All posts tagged Outremer

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)

This is a review of the second half of the third volume in John Julius 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 third volume covers the period from 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, through to the final triumph of the Ottoman Turks and the miserable fall of the city.

It is a long, miserable and frequently appalling book to read. It took a big effort to get over the emotional trauma of reading about the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204, so traumatic I devoted a detailed blog post to it.

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall contains so much brutality, cruelty, violence, so much destruction, rape and sending into slavery that it is hard to process and hard to cope with, emotionally.

As mentioned in my review of the first half, it depicts a world of unending conflict, in which all nations, rulers, emperors, kings, princes, khans, sultans, emirs and warlords are unceasingly engaged in endless conflict with each other, in which no treaties last, no peace endures, and each spring armies are mustered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia, on that year’s campaign of war and conquest.

Key events

1202 Fourth Crusade assembled at Venice. 1204 The Fourth Crusade captures Constantinople. A Latin Empire of Constantinople is formed, with other territories parcelled out to crusader lords and upstart Greeks asserting new Byzantine ‘successor states’.

1209 to 1229 The Albigensian Crusade against heretics in the south of France.

1243 The Battle of Köse Dağ in which the invading Mongols devastate the Seljuk Turks. The Turks never recover, but disintegrate into a host of emirates and small successor states. One of the smallest of these, in north-west Anatolia, would be ruled by Othman who would become the semi-legendary founder of the Ottoman Empire.

1261 Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptures Constantinople, not in a battle but almost by accident when the main Latin army is away.

1274 Union of Lyon – at the Second Church Council of Lyon the fourteenth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII made various pladges to reunite the Eastern church with the Western i.e. to submit to papal power and to change rituals and wordings to agree with the Latin rite. This was a bid to gain help from the pope and Latin nations but the Greek population and most of the clergy rejected it, and it was later repudiated by Michael’s successor, Andronicus II.

1282 The Sicilian Vespers – the Norman rulers of Sicily were a persistent threat to Constantinople, repeatedly mounting large expeditions to cross the Balkans and attack the city. The Sicilian Vespers was a rebellion of the native population of Sicily against their arrogant French overlords, which massacred them and for a generation neutralised that threat.

1291 The Fall of Acre, the last Crusader kingdom of Outremer.

1299 date traditionally given for the founding of the Ottoman Empire.

1354 The Ottoman Turks capture Gallipoli on the northern, European shore of the Bosphorus and henceforth use it as a bridgehead into the Balkans.

1389 After victory at the Battle of Kosovo (15 June) the Ottoman Turks take over most of the Balkans, depriving Constantinople of agricultural land and manpower.

1402 Tamburlaine devastates the Othman Turkish army at the Battle of the Chubuk Plain. If he had stayed and conquered more of Anatolia he might have wiped out Ottoman Rule but he ceased his Western campaign and turned East where he died the next year, leaving the Ottomans to regroup and renew their threat against Constantinople.

1453 May 29 – Fall of Constantinople Sultan Mehmed II’s forces capture the city, leading to a day of unprecedented massacre, pillaging and rape.

Key issues

The post-sack era

For sixty or so years after the sack of 1204, the history of the Byzantine Empire was one of a succession of Greek emperors based in Nicaea trying to unify the squabbling Greek statelets, negotiate with the new Latin rulers of Constantinople, while also managing relations with the Turks to the East and the Bulgars and Serbs to the North.

Family squabbles

Throw in repeated internecine rivalry within the extended families of the emperors themselves, and problems created by a series of religious divisions and you have an extremely complicated story to tell. The situation around the two sacks, in 1204 and 1453, are particularly complicated, but Norwich tells it all with admirable clarity, and finds the time to give a brief summary of the overall achievements of each of the emperors, men (and some women acting as regents) who were condemned to struggle with the steadily declining situation.

Schisms

The Arsenites took their name from the Patriarch Arsenius who excommunicated the emperor Michael VIII for his treatment of his young co-emperor and rival, John Lascaris (Michael had him blinded and confined to prison for the rest of his life). Michael had Arsenius deposed and replaced in 1267 but the Arsenites only grew in number and zeal, providing a powerful opposition for the rest of Michael’s reign.

The Hesychasts (from the Greek hesychasm meaning ‘holy silence’) teaching a meditation technique which could help the faithful attain a vision of ‘the divine, uncreated light which had surrounded Jesus Christ at his Transfiguration’. The practice spread sparking, as new movements do, reforming zeal among its adherents, and opposition to all the compromises and fudges of the orthodox establishment, until the church became divided into bitterly opposing factions of hesychasts and traditionalists, a schism which spilled over into politics and took up the energy of successive emperors throughout the 14th century.

The Catholic Church

By the 1200s the Roman Catholic Church demanded control over the Eastern Orthodox Church and was firmly of the view that the Easterners were schismatics, little better than heretics, a view dating from the actual schism of 1054, but accompanied by a background of suspicion and dislike.

In the last 250 years of its existence the empire was forced to approach the Papacy numerous times, begging for help against the encroaching Turks, in return for which the emperor pledged to convert his people en masse to Catholicism, at the 1274 Union of Lyon, and again in the 14th century. But this ploy never worked out because:

  1. all the senior Orthodox churchmen refused to co-operate
  2. the Greek people passively resisted all changes
  3. the papacy never came up with the material aid to the struggling empire which the emperor had bargained for

Crusades

We all know about the conventional and numbered sequence of crusades against Muslims in the Holy Land (and Egypt). Reading this book makes you aware of quite a few other ‘crusades’. I was surprised to learn of the many times Western princes and kings tried to get the pope’s approval for almost any armed venture by persuading him to call it a ‘crusade’.

  • 1190 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to secure papal blessing and the name of ‘crusade’ for his planned attack on Constantinople (p.161)
  • In 1265 Charles of Anjou and Provence, younger brother of King Louis of France, persuades pope Clement IV to declare Charles’s war against the pope’s arch-enemy, King Manfred of Sicily, a ‘crusade’ (p.225)
  • In 1280 the same Charles of Anjou (having defeated Manfred and become King of Sicily) persuades the pope also call his next campaign, a vast amphibious attack against Constantinople, a ‘crusade’ against the Eastern schismatics and heretics (p.249)
  • In 1396 Pope Boniface IX gives the name of ‘crusade’ (and historians call the Crusade of Nicopolis) to the vast army assembled by King Sigismund of Hungary. 10,000 French knights and 6,000 Germany knights joining Sigismund’s 60,000 who all set off down the Danube and, outside the city of Nicopolis, are massacred by the Turks. According to Norwich ten thousand captured prisoners were beheaded in the Sultan’s presence. (p.355)

Reading about the many, increasingly petty and secular, ‘crusades’ devalues them. Like the papal mechanism of ‘jubilees’ when all debts were meant to be forgiven, or the pope’s increasingly liberal use of ‘excommunication’, the term ‘crusade’ soon loses all religious meaning and becomes just another diplomatic tool in the endless series of conflicts which are the Middle Ages, just another tool in the armoury of popes struggling to maintain the independence of the Papal States and the authority of the Catholic Church.

The joke papacy

The devaluing of the idea of the ‘crusade’ was just part of the general absurdity of the papacy in the Middle Ages. The shenanigans surrounding the election of the popes, the interference of various kings (the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor in particular) and the repeated setting up of popes and anti-popes by rival factions, who promptly excommunicated each other and all their followers, reduced the concept of God’s one representative on earth to a laughing stock.

As I count it, there were no fewer than 21 anti-popes in the period covered by this book (1080 to 1453), and it was also the period when the papacy left Rome altogether and based itself in Avignon (from 1309 to 1376) where it fell under the domination of the French King. It is utterly typical of the period that the French ‘exile’ was triggered after Pope Boniface VIII was arrested and beaten so badly by soldiers of King Philip IV of France that he died.

Venice

Venice was responsible for the sack of Constantinople and plays the role of bad guy for the remaining 250 years of the empire, repeatedly attacking and burning the city, often as part of its ongoing and intensely bitter feud against Italy’s other maritime state, Genoa. The sequence of events is long and very complicated but Norwich gives the sense that, right up to the very last moment, Venice was guided purely by commercial self-interest, determined to screw as much land and trading advantages out of the Byzantine Empire as possible even when the ’empire’ amounted to little more than a half-ruined city. Only in the last few months of its existence do the Venetians seem to have realised that the loss of Constantinople and the unimpeded ownership of the entire Balkan Peninsula by the Turks would put them on the Adriatic coast right opposite themselves. Too late they offered to send the emperor ships and troops, decades too late, maybe a century too late.

Mercenaries

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Seljuk Turks were effectively free to move into Anatolia. The process wasn’t immediate but within a decade they had taken control of the whole central portion of Anatolia, submitting the native Greek Christians to Muslim rule and laws. Most importantly Anatolia had been for a thousand years the source of a) food b) fighting manpower to the Eastern Empire. With its loss, the empire had to turn increasingly to paying for mercenary soldiers to fight its cause.

The loss of Anatolia had long since deprived Byzantium of its traditional source of manpower; for many years already it had had to rely on foreign mercenaries. (p.259, referring to the year 1300)

As the book progresses, you become aware that mercenaries fought on all sides. It was, for example, striking to learn that when, in 1211 the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, Kaikosru, attacked the Byzantine forces of the emperor Theodore, both armies contained a contingent of Latin mercenaries at their core (p.190).

This sets the tone for the ever-increasing use of mercenaries by all sides: for example, the young general Michael Palaeologus – before he himself seized the throne – was sent into exile and ended up leading the Sultans Christian mercenaries in battle against the Mongol invaders in 1256 (p.205).

  • In 1258 Michael, now emperor, despatches an army against his Greek rival in the west, the Despot of Epirus: and this Byzantine army contains contingents from Hungary, Serbia, as well as Cuman and Turkish mercenaries (p.208)

‘Multicultural’ is not at all the right word, but the universal use of mercenaries brings home one of the many differences from our own ties. In our day we associate an army with the country which funds and organises it. We think of armies as being national. In those times an army could be made up of an extremely heterogenous group of man fighting for all kinds of reasons.

  • In 1302 a Byzantine force was caught just outside the city of Nicomedia by a Turkish army twice its size commanded by a local Ghazi named Othman. It wasn’t a decisive battle, the Byzantines turned and fled, the Turks proceeded west to the coast, ravaging all the towns and settlements they passed through. Historically the encounter is notable because it marks the first appearance of the legendary Othman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. But for the point I’m making the important thing is that the Byzantine force was largely composed of Alan tribesmen. (p.263)

As the reliance on mercenaries increased, successive emperors of Byzantium found themselves trapped into paying the spiralling costs of even basic defence. More and more income was diverted to pay the insatiable demands of foreign fighters. Thus when around 1350 Symeon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, sent a large quantity of gold to pay for the restoration of the St Sophia church, the emperor of the time was forced to use the entire sum in order to pay mercenaries, Turkish mercenaries – Muslim mercenaries. The Grand Duke was not pleased.

Because if their pay wasn’t kept up, mercenaries were a dangerously double-edged weapon.

  • In 1263 Michael sends a fleet and army against the King of Achaia (one of the breakaway Greek kingdoms created after the 1204 sack of Constantinople), an army of some 15,000 men a third of who are Muslim Seljuk mercenaries. (p.220) This did not end well as half way through the campaign the mercenaries, who had not been paid for six months, suddenly demanded their wages and when these were not forthcoming, deserted to the other side (p.222)

This of course was the weakness of mercenaries: if you ran out of money, they stopped fighting for you and, as the years went by, the Empire became increasingly strapped for cash. The most notable example of this was the Grand Catalan Company.

The Grand Catalan Company

This was a powerful group of mercenaries led by Roger de Flor between the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 and Roger’s assassination in 1305. During this period they evolved to become one of the most efficient fighting forces in the Mediterranean and were hired by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus to fight the increasing power of the Turks.

Norwich gives a fascinating account of the colourful career of Roger himself (sent to sea aged eight, pirate captain by the age of 24) and of the brilliant campaign they undertook against the Turks. He explains that, if only the Catalan Company had followed up its initial victories against the Turks and pushed on into Anatolia it is conceivable that the Empire might have been able to seize much of the territory back, re-establish its agriculture and earlier model of military service and generally been restored. But the Catalans, as mercenaries, were only interested in loot and broke off the campaign to return to the sea and their treasure stores. 

It was fear about their increasing independence and refusal to obey orders which prompted the emperor to permit his other group of mercenaries – the Alans – to carry out a massacre of the Catalan Company during a feast at which Roger himself was murdered (the Alans had a long-festering grievance against the Catalans). The surviving Catalans went on a wild rampage through Adrianople (where the assassination took place) and beyond. It’s fascinating to learn that the memory of these massacres lasted so long that the monks of nearby Mount Athos prohibited the entrance of Catalan citizens until as recently as 2000.

Marriages

As explained in a previous blog post, in the absence of all international bodies or agreed norms of behaviour, one of the few ways rulers had of trying to control the chaos of endless international rivalries and war, was through family and kinship ties. Specifically, the tool of marrying off your brothers or sisters or sons or daughters to the children of other rulers you wished to secure an alliance with, or to structure the inheritance of property, specifically territories and kingdoms.

  • In May 1197 the Emperor Alexius III was obliged to stand impotently by while his niece, Irene, daughter of the blinded ex-emperor Isaac II, was married off by Henry VI King of Sicily to his own younger brother Philip of Swabia. (p.164)
  • When Henry of Hainault, Latin ruler of Byzantium, died in 1216, the Frankish barons elected his brother-in-law Peter of Courtenay to succeed him. In France at the time Peter set sail for the East with an army of 5,500 men, landing in Epirus and laying siege to the town of Durazzo. The town proved impregnable and Peter and most of his men were captured in the mountains of Albania and thrown in prison, never to be heard of again. His wife, Yolanda, had sailed direct to Constantinople where she adopted the title of Empress and regent for their new-born son. She consolidated her position by giving the daughter of her brother, Henry (who was named Mary) to the Emperor of the Byzantine government in exile in Nicaea, Theodore Lascaris.
  • When the Latin Emperor Robert I (the son Yolanda acted as regent for) died in 1228, leaving an eleven-year-old boy, Baldwin II, as his successor, the Latin barons offered the throne of Byzantium to an ageing adventurer and one-time King of Jerusalem, John of Brienne. John reluctantly accepted on the understanding that 11-year-old Baldwin would immediately marry his (John’s) own four-year-old daughter, Maria, and that she be given a sizeable dowry in the form of land. (p.195)
  • In 1235 John Asen emperor of Bulgaria signed a treaty of alliance with Nicaea which was sealed by the marriage of his daughter Helena to the son of the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes. (p.197)
  • In 1249 John Vatatzes secured a treaty of friendship with Michael II, Despot of Epirus (and illegitimate son of the despotate’s original founder, Michael I) by marrying his granddaughter Maria to Michael’s son Nicephorus. (p.200)

And so on and on.

In fact I noticed that there is a slowly increasing mention of treaties in the text, and it would be interesting to know how the concept of ‘the treaty’ changed and evolved over this long period and how it related to the early development of ‘the nation state’, whether there was an increasing recognition of the legal standing of treaties, or whether they remained agreements between individual leaders.

Whatever the theory, pieces of paper remained cheap and easy to tear up, whereas bonds of blood and marriage (and so grandparentage of the children of these unions) remained a primeval force understood by all sides.

  • In 1256 Tsar Michael Asen of the Bulgars was assassinated and succeeded by a boyar named Constantine Tich. Tich saw the strategic usefulness of an alliance with Byzantium and so he repudiated his wife in order to marry Irene, the daughter of Byzantine Emperor Theodore II. (p.205)
  • Early in 1258 Manfred of Sicily, the bastard son of Frederick II, invaded Epirus. The Despot of Epirus, Michael, was at that moment besieging the Byzantine city of Thessalonica so he decided to ally with Manfred against the Nicaean Empire, negotiated a deal with him and sealed it by giving Manfred the hand of his eldest daughter, Helena. (p.207)
  • In 1291 Charles II of Anjou proposed an alliance with Nicephorus, Despot of Epirus, against Constantinople, which he cemented by marrying his son, Philip, to Nicephorus’s daughter, Thamar. (p.260)

Child marriages

I was struck by the number of marriage contracts which involved very young children.

  • In 1136 Raymond of Poitiers, son of William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, married Constance, daughter of Bohemund II of Antioch, aged six, in order to give Raymond legitimacy as the new ruler of the Crusader Kingdom of Antioch. (p.77)
  • In September 1158 Theodora Comnena, niece of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, was married to King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. She was 12, he was 28. (p.122)
  • On 2 March 1180 the Patriarch Theodosius celebrated the marriage of Princess Agnes of France to Alexius Comnenus of Constantinople. She was nine, her husband was ten. (p.137)
  • In 1244 the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes strengthened his position vis-a-vis the Latin kingdom by marrying Constance, the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Constance was just 12-years-old and forced to take the Byzantine name Anna, and married to a man forty years older than her who was, as everyone knew, having an affair with one of her own waiting-women. (p.199)
  • In 1282 an ambitious new ruler came to the throne of Serbia, Stephen Miliutin, who within a year declared support for Charles of Anjou (the threatener from Sicily) and allied with the Despotate of Epirus (on the west Balan coast). The Byzantine Emperor Andronicus realised he had to neutralise this threat and when he heard that Miliutin’s legal wife had died (he was said to keep at least two concubines) he offered his own sister in marriage. Interestingly, the sister, Eudocia, flat out refused to be married and so Andronicus turned to the next best thing, his own daughter Simonis. Simonis was five years old and Miliutin 40. Amazingly, the little girl was taken by a Byzantine deputation to Thessalonica where the wedding was carried out by the Archbishop of Ochrid. Miliutin was thrilled that her dowry included most of the territory of Macedonia (which he coveted) and he agreed to allow little Simonis to remain in the Serbian nursery ‘for a few more years until she was old enough to live with him as his wife’. It is interesting to note that many people at the time saw this as immoral, and that the Patriarch of Constantinople, John XII, resigned in protest. (p.261)
  • In 1284, Andronicus II married Yolanda (who was renamed Eirene as Empress) who was eleven at the time. (p.275)

You could see this as the exploitation of the young, or as treating women as pawns – but I see it as treating people as pawns.

Everyone in any kind of position of power might well have had their own identity, character, wishes, plans and all the rest of the fol-de-rol surrounding ‘personality’ and ‘individuality’ which we in our post-Enlightenment, post-religious, consumer society take for granted. But eminent people living then existed primarily as pieces on a vast chess board, to be switched, taken, or sacrificed without a moment’s hesitation, as the game demanded.

  • Manfred of Sicily was defeated by the merciless Charles of Anjou at the Battle of Benevento on 26 February 1266. Only after three days was Manfred’s body found and Charles then denied it a Christian burial but had it placed by the bridge at Benevento so that every passing soldier in his army could throw a stone at it and build up a burial cairn. Manfred’s wife, Helena of Epirus, and is three young children were imprisoned at Nocera. Of the four, three never appeared again: one son was still there in the same prison 43 years later. (p.225)
  • In December 1355 the Emperor John V sent a desperate letter to Pope Innocent VI begging for help. If the pope would send him 500 knights, a thousand infantry, fifteen transport ships and five galleys, John promised to oversee the conversion of the Greek Orthodox church to Roman Catholic rites and personnel. In addition he would send his five-year-old son, Manuel, to be raised a Catholic and disposed of as the pope saw fit. (p.326)

Youth

Very young some of these children may well have been but then, almost everyone was young. Lots of the rulers died in their 30s or 40s. Norwich repeatedly comments that rulers in their 60s were old for their time. And there are some staggering examples of how much was expected, and achieved, by people of incredible youth.

  • In 1268 Manfred of Sicily’s nephew Conradin marched south from Germany in a bid to save his family’s inheritance from the aggressor Charles of Anjou. On 23 August Charles shattered his army at Taglioacozzo. Conradin captured, subjected to a kangaroo court and then beheaded in the market square in Naples. He was just sixteen and the last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. (p.225)

The most striking example of youth achieving astonishing things is the final capture of Constantinople itself by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Norwich shows in detail how Mehmed led Turkish forces to defeat the crusade led by John Hunyadi after the Hungarian incursions into his country broke the conditions of the truce Peace of Szeged, and then goes on to explain the thinking behind his final assault on Constantinople, and describe in great details both the preparations for the siege – by land and by sea – and a day-by-day account of the siege, breach and fall of the city. The attacking Turks gave themselves up to an orgy of violence and destruction, massacring and raping civilians, desecrating, looting and torching the churches. Through the mayhem strode the Sultan, surrounded by his bodyguard, to the vast church of Hagia Sophia, which he had already decided would be converted into the largest mosque in the world. He knelt and kissed the floor and thanked Allah for his victory.

And he had achieved all this – by the age of twenty-one!

The generality of the heartless, calculating treatment meted out to everyone was symbolised for me by the widespread blinding of the powerful when they were brought low or presented a threat – not as a punishment, but to neutralise them as a threat.

Blindings

From the eight or nine hundreds onwards it became customary to blind rival emperors you had overthrown and/or their male children, in order to permanently prevent them becoming a threat. It was considered less cruel than simply murdering them.

  • In 1077 the general Nicephorus Bryennius made a bid for the throne, but was captured and blinded by Nicephorus III Botaneiates. (p.64)
  • 1204 following the fall, sack, and occupation of Constantinople, the Emperor Alexius V ‘Mourtzouphlos’ was blinded
  • In 1218 Boril of the Bulgars was overthrown by his cousin John II Asen and blinded. (p. 193)
  • 1230 John Asil of Bulgaria defeated Theodor of Thessalonica and had him blinded. (p.197)
  • In 1295 the Empire’s foremost general, Alexius Philanthropenus, rose up in revolt. He was quickly defeated, captured and blinded. (p.262)
  • In 1373 the Ottoman Sultan Murad’s son, Sauji, rose against him. The Sultan quickly defeated the rebel forces and had his son blinded. (p.336)

But the most disgusting of the many, many blindings in this book is of a helpless eleven-year-old boy.

  • John IV Lascaris was only seven years old when he inherited the throne on the death of his father, Theodore II Ducas Lascaris. He was put under the regency of the bureaucrat George Muzalon who was hugely unpopular and swiftly murdered by the nobility (in church). The leader who emerged was the successful young general Michael Palaeologus who usurped the regency and then, on January 1, 1259, made himself co-emperor as Michael VIII. (Michael was, in fact, John’s second cousin once removed.) After Michael’s conquest of Constantinople from the Latin Empire on July 25, 1261, Michael needed to secure full control of the Byzantine inheritance and so four months later he had John IV – who he’d left behind in the palace at Nicaea – blinded on Christmas Day. It was the boy’s eleventh birthday. He was then sent to a prison in Bithynia where he lived for another fifty years. Many at the time were disgusted by this act and it led to Michael’s excommunication by the Patriarch Arsenius Autoreianus. (p.212)

Political mutilation in Byzantine culture

All this can be set against what became an embedded habit of the Ottoman Dynasty which was that, upon the death of each Sultan, his sons fought for power and the victor had all his defeated rivals strangled. This wasn’t just a bad habit practised by the occasional wicked sultan – it was enshrined in Ottoman law.

Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s Law of Governance imparted the right of executing the male members of the dynasty to his son in order to prevent an interregnum.

To prevent attempts at seizing the throne, reigning sultans practiced fratricide upon accession, starting with Murat I in 1362. Both Murad III and his son Mehmed III had their half-brothers murdered. The killing of all the new sultan’s brothers and half-brothers (which were usually quite numerous) was traditionally done by manual strangling with a silk cord. As the centuries passed, the ritual killing was gradually replaced by lifetime solitary confinement in the ‘Golden Cage’ or kafes, a room in the harem from where the sultan’s brothers could never escape, unless they happened to become heir presumptive. Some had already become mentally unstable by the time they were asked to reign. (Wikipedia)

Slavery

I also cannot get over the way slavery is so casually mentioned. Again and again entire populations of towns, cities and regions are led off into slavery. We are told slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Muslim lands, but also appears to have been common in the Byzantine Empire, and was practiced by all the lesser peoples fringing the narrative, like the Bulgars and Hungarians and Serbs. I am puzzled why the ubiquity of slavery across Europe and the Middle East for most of the Middle Ages isn’t better known, isn’t made more of – especially when you consider the enormous fuss which is made about the African slave trade carried out by the West European nations from the 1500s onwards.

  • After the Turks seized Gallipoli they began conquering Thrace, taking Didymotichum in 1361, Adrianople in 1362. ‘In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor’ (p.328)
  • When the Turks seized the city of Thessalonica in 1430, they looted all the churches and burnt many of them to the ground, massacring most of the male population and selling some seven thousand women and children into slavery. (p.395)
  • In preparation for the final siege the Turks took the nearby island of Prinkipo. the garrison was burnt alive in their fortress, the entire civilian population was sold into slavery. (p.424)
  • The monk and scholar George Scholarius was sold into slavery along with all his fellow monks (p.442)

Why is black African slavery discussed, raised, debated and lamented on an almost daily basis in books, films, art galleries and the media – while the European and Asian slave trade is completely and utterly absent from all forms of culture whatsoever, except tucked away as a minor detail of histories of the classical world and Middle Ages?

Weren’t the huge numbers of people sold into slavery in the 1100s, 1200s, 1300s and 1400s just as much human beings with lives and hopes and fears, as the people sold into slavery in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s?

So why commemorate the one and not the other?

Other medieval reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on June 9, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, Crusades, Middle Ages
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/byzantium-the-decline-and-fall-2-john-julius-norwich/

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 to 1099) 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 fait accompli 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 to 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 to 1192) 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 to 1221) and sixth crusades (1228 to 1229) 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 to 1204. 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.

Other medieval reviews

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

Posted by Simon on May 24, 2019

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

%d bloggers like this: