced commitment to the Venice plan on the heterogenous armies and forces scattered all across Europe, and so various contingents sailed under their own steam from a variety of European ports. The number of crusaders who actually turned up at Venice in the appointed month of May 1202 was about a third of the expected 33,500.

Reasonably enough, the Venetians, under their aged and blind Doge Enrico Dandolo, would not let the crusaders leave without paying the full amount agreed to, some 85,000 silver marks. The crusaders could only manage 35,000 silver marks between them. This was disastrous for the Venetians, who had suspended their usual trading for a year, trained sailors and so on, in order to fulfil the deal.

Doge Dandolo proposes an attack on Zara

It is now that the Doge Dandolo starts to emerge as the wicked genie of the expedition. Dandolo proposed that to pay off their debts the crusaders should help Venice with a spot of bother: the port of Zara in Dalmatia had traditionally been dominated by Venice but had rebelled in 1181 and allied itself with King Emeric of Hungary. Dandolo told the crusaders they could pay off their debt if they helped Venice seize back control of Zara.

Now King Emeric was himself a Catholic and had taken the cross in 1195, so many of the crusaders understandably refused to countenance attacking Zara, and some, including a force led by the elder Simon de Montfort, returned home. Also, as soon as he learned about the proposal, the Pope wrote a letter to the crusading leadership threatening excommunication if they attacked another Christian state. However, this letter was kept secret from the ranks of the crusader army, which proceeded to take ship across the Adriatic and besiege Zara in November 1202.

Although the inhabitants of Zara hung banners from their buildings with crosses on to point out that they were fellow Christians, the crusaders quickly breached the walls and proceeded to ransack and pillage the city. Giving way to crude greed, the Venetians and other crusaders came to blows over the division of the spoils.

When Innocent III heard of the sack of Zara, he sent a letter to the crusaders excommunicating them and ordering them to return to their holy vows and head for Jerusalem. The leaders kept this letter from the troops, and replied to the pope that they had been forced to do it by the Venetians, having had no alternative between carrying out the attack or calling off the whole crusade.

The pope relented and in February 1203 rescinded the excommunications against all non-Venetians in the expedition. Somewhere someone must have done a study of just how ineffectual papal excommunications were in the Middle Ages.

The fatal deal with Alexius IV Angelus

Meanwhile, the nominal leader of the crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, had left the fleet before it sailed for Zara, to visit his cousin Philip of Swabia. At Philip’s court he found the exiled Byzantine prince Alexius IV Angelus, Philip’s brother-in-law and the son of the recently deposed Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelus. (Isaac II had been deposed and blinded by his older brother, Alexius Angelus, who then claimed the throne as Alexius III. Alexius IV wasn’t Alexius IV yet, but would be if he could only reclaim the throne.)

Now Alexius proceeded to make the two would-be crusaders an offer: if they could get the crusaders to sail to Constantinople, and overthrow the reigning emperor Alexius III Angelus, and restore his father and himself to the Byzantine throne, then Alexius would:

  1. use the wealth of the Byzantine Empire to pay the entire debt owed to the Venetians
  2. give 200,000 silver marks to the crusaders
  3. give 10,000 Byzantine professional troops for the Crusade
  4. pay for the permanent maintenance of 500 knights in the Holy Land
  5. offer the service of the Byzantine navy to transport the Crusader Army to Egypt
  6. place the Eastern Orthodox Church under the authority of the Pope

This fantastic offer was passed on to the leaders of the Crusade as they wintered at Zara and they enthusiastically agreed, seconded by Doge Dandolo – although the latter knew that Alexius could never keep these promises: he knew that Byzantium didn’t have that much money and would never agree to submit its church to Rome. Dandolo did, though, see at a glance the benefits for Venice in such an arrangement, which were:

  • revenge for the massacre of the Latins and other historical grievances
  • seizure of Constantinople’s significant wealth
  • by reinstating a large Venetian colony in the city, gaining a permanent commercial advantage over Venice’s rival, Genoa

Even now there were dissenters among the crusade’s leaders who (correctly) thought it was no part of a crusade against the Muslims to attack the mainstay of Christian power in the East. Led by Reynold of Montmirail, they sailed directly on to Syria.

Diversion of the crusade to Constantinople

But the majority of the fourth crusade now set sail for Constantinople in April 1203. The fleet consisted of some 60 war galleys, 100 horse transports and 50 large transports (manned by 10,000 Venetian oarsmen and marines). The Pope hedged and issued an order against any more attacks on Christians unless they were actively hindering the Crusader cause, but he did not condemn the scheme outright.

The crusaders attack Constantinople

When the Fourth Crusade arrived at Constantinople on 23 June 1203, the city had a population of approximately 500,000 people, a garrison of 15,000 men (including 5,000 Varangians), and a fleet of 20 galleys. Norwich emphasises that the city’s defences had been left to decay by the useless emperor Alexius III Angelus, and most of the galleys had fallen into disrepair.

The crusaders delivered their ultimatum demanding that that the emperor Alexius III should abdicate to make way for his nephew, Alexius IV. The emperor refused. The crusaders attacked the suburbs of Chalcedon and Chrysopolis. When about 200 ships, horse transports, and galleys delivered the crusading army across the narrow strait of the Bosphorus from Asia to Europe, Alexius III had lined up the Byzantine army in battle formation along the shore but, when the crusader actually knights charged, the Byzantine army turned and fled.

The Crusaders followed south along the shore and attacked the Tower of Galata. From this tower stretched a massive chain across the Golden Horn, the strait of water up the east side of the city, preventing entry to enemy ships. The crusaders took the tower and lowered the chain, allowing the Venetian fleet to sail up the Golden Horn. This is a narrow strip of water and the crusader galleys were able to come up close against the city’s seaward walls. Here they presented the pretender to the throne, Alexius IV, but were surprised when the people and soldiers of Constantinople jeered from the battlements. The crusaders had been told the people were in the grip of a cruel dictator and that they and Alexius would be greeted as liberators. Now they began to realise this was not true.

The crusaders set about attacking the city, combining an attack on the land walls at the north-west, with attacks on the sea walls from the fleet in the Horn. Eventually a breach was made and the crusaders entered the city. They were forced back by the Byzantine response and set a fire to keep off their attackers. This fire got out of control and was the first of the disastrous fires which were to burn through a large part of the city, this first one leaving an estimated 20,000 people homeless.

Alexius III made one last foray out to face the crusaders, but compounded his reputation for cowardice and ineffectiveness by turning his 8,500 men back in the face of the crusaders’ smaller force of 3,500. The impact of the fire and of this dismal capitulation led to a collapse in morale among the defenders. Alexius fled the city with his favourite daughter and courtiers.

The Byzantine officials now quickly declared the runaway emperor deposed and restored blind old Isaac II to the throne.

This presented the crusaders with a dilemma. The main, official, justification for the whole expedition was supposed to be restoring Isaac and his son, Alexius IV, who had proposed the whole scheme in the first place, to the throne. Now the Byzantines had called their bluff and restored Isaac. The crusaders responded that they would only recognize the authority of Isaac II if his son was raised to co-emperor, but the Byzantines again called the crusaders’ bluff by immediately agreeing to this, taking Alexius into the city and hurriedly arranging for his coronation at Hagia Sophia where he was crowned Alexius Angelus IV, co-emperor.

Alexius is unable to pay

As Norwich makes all too plain, Alexius now realised what a dreadful error he had made. The mismanagement of the Angelus dynasty over the previous decades had left Byzantium’s coffers bare, and Alexius III had made it worse by fleeing with as much imperial treasure as he could carry.

Alexius IV now ordered the seizure and melting down of priceless icons and church plate to use their gold and silver to pay off the impatient crusaders who were waiting across the Golden Horn in the suburb of Galata. Forcing the populace to destroy their most precious icons to satisfy an army of foreign schismatics did not endear Alexius IV to the citizens of Constantinople. Alexius negotiated a six-month extension to his pledge to the crusaders, making it now fall due in April 1204. Alexius IV then led 6,000 men from the crusader army against his rival Alexius III in Adrianople, with a view to seizing back the treasure his uncle had stolen and whatever could be ransacked from the Empire’s second city.

The Great Fire of Constantinople

But during the co-emperor’s absence in August 1203, rioting broke out in the city against the arrogant Latin occupiers, a number of whom were killed. In retaliation armed Venetians and other crusaders entered the city from the Golden Horn and, among other mayhem, discovered a church which had been converted into a mosque to cater to Constantinople’s not insignificant Muslim population. Citizens, both Greek and Muslim, rallied to the defence of this building and, to cover their retreat, the Latins started a fire, which – as is the way with fires – quickly spread out of control.

This became the ‘Great Fire’ of Constantinople which burnt from 19 to 21 August, destroying a large part of the city, consuming many ancient palaces and churches, and leaving an estimated 100,000 homeless. Amid the ruins the demoralised citizenry struggled on, while the crusaders waiting impatiently for their money.

The overthrow of Alexius IV

In January 1204, blind old Isaac II died, probably of natural causes, and rule now passed to his lamentable son, Alexius IV. The Byzantine Senate elected a young noble Nicolas Canabus to be co-emperor, in what was to be one of the last known acts of this ancient institution. However he declined the appointment and sought church sanctuary. Who can blame him?

Now during this period of crisis a nobleman called Alexius Ducas (nicknamed Mourtzouphlos, referring to his bush eyebrows) had led Byzantine forces during the initial clashes with the crusaders, winning respect from both the army and the people. And so it was Mourtzouphlos who one night entered the bed chamber of Alexius IV, told him there was rioting outside and the people were baying for his blood, led him through secret passages in the palace, to a dungeon where he chained and locked him up. Then returned to join his supporters and have himself proclaimed Emperor Alexius V. A few weeks later Alexius IV, the man who had caused all this trouble with his foolish promise to the crusaders, was strangled.

Alexius immediately took control of the Byzantine resistance and had the city fortifications strengthened, as well as recalling loyal troops from the provinces to bolster the Constantinople garrison.

The crusaders and Venetians, incensed at the murder of their supposed patron, demanded that Mourtzouphlos honour the contract that Alexius IV had made. The terms, if you remember, were to:

  1. use the wealth of the Empire to pay the entire debt owed to the Venetians
  2. give 200,000 silver marks to the crusaders
  3. give 10,000 Byzantine professional troops for the Crusade
  4. pay for the maintenance of 500 knights in the Holy Land
  5. offer the service of the Byzantine navy to transport the Crusader Army to Egypt
  6. place the Eastern Orthodox Church under the authority of the Pope

The crusaders renew their attack

Alexius V refused for the simple reason that there was nowhere near that much money in the imperial treasury. In March he ordered the forcible expulsion of all Latins from the city, which , and so in April the crusaders launched another attack on the city. Alexius V’s army put up a strong resistance, hurling projectiles onto the crusader’s siege engines, shattering many of them, and bad weather also hampered the attackers.

Pope Innocent III again sent a message ordering the crusaders not to attack, but once again the papal letter was suppressed by the clergy and never made public. While the Latin crusaders prepared to attack the land walls the Venetian fleet drew close to the sea-walls in an attempt to storm them.

On 12 April 1204, the weather conditions finally favoured the crusaders. A strong northern wind helped the Venetian ships get close to the seaward walls while on the land approach, the crusaders managed to make a hole in the walls through which a force of crusaders was able to crawl and overpower the defenders.

The crusaders captured the Blachernae section of the city in the northwest and used it as a base to attack the rest of the city. Alexius V fled the city accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law. In the Hagia Sophia Constantine Lascaris was acclaimed emperor but, when he failed to persuade the Varangian guard to continue the fight against the crusaders, in the early hours of 13 April he also fled, leaving Constantinople abandoned to the control of the Latins.

The sack of Constantinople

Over the centuries Constantinople had become a museum of ancient and Byzantine art. Having secured control of the city the crusaders proceeded to systematically sack and devastate it for three days. Churches and palaces were ransacked. Vast numbers of works of art were stolen, or melted down for their precious metals, or just burned and destroyed. Thousands of citizens were murdered or raped.

Despite the pope’s threat of excommunication, the crusaders destroyed, defiled and looted and set on fire the city’s churches and monasteries. Priests were abused, defrocked or murdered. In the greatest church in Christendom, Hagia Sophia, the crusaders melted down the silver iconostasis, smashed the icons, burned the holy books, and set on the patriarchal throne a prostitute who sang bawdy songs as the crusaders got drunk and pissed on the holy relics.

It was now that the Venetians stole the four statues of horses which they set up over the portico of St Mark’s cathedral in the main square in Venice. A large bronze statue of Hercules, created by the legendary Lysippos, court sculptor of Alexander the Great, was destroyed. Like countless other artworks, the statue was melted down for its metal value.

It was said that the total amount looted from Constantinople was about 900,000 silver marks. After the dust had settled the leaders of the ‘crusade’ made a big pile of their takings and divided up according to a pre-arranged deal. The Venetians took 150,000 silver marks that they reckoned was their due, while the crusaders took 50,000 silver marks. A further 100,000 silver marks were divided evenly up between the crusaders and Venetians. The remaining 500,000 silver marks were kept back by crusader knights and gangs.

When Innocent III heard of the conduct of his crusaders he was beside himself with rage. The whole episode sharply highlights the limits of papal power, and the ineffectiveness of even of the strongest weapon the pope possessed, that of excommunication. Various popes excommunicate numerous kings and emperors and princes throughout Norwich’s book and it never seems to have the slightest effect. In fact I wonder if there is a single example of the threat of excommunication making anyone (anyone of note, any leader) change their behaviour. In his shame the pope wrote:

As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood, they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex. They have committed incest, adultery, and fornication before the eyes of men. They have exposed both matrons and virgins, even those dedicated to God, to the sordid lusts of boys. Not satisfied with breaking open the imperial treasury and plundering the goods of princes and lesser men, they also laid their hands on the treasures of the churches and, what is more serious, on their very possessions. They have even ripped silver plates from the altars and have hacked them to pieces among themselves. They violated the holy places and have carried off crosses and relics.

The fourth crusaders

The naval attack on Egypt was never carried out. Only a relatively small number of the members of the Fourth Crusade finally reached the Holy Land. About a tenth of the knights who had taken the cross in Flanders arrived to reinforce the remaining Christian states there, plus about half of those from the Île-de-France. What a farce.

The Fourth Crusade – if indeed it can be so described – surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. Constantinople in the twelfth century had been not just the wealthiest metropolis in the world, but also the most intellectually and artistically cultivated and the chief repository of Europe’s classical heritage, both Greek and Roman. By its sack, Western civilisation suffered a loss greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century or the burning of the library of Alexandria by the soldiers of the Prophet in the seventh – perhaps the most catastrophic single loss in all history. (Norwich, p.182)

The aftermath – a Latin emperor and the Greek successor states

When the looting was quite finished and large parts of the once-glorious city burned to the ground, the crusaders convened to appoint a Latin emperor to take control of the city and the Byzantine Empire. Doge Dandolo wisely withdrew from the field of candidates and Boniface of Montferrat was deliberately rejected because of his family ties with the Greek regime. Several other crusader leaders were overlooked till they settled on the inoffensive Baldwin of Flanders. The Empire was now partitioned:

  • Boniface went on to found the Kingdom of Thessalonica, a vassal state of the new Latin Empire.
  • The Venetians founded the Duchy of the Archipelago in the Aegean Sea.
  • A Duchy of Athens controlling most of Greece.

Byzantine refugees founded their own rump states, namely:

  • the Empire of Nicaea, just across the Bosphorus on the Asian mainland, under Theodore Lascaris (a relative of Alexius III)
  • the Empire of Trebizond far away on the south coast of the Black Sea
  • the Despotate of Epirus on the Dalmatian shore opposite Italy

While Crete, Rhodes, Caphalonia and Corfu were permanently handed over to Venice.

Partition of the Byzantine Empire into The Latin Empire, Empire of Nicaea, and Despotate of Epirus after 1204 (source: Wikipedia)

Its enemies take advantage of the ruin of the Byzantine Empire

Norwich’s book takes a decisive turn after the sack of Constantinople. Up till then the reader had a reasonable grasp on the notion of one Byzantine Empire and one Byzantine emperor, who faced a sea of opponents to north, west and east.

But now there were no fewer than four emperors – the Latin one in Constantinople, the Greek one in Nicaea, one in faraway Trebizond and an aspirant one in Epirus (not to mention the Holy Roman Emperor based in Germany). Each of these are led by rulers who aren’t content with their holdings but immediately started scheming against each other, and involving the leaders of the lesser states – the Duchy of Athens, the Principality of Achaea and so on.

For the next fifty years or so, all these characters conspired against each other, fought against each other, made and broke alliances with each other – all the time doing the same with the many enemies who continued to surround and menace the Empire, from the Bulgarians and Serbs in the north, to the Seljuk Turks in the East.

Several of the major Greek and Latin protagonists in the events died or were killed soon after the fall of the city. The betrayal and blinding of Murtzuphlus by Alexius III led to his capture by the Latins and his execution in 1205. Not long after, Alexius III was himself captured by Boniface and sent to exile in Southern Italy. He died in Nicaea in 1211.

On 14 April 1205, one year after the conquest of the city, the Latin emperor Baldwin was decisively defeated and captured at the Battle of Adrianople by the Bulgarians. In 1205 or 1206, the Bulgarian Emperor Kaloyan mutilated him and left him to die (others suggest he was kept captive in the famous Baldwin’s Tower in the Bulgarian capital Veliko Turnovo, where he died under unknown circumstances). Either way, he only lasted a year as the ruler of the Latin Empire and that Empire was to lead a stunted, blighted life, menaced on all sides and deprived of all economic livelihood.

Baldwin was succeeded by his brother Henry of Hainault who appears to have been a wise and fair king, liberal to his Greek subjects, and who – beside battling the troublesome Bulgarians – reached a peace settlement with the Greek Empire based in Nicaea.

The Latin Empire always rested on shaky foundations but it took nearly sixty years before the city was finally retaken by the Nicaean Greeks under Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1261. But it was a ruined wreck of a city, as Norwich’s desolate description makes clear. Many of the churches and palaces still lay abandoned ruins. The population had collapsed. The city was never to recover.

Conclusion

The sack of Constantinople was a major turning point in medieval history. The Crusaders’ decision to attack the world’s largest Christian city was controversial at the time and has been ever since. Reports of Crusader looting and brutality horrified the Orthodox world and crystallised bitter opposition to the barbarian West.

Relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches were blighted, arguably right up to the present day. Norwich makes the point that, as the Turks drew nearer in the coming centuries, most Byzantines, whether aristocrats or peasants, preferred the idea of subjection by the Muslims to the barbaric destructiveness of the West Europeans. The Byzantines had a saying, ‘Better a turban than a cardinal’s hat,’ and they meant it.

So much for East-West relations, but the main and obvious result of the sack was that the Byzantine Empire was permanently crippled. Broken up into a number of successor states, it was never to be really unified again, never able to muster the resources in men and goods necessary to hold off its enemies, especially the Ottoman Turks who would begin their rise to power 200 years later.

The actions of the Crusaders thus directly accelerated the collapse of Christendom in the East, and in the long run facilitated the expansion of Islam across the Bosphorus and right into the heart of Europe. In 1529 the Ottoman Turks led by Suleiman the Magnificent were to lay siege to Vienna.

So you could argue that the net effect of the entire crusading enterprise was not only to leave an enduring legacy of bitterness throughout the entire Muslim world and among the Greek Orthodox eastern world – but also to hand the Middle East, all of Anatolia and half the Balkans over to Muslim occupiers.

Was ever a mass social movement and religious undertaking so utterly and completely counter-productive?

Related links

Reviews of other books and exhibitions about the Middle Ages

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Posted by Simon on June 5, 2019

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

In February 1130 on the banks of the river Pyramus (now the Ceyhan) 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)

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, it this is the third and final volume in Norwich’s weighty and famous three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to the fall of the same city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The second volume 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 1096-99, Second 1147-49, Third 1189-92, Fourth 1202-4 etc through to the ninth crusade 1271-2) and there are lots of sources about them, too

Permanent war

What struck me more than ever about this about this final instalment 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 jockeying for position.

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, Alexius Comnenus gives 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 not a scholarly or 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…
1145-49 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…
1189-92 The Third Crusade, which results in a negitiated 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 or Sri Lanka or Yemen – 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 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 Rus –

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.

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 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 six and seven hundreds, looms the even bigger Fact of medieval history from the three hundreds 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 Genghiz 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 expedictions 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 ad, 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 Fouth 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 1081-1118) 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 often violently disagreed among themselves, 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 just one among countless other 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 theimselves 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 top 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 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 favoritism 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 four 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 women were used this embodied typical misogyny and sexism, and there’s no doubting that it was a 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 sons found themselves being married off to complete strangers from foreign lands who didn’t speak the same language, who might not even be Christians. 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 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 that 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 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) 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.

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

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 (1040-90) 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.
  • Alexius’s mother, Anna Dalassene
  • the empress Maria, the one who adopted young Alexius
  • Alexius’s daughter, Anna Comnena (1083-1153), 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.
  • 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 – 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, and 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 guide of the ‘fourth crusade’.

When you actually read in fine detail what actually happened during the so-called crusades, and study the background of continual warfare all across Europe and the Middle East at the time, the so-called crusades cease to stand out as any kind of special event and merge seamlessly into the unending and fiendishly complicated series of wars and conflicts and battles and shifting alliances which characterised the entire period.

Byzantine emperors (1068 – 1453)

Romanus IV Diogenes (1068 –1071)

A highly successful general, Romanus is, however, mostly remembered for leading the Byzantine forces to catastrophic defeat against the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert on 26 August 1071, defeat which left Anatolia – for 700 years the source of Byzantium’s grain and manpower – vulnerable to the Seljuk Turks’ slow but steady annexation. Quite quickly central Anatolia became known as the Sultanate of Rum, referring to Rome, the name the Turks gave all the Greeks. This map from Wikipedia shows how the Sultanate slowly but steadily annexed Anatolia.

Expansion of the Sultanate 1100–1240 (source: Wikipedia)

Romanus and the victor, Alp Arslan, got on well and Alp released Romanus to return to Constantinople. Had he survived something might have been salvaged, but he was overthrown and blinded in a coup.

Michael VII Ducas (1067 – 1078)

Michael had been a boy when the usurper Romanus Diogenes made himself senior emperor. Soon after Romanus returned to Constantinople after the shameful defeat of Manzikert, he was blinded by partisans of the powerful Ducas family and power returned, at least in theory, to Michael. Michael was, however, weak and ineffectual, and his policies prompted several attempts at a coup, the successful one being led by…

Nicephorus III Botaneiates (1078 –1081)

Nicephorus had risen to become military ruler of Anatolia. He rebelled against the bad rule and high taxes of Michael VII, leading his army and was welcomed into the capital (Michael wisely abdicated and went off to a monastery). But Nicephorus, born around 1001, was 77 and, having secured power, did not know what to do with it. While military threats mounted in the east and west, the young general Alexius Comnenus emerged as a rising star, a general who never lost a battle. Learning that Nicephorus was about to have him arrested, Alexius rallied his troops and many supporters among the aristocracy and staged a coup. Botaneiates was allowed to retire to a monastery.

Comnenid dynasty (1081–1185)

Alexius I Comnenus (1081 –1118)

Alexius is one of the heroes of the book, a distinguished general who set about restoring military and political stability to the empire. His successes in Anatolia against the Turks had made Botaneiates jealous and so Alexius staged a military coup before he himself was arrested. Pious and hard-working, Alexius had to fight wars against the Normans – who, led by their buccaneering leader Robert Guiscard, invaded from their base in south Italy in 1081 – and against the Seljuk Turks who continued their expansion into Anatolia.

Norwich’s account of the canny way Alexius handled the incursion of the various crusader armies into his territory is fascinating. After fifty years which had seen a dozen or so emperors come and go, Alexius was successful in establishing an enduring and (relatively) stable dynasty.

John II Comnenus (1118 –1143)

Eldest son of Alexius I, John inherited in a smooth transition on his father’s death. His reign was dominated by wars – defending attacks by the Sicilian Normans, fending off a Venetian invasion fleet, dealing with the Hungarians to the North, and then campaigning against the Seljuk Turks and Armenians of Cilicia to the east, with the sometimes reluctant co-operation of the Crusader states of Edessa and Antioch.

Manuel I Comnenos ‘the Great’ (1143 –1180)

The fourth and youngest son of John II, his two eldest brothers died before their father who chose Manuel over the surviving elder brother Isaac. An energetic ruler, he launched campaigns against the Turks, humbled Hungary, achieved supremacy over the Crusader states, and tried unsuccessfully to recover Italy. His extravagance and constant campaigning, however, depleted the Empire’s resources.

Alexius II Comnenos (1180 –1183)

Born on 14 September 1169, the only son of Manuel I. In 1180–1182 i.e. aged 11 and 12 he came under the regency of his mother, Maria of Antioch but, as described above, she was unpopular because a Latin, and was overthrown by Andronicus I Comnenos, who became co-emperor and finally had Alexius II deposed and killed.

Andronicus I Comnenos (1183 –1185)

Born c. 1118, a nephew of John II by his brother Isaac. A general, he was imprisoned for conspiring against John II, but escaped and spent 15 years in exile in various courts in eastern Europe and the Middle East, where he acquired a reputation for his promiscuousness.

In 1182 marched on Constantinople, capitalising on the unpopularity of Maria of Antioch, his arrival coinciding with a city-wide uprising against the hated Venetians, who benefited from trade and legal advantages. Having quelled the riots and established his authority, Andronicus has Mariastrangled in prison, and then overthrew his nephew Alexius II, who he had murdered.

His campaign against the vast landowning aristocracy was justifiable from an economic point of view, but was accompanied by growing paranoia and tyranny, not a day going by without public tortures and executions. The Normans from Sicily took the opportunity to invade Illyria and Andronicus’s abject failure to repel them clinched opposition to him at all levels of society and he was overthrown and lynched in a popular uprising.

The Angelid dynasty (1185–1204)

Of all the families who at one time or another wore the imperial crown of Byzantium, the Angeli were the worst… The three Angelus emperors – Isaac II, Alexius III and Alexius IV – reigned from first to last, a mere nineteen years. But each was in his own way disastrous, and together they were responsible for the greatest catastrophe that Constantinople was ever to suffer until its final fall. (p.156)

Isaac II Angelus (1185 –1195)

Born in September 1156, Isaac came to the throne at the head of a popular revolt against Andronicus I. His reign was marked by revolts and wars in the Balkans, especially against a resurgent Bulgaria. He was deposed, blinded and imprisoned by his elder brother, Alexius III.

Alexius III Angelus (1195 –1203)

Born in 1153, Alexius was the elder brother of Isaac II, who he deposed and blinded. His reign was marked by misgovernment and the increasing autonomy of provincial magnates. He was deposed by the Fourth Crusade and fled Constantinople, roaming Greece and Asia Minor, searching for support to regain his throne. He died in Nicaean captivity in 1211.

Isaac II Angelus (18 July 1203 – 27/28 January 1204)

The armies of the Fourth Crusade arrived at the walls of Constantinople in 1203 and began besieging the city. Alexius III fled with his wife. the city council restored Isaac II who, although blind, was the most legitimate ruler. Actual rule fell to his son Alexius IV but both of them failed to deal adequately with the crusader demands and Isaac was deposed by Alexius V Dukas in January 1204 and died on 28 January 1204, perhaps of poison.

Alexius IV Angelus (1 August 1203 – 27/28 January 1204)

The son of Isaac II, Alexius enlisted the Fourth Crusade to return his father to the throne, and reigned alongside his restored father. Due to their failure to deal with the Crusaders’ demands, he was deposed by Alexius V Ducas in January 1204, and was strangled on 8 February.

The fall of Constantinople

Alexius V Ducas ‘Mourtzouphlos’ (5 February 1204 – 13 April 1204)

In Norwich’s view the only Byzantine ruler of the time who was up to the crisis, Alexius was born in 1140, the son-in-law of Alexius III and a prominent aristocrat. He deposed Isaac II and Alexius IV in a palace coup. He tried to repel the Crusaders, but they captured Constantinople forcing Mourtzouphlos to flee. He joined the exiled Alexius III, but was later blinded by the latter. Captured by the Crusaders, he was executed in December 1205.

Theodore I Laskaris (1205 – 1222)

Born c. 1174, he rose to prominence as a son-in-law of Alexios III. His brother Constantine Laskaris (or Theodore himself, it is uncertain) was elected emperor by the citizens of Constantinople on the day before the city fell to the Crusaders.

Constantine only remained for a few hours before the sack of the City and later fled to Nicaea, where Theodore organized the Greek resistance to the Latins. Proclaimed emperor after Constantine’s death in 1205, Theodore was crowned only in 1208. He managed to stop the Latin advance into Asia Minor and also to repel Seljuk Turk attacks, establishing the Empire of Nicaea as the strongest of the several Greek successor states to Constantinople.

John III Ducas Vatatzes (15 December 1221 – November 1254)

Born around 1192, John became the son-in-law and successor of Theodore I in 1212. A capable ruler and soldier, he expanded his state in Bithynia, Thrace and Macedonia at the expense of the Latin Empire, Bulgaria and the rival Greek state of Epirus.

Related links

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by Simon on June 2, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 2, 2019

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Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1) by Norman Cohn (1975)

Norman Cohn (1915-2007) was an English academic historian. In the 1960s he became the head of the Columbus Centre, which was set up and initially financed by Observer editor David Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution. As head, Cohn commissioned research and studies from other academics on numerous aspects of persecution, and himself wrote several books on the subject, namely:

  • The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) which traced the long history of millenial, end-of-the-world cults which, more often than not, seek scapegoats when the Great Awakening or Rapture or whatever they call it fails to happen
  • Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993) which traced millennial religious themes to their sources in ancient civilizations
  • Warrant for Genocide (1966) about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic forgery which surfaced in Russia in 1903 and claimed to describe a Jewish conspiracy for world domination

Europe’s Inner Demons is roughly in two halves: what it builds up to is a description of the witch craze and witch trials of early modern Europe and America (i.e. the 1600s and 1700s). But it’s the first half which interests me more. In this Cohn describes the origin and meanings of many of the absurd accusations which were later to be brought against the ‘witches’, following them from their origin in pagan times, through the early medieval period, and climaxing with their deployment in the arrests, torture and execution of the Knights Templar in the early 1300s.

It happens that I’ve just finished reading a book about the Knights Templars, which mentions Cohn’s book, and so I was inspired to read the first half, up to and including the Templars trial.

Cohn shows that:

  • In pre-Christian, pagan Rome writers and authorities attributed inhuman and uncanny activities to minority, outsider groups who they associated with secret societies dedicated to overthrowing the state. Chief among these was the (originally traditional) event of the Bacchanalia, which, originally, was an orgiastic festival celebrating the god Bacchus but, over time, became associated with dark nights, wine and promiscuous sex. Cohn shows how traditional Roman writers came to associate it with darker, anti-social motivations. A fateful link was made between tiny, minority sects who held secretive activities – the worry that these sects were in some way anti-social, dedicated to social revolution – and the attribution to them of increasingly absurd accusations, such as child murder, ritual sacrifice, the drinking of human blood, and deliberately indiscriminate sex – all designed to undermine traditional values and hierarchies and relationships.
  • In the early centuries of Christianity, pagan and Roman writers redirected the tropes they’d developed to blacken the followers of the Bacchanal at the new Eastern religious sect, accusing the Christians of unholy rituals at which they drank the blood of ritually murdered individuals, or engaged in promiscuous sex. Cohn points out that these are easily understandable distortions of a) the Eucharist, where Christians really are enjoined to drink the blood of Christ and b) the Loving Cup or various other references to group love, team love, Christian love, which had a purely Platonic, non-sexual meaning. But not for the accusers and propagandists who scraped the barrel of the human psyche to dredge up all the worst crimes they could think of.
  • Once Christianity had become established (by, say, around 400) the powers-that-be began to persecute Christian heretics and Cohn shows how these heretics now found themselves subject to the same slanders and propaganda as the early Christians had been – dark rumours of midnight masses, perverted rituals, the slaying of a victim whose blood was then drunk and body eaten. And he shows how the ritual victim was all-too-often said to be a baby.

Medieval pessimism

A big-over-arching idea which I found particularly powerful was Cohn’s contention that as the Middle Ages progressed, Christianity – and western culture, such as it was in the early Middle Ages – became more pessimistic.

Going back and reading the early Church Fathers – Tertullian and Justin Martyr and St Jerome and so on – he says you are struck by their conviction that the end of the world is just around the corner and the Day of the Lord is at hand. The early Christians are strong in their faith and happy, burning with conviction that the End is Nigh, that any day now the Lord will return in splendour and all their sufferings will be justified.

However, as the years, then decades, then centuries go by, hopes fade, the Roman Empire is overthrown, societies sink into less advanced forms, the economy collapses, waves of barbarians fight their way across the old imperial lands. And Jesus does not return. By around 1000 AD, medieval culture can be described as depressed. And in its disappointment, it looked with ever-greater desperation for scapegoats.

The atmosphere was changing. Fantasies which in the early Middle Ages had been unknown in western Europe were turning into commonplaces. (p.41)

This is reflected in the rise of the figure and role of Satan and his demons. Cohn has a fascinating chapter (pp.16-34) describing the development of Satan, the Devil. In the Old Testament he is barely mentioned. When bad things happen it is generally because the Old Testament God is wilful and capricious and swayed by his bad moods. Satan does appear in the Book of Job but he is more of a collaborator with God than his enemy; it is Satan who comes up with new ways to persecute Job. It is in the so-called inter-testamentary period – between the last of the accepted books of the Old Testament, written about 300 BC and the first books of the New Testament, written about 50 AD, that Satan undergoes a sweeping change of character. Historians usually attribute this to the influx of Eastern, Zoroastrian and Manichean ideas coming from the Persian Empire in the greater multicultural atmosphere created by the triumph of the Roman Republic and then Empire.

Anyway, in the New Testament, Satan has become a completely new thing, a tormentor and tempter sent to oppose Jesus at every step. Satan’s demons possess innocent people and only Jesus can exorcise them. In the climax of a series of tests, Jesus is made to go out into the wilderness to be confronted and tempted by the Devil in person.

Cohn shows how in the early centuries of the church, saints and holy men were still supposed to be able to drive out demons and Satan’s helpers, merely by revealing the consecrated host or a cross or saying Jesus’ name. But in line with the growth of medieval pessimism, the years from around 1000 AD saw greater and greater anxiety that the Devil was taking over the world which translated into ever-more paranoid fears that secret societies and heresies were flourishing everywhere, dedicated to the overthrow of existing society and to establish the triumph of the Antichrist.

Slowly and steadily, the myth of Devil worship, and the details of how this worship was carried out – by murdering a baby, drinking its blood or its ashes mixed with blood, and then weird rituals to do with black cats (lifting its tail to kiss its anus) – were carefully elaborated by successive generations of highly educated and paranoid Catholic intellectuals.

The stereotype of the Devil-worshipping sect was fully developed, in every detail, by 1100. (p.76)

Heretic hunting and the inquisition

Cohn devoted a chapter to the rise of inquisitions, carefully delineating the difference between secular courts and their power, and the power vested in one-off inquisitors by the pope. He describes the hair-raising campaigns of heretic-hunting inquisitors in Germany and the South of France in the 1200s, notably the egregious Conrad of Marburg appointed inquisitor in central Germany in 1231, or John of Capestrano, appointed heresy inquisitor by the pope in 1418. Already, in 1215 the Lateran Council, by insisting that bishops do everything in their power to suppress heresy on pain of dismissal, had incentivised people across society to come forward with denunciations. Basically a lot of people were tortured into confessing and then burned to death. A lot.

Along the way we learn about the beliefs, the demographics and then the terrible persecutions endured by groups such as:

  • the Paulicians – Christian sect which was formed in the 7th century and rejected a good deal of the Old and much of the New Testament, originally associated with Armenia and horribly persecuted by the Byzantine Empire
  • the Bogomils – sect founded in the First Bulgarian Empire by the priest Bogomil during the reign of Tsar Peter I in the 10th century, a form of opposition to the Bulgarian state and the church, they called for a return to what they considered to be early spiritual teaching, rejecting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Dualists or Gnostics, they believed in a world within the body and a world outside the body, did not use the Christian cross, nor build churches, as they revered their gifted form and considered their body to be the temple, giving rise to many forms of practice to cleanse oneself through purging, fasting, celebrating and dancing.
  • the Waldensians – originated in the late twelfth century as the Poor Men of Lyon, a band organized by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant who gave away his property around 1173, preaching apostolic poverty as the way to perfection. Waldensian teachings quickly came into conflict with the Catholic Church and by 1215, the Waldensians were declared heretical and subject to intense persecution.
  • the Fraticelli ‘de opinione’ – members of the Franciscan order of monks who rebelled against its growing worldliness and corruption (St Francis had died in 1226) and tried to return to a really primitive material life, owning literally nothing, and having no food from one day to the next. Declared heretics in the 1400s, Cohn goes into great detail about the trial of leading Fraticelli in 1466.
  • the Cathars – from the Greek katharoi meaning ‘the pure’, the Cathars were a dualist or gnostic movement which became widespread in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. They believed there were two gods, one good, one evil – diametrically opposed to the Catholic church which believes in only one God. The Cathars believed the God of the Old Testament, creator of the physical world, was evil. Cathars thought human spirits were the genderless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god, and destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, when they could return to the benign God of the New Testament.

The self-fulfilling nature of torture

Cohn introduces the reader to each groups’ likely beliefs and social origins, then describes how the secular and religious authorities (i.e. the King of France or Holy Roman Emperor or pope) launched an inquisition, sometimes even called a ‘crusade’, against each of them. (The crusade to exterminate the Cathars in the south of France became known as the Albigensian Crusade, 1209-1229).

And then he makes his over-arching point which is that, time and time and time again, the use of torture made ‘heresies’ appear to explode, appear to be held by huge numbers of people, at all levels of society, as innocent victims were roped in and tortured and, quite quickly, would say anything and implicate anyone in order to stop the torture (or, more cruelly, to prevent their family and children being tortured, too).

Yet as soon as they were free to speak in front of secular courts, again and again these supposed ‘heretics’ recanted and said they only confessed to the bizarre rituals, murder, cannibalism and orgies, because they were tortured into saying so.

Cohn shows that there were real heretics i.e. groups who rejected the worldly corruption of the Catholic Church and tried to return to the simple, pure, ascetic life of the early apostles and that, on its own terms, the Church was correct to be concerned about them and to try and bring them back within the fold.

But that the way it did this – by trying to blacken their name by getting members to confess under torture to midnight masses where the Devil appeared in the shape of a black cat, and then a baby was ritually burned to death and its ashes mixed in with wine which all the followers had to drink to assert their membership — all this was fantasy cooked up in the feverish brains of Catholic propagandists and the inquisitors themselves.

What interests Cohn is the way these fantasies became formalised, and turned into part of received opinion, official ‘knowledge’ – not least when a list of these perverse practices was included in a formal papal bull, Vox in Rama, issued in 1233, which included the accusation that the Devil in person attended the midnight covens of the Waldensians and other heretics. In other words, by the early 13th century these absurd fantasies had received official sanction and recognition from the highest religious authorities on earth.

Although each of the heretic-hunting frenzies Cohn describes eventually burned out and stopped – sometimes due to the death or discrediting or, in the case of Conrad of Marburg, the assassination of the lead inquisitor – nonetheless, the period as a whole had established the absurd practices of all heretics and enemies of the Church as accepted, indisputable fact, sanctioned by the pope and the entire church hierarchy.

The crushing of the Knights Templar (pp.79-101)

Cohn then goes on to show how precisely the same old tropes, the same accusations of unnatural and blasphemous crimes, were dusted off and dragged out to accuse the Knights Templars, in their trials which lasted from roughly 1307 to 1309. His account is largely the same as Michael Haag’s in The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States namely that the whole farrago of trumped-up accusations was made by King Philip the Fair of France in order to get his hands on the Templars’ vast amounts of gold and land. Its more proximate cause was that Philip wanted to merge the two great crusading orders, the Templars and Knights Hospitallers, into one super-order and then place himself at the head of it in order to lead a mighty new crusade – but that was never very likely to, and indeed never did, happen.

Instead Philip’s loyal bureaucrats pounced, arresting all the Templars on the same day and submitting them to torture to force them to admit to the same litany of crimes: that at the initiation ceremony they were forced to spit on the cross, to kiss their initiator on the lower back, buttocks or mouth, agree to sodomy if requested by a senior brother, and other blasphemous acts such as worshiping a malevolent satanic head.

All the Templars who were tortured signed confessions agreeing this is what they had done – understandable, seeing that the tortures included:

  • having your hands tied behind you, being hauled up via a hook secured to the ceiling, then suddenly released, coming to a stop with a jerk, so that the tendons, muscles and sometimes bones on your shoulders and bones were abruptly torn or shattered
  • having your feet covered in grease and pit in a naked fire, where they roasted until the toe and feet bones fell out of the cooked flesh

As one Templar said, rather than submit to the tortures he would have confessed that he personally murdered Jesus Christ. The sorry saga dragged on for three years because Pope Clement feebly tried to rescue the order which was, theoretically, answerable only to him. But being himself French and a nominee of the French crown, and based in Avignon on French soil, he eventually, feebly acquiesced in the crushing of the order, the confiscation of its wealth and the burning at the stake of its four most senior officers (plus at least a hundred others).

The fate of the Templars is a sorry, sordid tale of greed, corruption and unbelievable cruelty, but for me is one more proof that the nominally Christian Middle Ages were a complicated mixture of genuine religious belief, almost incomprehensible religious fanatacism, alongside staggering cruelty, all underpinned by very recognisable motives of greed and ambition.

More generally, Cohn’s review of how society has tended to demonised outsider groups -from as far back as we have records – sheds sobering light on this permanent tendency of human nature, and shows how even the most ridiculous prejudices and bigotries can be entrenched as established ‘fact’, and then revived as and when needed to persecute the different, the strange, the non-conformist, the helpless. Couldn’t happen now? Well, the career of the fanatical heretic-inquisitor Conrad of Marburg could be usefully compared to that of Senator Joe McCarthy. And in our own time, right now, 2019, we are seeing the revival of all kinds of tropes and stereotypes designed to justify prejudice and persecution. At least we don’t strappado people or burn them to death – but the underlying impulses of human nature haven’t changed one whit.

Some Knights Templar being burned at the stake, illustration in the Chroniques de France ou de St. Denis.

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Reviews of other books and exhibitions about the Middle Ages

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by Simon on May 27, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/europes-inner-demons-norman-cohn/

Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone (2012)

I picked this up in the library to shed more light on the very early years of Anatolia, specifically on the Seljuk Turks who stormed into the old Persian Empire in the 1050s, seized the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad, in 1055 and went on to inflict a seismic defeat on the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the equivalent – for the region – of our Battle of Hastings, which marked the decisive shift of control of Anatolia i.e. modern Turkey, away from the Christian Greeks and towards the Islamicised Turks.

On reflection it was foolish to expect much on just this one era from a book which is only 165 pages long, only claims to be a short history, and which has reached the origin of the Ottoman Turks (the 1250s) by page 23 and the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) by page 32.

The Seljuk period is skimmed over in a few brief pages and the Battle of Manzikert in a couple of brief sentences. I’m glad I had read the long, detailed account of the build-up, the battle itself, and its historical repercussions, in John Julius Norwich’s book, Byzantium: The Apogee.

Odd tone

This is an odd book. All the important dates and ideas are here, but Professor Stone comes across as a rather grumpy and capricious older fellow, who makes dated attempts at humour, and is easily distracted by historic trivia.

He takes a dismissive tone to much historical debate, a kind of urbane, pooh-poohing lofty tone. For example, he jocosely points out that Iranian schoolchildren learn that Turkish barbarians came and stormed their civilised empire, while Turkish schoolchildren learn that effete, decadent imperial Persia was revived and renewed with the strong, virile blood of the Turks. Similarly, discussing the influence of Asian tribes on the early state of Russia (in the 1500s), he writes,

The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capital, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade  in which indignant peasants freed themselves from ‘the Tatar yoke’. (p.20)

‘Nineteenth-century warhorses’? I’m still not totally sure what he means by that phrase. Does he just mean boring schoolmasters, or is he also referring to the wider culture of Russian writers and journalists and thinkers etc.

He mentions the many areas or issues where the early history of the Turks is contested by historians, where there are conflicting theories – but rarely without being pretty casual, sometimes rather dismissive, or even facetious.

There is a twentieth-century claim that the early Ottomans (which is a westernisation of Osmanli) were bright-eyed fighters for the cause of Allah, itself the answer to a rather Christian-triumphalist claim that they were noble savages who had to learn everything from Byzantium, but the evidence either way is thin. (p.23)

Jocose

So all the right dates are here, along with nodding references to the main cruxes or issues of Turkish historiography – and the book does give you a good quick overview of the entire history from the Seljuks to the glories of the great Ottoman Empire (at its peak in the 1550s) and then its long decline down to the death agonies in the First World War, and then the rebirth of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

But all conveyed in a deliberately jocose, facetious way.

The Turks had a modern army, whereas the Christians were still fighting pre-gunpowder wars, in which heavy cavalry, imprisoned in armour, charged off pretentiously after quarreling leaders had windbagged away as to who would lead. (p.27)

‘windbagged away.’ Presumably Stone thinks – or his editors suggested – that he could make the knotty and complex history of medieval and Renaissance Turkey more palatable if he slipped in wrote it in a jokey and irreverent tone.

The Pope staged a great conference in Rome in 1490 and, as in Cold War days, it attracted all manner of bores, adventurers and braggarts – poor Cem [the Ottoman sultan’s exiled brother], some stray Byzantine pretenders, a fake Georgian prince or two, men wanting money to print unreadable tracts, Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes… (p.43)

Hence the ho-ho tone of much of his commentary (‘Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes’) – except that it itself is heroically out of date. It reads like the jokey slang of the Just William stories, or Geoffrey Willans’ Down with Skool! books from the 1950s. Looking it up I see that Professor Stone was born in 1941, so is now 78, was around 70 when this book was published. On one level, then, it feels a bit like a repository of naughty schoolboy attitudes from the 1950s.

Turkish trivia

Not only is the tone odd, but Stone is easily distracted by eccentric factoids and historical trivia. For example, it is odd that the prelude to this short book, where space is surely a premium, spends five pages describing the German academic exiles from Nazi Germany who came, settled in Istanbul, and helped set up the world-class university there. All very well and interesting, but not really the first or most important thing which readers ought to know about Turkish history.

Once we get to his swift outline of the Turks’ obscure early history in Central Asia, it is dotted with odd explanations, for example the fact that the Italian word pastrami derives from a Turkish original which he uses to illustrate some key aspects of the Turkish language – the way it includes preposition, tenses and other information by making changes to internal vowels and adding prefixes and suffixes and structural changes (although this brief paragraph is not really very useful).

He is particularly fond of the way medieval crowns and titles have descended by historical accidents to the most unlikely descendants. Thus he tells us that, after the last crusaders had been kicked out of the Holy Land in 1291, some took refuge in highly fortified islands, such as Cyprus, the ruler of which called himself ‘King of Jerusalem’ for generations afterwards, the title eventually passing to… the Courtenay family in Devon!

Similarly, he describes the machinations by which the Sultan Bayezid (1360 – 1403) kept his brother Cem detained by various Christian powers far from the throne, until Cem died – at which point Bayezit had all Cem’s descendants murdered – except for one, who fled to the Knights of St John on Rhodes, converted to Christianity, acquired a title from the Pope and… has a chief descendant in Australia!

The book is packed with trivial pursuit factoids such as:

  • on the Bosnian-Serbian border there were silver mines Srebrenica, the town which saw massacres during the Yugoslav wars, derives from the Slavonic name for ‘silver’
  • in the Middle Ages the Black Sea was the high road for the Russian trade in furs and slaves – the present-day Turkish name for prostitute, orospu, is medieval Persian, and the central part of it denotes ‘Rus’
  • Turkish rulers hit on the idea of recruiting young boys from occupied lands (especially Greece) to the court, converting them to Islam, giving them an education and training. Some formed the nucleus of elite units within the army known, in Turkish, as the yeñi çeri (meaning ‘new soldiers’) who, over time, became known to Westerners as the Janissaries
  • The Topkapi palace in Istanbul is laid out in courtyards with elaborate pavilions known as köşk, the Turkish word for an ornate wooden mansion, smaller than a palace – which is the source of the English word ‘kiosk’

And there are lots more distracting and diverting factoids where they came from.

Contorted style

Another major feature of the book is the odd, garbled prose style. On every page he phrases things, well, oddly.

To what extent was the success of the Ottomans based on Islam, or would you read this the other way round, and say that the Ottomans were successful when their Islam was not taken too seriously? (p.7)

His prose is not incomprehensible, just oddly laid out. Stiff. Ungainly.

There is a line in Proust, to the effect that someone looks on history as would a newly born chicken at the bits of the eggshell from which it had been hatched. (p.8)

You can see what he’s getting at, but can’t help noticing how inelegantly it has been phrased.

By the mid-fifteenth century Byzantium had shrunk to the point that it consisted of just Constantinople and its hinterland. (p.29)

Or:

The Mameluks had made endless trouble for Constantinople and with their fabled riches from trade they provided an obvious target for Selim, who trundled his gunnery and Janissaries to effect against them. (p.49)

I think he means that Selim trundled his guns and Janissaries off to fight the Mameluks, with (or to) great effect i.e. his guns and Janissaries were very effective. Odd phrasing though, isn’t it? And these oddities crop up on every page. After a while I began relishing the book, not only for its ostensible subject, but also for its car-crash prose.

As early as the eighth century, Turkish mercenaries had made their appearance in Persia, in the then capital of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. (p.18)

A personal history of Turkey

Maybe you could turn my critique on its head by simply describing this book as a personal history of Turkey, one in which Professor Stone felt released from the corsets of formal, academic history writing, to air his opinions about everything – from penpushing bureaucracies to partisan school teachers, from the absurdities of the old Eastern Europe through the tastiness of Turkish tea – all served up in an idiosyncratic style which is continually reaching for the droll and the whimsical, rather than the serious or profound.

Madrid and Ankara are both artificial capitals, without economic activity between pen-pushing and boot-bashing. (p.54)

Conclusion

So, if you’re looking for a short history of Turkey written in idiosyncratic English, which certainly covers all the bases but also includes an entertaining selection of odd anecdotes and Turkey trivia – then this is very possibly the book for you!

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The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (2) by Michael Haag (2012)

The Turks were aliens; the crusaders were not.

Haag’s book is opinionated in a very unacademic way. He has certain hobby horses, vehement ideas – about the central role played by the Templars in the crusades, and about justifying the crusades by completely rethinking their context, portraying the crusades not as violent attacks against peace-loving Arabs, but as justified attempts to help oppressed Christians in the Holy Land – which he gives vent to repeatedly and almost obsessively so that, eventually, the detached reader can’t help having misgivings about the objectivity of what they’re reading.

Nonetheless, that big reservation stated right at the start, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking book.

The Tragedy of the Templars signals its unorthodox approach by going back not ten or thirty or fifty years before the founding of its ostensible subject, the Order of the Knights Templars (in 1139), but by going back one thousand four hundred years earlier, to the conquests of Alexander the Great – and then giving a sweeping recap of all the wars and vicissitudes which struck the Middle East from 300 BC through to the eruption of the Muslims from Arabia in the 630s AD.

The book has notes on every page and an excellent bibliography at the back, and yet it sometimes reads like the opinions of a crank, determined at any cost to convince you of his deliberately revisionist point of view. This comes over most obviously in the very unacademic use of repetition. Again and again he drums home a handful of key points. These are:

Haag’s key points

– the Crusades were not an unprovoked outburst of Western, racist, colonialist, greed and violence

– they were a rational response to repeated pleas for help from figures like the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Emperor of Byzantium

Why the pleas? because:

– even as late as the First Crusade (1095-99) the majority population of the Levant, of Jerusalem and all the other holy cities, let alone of Anatolia and even of Egypt – were Christians:

Christians had remained the majority at Damascus until the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh. (p.208)

Five hundred years after the Arab conquest, Egypt was still a substantially Christian country (p.211)

The Nubians were Christians, as were the majority of Egyptians (p.235)

– these Christians had suffered under the lordship of the Muslim Arabs who came rampaging out of Arabia in the 700s and quickly conquered north up the coast of Palestine into Syria, eastwards conquered the old Persian Empire, and westwards conquered Egypt and beyond

– but, despite centuries of inter-marriage, the Arabs remained an aristocracy, thinking of themselves as lords, knights, emirs and rulers over a broad population of subservient serfs – and these serfs remained predominantly Christian

– through the three hundred years from the mid-700s to the mid-1000s these Christian populations suffered from being second-class citizens, forced to wear clothes which identified them as dhimmis and, occasionally, when the oppression got really bad, forced to wear halters round their necks or be branded

– meanwhile they were forbidden to repair existing churches, build any new ones, and had to stand by while existing ones were often desecrated and destroyed in periodic waves of persecution or forcibly converted into mosques

So Haag’s central point, rammed home on scores of occasions, with all the data he can muster, is that it was not the Crusaders who were the foreign invaders – it was the Muslim Arabs. It was the Arabs who had invaded and conquered Christian Egypt, Christian Palestine, Christian Syria and raided into Christian Anatolia.

Bethlehem where Jesus was born, Nazareth Jesus’ home town, the River Jordan where Jesus was baptised, Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified and rose again, Tarsus where the apostle Paul came from, Antioch where the followers of Jesus were first named ‘Christians’, Damascus, on the road to which Paul had his great conversion experience – all these lands had, by about 400, become solidly Christian and were ruled by the Christian Roman Empire.

It was the Arabs who invaded and conquered them and subjected the Christian inhabitants to all kinds of discrimination and persecution. Christians were forbidden to build new churches or repair old ones. Thousands of churches were destroyed or converted into mosques. There were periodic massacres which triggered pleas from Christian leaders in the region to the Emperor in Constantinople for help, with the result that the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim invaders in the East were permanently at war.

And it wasn’t just the Arabs who were the alien invaders…

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

What specifically triggered the Crusades was the arrival of a third force on the scene, the Seljuk Turks, who swept out of central Asia, converted to Islam, and conquered Muslim Persia including the capital of the Abbasid Dynasty, Baghdad, in 1055.

From the 1060s the Seljuks besieged and took various cities in Palestine, as well as probing the eastern edges of Anatolia – the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Their ultimate goal was to tackle the Fatimid Dynasty based on Egypt. The Turks had converted to the majority or Sunni brand of Islam. A territorial ambition to seize Egypt – centrepiece of the Muslim lands – was compounded by the fact that the Fatimids were adherents to Shia Islam, which Sunnis regard as a heresy.

The Fatimids, for their part, also wanted control of (at least southern) Palestine, in order to create a buffer against the insurgent Turks. This meant that the two Muslim opponents clashed in various battles, at various times throughout the later 11th century, taking and retaking bits of Palestine from each other.

Meanwhile the Byzantine Empire was reeling from its defeat by the Turks at the momentous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, after which:

the empire lay open before bands of Turkish tribesmen, who looted, murdered and destroyed as they marauded westwards until in 1073 they were standing on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. (p.76)

As an anonymous chronicler put it:

Almost the whole world, on land and sea, occupied by the impious barbarians, has been destroyed and has become empty of population, for all Christians have been slain by them and all houses and settlements with their churches have been devastated by them in the whole East, completely crushed and reduced to nothing. (quoted on page 76)

It was not the Crusaders who were invading; it was the Seljuk Turks who, in the years after 1071, invaded, conquered, devastated and took control of a vast central region of Anatolia which had been part of the Roman Empire and solidly Christian for at least 600 years.  When the First Crusade arrived 25 years later it was to recover solidly Christian lands which had been invaded and to liberate its Christian inhabitants.

Anyway, the Byzantine Emperor survived the Turkish siege and soon began launching retaliatory raids into Syria and against Muslim strongholds in Palestine. So that’s Turks and Byzantines warring across the region.

And the Turks had brought with them bands of Turkomens, tribesmen of similar ethnic origin who didn’t, however, submit to Seljuk centralised authority and so raided, kidnapped and murdered across the region at will.

And the area had become infested by nomadic Bedouin, who took advantage of the prevailing chaos to also raid and kidnap and murder. Haag quotes liberally from the accounts of Christian pilgrims from Western Europe who made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean and then found every step of their way to the Christian Holy Places fraught with the necessity to pay bribes to countless Muslim officials, and to pay armed guards to protect them from all manner of marauders and kidnappers.

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

In 1077 Turkish forces led by Atsiz bin Uwaq laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the surrounding orchards and vineyards. The city finally capitulated on promise of good treatment but Uwaq reneged on the deal and massacred about 3,000 of the Muslim population. He went on to devastate Palestine, burning harvests, razing plantations, desecrating cemeteries, raping women and men alike, cutting off ears and noses. He destroyed Ramla then went on to Gaza where he murdered the entire population, devastating villages and towns, burning down churches and monasteries.

In other words, the advent of the Seljuk Turks into the Middle East inaugurated a new era of chaos and disorder in the Holy Land

The Muslim East was wracked by misgovernment, division, exploitation, fanaticism an aggression. (p.79)

And this was widely reported by Christian pilgrims who returned to Western Europe (if they survived) telling tales of kidnap, rape and extortion, tales which had a cumulative effect at local, regional and national levels.

Back in 1009 al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, the sixth Fatimid caliph, embarked on an attempted ‘annihilation’ of Christians in the Levant, and called for the systematic destruction of all Christian holy places which culminated in the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

This was the church built over two of the central holy sites in Christian tradition, the site where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and Jesus’s empty tomb, where he is said to have been buried and resurrected.

On Al-Hakim’s orders the church of the Holy Sepulchre was razed to its foundations, its graves were dug up, property was taken, furnishings and treasures seized, and the tomb of Jesus was hacked to pieces with pickaxes and hammers and utterly obliterated. Al-Hakim’s orders led to as many as thirty thousand churches being destroyed across the region or converted into mosques. News of the utter destruction of one of the holiest sites in Christendom shocked and appalled Christians from Constantinople through to Rome and into the Kingdom of the Franks. How much longer were the holiest sites in Christendom to remain at the utter mercy of fanatical opponents?

It was against this setting that Haag lists the repeated pleas for help, from the Byzantine Emperor and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, among others, which struck a chord, above all, with the Pope in Rome who, more than anyone else, heard eye-witness reports from pilgrims high and low about the mounting chaos in the region, about the wanton violence inflicted on pilgrims, and the wanton destruction inflicted on the Holy Sites themselves.

Seen from this perspective, the Crusades are not the unprovoked eruption of a bellicose West. The question is not why the Crusaders came, the question is why they took so long to respond to the pleas for help from their persecuted fellow Christians.

The Reconquista

The other really big idea I took from the book was that the Crusades happened in parallel to the Christian reconquest of Spain. I sort of knew this but Haag’s book really binds the two processes together, explaining how the Templars (the nominal subjects of his book) played as big or maybe a bigger role in the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control as they did in the Holy Land in the early years, anyway).

He points out how Popes and senior church figures called for the Christian knights of North and West Europe to put aside their differences and fight the Muslims in both places. When you look at a map of the Mediterranean Haag’s use of the phrase ‘war on two fronts’, fighting ‘on two fronts’, really makes sense.

The map below, from Wikipedia, clearly shows a) how the Muslims conquered the East, the West and the Southern coast of what had once been the Roman Christian Mediterranean and how, as a result, all the Mediterranean islands – Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, Cyprus – became battlefields for the centuries-long ‘assault by Islam against a Christian civilisation that had once embraced the whole of the Mediterranean’ (p.93)

If you were a Christian knight it wasn’t just a case of joining a Crusade to the Holy Land (as Haag points out, the term ‘crusade’ wasn’t coined until centuries after the things themselves had ended – contemporaries wrote about ‘taking the cross’). It was a question of where you chose to sign up to the global effort to stop and repel the invading Muslims – in Spain, in Sicily, in Cyprus or in Egypt or the Holy Land.

Map of the main Byzantine-Muslim naval operations and battles in the Mediterranean

Crusades wicked, Reconquista OK?

The big question all this left me asking is – Why is the ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Christian Holy Land from Muslim rule nowadays always criticised and castigated in the harshest possible terms as a racist, violent and greedy example of Western colonialism, whereas… the parallel ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, which was fought by much the same knights fighting for the same spiritual rewards offered by the same Pope… is totally accepted?

Does anyone suggest we should hand Spain back over to Muslim rule, to its rightful Moorish owners? No. The question is absurd. Does anyone suggest we should apologise to the Muslim inhabitants of Spain who were expelled 500 years ago? No. The notion is absurd.

Is it because the Crusades are perceived as consisting of violent attacks on Muslims living in a land they’d inhabited for hundreds of years? Well, the Reconquista was drenched in blood.

Or does the stark difference in historiographical thinking about the two Crusades mean that morality in history – how we judge the morality of past events – simply boils down to their success? The Christian Crusaders managed to expel the Muslims from Spain by about 1500, it has been a solidly Christian land for the past 500 years and so… it is accepted as the natural state of things…

Whereas the Christian Crusaders who tried to hang onto the Holy Land were always doomed to failure by virtue of the endless waves of new invaders streaming in from Asia (first the Turks, then the Golden Horde of Genghiz Khan’s Mongols) which were always going to outnumber the Christians’ dwindling numbers… and so… their effort is seen as reprehensible and subject to all the insults and abuse modern historians and the politically correct can level at them.

Yet the two Crusades were carried out by the same kind of knights, over the same period, inspired by the same ideology, and offered the same rewards (seizure of land and the remission of sins).

Is one a totally accepted fact which nobody questions, and the other a great Blot on the face of Western Civilisation, simply because one succeeded and the other failed?

The West

Not far behind that thought is the reflection that the West is simply called the West – is the West – because Muslim conquerors conquered the East.

‘The West’ was not some great insurgent triumphant entity – it is all that was left after the rampaging Muslims seized all of North Africa, all of the Middle East and most of Spain, then, in the 1100 began the process of seizing all of what we now call Turkey.

Previously Christendom had encompassed the entire Mediterranean and the lands around it. In this basic, geographical sense, the West is the creation of Islam.

The Knights Templar

So what about the ostensible subject of the book, the Order of the Knights Templar? Well it takes a while to get around to their founding in the 1130s… and then, in the rather unscholarly way which the reader soon gets used to, Haag goes out of his way to praise their involvement – claiming they were decisive or vital in almost every encounter with the Muslims over the next two hundred years – and to exonerate them from all accusations of greed, inaction or treachery brought against them by contemporaries. For example,

– when the contemporary chronicler William of Tyre criticises the Templars for their involvement in the murder of an envoy from the ‘Old Man of the Hills’ (p.251) – Haag dismisses William’s criticism as biased.

– Haag claims that the Crusader states – by the 1100s often administered by the Templars – were far more religiously tolerant than the surrounding Muslim states. When the Templars didn’t support an ill-fated Frankish expedition against the Fatimids in Egypt, Haag makes excuses for them. And so on.

So there’s lots of detail about the Knights Templars (when they were set up, their location in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the vows they took, names of the founders and much, much more).

But, again, I was rather dazzled by one Big Idea about the Templars, which is the notion that they were the first multinational corporation. They were established after the First Crusade had established the Crusader states in Palestine, to guard the Holy Places and protect pilgrims. Quite quickly they began offering banking services i.e. they set up branches in London, Paris, Rome, on the Mediterranean islands – because if you were going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land it was wise not to carry a big sack of gold which all manner of Muslim pirates, kidnappers and bandits might steal from you. Better to deposit the gold in London or Paris or Rome, and receive a chit or docket proving the fact, while the Templars recorded the fact on their increasingly sophisticated ledgers.

Within a hundred years they were on the way to becoming official bankers to the King of France. They made huge loans to the King of England and helped finance the Reconquista. By their constitution they answered only to the Pope in Rome. The point is that – not being allied with this or that European prince or king – they were strikingly independent. No-one had any interest in ‘conquering’ them, there was nothing to conquer except a set of international financial services.

Land and tithes in the West, gold and banking facilities across Europe, and by the time of the Battle of Hattin it is estimated the Templars, along with the Hospitallers (the other great order of knights) held maybe a third of the land of Outremer, the kingdom beyond the sea (i.e. the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land established after the success of the First Crusade).

I found these ideas about the economic roots of their power and wealth more interesting than the blizzard of detail Haag also gives about the Templars’ involvement in various battles and strategic decisions. He follows the story right through to the events leading up to the suppression of the Knights Templar by King Philip IV of France who persuaded the Pope to suppress the order on trumped up charges of blasphemy, heresy and homosexuality, when his real motivation was simply to write off the enormous debts he’d incurred with the order to fund his prolonged war with England.

Saladin

As part of his program to debunk every myth about the Crusades, Haag really has it in for An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, commonly known as Saladin (1137-1193) who defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, then seized Jerusalem later the same year, events which triggered the third Crusade (1189-92) in which Saladin was confronted by Richard I of England, both becoming heroes of legend for centuries to follow.

Haag places Saladin carefully in the succession of Turkish leaders who wanted to overthrow the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt and establish their own kingdom. Haag goes out of his way to point out that:

– Saladin was not an Arab, he was a Turk; in fact he wasn’t strictly a Turk, but a ‘Turkified’ Kurd (p.233), having been born in Tikrit of Kurdish family, his father rising within the ranks of the Turkish army to become a city governor

– Saladin spent far more time waging jihad against his fellow Muslims than against the crusaders

[between 1171 and 1186] Saladin had spent no more than thirteen months fighting against the Franks; instead he directed his jihad almost entirely against his fellow Muslims, heterodox in many cases but most of them far from being heretics (p.262)

– this is one of the points Haag really dins home with endless repetition seeking to emphasise that Saladin was not a Muslim hero defending Muslim Palestine from marauding Crusaders – he was a Kurd fighting under the banner of the Seljuk Turks, against his fellow Muslims in Egypt and Syria, in order to establish a dynasty of his own

As the Cambridge History of Islam explains, Saladin’s army was ‘as alien as the Turkish, Berber, Sudanese and other forces of his predecessors. Himself a Kurd, he established a regime and an army of the Turkish type, along the lines laid down by the Seljuks and atabegs in the East.’ In capturing Egypt, and in all his wars against the Muslims of Syria and the Franks of Outremer, Saladin was not a liberator; like the Seljuks and like Zengi and Nur al-Din, he was an alien leading an alien army of conquest and occupation. (p.234, emphasis added)

– Saladin wrote letters and issued edicts claiming he was fighting a jihad against heresy and the infidel – in both cases Haag claims, he was hypocritically assuming a religious mantle to conceal what were basically the same lust-for-power motivations as all the other petty emirs and viziers competing in the region, a record of ‘unscrupulous schemes and campaigns aimed at personal, and family aggrandisement’ (Lyons and Jackson’s biography of Saladin, quoted on page 262)

– Haag goes out of his way to contrast Saladin’s fierce campaigns against what he regarded as Muslim heretics (especially Ismaili Islam, which he explains as a form of dualism), with the religious freedom operating in the Crusader states of Outremer, even quoting a contemporary Muslim chronicler, Ibn Jubayr, who admits that many Muslims preferred to live under the rule of the Franks who didn’t care what style of Islam they practiced, where they were treated fairly in the law courts, and taxed lightly (p.243).

– far from being the chivalrous knight of legend, Saladin routinely beheaded captured prisoners of war, as well as massacring the populations of captured towns, or selling all the women and children into slavery, for example:

  • after taking the Templar stronghold of King’s Ford in 1179 Saladin took 700 prisoners, who he then had executed
  • all the Templars and Hospitallers who survived the Battle of Hattin (4 July 1187) were, according to an eye witness account, lined up and hacked to pieces with swords and knives (p.274)
  • when Jaffa refused to yield to Saladin, it was eventually taken by storm and the entire population either massacred or sent off to the slave market at Aleppo
  • after taking Jerusalem, Saladin was reluctantly persuaded to allow the inhabitants to go free if they could pay a ransom; about 15,000 of the population was sold into slavery; all the churches had their spires knocked down and were converted into stables

As with Haag’s treatment of the entire period, his treatment of Saladin is detailed, compelling and, you eventually feel, strongly biased. I dare say the facts are correct, but Haag continually spins them with the very obvious purpose of undermining the legend of Saladin the chivalric defender of Muslims.

But to the casual reader, what really comes over is the immense violence and cruelty of everyone, of all sides, during the period. Muslims massacred Muslims. Muslims massacred Christians. Christians massacred Muslims. When Richard the Lionheart took Acre after a siege, he executed 3,000 Muslim prisoners, including women and children. All sides carried out what we would consider war crimes, because all sides were convinced God was on their side.

And all sides took part in the slave trade. Populations of captured towns were liable to be sent off to the great slave trade centres such as Ayas on the coast. I was genuinely surprised to learn that both the Templars and the Hospitallers took part in the slave trade, shipping captives taken in Palestine to work for the houses, especially in southern Italy and Christian Spain (p.229).

In the last decades of Outremer, as town after town fell to the Turks, the men would usually be slaughtered but their women and children would be taken to the slave markets of Aleppo or Damascus. Many thousands of Frankish women, girls and boys must have suffered this fate, as well as great numbers of native Christians.

Otherwise the great centre of the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in 1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars opened a wharf there. the slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russia and Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers. (p.230)

Slavery is mentioned a lot throughout the book. I would really like to read a good account of slavery in the Middle Ages.

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

Haag in several places criticises Sir Steven Runciman, author of what, for the second half of the twentieth century, was the definitive three-volume history of the crusades, published from 1951 to 1954.

Haag’s criticism is that Runciman was a passionate devotee of Byzantine culture and the Greek Orthodox church – for example, the Protaton Tower at Karyes on Mount Athos was refurbished largely thanks to a donation from Runciman.

And so Runciman considered the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders one of the greatest crimes in human history. His entire account is heavily biased against the crusaders who he portrays as ‘intolerant barbarians’ and, in the famous conclusion to his history, calls the entire enterprise a long act of intolerance and a sin against the Holy Ghost.

This is important because:

It is no exaggeration to say that Runciman single-handedly crafted the current popular concept of the crusades. (Thomas F. Madden, 2005)

And his three-volume history, still published by Penguin, created the impression which

across the Anglophone world continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet. (Christopher Tyerman, Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College, Oxford)

Looking it up, I can see that Haag’s criticism of Runciman – that he was consistently and obviously biased against the crusaders, and that his negative interpretation has been massive and widespread and continues to this day – is now widely shared.

Reflections

The big picture lesson for me is not that this, that or the other side was ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ (and Haag’s interpretation has successfully undermined my simple, liberal, politically correct view that the Crusades were xenophobic, colonial massacres by showing how extremely complicated and fraught the geopolitical and military situations was, with a complex meshing of different forces each fighting each other).

The more obvious conclusion is that all sides in these multi-levelled conflicts shared values and beliefs and codes of conduct and moral codes and ethics which are wildly different from ours today – almost incomprehensibly different – drenched with a religious fanaticism few of us can imagine and prepared to carry out atrocities and cruelties it is often hard to believe.

It is in this light that the shambolic fourth (1204), fifth (1217-21) and sixth crusades (1228-9) must be seen – less as the violent intrusions of a homogenous Superpower into the peace-loving affairs of poor innocent Muslims – more as forms of time-honoured attack, war and conquest (and ignominious defeat) which had been practiced by all mankind, over the face of the whole world, since records began.

The 4th, 5th and 6th crusades may well have been blessed by the Pope (who also didn’t hesitate to excommunicate them and their leaders when they wandered off-target) but in practice followed the entirely worldly, calculating, selfish, power-hungry agendas of the various European princes and kings who led them.

Already, during the third crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had openly plotted with the Serbs, Bulgarians, Byzantine traitors, and even the Muslim Seljuks against the Eastern Empire and at one point sought Papal support for a crusade against the Orthodox Byzantines. Feeling between Latin West and Greek East was becoming ever more polarised.

It is this which helps explain why the so-called fourth crusade ended in the shameful sack of Constantinople in 1203-4. The Venetians were promised a huge sum if they built ships to carry 35,000 warriors to the Holy Land. They stopped all commercial activity to build the fleet. When the knights arrived they were more like 12,000 and the Venetians were told they would only be paid a third of the promised sum. After fractious negotiations, the Venetians came up with a compromise solution – the existing Crusader force would seize the port of Zara in Dalmatia. Zara had been dominated economically by Venice throughout the 12th century but had rebelled in 1181 and allied itself with King Emeric of Hungary and Croatia. It was a Christian city, but the ‘crusade’ proceeded nonetheless, and Zara fell to the combined Venetian-Crusader forces, after which it was thoroughly pillaged. Then, after further complicated negotiations, the crusaders were prevailed upon to attack Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire, by the Venetians, led by their blind Doge Dandolo. The Venetians had long been commercial rivals of the Greeks, and it was said Dandolo had himself been blinded by Byzantine forces in a much earlier conflict between them. There were many more complications – for example the crusaders were told they were fighting to liberate the deposed Byzantine emperor but, during the resultant siege, this emperor was hastily restored by the population of Constantinople, which robbed the attack of its prime goal. Didn’t stop the ‘crusaders’ from finally storming the walls and sacking the Greek capital.

The point is not that this was appalling. The point is that it quite patently has nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Land or Muslims or liberating the Holy Places and all the rest of crusader rhetoric. It was quite clearly commercial and political warfare of the kind going on all across the world at the time, in a world awash with armies and fighting princes, kings, khans, emperors, sultans and so on, not to mention Chinese emperors and Mayan and Aztec kings.

Same goes for the long-delayed and wandering expedition of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, which he grandly titled the Fifth Crusade, and which led up to him being crowned king of Jerusalem on 29 March 1229 but which was obviously more to do with his personal ambition than any ’cause’, let alone representing anything called ‘the West’. Frederick was excommunicated by the pope three times for pursuing his utterly selfish aims. He only stayed two days in Jerusalem. By this stage the once famous city was a dump, filled with ruins and churches turned into stables. As soon as decent, Frederick took ship back to Europe and got on with the serious job of building up his empire.

The fall of the Templars

And the point – that beneath a thin veneer of religious rhetoric, all these events were just dynasty-making, invading, conquering, and commercial conflicts of a familiar and entirely secular kind – is reinforced by the last few pages of Haag’s book, which chronicle the downfall of the Templars. King Philip IV was hugely in debt to the Templars. He decided to take advantage of the fact that the last Christian enclave in the Holy Land, Acre, had fallen in 1291, and the last little offshore island, Arwan, had fallen to Muslim forces in 1303, to turn on the Templars with a whole string of trumped-up charges of heresy, sodomy and so on which, despite the efforts of the pope to support an order which was nominally under his control, succeeded. The order was convicted of heresy, its leaders were burned at the stake and – the point of the exercise – King Philip’s huge debts were cancelled.

None of this is very edifying. But it is all very, very human.

Maps

There are only three maps in the book but they are excellent, clear and easy to read and they include all the place names mentioned in the text. I can’t find the name of the map designer but he or she is to be congratulated.

Related links

Reviews of other books and exhibitions about the Middle Ages

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by Simon on May 24, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Crusades, European History, History
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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/the-tragedy-of-the-templars-michael-haag-2/

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