All posts tagged the sack of Constantinople

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.

The Sack of Constantinople

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:

all the senior Orthodox churchmen refused to co-operate
the Greek people passively resisted all changes
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.

The Avignon Papacy

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.

The Great Catalan Company

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?

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by Simon on June 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, Crusades, Middle Ages

Tagged 1071, 1453, Adrianople, Adriatic Sea, African slave trade, Albania, Alexius III, Alexius Philanthropenus, Andronicus II, Andronicus II Palaeologus, Andronicus III Palaeologus, Andronicus IV Palaeologus, Arsenites, Baldwin II, Battle of Manzikert, Bohemund II of Antioch, Boril of the Bulgars, Byzantine Empire, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Charles II of Anjou, Charles of Anjou, Clement IV, Conradin, Constantine Tich, Constantine XI Dragases Palaeologus, Constantinople, crusaders, crusades, Despot of the Morea, Durazzo, Eastern Orthodox Church, Emperor Alexius V 'Mourtzouphlos', Emperor John V, Empire of Nicaea, fall of Constantinople, Fourth Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa, Gallipoli, George Muzalon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, Helena Dragaš, Helena of Epirus, Henry VI of Sicily, Hesychasts, Holy Roman Emperor, Isaac II, John Asen, John Cantacuzenos, John II Asen, John III Ducas Vatatzes, John IV Lascaris, John Julius Norwich, John Lascaris, John of Brienne, John V Palaeologus, John Vatatzes, John VI Cantacuzenos, John VII Palaeologus, John VIII Palaeologus, King Baldwin III, King Manfred of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, Manuel I Comnenus, Manuel II Palaeologus, Mehmed III, Mehmed the Conqueror's Law of Governance, mercenaries, Michael II, Michael Palaeologus, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Murad I, Murad III, Nicephorus Bryennius, Nicephorus III Botaneiates, Othman, Outremer, Patriarch Arsenius Autoreianus, Peter of Courtnay, Philip of Swabia, Pope Boniface IX, Pope Innocent VI, Principality of Achaea, Raymond of Poitiers, Robert I, Roger de Flor, schisms, Second Church Council of Lyon, Sicily, slave trade, Stephen Miliutin, Sultan Mehmed II, Sultan Murad, Sultan of Iconium, Symeon, Tamburlaine, The Albigensian Crusade, the Balkans, the Battle of Köse Dağ, the Battle of Kosovo, the Crusade of Nicopolis, the Duchy of Athens, the Fall of Acre, the Grand Catalan Company, the Ottoman Turks, the sack of Constantinople, the Seljuk Turks, The Sicilian Vespers, the Union of Lyon, Theodore I Lascaris, Theodore II Ducas Lascaris, Theodore II Lascaris, Theodore Lascaris, Theodore of Thessalonica, Venice, When Henry of Hainault, William IX Duke of Aquitaine

Posted by Simon on June 9, 2019

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

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 misjudgements 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:

long-term mistrust between Latin Westerners and Greek Byzantines
the long-term rivalry with Venice which wished to supersede Byzantium as the main power in the eastern Mediterranean
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:

use the wealth of the Byzantine Empire to pay the entire debt owed to the Venetians
give 200,000 silver marks to the crusaders
give 10,000 Byzantine professional troops for the Crusade
pay for the permanent maintenance of 500 knights in the Holy Land
offer the service of the Byzantine navy to transport the Crusader Army to Egypt
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:

use the wealth of the Empire to pay the entire debt owed to the Venetians
give 200,000 silver marks to the crusaders
give 10,000 Byzantine professional troops for the Crusade
pay for the maintenance of 500 knights in the Holy Land
offer the service of the Byzantine navy to transport the Crusader Army to Egypt
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?

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by Simon on June 5, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Christianity, Crusades, History, Middle Ages, War

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Posted by Simon on June 5, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/05/sack-of-constantinople-1204/

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.

Steven Runciman Wikipedia article

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

Complete list of my medieval reviews

1 Comment

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/

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

The sub-title is ‘Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 to 1350’ and that is very much the central idea I take from this book – that before Europe embarked on its well-known colonial adventures from 1492 onwards, it had already experienced centuries of internal colonisation.

Another book I’ve recently read, Robert Fletcher’s ‘The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD’, has prepared my mind for this idea, with its account of the millennium-long process whereby Christianity was spread across the ‘nations’ (such as they were) of Europe, to the pagan peoples and rulers of the fringes.

The final part of that book makes it clear that, after the First Crusade (1095 to 1099), as Christianity was spread along the Baltic and into the last bastions of paganism in Eastern Europe, the evangelising became much more violent. It no longer amounted to a much-venerated saint converting a bunch of open-mouthed peasants by healing a sick girl; it was now about armed bands of knights united in an ‘Order’ – the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, the Teutonic Order – who waged fierce wars of conquest into the East, forcibly converting the populations they conquered and building imperial castles to hold the territory they’d seized.

Charge of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Peipus, April 5, 1242

Europe had to colonise itself, before its rulers went on to violently colonise the rest of the world.

Bartlett’s book aims to make you see that a number of scattered events usually treated as separate entities in siloed national histories, were actually all part of One Really Big Pattern: the spread, by conquest, of a centrally organised, Latin, Catholic Christianised state ideology right across Europe, and that this diffusion came from the heart of the old Frankish empire, from the most technologically and ideologically advanced heart of Europe consisting of north-France, north-west Germany and south-east England (after it had been conquered by the Normans in the 1060s).

Thus:

The Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s was partly a crude seizure of land and resources, but also involved the imposition on Gaelic Christianity of the much more centrally organised Latin Roman version.
A hundred years later, Edward I’s conquest of Wales in the 1280s had a similar aim of imposing a strong, centralised, Latinate organisation onto a culture traditionally made of scores of petty princes.
The Scots had already undergone a European-style centralising ‘revolution’ under King David I (1124-1153) and so could muster more resources to resist Edward I’s imperial ambitions – but only at the expense of handing over large parts of southern Scotland to settlement by Normans (and Flemings).
This period also saw the Reconquista of Spain, the long effort to push the occupying Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula, over the centuries from the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 to the recapture of Seville in 1248.
It was also the era of the Crusades (1095 to 1291), which imposed Latin, Catholic Christianity on formerly Orthodox territories in the Middle East.
Just before the First Crusade began, Norman troops under Roger I conquered the Kingdom of Sicily from the Muslims (complete by 1091).
En route to the Holy Land, King Richard I seized Cyprus from its Greek ruler in 1191, transferring it to Latin rule.
And the sack of Constantinople in 1204 led directly to the imposition of Latin, Catholic dioceses and bishops over much of the Byzantine Empire.

The same period saw the campaigns to Christianise the remote regions of northern and north-eastern Europe, now collectively referred to as the ‘Northern Crusades’. These included:

The Wendish Crusade (1147) against the Wends of north-east Germany and Poland.
The Crusade against the Livonians in the north-east Baltic in the 1190s.
The Teutonic Knights prolonged campaign to crush and convert the Prussians in the 1250s.
And a series of drawn-out campaigns against the pagan Duchy of Lithuania, the last stronghold of paganism in all Europe.

Moreover, this period also saw internal crusades to impose order and uniformity within Latin Christendom – most notoriously against the Cathars, a heretical sect which had followers across the South of France and which was brutally suppressed in the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ from 1209 to 1229 (named for the town of Albi, which was one of the heretical strongholds).

The Frankish expansion

The animation below shows the first 500 years of the spread of Christianity, the loss of the Middle east and Africa to the Muslims in the 700s and 800s, the Christian fightback – permanent in Spain, transient in the Levant – and then the abrupt worldwide explosion of Christianity commencing in 1500. It’s the first 1400 years or so we’re interested in, the fluctuations in and around the Mediterranean, and the period 950 to 1350 that Bartlett is particularly concerned with.

In a host of ways Bartlett identifies this expansion with the Franks, the Gothic tribe which seized Gaul from the Romans in the 500s and quickly established a centralised state which reached its geographical maximum under the legendary Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. I hadn’t realised that at its peak, Charlemagne’s empire was coterminous with Western Christendom (with the exception of the Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) as this map shows. It really was an awesome achievement.

Map of Europe around 800 AD

William of Normandy who conquered Britain in 1066 was a descendant of the Frankish kings. Frankish aristocrats played key roles in all the conquests of the day, against the Moors in Spain and the Saracens in the Levant, in Sicily and Crete and Cyprus, and in the north pressing into Denmark, into Poland and along the Baltic towards Finland and Russia. Bartlett has a nifty diagram showing that by the late Middle Ages, 80% of Europe’s monarchs were descended from the Frankish royal family or Frankish nobles.

No surprise, then, that the word ‘Frank’ began to be used widely as a generic name for the conquerors and settlers all over Europe:

the Byzantine Greeks called the incoming Latins ‘the Franks’
a settlement in Hungary was called ‘the village of the Franks’
the newly conquered peoples of Silesia and Moravia had to submit to ‘Frankish law’
Welsh chroniclers refer to incursions by ‘the Franci’
Irish monks referred to the Anglo-Norman invaders as ‘the Franks’

Similarly, in the Middle East of the Crusader era, Muslim commentators, kings and peoples came to call all Westerners ‘the Franks’. So widespread and famous was this association, that Muslim traders took the name Faranga on their journeys through the Red Sea eastwards, spreading the term as far East as China, where, when westerners arrived hundreds of years later, they were identified as the long-rumoured Fo-lang-ki. (pp.104-105).

Questions and theories

All this prompts three questions:

Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to convert the entire continent?
Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to be so centralised; why did it feel so obliged to impose uniformity of ritual and language all across the Christian world?
What gave Latin Christian culture its dynamism – the aggressive confidence which would spill out to the Canary Islands (conquered in the early 1400s), to the Caribbean (1490s), to Central America (1520s), along the coast of Africa (first settlements in Mozambique in 1500), to India and beyond?

1. The first of these questions is answered at length in Richard Fletcher’s book, which shows how Christ’s Great Commission in St Matthew’s Gospel (‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you‘) was interpreted by successive Church authorities to mean, first of all, gaining some converts among the rich in cities around the Roman Empire; then to convert all inhabitants of the cities; then, only slowly, to undertake the task of converting the rural peasants; and only then, in the 700s and 800s, the brave idea of venturing beyond the pale of Romanitas to try and convert pagans.

The second two questions are the ones Bartlett specifically addresses and he approaches them from different angles, examining various theories and sifting a wide range of evidence. I found two arguments particularly convincing:

2. The centralisation of the Catholic Church. This stems from the Gregorian Reforms, a series of measures instituted by Pope Gregory VII from around 1050 to 1080. They banned the purchase of clerical positions, enforced clerical celibacy, significantly extended Canon law to impose uniformity on all aspects of Catholic practice. As Wikipedia puts it, these reforms were based on Gregory’s

conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church under the Petrine Commission, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity.

This gathering of power by the papacy is generally thought to have reached its height under the papacy of Pope Innocent III (1198 to 1216). Innocent further extended Canon Law, upheld papal power over all secular rulers, using the Interdict to punish rulers he disagreed with (e.g. King John of England) and he was personally responsible for some of the violent campaigns we’ve listed: Innocent called for Christian crusades to be mounted against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the south of Spain, and against the Cathars in the South of France.

Making Christian belief and practice uniform was part and parcel of the extension of its power by a vigorously confident papacy, a vision of uniformity which echoed and reinforced the tendency of secular rulers to create larger ‘states’ in which they asserted increasingly centralised power and uniform laws.

3. As to the literal force behind the aggressive military confidence, Bartlett has a fascinating chapter about the technology of medieval war. Basically, the Franks had heavy war-horses, heavy body armour, the crossbow and a new design of impenetrable defensive castles and all of these were absent in the conquered territories, the Holy Land, southern Spain, Wales and Ireland, in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. These advanced military technologies gave the better-armed Franks victory – at least until their opponents managed to figure out and copy them for themselves. (The Crusades are a different case – fundamentally the Crusaders lost for lack of men and resources.)

But I was drawn to a subtler cause for this great expansion: in the 9th and 10th centuries the laws of inheritance were hazy and patrimonies and estates could be divided among a number of sons, daughters, cousins, uncles and so on. (One aspect of this is the way that Anglo-Saxon kings were chosen by acclamation, not rigid law; and this uncertainty explains the long English civil war following Henry I’s death between his daughter Matilda and her cousin Stephen of Blois, which lasted from 1135 to 1153.)

Thus, along with the imposition of clearer laws and rules within the Church went secular attempts in Frankish lands to regularise secular law, and one element of this was to enforce the previously haphazard law of primogeniture i.e. the eldest son inherits the entire estate. But this new rigour had unexpected consequences – it forced all the other male heirs to go off looking for land.

In a fascinating chapter Bartlett sketches the histories of several aristocratic Frankish families where one son inherited the father’s entire estate and left the other 3 or 4 or 5 well-armed, well-educated, ambitious sons literally homeless and landless. There was only one thing for it – to associate themselves with the nearest campaign of Christianisation and conquest. Thus the de Joinville family from the Champagne region of France spawned sons who fought and won lands in Ireland, in Africa and Syria. The descendants of Robert de Grandmenils from Normandy (d.1050) won lands in southern Italy and Sicily, served the Byzantine Emperor, joined the First Crusade, and ended up building castles in northern Wales.

So a newly rigorous application of the law of primogeniture provided the motive for forcing dispossessed aristocrats to go a-fighting – the newly authoritarian Catholic Church provided a justifying ideology for conquest in the name of uniformity – and iron armour, heavy warhorses, the crossbow and castles provided the technology. Taken together these elements at least begin to explain the phenomenal success of the ‘Frankish expansion’.

Other aspects of medieval colonisation

These ideas are pretty clearly expressed in the first three chapters; the remaining nine chapters flesh them out with a host of details examining the impact of the Frankish expansion on every aspect of medieval life: the image of the conquerors as embodied in coins, statutes and charters; the division of time into primitive pagan ‘before’ and civilised Christian ‘after’; the propagandistic literature of conquest (in various romances and epics); the giving of new Latin place names which over-wrote the native names of the conquered – the Arabs, the Irish, the Slavs; the imposition of new Frankish laws and tax codes; the proliferation of New Towns with Western-based charters, and the creation of hundreds of new villages, laid out on logical grid patterns, especially in eastern Europe. (This reminded me of the passage in Marc Morris’s history of Edward I which describes Edward’s creation of New Model Towns on grid plans in Wales (Flint) but also England (Winchelsea)).

Bartlett presents the evidence for the widespread importation from Christian Germany of heavy, iron-tipped ploughs which were much more efficient at turning the soil than the lighter, wooden Slavic ploughs, and thus increased productivity in the new settlements (pages 148 to 152). This went hand-in-hand with a ‘cerealisation’ of agriculture, as woods were cleared and marshes drained to provide more ploughing land to grow wheat and barley, which in turn led to significant increases in population in the newly settled lands. (Although as with all things human this had unintended consequences, little understood at the time; which is that the pagan predecessors, though fewer in number, had a more balanced diet which included fruit and berries and honey from woodlands – the switch to a cereal-based monoculture increased production but probably led to unhealthier people. Analysis of corpses suggests there was a net loss of stature in humans over the period, with the average height decreasing by about 2 inches between the early and the High Middle Ages.)

Names became homogenised. The Normans imported ‘William’ and ‘Henry’ into the England of ‘Athelstan’ and ‘Aelfric’, and then into the Wales of ‘Llywelyn’ ‘Owain’ and the Ireland of ‘Connor’, ‘Cormac’ and ‘Fergus’. Bartlett shows how these essentially Frankish names also spread east replacing ‘Zbigniew’ and ‘Jarosław’, south into Sicily and even (to a lesser extent) into Spain.

In a move typical of Bartlett’s ability to shed fascinating light on the taken-for-granted, he shows how the centralisation and harmonisation of the Latin church led to the diffusion of a small number of generic saints names. Before about 1100 the churches of the various nations were dedicated to a very wide spectrum of saints named after local holy men in Irish, Welsh, Scots, Castilian, Navarrese, Italian, Greek, Germanic or Polish and so on. But the 1200s saw the rise of a continent-wide popularity for the core gospel names – Mary at the top of the table, followed by Christ (as in Christ Church or Corpus Christi) and then the names of the most popular disciples, John, Peter, Andrew.

The names of individual people as well as the names of their churches, along with many other cultural changes which he describes – all followed this process of homogenisation and Latinisation which Bartlett calls ‘the Europeanisation of Europe’ (chapter 11).

New worlds and the New World

Bartlett doesn’t have to emphasise it but the parallels are clear to see between the colonisation by violence and crusading Christianity of the peripheral areas of Europe in the 1000s to 1300s, and the conquest of the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s. It’s a mind-opening comparison, which works at multiple levels.

For example, many of the charters and decrees about the new European lands proclaimed them ’empty’ virgin land ready to be settled, despite the evidence of native populations living in well-developed (though non-Latin) settlements – just as publicists for the Americas and, later, Australia, would declare them ’empty’ of natives.

Even when there are obviously natives (Welsh, Scots, Muslims, Slavs) the official colonial medieval literature disparages the aboriginal inhabitants’ lack of literacy, of iron tools or weapons, of orthodox Christianity, of organised towns with advanced codes of law and so on.

‘They’ are in every way uncivilised; ‘we’ in every way deserve to take their land because only ‘we’ know how to make it productive and fertile.

Many of the other histories I’ve read describe the numerous medieval conquests in terms of battles, alliances, troops and armour and so on; Bartlett’s is the only one I know which goes on to explain in great detail that, once you’ve conquered your new territory – you need people to come and live in it. You have to persuade people from the old lands to risk making a long journey, so you have to advertise and give would-be settlers tax breaks and even cash incentives. Settlers in Ireland, the south of Spain, the Holy Land or Livonia were all told how much empty land they could have, were offered tax breaks for the first few years and then reduced taxes for decades after, and the lords and conquerors fell over themselves to give the new towns attractive charters and independent powers to determine their own laws and taxes.

All of these techniques would be copied by the conquistadors in Central America or the merchant adventurers who launched the first settlements in North America, or the colonial authorities desperate to fill the wide ’empty’ spaces of Australia or New Zealand. It is a mind-opening revelation to learn how all these techniques were pioneered within Europe itself and against fellow ‘Europeans’, centuries before the New World was discovered.

Conclusion

This a very persuasive book which mounts an impressive armoury of evidence – archaeological and ecological, in place names, people’s names, saints names, in cultural traditions, church records and epic poems, in the spread of monasteries and universities and charters and coinage – to force home its eye-opening central argument: that the more advanced, centrally organised parts of Europe (north-west France, north-west Germany and south-east England) (all ultimately owing their authority, technology and ideology to the Frankish empire of Charlemagne) succeeded in conquering and settling the rest of less advanced, less developed and non-Christian Europe with the aid of a panoply of technologies and ideologies, legal and cultural and physical weapons – a panoply which Europeans would then use to sail out and conquer huge tracts of the rest of the world.

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

Key events

Key issues

The post-sack era

Family squabbles

Schisms

The Catholic Church

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Venice

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The Sack of Constantinople in 1204

Summary

Background

East-West relations

1. Mass arrest of the Venetians 1171

2. The massacre of the Latins

The Fourth Crusade

Henry VI’s failed expedition

Pope Innocent III preaches the fourth crusade

Richard the Lionheart’s advice – attack Egypt

The deal with Venice

Doge Dandolo proposes an attack on Zara

The fatal deal with Alexius IV Angelus

Diversion of the crusade to Constantinople

The crusaders attack Constantinople

Alexius is unable to pay

The Great Fire of Constantinople

The overthrow of Alexius IV

The crusaders renew their attack

The sack of Constantinople

The fourth crusaders

The aftermath – a Latin emperor and the Greek successor states

Its enemies take advantage of the ruin of the Byzantine Empire

Conclusion

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

Haag’s key points

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

The Reconquista

Crusades wicked, Reconquista, OK?

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Saladin

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

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The fall of the Templars

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The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

The Frankish expansion

Questions and theories

Other aspects of medieval colonisation

New worlds and the New World

Conclusion

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