Alexius Comnenus found himself, in 1081, placed in a position almost as difficult and perilous as that which Leo the Isaurian faced in 716. Like Leo, he was a usurper without prestige or hereditary claims, seated on an unsteady throne, and forced to face imminent danger from the Moslem enemy without, and from rival adventurers within. It may be added that the Isaurian, grievously threatened as he was by the enemy from the East, had no peril impending from the West. Alexius had to face at one and the same time the assault of the Seljouks on Asia Minor, and the attack of a new and formidable foe in his western provinces. We have already mentioned the manner in which the Byzantine dominion in Italy had come to an end. Now the same Norman adventurers who had stripped the empire of Calabria and Apulia were preparing to cross the straits of Otranto, and seek out the Emperor in the central provinces of his realm. The forces of the Italian and Sicilian Normans were united under [pg 259] their great chief Robert Guiscard, the hardy and unscrupulous Duke of Apulia. Just ten years before he had captured Bari, the last Byzantine fortress on his own side of the straits; now he was resolved to take advantage of the anarchy which had prevailed in the empire ever since the day of Manzikert, and to build up new Norman principalities to the east of the Adriatic. There seemed to be nothing presumptuous in the scheme to those who remembered how a few hundred Norman adventurers had conquered all Southern Italy and Sicily, and swelled into a victorious army fifty thousand strong. Nor could the invaders fail to remember how, but fifteen years before, another Norman duke had crossed another strait in the far West, and won by his strong right hand the great kingdom of England. Alexius Comnenus sat like Harold Godwinson on a lately-acquired and unsteady throne, and Duke Robert thought to deal with him much as Duke William had dealt with the Englishman.
In June, 1081, the Normans landed, thirty thousand strong, and laid siege to Durazzo, the maritime fortress that guarded the Epirot coast. The Emperor at once flew to its succour. Always active, hopeful, and versatile, he trusted that he might be able to beat off the new invaders, whose military worth he was far from appreciating at its true value. He patched up a hasty pacification with Suleiman, Sultan of the Seljouks, by surrendering to him all the territory of which the Turk was in actual possession, a tract which now extended as far as the waters of the Propontis, and actually included the city of Nicaea, [pg 260] close to the Bithynian shore, and only seventy miles from Constantinople.
The army with which Alexius had to face the Normans was the mere wreck and shadow of that which Romanus IV. had led against the Turks ten years before. The military organization of the empire had gone to pieces, and we no longer hear of the old “Themes” of heavy cavalry which had formed its backbone. The new army contained quite a small proportion of national troops. Its core was the imperial guard of Varangians—the Russian, Danish, and English mercenaries, whose courage had won the confidence of so many emperors. With them marched many Turkish, Frankish, Servian, and South-Slavonic auxiliaries; the native element comprised the regulars of the three provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, all that now remained in Alexius' hands of the ancient East-Roman realm.
Alexius brought Robert Guiscard to battle in front of Durazzo, and suffered a crushing defeat at his hands. The Emperor's bad tactics were the main cause of his failure: his army came upon the ground in successive detachments, and the van was cut to pieces before the main body had reached the field. The brunt of the battle was borne by the Varangians: carried away by their fiery courage, they charged the Normans before the rest of Alexius's troops had formed their line of battle. Rushing on the wing of Robert's army, commanded by the Count of Bari, they drove it horse and foot into the sea. Their success, however, disordered their ranks, and the Norman duke was able to turn his whole force [pg 261] against them ere the Emperor was near enough to give them aid. A fierce cavalry charge cut off the greater part of the Varangians; the rest collected on a mound by the sea-shore, and for some time beat off the Normans with their axes, as King Harold's men had done at Senlac on the last occasion when English and Norman had met. But Robert shot them down with his archers, and then sent more cavalry against them. They fell, save a small remnant who defended themselves in a ruined chapel, which Guiscard had finally to burn before he could make an end of its obstinate defenders.
The rest of Alexius's army only came into action when the Varangians had been destroyed. It was cowed by the loss of its best corps, fought badly, and fled in haste. Alexius himself, who lingered last upon the field, was surrounded, and only escaped by the speed of his horse and the strength of his sword-arm. Durazzo fell, and in the next year the Normans overran all Epirus and descended into Thessaly. Alexius risked two more engagements with them, but his inexperienced troops were defeated in both. Disaster taught him to avoid pitched battles, and at last, in 1083, after a more cautious campaign, his patience was rewarded by the dispersion of the Norman army. Catching it while divided, the Emperor inflicted on it a severe defeat at Larissa, and forced it back into Epirus. After this the war slackened, and when Robert Guiscard died in 1085 the Norman danger passed away.
Thus one foe was removed, but Alexius was not destined to win peace. Constant rebellions at home, [pg 262] and wars with the Patzinaks, the Slavs, and the Seljouks filled the next ten years. Alexius, however, was never discouraged: “eking out the lion's skin with the fox's hide,” he fought and intrigued, lied and negotiated, and at the end of the time had held his own and lost no more territory, while his throne was growing more secure.
But in the fifteenth year of his reign a new cloud began to arise in the west, which was destined to exercise unsuspected influence, both for good and evil, on the empire. The Crusades were on the eve of their commencement. Ever since the Seljouks had taken Jerusalem in 1075, four years after Manzikert, the western pilgrims to the Holy Land had been suffering grievous things at the hands of the barbarians. But all the wrath that their ill-treatment provoked would have been fruitless, if the way to Syria had not been opened of late to the nations of Western Christendom. Two series of events had made free communication between East and West possible in the end of the eleventh century, in a measure which had never before been seen.
The first of these was the conversion of Hungary, begun by St. Stephen in 1000, and completed about 1050. For the future there lay between the Byzantine Empire and Germany not a barbarous pagan state, but a semi-civilized Christian kingdom, which had taken its place among the other nations of the Roman Catholic faith. Communication down the Danube, between Vienna and the Byzantine outposts in Bulgaria, became for the first time possible, and ere long the route grew popular. The second phenomenon [pg 263] which made the Crusades possible was the destruction of the Saracen naval power in the Central Mediterranean. This was carried out first by the Pisans and Genoese, whose fleets conquered Corsica and Sardinia from the Moslems, and then by the Normans, whose occupation of Sicily made the voyage from Marseilles and Genoa to the East safe and sure. Four new maritime powers—the Genoese, Pisans, and Normans in the open sea, and the Venetians in the Adriatic—had developed themselves into importance, and now their fleets swept the waters where no Christian war-galleys save those of Byzantium, had ever been seen before.
It was the fact that free access to the East was now to be gained, both by land and sea, as it had never been before, that made the Crusades feasible. Of the preaching of Peter the Hermit and the efforts of Pope Urban we need not speak. Suffice it to say, that in 1095 news came to the Emperor Alexius that the nations of the West were mustering by myriads, and directing their march towards his frontiers, with the expressed intention of driving the Moslems from Palestine. The Emperor had little confidence in the purity of the zeal of the Crusaders; his wily mind could not comprehend their enthusiasm, and he dreaded that some unforeseen circumstance might turn their arms against himself. When the hordes of armed Frankish pilgrims began to arrive, his fears were justified: the new-comers pillaged his country right and left upon their way, and were drawn into many bloody fights with the peasantry and the imperial garrisons, which might have ended in open [pg 264] war. But Alexius set himself to work to smooth matters down; all his tact and patience were needed, and there was ample scope for his talent for intrigue and insincere diplomacy. He had resolved to induce the crusading chiefs to do him homage, and to swear to restore to him all the old dominions of the empire which they might reconquer from the Turks. After long and tedious negotiations he had his way: the leaders of the Crusade, from Godfrey of Bouillon and Hugh of Vermandois down to the smallest barons, were induced to swear him allegiance. Some he flattered, others he bribed, others he strove to frighten into compliance. The pages of the history written by his daughter, Anna Comnena, who regarded his powers of cajolery with greater respect than any other part of his character, are full of tales of the ingenious shifts by which he brought the stupid and arrogant Franks to reason. At length they went on their way, with Alexius's gold in their pockets, and encouraged by his promise that he would aid them with his troops, continue to supply them with provisions, and never abandon them till the Holy City was reconquered.
In the spring of 1097 the Crusaders began to cross the Bosphorus, and in two marches found themselves within Turkish territory. They at once laid siege to Nicaea, the frontier fortress of the Seljouk Sultan. Encompassed by so great a host the Turkish garrison soon lost heart and surrendered, not to the Franks, but to Alexius, whose troops they secretly admitted within the walls. This nearly led to strife between the Emperor and the Crusaders, who had been reckoning on the plunder of the town; but Alexius [pg 265] appeased them with further stores of money, and the pilgrim host rolled forward once more into the interior of Asia Minor.
In 1097 the Crusaders forced their way through Phrygia and Cappadocia, beating back the Seljouks at every encounter, till they reached North Syria, where they laid siege to Antioch. Alexius had undertaken to help them in their campaign, but he was set on playing an easier game. When they were crushing the Turks he followed in their rear at a safe distance, like the jackal behind the lion, picking up the spoil which they left. While the Sultan was engaged with them Alexius despoiled him of Smyrna, Ephesus, and Sardis, reconquering Western Asia Minor almost without a blow, since the Seljouk hordes were drawn away eastward. It was the same in the next year; when the Crusaders were fighting hard round Antioch against the princes of Mesopotamia, and sent to ask for instant help, Alexius despatched no troops to Syria, but gathered in a number of Lydian and Phrygian fortresses which lay nearer to his hand. Hence there resulted a bitter quarrel between the Emperor and the Franks, for since he gave them no help they refused to hand over to him Antioch and their other Syrian conquests. Each party, in fact, broke the compact signed at Constantinople, and accused the other of treachery. Hence it resulted that the Crusade ended not in the re-establishment of the Byzantine power in Syria, but in the foundation of new Frankish states, the principalities of Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli, and the more important kingdom of Jerusalem.
[pg 267]That he did not recover Syria was no real loss to Alexius; he would not have been strong enough to hold it, had it been handed over to him. The actual profit which he made by the Crusade was enough to content him: the Franks had rolled back the Turkish frontier in Asia not less than two hundred miles: instead of the Seljouk lying at Nicaea, he was now chased back behind the Bithynian hills, and the empire had recovered all Lydia and Caria with much of the Phrygian inland. The Seljouks were hard hit, and for well-nigh a century were reduced to fight on the defensive.
Owing, then, to the fearful blow inflicted by the Crusades on the Moslem powers of Asia Minor and Syria, the later years of Alexius were free from the danger which had overshadowed the beginning of his reign. He was able, between 1100 and 1118, to strengthen his position at home and abroad; the constant rebellions which had vexed his early years ceased, and when the Normans, under Bohemund of Tarentum, tried to repeat, in 1107, the feats which Robert Guiscard had accomplished in 1082, they were beaten off with ease, and forced to conclude a disadvantageous peace.
The reign of Alexius might have been counted a period of success and prosperity if it had not been for two considerations. The first was the rapid decline of Constantinople as a commercial centre, which was brought about by the Crusades. When the Genoese and Venetians succeeded in establishing themselves in the seaports of Syria, they began to visit Constantinople far less than before. It paid them much [pg 268] better to conduct their business at Acre or Tyre than on the Bosphorus. The king of Jerusalem, the weakest of feudal sovereigns, could be more easily bullied and defrauded than the powerful ruler of Constantinople. In his own seaports he possessed hardly a shadow of authority: the Italians traded there on such conditions as they chose. Hence the commerce of the West with Persia, Egypt, Syria, and India, ceased to pass through the Bosphorus. Genoa and Venice became the marts at which France, Italy, and Germany, sought their Eastern goods. It is probable that the trade of Constantinople fell off by a third or even a half in the fifty years that followed the first Crusade. The effect of this decline on the coffers of the state was deplorable, for it was ultimately on its commercial wealth that the Byzantine state based its prosperity. All through the reigns of Alexius and his two successors the complaints about the rapid fall in the imperial revenue grew more and more noticeable.
This dangerous decay in the finances of the empire was rendered still more fatal by the political devices of Alexius, who began to bestow excessive commercial privileges to the Italian republics, in return for their aid in war. This system commenced in 1081, when the Emperor, then in the full stress of his first Norman war, granted the Venetians the free access to most of the ports of his empire without the payment of any customs dues. To give to foreigners a boon denied to his own subjects was the height of economic lunacy; the native merchants complained that the Venetians were enabled to undersell them in every [pg 269] market, owing to this exemption from import and export duties. Matters were made yet worse in 1111, when Alexius bestowed a similar, though less extensive, grant of immunities on the Pisans.
When John II., the son of Alexius, succeeded in 1118 to the empire which his father had saved, the fabric was less strong than it appeared to the outward eye. Territorial extension seemed to imply increased strength, and the rapid falling off in the financial resources of the realm attracted little attention. John however was one of those prudent and economical princes who stave off for years the inevitable day of distress. Of all the rulers who ever sat upon the Byzantine throne, he is the only one of whom no detractor has ever said an evil word. When we remember that he was his father's son, it is astonishing to find that his honesty and good faith were no less notable than his courage and generosity. His subjects named him “John the Good,” and their appreciation of his virtues was sufficiently marked by the fact that no single rebellion27 marred the internal peace of his long reign. [1118-1143.]
John was a good soldier, and during his rule the frontier of the empire in Asia continued to advance, at the expense of the Turks. But his strategy would seem to have been at fault since he preferred to reconquer the coast districts of Northern and Southern Asia Minor, rather than to strike at the heart of the Seljouk power on the central table-land. When he [pg 270] had reduced all Cilicia, Pisidia, and Pontus, his dominions became a narrow fringe of coast, surrounding on three sides the realm of the Sultan, who still retained all the Cappadocian and Lycaonian plateau. It should then have been John's task to finish the reconquest of Asia Minor, but he preferred to plunge into Syria, where he forced the Frank prince of Antioch and the Turkish Emir of Aleppo to pay him tribute, but left no permanent monument of his conquests. He was preparing a formidable expedition against the Franks of the kingdom of Jerusalem, when he perished by accident while on a hunting expedition.28
John the Good was succeeded by his son Manuel, whose strength and weakness combined to give a deathblow to the empire. Manuel was a mere knight-errant, who loved fighting for fighting's sake, and allowed his passion for excitement and adventure to [pg 271] be his only guide. His whole reign was one long series of wars, entered into and abandoned with equal levity. Yet for the most part they were successful wars, for Manuel was a good cavalry officer if he was but a reckless statesman, and his fiery courage and untiring energy made him the idol of his troops. At the head of the veteran squadrons of mercenary horsemen that formed the backbone of his army, he swept off the field every enemy that ever dared to face him. He overran Servia, invaded Hungary, to whose king he dictated terms of peace, and beat off with success an invasion of Greece by the Normans of Sicily. His most desperate struggle, however, was a naval war with Venice, in which his fleet was successful enough, and drove the Doge and his galleys out of the Ægean. But the damage done to the trade of Constantinople by the Venetian privateers, who swarmed in the Levant after their main fleet had been chased away, was so appalling that the Emperor concluded peace in 1174, restoring to the enemy all the disastrous commercial privileges which his grandfather Alexius had granted them eight years before.
The main fault of Manuel's wars was that they were conducted in the most reckless disregard of all financial considerations. With a realm which was slowly growing poorer, and with a constantly dwindling revenue, he persisted in piling war on war, and on devoting every bezant that could be screwed out of his subjects to the support of the army alone. The civil service fell into grave disorder, the administration of justice was impaired, roads and bridges went to decay, docks and harbours were neglected, while [pg 272] the money which should have supported them was wasted on unprofitable expeditions to Egypt, Syria, or Italy. So long as the ranks of his mercenaries were full and their pay forthcoming, the Emperor cared not how his realm might fare.
Of all Manuel's wars only one went ill, but that was the most important of them all, the one necessary struggle to which he should have devoted all his energies. This was the contest with the Seljouks, which ended in 1176 by a disastrous defeat at Myriokephalon in Phrygia, brought about by the inexcusable carelessness of Manuel himself, who allowed his army to be caught in a defile from which there was no exit, and routed piecemeal by an enemy who could have made no stand on the open plains. Manuel then made peace, and left the Seljouks alone for the rest of his reign.
In 1180 Manuel died, and with him died the good fortune of the House of Comnenus. His son and heir, Alexius, was a boy of thirteen, and the inevitable contest for the regency, which always accompanied a minority, ensued. After two troubled years Andronicus Comnenus, a first cousin of the Emperor Manuel, was proclaimed Caesar, and took over the guardianship of the young Alexius. Andronicus was an unscrupulous ruffian, whose past life should have been sufficient warning against putting any trust in his professions. He had once attempted to assassinate Manuel, and twice deserted to the Turks. But he was a consummate hypocrite, and won his way to the throne by professions of piety and austere virtue. No sooner was he seated by the side of [pg 273] Alexius II., and felt himself secure, than he seized and strangled his young relative [1183].
But, like our own Richard III., Andronicus found that the moment of his accession to sole power was the moment of the commencement of his troubles. Rebels rose in arms all over the empire to avenge the murdered Alexius, and the Normans of Sicily seized the opportunity of invading Macedonia. Conspiracies were rife in the capital, and the executions which followed their detection were so numerous and bloody that a perfect reign of terror set in. The Emperor plunged into the most reckless cruelty, till men almost began to believe that his mind was affected. Ere long the end came. An inoffensive nobleman named Isaac Angelus, being accused of treason, was arrested at his own door by the emissaries of the tyrant. Instead of surrendering himself, Isaac drew his sword and cut down the official who laid hands on him. A mob came to his aid, and met no immediate opposition, for Andronicus was absent from the capital. The mob swelled into a multitude, the guards would not fight, and when the Emperor returned in haste, he was seized and torn to pieces without a sword being drawn in his cause. Isaac Angelus reigned in his stead.
The state which had been drained of its resources by the energetic but wasteful Manuel, and disorganized by the rash and wicked Andronicus, now passed into the hands of the two most feeble and despicable creatures who ever sat upon the imperial throne—the brothers Isaac and Alexius Angelus, whose reigns cover the years 1185-1204.
Among all the periods which we have hitherto described in the tale of the East-Roman Empire, that covered by the reign of the two wretched Angeli may be pronounced the most shameful. The peculiar disgrace of the period lies in the fact that the condition of the empire was not hopeless at the time. With ordinary courage and prudence it might have been held together, for the attacks directed against it were not more formidable than others which had been beaten off with ease. If the blow had fallen when a hero like Leo III., or even a statesman like Alexius I. was on the throne, there is no reason to doubt that it would have been parried. But it fell in the times of two incompetent triflers, who conducted the state [pg 275] on the principle of, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Isaac and Alexius felt in themselves no power of redeeming the empire from the evil day, and resignedly fell back on personal enjoyment. Isaac's taste lay in the direction of gorgeous raiment and the collecting of miraculous “eikons.” Alexius preferred the pleasures of the table. Considered as sovereigns there was little to choose between them. Each was competent to ruin an empire already verging on its decline.
The disaster which the Angeli brought on their realm was rendered possible only by its complete military and financial disorganization. As a military power the empire had never recovered the effects of the Seljouk invasions, which had robbed it of its great recruiting-ground for its native troops in Asia Minor. After that loss the use of mercenaries had become more and more prevalent. The brilliant campaigns of Manuel Comnenus had been made at the head of a soldiery of whom two-thirds were not born-subjects of the empire. He, it is true, had kept them within the bounds of strict discipline, and contrived at all costs to provide their pay. But the weak and thriftless Angeli were able neither to find money nor to maintain discipline. A state which relies for its defence on foreign mercenaries is ruined, if it allows them to grow disorderly and inefficient. In times of stress they mutiny instead of fighting.
The civil administration was in almost as deplorable a condition, while those two “Earthly Angels” (as a contemporary chronicler called them) were charged with its care. Isaac Angelus put the finishing touch [pg 276] to administrative abuses, which had already been rife enough under the Comneni, by exposing offices and posts to auction. Instead of paying his officials he “sent them forth without purse or scrip, like the apostles of old, to make what profit they could by extortion from the provincials.”29 His brother Alexius promised on his accession to make all appointments on the ground of merit, but proved in reality as bad as Isaac. He was surrounded by a ring of rapacious favourites, who managed all patronage, and dispensed it in return for bribes. When high posts were not sold, they were given as douceurs to men of local influence, whose rebellion was dreaded.
The history of the twenty years covered by the reigns of the two Angeli is cut into two equal halves at the deposition of Isaac by his brother in 1195. It is only necessary to point out how the responsibility for the disasters of the period is to be divided between them.
Isaac's share consists in the loss of Bulgaria and Cyprus. The former country had now been in the hands of the Byzantines for nearly two hundred years, since its conquest by Basil II. But the Bulgarians had not merged in the general body of the subjects of the empire. They preserved their national language and customs, and never forgot their ancient independence. In 1187, three brothers named Peter, John, and Azan stirred up rebellion among them. If firmly treated it might have been crushed with ease by the regular troops of the empire. But Isaac first appointed incompetent generals, who let the rebellion grow to a [pg 277] head, and when at last he placed an able officer, Alexis Branas, in command, his lieutenant took the opportunity of using his army for revolt. Branas marched against Constantinople, and would have taken it, had not Isaac committed the charge of the troops that remained faithful to him to stronger hands than his own. He bribed an able adventurer from the West, Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, by the offer of his sister's hand and a great sum of money to become his saviour. The gallant Lombard routed the forces of Branas, slew the usurper, and preserved the throne for his brother-in-law. But while the civil war was going on, the Bulgarians were left unchecked, and made such head that there was no longer much apparent chance of subduing them. Isaac took the field against them in person, only to see the great towns of Naissus, Sophia, and Varna taken before his eyes.
While a national revolt deprived the Emperor of Bulgaria, Cyprus was lost to a meaner force. Isaac Comnenus, a distant relative of the Emperor Manuel II., raised rebellion among the Cypriots and defeated the fleet and army which his namesake of Constantinople sent against him. He held out for six years, and appeared likely to establish a permanent kingdom in the island. This revolt was of the worst augury to the empire. It had often lost provinces by the invasion of barbarian hordes, or the rebellion of subject nationalities. But that a native rebel should sever a civilized Greek province from the empire, and reign as “Emperor of Cyprus,” was a new phenomenon. By the imperial theory the idea of an independent [pg 278] “Empire of Cyprus” was wholly monstrous and abnormal. The successful rebellion of Isaac Comnenus pointed to the possibility of a general breaking up of the Byzantine dominion into fragments, a danger that had never appeared before. Till now the provinces had always obeyed the capital, and no instance had been known of a rebel maintaining himself by any other way than the capture of Constantinople. Isaac Comnenus might, however, have founded a dynasty in Cyprus, if he had not quarrelled with Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the crusading King of England. When he maltreated some shipwrecked English crews, Richard punished him by landing his army in Cyprus and seizing the whole island. Isaac was thrown into a dungeon, and the English king gave his dominions to Guy of Lusignan, who called in Frank adventurers to settle up the land, and made it into a feudal kingdom of the usual Western type.
While Isaac II. was in the midst of his Bulgarian war, and misconducting it with his usual fatuity, he was suddenly dethroned by a palace intrigue. His own brother, Alexius Angelus, had hatched a plot against him, which worked so successfully that Isaac was caught, blinded, and immured in a monastery long before his adherents knew that he was in danger.
Alexius III. never showed any other proof of energy save this skilful coup d`état aimed against his brother. He continued the Bulgarian war with the same ill-success that had attended Isaac's dealings with it. He plunged into a disastrous struggle with the Seljouk Sultan of Iconium, and he quarrelled with the Emperor Henry VI., who would certainly have [pg 279] invaded his dominions if death had not intervened to prevent it. But as long as Alexius was permitted to enjoy the pleasures of the table in his villas on the Bosphorus, the ill-success abroad of his arms and his diplomacy vexed him but little.
But in 1203, a new and unexpected danger arose to scare him from his feasting. His blind brother Isaac had a young son named Alexius, who escaped from Constantinople to Italy, and took refuge with Philip of Suabia, the new Emperor of the West. Philip had married a daughter of Isaac Angelus, and determined to do something to help his young brother-in-law. The opportunity was not hard to seek. Just at this moment a large body of French, Flemish, and Italian Crusaders, who had taken arms at the command of the Pope, were lying idle at Venice. They had marched down to the great Italian seaport with the intention of directing a blow against Malek-Adel, Sultan of Egypt. The Venetians had contracted to supply them with vessels for the Crusade, but for reasons of their own had determined that the attack should not fall on the shore for which it had been destined. They were on very good terms with the Egyptian sovereign, who had granted them valuable commercial privileges at Alexandria, which threw the whole trade with the distant realms of India into Venetian hands. Accordingly they had determined to avert the blow from Egypt and turn it against some other enemy of Christendom. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade proved unable to pay the full sum which they had contracted to give the Venetians as ship-hire, and this was made an excuse for keeping [pg 280] them camped on the unhealthy islands in the Lagoons till their patience and their stores were alike exhausted. Henry Dandolo, the aged but wily doge, then proposed to the Crusaders that they should pay their way by doing something in aid of Venice. The Dalmatian town of Zara had lately revolted and done homage to the King of Hungary; if the Crusaders would recover it, the Venetian state would wipe out their debts and transport them whither they wished to go.
The Crusaders had taken arms for a holy war against the Moslems. They were now invited to turn aside against a Christian town and interest themselves in Venetian politics. Conscientious men would have refused to join in such an unholy bargain, and would have insisted in carrying out their original purpose against Egypt. But conscientious men had been growing more and more rare among the Crusaders for the last hundred years. There were as many greedy military adventurers among them as single-hearted pilgrims. The more scrupulous chiefs were over-persuaded by their designing companions, and the expedition against Zara was undertaken.
Zara fell, but another and a more important enterprise was then placed before the Crusaders. While they wintered on the Dalmatian coast the young Alexius Angelus appeared in their camp, escorted by the ambassadors of his brother-in-law, the Emperor Philip of Suabia. The exiled prince besought them to turn aside once more before they sailed to the East, and to rescue his blind father from the dungeon into which he had been cast by his cruel brother Alexius III. If they would drive out the [pg 281] usurper and restore the rightful ruler to his throne, they should have anything that the Byzantine Empire could afford to help them for their Crusade—money in plenty, stores, a war fleet, a force of mercenary troops, and his own presence as a helper in the war with Egypt.
Pope Innocent III. had already been storming at the adventurers for shedding Christian blood at Zara, and tampering with their Crusader's oath. But the prospect of Byzantine gold seduced the needy Western barons, and the desire of keeping the war away from Egypt ruled the minds of the Venetians. They hesitated and began to treat with Alexius, though they knew that thereby they were calling down on themselves the terrors of a Papal excommunication. All now depended on the leaders, and among them the abler minds were set on the acceptance of the proposal of the young Byzantine exile. The three chiefs of the Crusade were the Doge Henry Dandolo, Boniface Marquis of Montferrat, and Baldwin Count of Flanders. In Dandolo the ruthless energy of the Italian Republics stood incarnate; he was the one man in the crusading army who knew exactly what he wanted. Old and blind, but clear-headed and inflexible, he was set on revenging an ancient grudge against the Greeks, and on furthering, by any means, good or evil, the fortunes of his native city. Baldwin and Boniface, the two secondary figures in the camp of the Franks, are perfect representations of the two types of crusader. The Fleming, gallant and generous, pious and debonnair, worthy of a more righteous enterprise and a more honourable death, was a true [pg 282] successor of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the heroes of the First Crusade. The Lombard, a deep and hardy schemer, to whom force and fraud seemed equally good, was simply seeking for wealth and fame in the realms of the East. He cared little for the Holy Sepulchre, and much for his own private advancement. Behind these three leaders we descry the motley crowd of the feudal world; relic-hunting abbots in coats of mail, wrangling barons and penniless knights, the half-piratical seamen of Venice, and the brutal soldiery of the West.
Boniface of Montferrat and Doge Dandolo gradually talked over the more scrupulous Baldwin and his friends, and the crusading fleet was launched against Constantinople, after a treaty had been signed which bound Alexius Angelus and his blind father, Isaac II., to pay the Crusaders 200,000 marks of silver, send ten thousand men to Palestine, and acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope over the Eastern Church. In these conditions lay the germs of much future trouble.
The Crusading armament reached the Dardanelles without having to strike a blow. The slothful and luxurious emperor let things slide, and had not even a fleet ready to send against them in the Aegean. He shut himself up in Constantinople, and trusted to the strength of its walls to deliver him, as Heraclius and Leo III. and many more of his predecessors had been delivered. If the siege had been conducted from the land side only, his hopes might have been justified, for the Danes and English of the Varangian Guard beat back the assault of the Franks on the land-wall. But Alexius III., unlike earlier emperors, was attacked by [pg 284] a fleet to which he could oppose no adequate naval resistance. Though the Crusaders were driven off on shore, the Venetians stormed the sea-wall, by the expedient of building light towers on the decks, and throwing flying bridges from the towers on to the top of the Byzantine ramparts. The blind Doge pushed his galley close under the wall, and urged on his men again and again till they had won a lodgment in some towers on the port side of the sea-wall. The Venetians then fired the city, and a fearful conflagration followed.
Hearing that the enemy was within the ramparts, the cowardly Alexius III. mounted his horse and fled away into the inland of Thrace, leaving his troops, who were not yet half beaten, without a leader or a cause to fight for. The garrison bowed to necessity, and the chief officers of the army drew the aged Isaac II. out of his cloister prison and proclaimed his restoration to the throne. They sent to the Crusading camp to announce that hostilities had ceased, and to beg Prince Alexius to enter the city and join his father in the palace.
The end of the expedition of the Crusaders had now been attained, but it may safely be asserted that the chief feeling in their ranks was a bitter disappointment at being cheated out of the sack of Constantinople, a prospect over which they had been gloating ever since they left Zara. They spent the next three months in endeavouring to wring out of their triumphant protégés, Isaac and Alexius, every bezant that could be scraped together. The old emperor, already blind and gout-ridden, was driven to imbecility [pg 285] by their demands: his son was a raw, inexperienced youth who could neither be firm, nor frank, nor dignified in dealing with any one. He angered the Franks by insincere diplomacy, and the Greeks by his reckless schemes for extracting money from them. The winter of 1203-4 was spent in ceaseless wrangling about the subsidy due to the Crusaders, till Alexius, growing seriously frightened, began exactions on his subjects which drove them to revolt. When he seized and melted down the golden lamps and silver candelabra which formed the pride of St. Sophia, stripped its eikonostasis of its rich metal plating, and requisitioned the jewelled eikons and reliquaries of every church in the city, the populace would stand his proceedings no longer. They would not serve an emperor who had sold himself to the Franks, and only reigned in order to subject the Eastern Church to Rome, and to pour the hoarded wealth of the ancient empire into the coffers of the upstart Italian republics.
In January, 1204, the storm burst. The populace and troops shut the gates of the city, and fell on the isolated Latins who were within the walls. They were not long without a leader; a fierce and unscrupulous officer named Alexius Ducas put himself at their head and determined to seize the throne. Isaac II. died of fright in the midst of the tumult; his son Alexius was caught and strangled by the usurper. Thus the Angeli ceased out of the land, and Alexius V. reigned in their stead. He is less frequently named by chroniclers under his family name of Ducas, than under his nickname of “Murtzuphlus,” [pg 286] drawn from the bushy overhanging eyebrows which formed the most prominent feature of his countenance.
Alexius Ducas had everything against him. He was a mere usurper, whose authority was hardly recognized beyond the walls of Constantinople. The Angeli had so drained the treasury that nothing remained in it. Twenty years of indiscipline and disaster had spoilt the army; the fleet was nonexistent, for the admirals of Alexius Angelus had laid up the vessels in ordinary, and sold the stores to fill their own pockets. Nevertheless Murtzuphlus made a far better fight than his despicable predecessor and namesake. He collected a little money by confiscating the properties of the unpopular courtiers and ministers of the Angeli, and used it to the best advantage. The army received some of the arrears due to them, and Alexius spent every spare moment in seeing to their drill and endeavouring to improve their discipline. He strengthened the sea-wall, whose weakness had been proved so fatally four months ago, by erecting wooden towers along it, and building platforms for all the military engines that could be found in the arsenal. He ordered, too, the enrolment of a national militia, and compelled the nobles and burghers of Constantinople to take arms and man the walls. To the discredit of the Byzantines this order was received with many murmurs: the citizens complained that they paid taxes to support the regular army, and that they therefore ought to be excused personal service. Little good was got out of these new and raw levies; they swelled the numbers [pg 287] of the garrison, but hardly added anything appreciable to its strength.
Alexius Ducas himself with his cavalry scoured the country round the Crusading camp every day, to cut off the foraging parties of the Franks, and when not in the field, rode round the city superintending the works, inspecting the guard-posts, and haranguing the soldiery. If courage and energy command success, he ought to have held his own. But he could not counteract the work of twenty years of decay and disorganization, and felt that his throne rested on the most fragile of foundations.
The Crusaders took two months to prepare for their second assault on Constantinople, which they felt would be a far more formidable affair than the attack in the preceding autumn. They directed their chief efforts against the sea-wall, which they had found vulnerable in the previous siege, and left the formidable land-wall alone. The ships were told off into groups, each destined to attack a particular section of the wall, and covered with as many military engines as they could carry. Flying bridges were again prepared, and landing parties were directed to leap ashore on the narrow beach between the wall and the water, and get to work with rams and scaling ladders. The attack was made on April 8th, at more than a hundred points along two miles of sea-wall, but it was beaten off with loss. Alexius Ducas had made his arrangements so well, that the fire of his engines swept off all who attempted to gain a footing on the ramparts. The ships were much damaged, and at noon the whole fleet gave back, and retired [pg 288] as best it could to the opposite side of the Golden Horn.
Many of the Crusaders were now for returning; they thought their defeat was a judgment for turning their arms against a Christian city, and wished to sail for the Holy Land. But Dandolo and the Venetians insisted upon repeating the assault. Three days were spent in repairing the fleet, and on April 12th a second attack was delivered. This time the ships were lashed together in pairs to secure stability, and the attack was concentrated on a comparatively small front of wall. At last, after much fighting, the military engines of the fleet and the bolts of its crossbowmen cleared a single tower of its defenders. A bridge was successfully lowered on to it, and a footing secured by a party of Crusaders, who then threw open a postern gate and let the main body in. After a short fight within the walls, the troops of Alexius Ducas retired back into the streets. The Crusaders fired the city to cover their advance, and by night were in possession of the north-west angle of Constantinople, the quarter of the palace of Blachern.
While the fire was keeping the combatants apart, the Emperor tried to rally his troops and to prepare for a street-fight next day. But the army was cowed; many regiments melted away; and the Varangian Guard, the best corps in the garrison, chose this moment to demand that their arrears of pay should be liquidated; they would not return to the fight without their money! The twenty years of disorganization under the Angeli was now bearing its fruit, and deeply was the empire to rue the next day.
[pg 289]Alexius Ducas, in despair at being unable to make his men fight, left the city by night. He was soon followed by the last Greek officer who kept his head, the general Theodore Lascaris, who endeavoured to make one final attack on the Crusaders even after his master had departed. Next morning the Franks found themselves in full possession of the city, though they had been expecting to face a hard day of street-fighting before this end could be attained.
[pg 290]In cold blood, twelve hours after all fighting had ended, the Crusaders proceeded with great deliberation to sack the place. The leaders could not or would not hold back their men, and every atrocity that attends the storm of a great city was soon in full swing. Though no resistance was made, the soldiery, and especially the Venetians, took life recklessly, and three or four thousand unarmed citizens were slain. But there was no general massacre; it was lust and greed rather than bloodthirstiness that the army displayed. All the Western writers, no less than the Greeks, testify to the horrors of the three days' carnival of rape and plunder that now set in. Every knight or soldier seized on the house that he liked best, and dealt as he chose with its inmates. Churches and nunneries fared no better than private dwellings; the orgies that were enacted in the holiest places caused even the Pope to exclaim that no good could ever come out of the conquest. The drunken soldiery enthroned a harlot in the patriarchal chair in St. Sophia, and made her rehearse ribald songs and indecent dances before the high altar. There were plenty of clergy with the Crusading army, but instead of endeavouring to check the sacrilegious doings of their countrymen, they devoted themselves to plundering the treasuries of the churches of all the holy bones and relics that were stored in them. “The Franks,” remarked a Greek writer who saw the sack of Constantinople, “behaved far worse than Saracens; the infidels when a town has surrendered at any rate respect churches and women.”
After private plunder had reigned unchecked for [pg 291] three days, the leaders of the Crusaders collected such valuables as could be found for public division. Though so much had been stolen and concealed, they were able to produce no less than £800,000 in hard gold and silver for distribution. The sum was afterwards supplemented by the use of a resource which makes the modern historian add a special curse of his own to the account of the Crusaders. Down to 1204 Constantinople still contained the monuments of ancient Greek art in enormous numbers. In spite of the wear and tear of 900 years, her squares and palaces were still crowded with the art-treasures that Constantine and his sons had stored up. Nicetas, who was an eyewitness of all, has left us the list of the chief statues that suffered. The Heracles of Lysippus, the great Hera of Samos, the brass figures which Augustus set up after Actium, the ancient Roman bronze of the Wolf with Romulus and Remus, Paris with the Golden Apple, Helen of Troy, and dozens more all went into the melting-pot, to be recast into wretched copper money. The monuments of Christian art fared no better; the tombs of the emperors were carefully stripped of everything in metal, the altars and screens of the churches scraped to the stone. Everything was left bare and desolate.
Such was “the greatest conquest that was ever seen, greater than any made by Alexander or Charlemagne, or by any that have lived before or after,” as a Western chronicler wrote, while the Greeks grew hyperbolical in lamentation, as they saw “the eye of the world, the ornament of nations, the fairest sight on earth, the mother of churches, the spring whence [pg 292] flowed the waters of faith, the mistress of Orthodox doctrine, the seat of the sciences, draining the cup mixed for her by the hand of the Almighty, and consumed by fires as devouring as those which ruined the five Cities of the Plain.”
At last the Crusaders sat down to divide up their conquests. They elected Baldwin of Flanders Emperor of the East, and handed over to him the ruined city of Constantinople, half of it devoured by the flames of the conflagrations that attended the two sieges, and all of it plundered from cellar to attic. Four-fifths of the population had fled, and no one had remained save beggars who had nothing to save by flight. With the capital Baldwin was given Thrace and the Asiatic provinces—Bithynia, Mysia, and Lydia, all of which had still to be conquered. His colleague, Boniface of Montferrat, was made “King of Thessalonica,” and did homage to Baldwin for a fief consisting of Macedonia, Thessaly, and inland Epirus. The Venetians claimed “a quarter and half-a-quarter” of the empire, and took out their share by receiving Crete, the Ionian Islands, the ports along the west coast of Greece and Albania, nearly the whole of the islands of the Aegean, and the land about the entrance of the Dardanelles. They seized on every good harbour and strong sea-fortress, but left the inland alone; commerce rather than annexation was their end. The rest of the empire was parcelled out among the minor leaders of the Crusade; they had first to conquer their fiefs, and were then to do homage for them to the Emperor Baldwin. Most of them never lived to [pg 293] accomplish the scheme. Meanwhile a Venetian prelate was appointed patriarch of Constantinople, and news was sent to the Pope that the union of the Eastern and Western Churches was accomplished, by the forcible extinction of the Greek patriarchate.
It only remains to speak of Alexius Ducas, the fugitive Greek emperor. He fell into the hands of the Crusaders, was tried for the murder of the young Alexius Angelus, and suffered death by being taken to the top of a lofty pillar and hurled from it. The Greeks saw in this strange end the fulfilment of an obscure prophecy about the last of the Caesars, which had long puzzled the brains of the oracle-mongers.