City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (13 page)

And the land army was now in a position of supreme peril. Forced back at the walls, short of food, weary from days of feints and alarms around their camp, it seemed that they again had to do or die. Rapidly they lined up their forces in front of the palisaded encampment: lines of archers and crossbowmen, then knights on foot who had lost their horses, then the mounted knights, each of whose horses was magnificently ‘adorned over all its other coverings with a coat of arms or a silk cloth’. They were formed up in disciplined order with strict instructions not to break ranks or charge intemperately. Yet the prospect in front of them was daunting. The Byzantine army seemed so huge that ‘if they were to go out into the countryside to engage the Greeks, who had such a vast number of men, they would have been swallowed up in their midst’. In desperation, they turned out all their servants, cooks and camp followers, dressed in quilts and saddle cloths for armour, with cooking pots for helmets, brandishing kitchen utensils, maces and pestles in a grotesque parody of a military force
– an ugly Brueghelesque vision of an armed peasantry. These men were tasked with facing the walls.

Tentatively the two armies closed on each other, each side keeping good order. From the walls and the windows of the palace, the ladies of the imperial court looked down on the unfolding spectacle like spectators at the Hippodrome. At the sea walls, Alexius’s show of force was having its desired effect. Dandolo ‘said that he wanted to live or die with the pilgrims’, and ordered the Venetians to withdraw from the sea walls and make their way up to the palisaded camp by boat.

Meanwhile, the crusaders were being drawn forward, away from the detachments guarding the camp. As they did so, it was pointed out to Baldwin, leader of the crusader army, that they would soon be out of reach of help if battle were engaged. He signalled a strategic withdrawal. The command was not well received. Within the chivalric code of knighthood, retreat was a smirch on honour. A group of knights disobeyed and continued the advance. For a short while the crusader ranks were thrown into disarray; a seasoned Byzantine general would have seized the moment to strike hard. The emperor did not; his army watched and waited from beyond a small valley that separated the two sides. Those around Baldwin were shamed by the spectacle of others riding forward in their place. They beseeched him to countermand the order: ‘My lord, you are acting with great dishonour by not advancing; you must realise if you do not ride forward, we will not stay at your side.’ Baldwin signalled a fresh advance. The two armies were now ‘so close together that the emperor’s crossbowmen fired directly on our men, at the same time as our archers fired into the emperor’s ranks’. There was a tense stand-off.

And then the far larger Byzantine army started to withdraw. Whether it was the resolve of the crusaders that dissuaded the unwarlike emperor, or whether he had achieved his objective of forcing the Venetians out of his city is not clear. In either case it was to prove a public relations disaster with his own people. As his men drew back, they were followed at a wary distance by the
enemy, brandishing their spears. It looked, from the lofty walls, like cowardice. ‘He returned’, wrote Choniates, ‘in the most utter and shameful disgrace, having only increased the enemy’s pride.’

Yet to the crusaders it seemed more like deliverance than victory. By God’s will, they had been mysteriously let off. Their nerves had been strung to breaking point in the presence of the might of the Greek army and they had been lucky to escape from potential disaster. ‘There were none so brave that he was not mightily relieved.’ They returned to camp ‘and took off their armour, because they were exhausted and overcome with fatigue. They ate and drank little because they had few provisions left.’ The overall emotion was one of relief rather than elation.

What they did not know was that the city was crumbling from within. The humiliating spectacle of the retreating Byzantine army, played out before a watching audience below the city walls; the burnt houses; the muttering of the people; the slippery allegiances in the whispering galleries of the imperial palace – the emperor returned from the field of battle uneasily aware that his hold on power was precarious. He himself had come to power by blinding his brother Isaac II; Isaac, in his turn, after the mob had strung the emperor Andronicus upside down in the street, in an execution of repulsive fury. Opinion was turning against the emperor; ‘It was as if he had actually worked to ruin the city,’ was Choniates’s scathing judgement. It was time to get out. Overnight, Alexius gathered up a large quantity of gold and precious imperial ornaments and slipped away. The imperial throne was suddenly vacant, the palace factions thrown into confusion. Stunned, they hauled the blinded Isaac back out of his monastery, reinstalled him on the throne and prepared to negotiate with the crusaders. Word was sent to their camp across the Golden Horn that Isaac wanted to make contact with his son, Alexius Angelus.

The crusaders were equally amazed when messengers reached their camp with the news. It seemed to Villehardouin like a vindication from God as to the justness of their cause: ‘Now hear how mighty are the miracles of our Lord when it pleases him!’ At
a stroke it appeared that their troubles were over. The next day, 18 July, they sent four envoys, two Venetians and two Frenchmen, one of whom was Villehardouin, to the imperial palace to discuss terms with the new emperor. Angelus they kept safely back in their own camp, still wary of Byzantine tricks. The envoys made their way up to the Blachernae Palace along a route flanked by the Varangian Guard. Inside they beheld a scene of extraordinary wealth. The blind emperor, richly attired, seated on his throne; around him so many noble lords and ladies, all ‘as magnificently dressed as could be’. The envoys, intimidated, or at least wary of this assemblage of people, asked to speak with Isaac in private. Here, before a select few, they outlined the terms that his son had agreed at Zara the previous December. It is clear from Villehardouin’s account that the deal the ‘foolish youth, ignorant of the affairs of state’ had struck with these insistent westerners made Isaac’s jaw drop open. The financial promises were outrageous: the two hundred thousand marks of silver, the year’s supply of provisions for the Holy Land crusade, a year’s campaigning by ten thousand Byzantine troops, a lifetime’s maintenance of five hundred knights in the Holy Land. Worst of all was his commitment to place the Orthodox Church under the authority of Rome. The populace would instantly riot at such news. Isaac told them quite bluntly, ‘I don’t see how it can be honoured.’ The envoys were insistent. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Isaac eventually conceded. Oaths were sworn and charters signed. The envoys returned triumphantly to their camp; Alexius Angelus was reunited joyfully with his father; on 1 August in a service of solemn pomp he was crowned co-emperor with his father in Hagia Sophia as Alexius IV.

*

It seemed as if an end was in sight for all the crusade’s problems. The army withdrew, at the emperor’s request, back over the Golden Horn, where it was supplied plentifully with food. Its candidate was now astride the Byzantine throne. The crusaders had been promised the resources to complete their pilgrimage
to the Holy Land; they could now write confidently back home in the hope that the pope might forgive all their manifold sins. ‘We carried out the work of Jesus Christ with his help,’ wrote the self-justifying count of Saint-Pol, ‘so that the Eastern Church … acknowledges herself to be the daughter of the Roman Church.’ This was wishful thinking.

Saint-Pol spoke up particularly for the part played by Enrico Dandolo: ‘For the Venetian doge, prudent in character and wise in making difficult decisions, we have a great deal of praise.’ Without Dandolo, the whole venture might have perished outside the city’s massive walls. And the Venetians were now in sight of reimbursement for their maritime efforts. They received eighty-six thousand marks from Alexius, the full amount of their debt; the other crusaders were similarly repaid. It seems that the new co-emperor would fulfil all his obligations to the expedition. The crusaders were free to tour the city which they had attempted to sack. They marvelled at its wealth, its statues, precious ornaments, its holy relics – objects of veneration for the pious pilgrims. Their admiration was both sacred and profane. Here was a city vastly richer than any they had seen in Europe. The westerners were astonished – and covetous.

Yet in this moment of holiday after the fight to survive, there were deep tensions. Constantinople remained taut, unappeased, volatile. Away from the broad thoroughfares and magnificent buildings, the Greek proletariat inhabited pitiful shanty towns; they were unpredictable and fiercely resentful of the imposition of the crusaders. Had they known of their new emperor’s promise of submission to the Roman pope they would have exploded. Choniates likened this mood to a kettle coming to the boil. Their animosity was centuries deep, and it was reciprocated by the westerners’ view of ‘Greek treachery’. ‘Their inordinate hatred for us and our excessive disagreement with them allowed for no humane feeling between us,’ Choniates later said. The French demanded that a section of wall should be demolished as security for their visitors against hostage-taking. And they were deeply
suspicious of the blind Isaac, who had attempted an anti-crusader alliance with Saladin twenty years earlier. From their camp three hundred yards across the Golden Horn, they could even see a mosque, built at that time just outside the sea walls for the use of a small colony of Muslims. It was a provocation.

And time continued to tick away. Despite the upfront payments, Alexius and Isaac were in growing trouble. The contract with Venice was due to expire on 29 September. It was now vital that the crusaders depart imminently. Alexius had no powerbase; he was dependent on the unpopular crusaders for support; he understood enough about the short and violent reigns of emperors to realise what their departure would mean. ‘You must know’, he frankly told the Venetian and crusader lords, ‘that the Greeks hate me because of you, and if you abandon me I will lose this land again and they will kill me.’ At the same time he was in financial straits; to keep up the payments he began on a course of action destined to double his unpopularity. ‘He profaned sacred things,’ howled Choniates, ‘he plundered the temples, the hallowed vessels were seized from churches without the slightest qualm, melted down and given to the enemy as common gold and silver.’ To the Byzantines, with their long experience of the Italian maritime republics, the westerners’ lust for money seemed like a dreadful dipsomania: ‘They yearned to drink again and again from a river of gold as if bitten by snakes that make men rabid with a thirst that can never be quenched.’

Confronted with the precariousness of the situation and the shortage of cash, Alexius, like a gambler doubling his stake whilst lengthening the odds, made the crusaders a new offer. If they would stay another six months, until 29 March 1204, this would give him time to establish his authority and meet his financial obligations; it was already late in the season to sail anyway, better to overwinter in Constantinople; he would pay all the provisioning expenses during that time, bear the costs of the Venetian fleet until September 2004 – another whole year – and provide his own fleet and army to accompany the crusade. If it was a desperate
gamble by Alexius, it was also a hard proposal for the crusader lords to sell to the put-upon army, which was also still blissfully unaware that it was under excommunication.

Predictably there was uproar. ‘Provide us with ships as you swore you would as we want to go to Syria!’ they cried. It took considerable cajoling and persuasive argument to talk the bulk of the army round. There would be a further postponement until the spring, and ‘the Venetians swore that they would provide the fleet for another year from the feast of St Michael [the end of September]’. Dandolo charged a further hundred thousand marks for the privilege. Alexius continued to melt down church gold ‘to appease the ravenous hunger of the Latins’. The doge, meanwhile, wrote a smooth letter to the pope trying to explain the sack of Zara in the hope of getting the excommunication lifted.

The temperature in the kettle was steadily rising. And while Alexius went on a progress of his domains to cement his powerbase beyond the city with the protection of a section of the crusader army – who had to be paid handsomely – it boiled over.

Four Emperors

AUGUST 1203–APRIL 1204

Throughout the first assault on Constantinople, a substantial population of Italian merchants had remained within the city. The citizens of Amalfi and Pisa had loyally fought alongside their Greek neighbours when Dandolo attacked the sea walls. The Venetian merchants probably barred their doors and stayed inside. But as the Greek population surveyed the aftermath of this attack – hundreds of homes gutted by fire, an unpopular new emperor installed, a section of their walls demolished to emphasise the humiliation of their proud city – they erupted in fury. The merchants’ quarters were down by the Golden Horn, where they had wharves and warehouses. On 18 August a Greek mob descended on the hated Italians. Their rage centred on Venice but the rampage quickly became indiscriminate. They ransacked all the merchant dwellings, driving out loyal foreigners as well as the treacherous Venetians. ‘Not only were the Amalfitans … disgusted by this wickedness and recklessness but also the Pisans who had chosen to make Constantinople their home,’ reported Choniates in dismay. The Pisans and Venetians disliked each other intensely but mob violence had given them a common cause. Now gathered in the crusader camp they had a shared motive for revenge.