Empire of God, page 30
610 Mesarites, Description, op. cit.
611 “Affirming Gender In Elementary School: Social Transitioning,” Human Rights Campaign Foundation™ Welcoming Schools, https://welcomingschools.org/resources.
612 Mesarites, Description, op. cit.
613 Ibid.
614 Ibid., 866-7.
615 Ibid., 867.
616 Garibian, “Historical Realities of the 7th Century,” op. cit., 68-9.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Beginning of the End
Slothfulness and Corruption
Neither the Roman Empire nor any other political entity of the time had ever worked out a mechanism for the orderly and peaceful transfer of power in the absence of a clear and universally recognized heir to the throne. The imperial throne was passed on from father to son, but if an emperor didn’t have a son, chaos could all too easily ensue. Many who did have undisputed male heirs were removed in coups, as was Isaac II Angelos. This had happened when the empire was strong with about the same frequency as when it was weak; only rarely did a dispute over the succession provide an opportunity for the enemies of the empire to advance at its expense. But when Alexios III overthrew, blinded, and imprisoned Isaac II, he set in motion a chain of events that led to the partition of the empire, the occupation of Constantinople by a hostile power, and ultimately, the destruction of the empire itself.
Niketas Choniates saw an omen at Alexios III’s coronation. After being acclaimed as emperor, the new ruler was to mount a horse and ride from Hagia Sophia to the palace. When Alexios tried to mount his horse, according to Choniates, the animal, “its eyes blood red and ears erect, snorted, kicked up its front hooves, repeatedly struck the ground, and bounded about spiritedly; driven wild with rage against him, it shunned Alexios as though it disdained to carry him on its back.”617 Alexios tried and failed again and again to mount the horse; “nor did it end its Bacchic frenzy until it had knocked the bejeweled crown from the emperor’s head to the ground so that certain parts of it were shattered and had thrown him off like a ball as well. When another horse was brought forward and Alexios paraded with a broken crown, this was deemed an inauspicious portent of the future: that he would be unable to preserve the empire intact but would fall from his lofty throne and be ill-treated by his enemies.”618 Indeed.
Alexios attempted to rule justly. Choniates notes that he “proclaimed that the ministries were not to be auctioned off for money but would be awarded only according to merit.”619 The corruption, however, was too far advanced and was too deeply entrenched among those closest to the emperor himself: “All the emperor’s relatives were avaricious and grasping, and the frequent turnover of officials taught them nothing else but eagerly to steal and loot, to purloin the public taxes, and to amass great wealth. The petitioners who came to them because of their influence with the emperor they despoiled, and the monies collected, huge sums that surpassed any private fortune, they appropriated for themselves.”620 Consequently, Alexios “failed in all else, more so than any other emperor, and the ministries went from bad to worse; once again they were offered for sale to those who wanted to buy them.”621 The emperor’s “excessive slothfulness was equal to his stupidity in neglecting what was necessary for the common welfare.”622
The Perfect Storm
A weak, ineffectual emperor with powerful and resentful domestic rivals. The man whom many believed to be the rightful emperor languishing in prison, blinded. The Turks advancing essentially unimpeded in Asia Minor, and a new Crusade called in 1198, with the crusader forces gathering in Venice. The perfect storm was set to break.
When the crusader forces were ready to set sail, says Niketas Choniates, “evil was heaped upon evil, and wave after wave rolled in upon the Romans.”623 This was because Alexios, the son of Isaac II Angelos and nephew of Emperor Alexios III, had letters from Pope Innocent III and King Philip of Germany, who styled himself “King of the Romans,” “that pledged their profound gratitude to these piratical gangs if they would welcome Alexios and restore him to his paternal throne.”624 Alexios sent envoys to make a deal with the crusaders, who told them: “If your young lord will agree to help us reconquer Jerusalem, we in our turn will help him to regain his empire which, as we know, has been wrongfully taken from him and his father.”625
Alexios himself appeared to appeal for help personally from the crusaders; Choniates remarks acidly that “his presence was thought to provide not only an opportune camouflage for sailing out to plunder the Romans but also a specious reason for sating the Venetians’ avaricious and money-loving temperament.”626
The crusaders prevailed upon the naïve and callow Alexios, according to Choniates, “to agree under oath to demands which were impossible to fulfill. The lad consented to their requests for seas of money and, in addition, agreed to assist them against the Saracens with heavy-armed Roman troops and fifty triremes. What was even worse and most reprehensible, he abjured his faith and embraced that of the Latins and agreed to the innovation of the papal privileges and to the altering of the ancient customs of the Romans.”627
The Latins advanced into Roman lands and began to conquer territory. When they reached Epidamnos (Dyrrachium, in modern-day Albania), the people of the town proclaimed young Alexios emperor of the Romans. This finally moved Emperor Alexios to act, but it was too late. He “began to repair the rotting and worm-eaten small skiffs, barely twenty in number” that remained of the Roman navy; also, “making the rounds of the City’s walls, he ordered the dwellings outside pulled down.”628 He knew war was coming but had precious little with which to wage it.
The Splendor of Constantinople
In June 1203, the crusaders’ ships sailed close to Constantinople, such that, says the French Crusader and historian Geoffrey de Villehardouin, “all those on board the ships had a full view of the city.”629 The crusaders, who came from all over Western Europe, had never seen anything like the Queen of Cities. According to Villehardouin, the fearsome warriors of the West were reduced to gawking rubes:
I can assure you that all those who had never seen Constantinople before gazed very intently at the city, having never imagined here could be so fine a place in all the world. They noted the high walls and lofty towers encircling it, and its rich palaces and tall churches, of which there were so many that no one would have believed it to be true if he had not seen it with his own eyes, and viewed the length and breadth of that city which reigns supreme over all the others. There was indeed no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight. Nor was this to be wondered at, for never before had so grand an enterprise been carried out by any people since the creation of the world.630
Even as the great city lay essentially prostrate before them, the Latins could not help but marvel at its splendor. There was simply nothing comparable to it in the West: not Old Rome, or Paris, or any of the cities of the Germans. Culturally, artistically, architecturally, Constantinople was mistress of the world.
But not militarily, not any longer.
False Bravado
The emperor sent an envoy to the crusaders, who were holding a conference at the sumptuous palace of Scutari outside Constantinople. The envoy, Nicholas Roux, appealed to the Latins on the basis of their common faith:
My lords, the Emperor Alexios has sent me to say that he is well aware that, next to kings, you are the noblest men alive, and come from the best country in the world. He therefore seriously wonders why, and for what purpose, you have entered his land over which he rules. For you are Christians just as he is, and he knows very well that you have left your own country to deliver the Holy Land oversea, and the Holy Cross and Sepulchre. If you are poor and in want of supplies, he will give you a share of his provisions and his money, provided you withdraw from his land.631
Nicholas concluded on a note of false and unsupportable bravado:
If you refuse to leave, he would be reluctant to do you harm, yet it is in his power to do so. For were you twenty times as many as you are, you would not, supposing he chose to harm you, be able to leave this country without losing many of your men and suffering defeat.632
Emperor Alexios could not make good on that threat, and the crusaders knew it. One of them answered:
My good sir, you have told us that your lord wonders very much why our lords and barons have entered his dominions. Our answer is that we have not entered his dominions, since he has wrongfully taken possession of this land, in defiance of God, and of right and of justice. It belongs to his nephew, seated here on a throne amongst us, who is his brother the Emperor Isaac’s son. However, if your lord will consent to place himself at the mercy of his nephew, and give back his crown and his empire, we will beg the prince to allow him enough money to live in a wealthy style. But unless you return to give us such a message, pray do not venture to come here again.633
Nicholas Roux left in order to convey this message to Emperor Alexios III, and of course he did not return, for there was no chance that the emperor was going to yield willingly. And so, the crusaders began to take action to remove him by force. To sustain their efforts, they needed funds and got them from another man with a grievance against the Roman Empire: Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, who despite being blind and quite elderly by this time had joined the Crusade and was only too happy to see it diverted to Constantinople in order to install an emperor who would be more willing to comply with the wishes of the West.
Restoring Isaac
The crusaders put Emperor Alexios III to flight and got the blind and aged Isaac II Angelos out of prison; the old man was proclaimed emperor once again and “arrayed in such costly robes that one would have looked in vain to find a man anywhere more richly dressed.”634 The crusaders immediately began to try to make good on the agreement they had made with his son Alexios (not the just-deposed emperor). They demanded that he “place the whole of this empire under the jurisdiction of Rome, from which it has long since broken away,” although the Orthodox would have said that it was Rome that broke away, not they.635 They also demanded the massive payments that the young Alexios had promised.
“These are very hard conditions,” Isaac said, “and I do not really see how we can put them into effect. All the same, you have rendered both my son and me such outstanding services, that if we were to give you the whole of our empire, it would be no more than you deserve.”636 He agreed to the terms to which his son had previously agreed, and many of the crusaders “went to visit Constantinople,” according to Villehardouin, “to gaze at its many splendid palaces and tall churches, and view all the marvelous wealth of a city richer than any other since the beginning of time. As for the relics, these were beyond all description; for there were at the time as many in Constantinople as in all the rest of the world.”637
This warm relationship was not to last. Eventually the crusaders came to realize that the young man, now Emperor Alexios IV Angelos, ruling with his father, Isaac II, “had never kept any of his promises; so that the barons were at last forced to recognize that, whatever his intentions toward them, they were anything but good.”638
Their intentions were not so good either. They were determined to get the promised payment one way or another. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Roman Senate and the people of Constantinople announced that Isaac II and Alexios IV were deposed; the Senate chose a new emperor, Nikolaos Kanabos, but he refused the dubious honor of presiding over a mortally wounded polity in imminent peril of conquest. Nikolaos’s non-reign lasted less than a week, as a Roman nobleman named Alexios Doukas, popularly known as Mourtzouphlos, “the Bushy-Eyebrowed,” imprisoned Isaac and Alexios IV and began to reign as Emperor Alexios V. His tenure lasted for ten weeks, during which time he was as consumed as were all of his immediate predecessors with internal rivals rather than external threats: he had the unfortunate Nikolaos Kanabos imprisoned and executed.
Alexios V was no more able to stave off the crusaders than were any of his immediate predecessors. In April 1204, he met with Dandolo to discuss peace terms. According to Choniates, “The demands made by the doge and the remaining chiefs were for the immediate payment of five thousand pounds of gold and certain other conditions which were both galling and unacceptable to those who have tasted freedom and are accustomed to give, not take commands.”639
As onerous as these terms were, the peace talks broke down over another indignity: “As the conditions for peace were being negotiated, Latin cavalry forces, suddenly appearing from above, gave free rein to their horses and charged the emperor, who wheeled his horse around, barely escaping the danger, while some of his companions were taken captive.”640 Choniates adds: “Their inordinate hatred for us and our excessive disagreement with them allowed for no humane feeling between us.”641
The Sack of Constantinople
The crusaders entered the city on April 13, 1204. They set fire to large swaths of it, storming the palace at Blachernae, and plundering everything that they could. The people of Constantinople buried their possessions and fled if they were able, Emperor Alexios V Doukas among them. “Then followed a scene of massacre and pillage,” says Villehardouin. “On every hand the Greeks were cut down, their horses, palfreys, mules, and other possessions snatched as booty. So great was the number of killed and wounded that no man could count them.”642
The crusaders roamed the city unimpeded for three days, seizing anything and everything of value. Choniates says that “these murderous men” even engaged in “the shameful dashing to earth of the venerable icons and the flinging of the relics of the saints, who had suffered for Christ’s sake, into defiled places.”643
Mad with lust for plunder, the crusaders labored assiduously to strip the Great Church of its treasures: “In order to remove the pure silver which overlay the railing of the bema, the wondrous pulpit and the gates, as well as that which covered a great many other adornments, all of which were plated with gold, they led to the very sanctuary of the temple itself mules and asses with packsaddles; some of these, unable to keep their feet on the smoothly polished marble floors, slipped and were pierced by knives so that the excrement from the bowels and the spilled blood defiled the sacred floor.”644 As the crusaders carried off their loot, “a certain silly woman laden with sins” sat upon the bishop’s chair “and intoned a song, and then whirled about and kicked up her heels in dance.”645
The great city, on whose streets the crusaders had so recently gaped in awe, was now reduced to ruins by those same men. Choniates wrote bitterly that in this, the crusaders were “exposed as frauds. Seeking to avenge the Holy Sepulcher, they raged openly against Christ and sinned by overturning the Cross with the cross they bore on their backs, not even shuddering to trample on it for the sake of a little gold and silver. By grasping pearls, they rejected Christ, the pearl of great price, scattering among the most accursed of brutes the All-Hallowed One.”646 Many of the artistic treasures of Constantinople were destroyed. Choniates notes that “these barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not allow the statues standing in the Hippodrome and other marvelous works of art to escape destruction, but all were made into coins. Thus great things were exchanged for small ones, those works fashioned at huge expense were converted into worthless copper coins.”647
The crusaders destroyed an immense and magnificent statue of Herakles. In a demonstration of their contempt for the status of Constantinople in New Rome, they also destroyed a statue of the she-wolf that had, according to the ancient legend, suckled Romulus and Remus on the site on which the Old Rome had been founded. Choniates says that they “delivered over the nation’s ancient and venerable monuments and cast these into the smelting furnace.”648 But Enrico Dandolo made sure that some of them made their way back to Venice, including four bronze horses that had stood at the hippodrome. They adorn the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice—which was itself patterned after Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—to this day.
The nobles of Constantinople fled the ruined city, including Choniates himself, who recounts that as the aristocrats left, “the rustics and baseborn greatly taunted those of us from Byzantion [Constantinople]. They foolishly called the misery of our poverty and nakedness the equality of civic rights, for they had not as yet been chastened by the evils at hand. Many seized upon lawlessness and said, ‘Blessed be the Lord, for we have become rich,’ and they paid very little for the possessions of their countrymen which were offered for sale. They had not as yet received the beef-eating Latins into their homes and thus did not know that they pour out their wine both unmixed and pure in the same way that they pour out their unmitigated gall, and that they treat the Romans with arrogance and contempt.”649
Two hundred and fifty years before, Liutprand of Cremona had complained that “the wine of the Greeks was undrinkable for us because of their commingling pitch, pine sap, and plaster in it.”650 Now Niketas Choniates was criticizing the crusaders for pouring out their wine “unmixed and pure.” This was yet another minor manifestation of what had become an immense gulf between the two camps, which had now been made wider and more difficult to bridge than ever. Much more than the schism of 1054, the sack of Constantinople in 1204 led to such bitterness, anger, and suspicion among the Romans—and among Orthodox Christians in general—toward Western Europe and Roman Catholicism that the split between the two began to appear to be permanent and impossible to heal. In 2054, the Great Schism will likely mark its thousand-year anniversary, yet were it not for the rampaging crusaders in Constantinople in April 1204, it might conceivably have been healed long ago.
The sack of Constantinople in 1204 also marked the end of the Roman Empire, at least for the time being. In Constantinople, the crusaders chose a new emperor from among their number. Choniates says that Enrico Dandolo was not considered for the position because he was blind, but that’s an implausible explanation in light of the fact that Isaac II Angelos had just been restored to the imperial throne a year earlier, when he had been blind for eight years. Dandolo did receive a piece of the pie and began styling himself “Duke of Dalmatia and Croatia, and Lord of One Quarter and a Half of the Roman Empire.”651 Ultimately chosen as emperor was the crusader chieftain Baldwin of Flanders, who styled himself Emperor Baldwin I.
