City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (15 page)

On 25 January a rowdy crowd descended on the mother church of Hagia Sophia; under its domed and mosaicked canopy, they forced the senate and clergy to convene and demanded the appointment of a new emperor. Choniates was one of the city dignitaries present. The nobility were frozen with fear and indecision by this eruption of violent democracy. They refused to appoint any of their number; none wanted to be nominated, ‘for we realised full well that whoever was proposed for the election would be led out the very next day like a sheep to slaughter’. Recent history had thrown up such ephemeral emperors whose reigns, like the gaudy life of dragonflies, had passed before sunset. The mob refused to budge from the church without a candidate. Eventually they seized a hapless young aristocrat, Nicholas Kannavos, led him to the church, placed a crown on his head, proclaimed him emperor and retained him there. It was now 27 January. The city descended into factional chaos. With Kannavos in the church, blind Isaac now dying and Murtzuphlus waiting in the wings, Alexius did what Choniates predicted he would. He played his last card. He called on the crusaders to enter the palace and secure his position. That day Baldwin of Flanders came to discuss this plan.

Murtzuphlus was party to these deeply unpatriotic deliberations. He knew that a moment had come. He secretly called on the palace power brokers, one by one. He won over the chief eunuch with the promise of new positions; he then gathered the Varangian Guard ‘and told them about the emperor’s intention and convinced them to consider taking as the right action that which was desirable and pleasing to the [Byzantines]’. Finally he went to deal with Alexius.

According to Choniates, at the dead of night on 27 January he burst into the emperor’s chamber informing him that the Varangian Guard was massing at the door, ‘ready to tear him apart’ because of his friendship with the hated Latins. Terrified, confused and barely awake, Alexius begged for help. Murtzuphlus threw a robe over the emperor by way of disguise, led him out through a little-used door to ‘safety’ with the emperor gabbling pathetic thanks, and threw him, chained by the legs, into ‘the most awful of prisons’. Murtzuphlus donned the imperial regalia and was proclaimed emperor. In the swirling confusion there were now four emperors in the city: the blind Isaac, Alexius IV Angelus in prison, Alexius V Murtzuphlus in the palace, Kannavos as the plaything of the mob in Hagia Sophia. The elaborate dignity of the great empire had completely collapsed. Murtzuphlus moved fast to clear up the mess. When the Varangian Guard burst into Hagia Sophia, Kannavos’s protectors simply melted away. On 2 February, the innocent young noble, apparently a man of integrity and talent, was taken off and decapitated; on the fifth, Alexius V Murtzuphlus was crowned in Hagia Sophia with the customary splendour. The blind Isaac, when he was told of the palace coup, was seized by terror and conveniently died. Or he may have been strangled.

Outside the walls, the news of the coup was greeted as final proof of Byzantine duplicity: Murtzuphlus was not a legitimate emperor, he was a usurper – and a bloodthirsty one at that. According to the more lurid accounts, when he captured three Venetians he had them hung up by iron hooks and roasted alive, ‘with our men looking on, and they could not be spared from such a horrible death by any prayer or payment’. More prosaically, he cut off the crusaders’ food supply. The change of regime returned the crusaders to a state of chronic need. ‘Once again,’ one of the sources records, ‘there was a time of much scarcity within our ranks and they ate many horses.’ ‘The prices in the camp were so high’, reported Clari, ‘that a
sestier
of wine was sold there for twelve sous, fourteen sous, even at times fifteen sous, a hen for
twenty sous and an egg for two cents.’ The crusaders embarked on another extensive raid to provision the army. They attacked the town of Philia on the Black Sea and were returning on 5 February with booty and cattle when Murtzuphlus, whose support now rested on the pledge rapidly to drive the Latins into the sea, rode out to intercept them. He took with him the imperial banner and a precious miracle-working icon of the Virgin, one of the most revered relics of the city, whose presence ensured victory in battle. In a fierce clash, the Greeks were rebuffed and the icon captured. Murtzuphlus rode back with a report that the battle had been won. Questioned as to the whereabouts of the icon and banner, he became evasive, declaring that they had been put away for safe-keeping. The following day, in an attempt to humiliate the upstart emperor, the Venetians put the imperial and sacred items on a galley and sailed up and down the city walls, taunting him with their trophies. When the Greeks saw this they turned on the new man; Murtzuphlus remained resolute. ‘Don’t be dismayed, for I will make them pay heavily and will fully avenge myself on them.’ He was already being backed into a corner.

A day later, 7 February, Murtzuphlus tried a different tack. He sent messengers to the crusader camp to ask for a parley at a site up the Golden Horn. Dandolo again had himself rowed across in a galley, while a party of horsemen came round the top of the Horn for extra security. Murtzuphlus rode up to meet the doge. The crusaders now felt no hesitation in speaking plainly to one who had, according to Baldwin of Flanders, ‘shut up his lord in prison and had snatched away his throne, after having disregarded the sanctity of an oath, fealty and a covenant – matters that are firmly binding even among infidels’. Dandolo’s requests were blunt: release Alexius from prison, pay five thousand pounds of gold, swear obedience to the pope in Rome. To the new anti-western emperor these conditions were of course ‘punitive and completely unacceptable’. While they were engrossed in these negotiations, ‘putting aside all other thoughts’, the crusader cavalry suddenly bore down on the emperor from the higher ground.
Giving free rein to their horses, they closed on the emperor, who wheeled his horse and scarcely managed to escape the danger, while some of his companions were captured.’ This treacherous ruse confirmed what Choniates and the Greeks already felt, that ‘their immense hatred for us and our great quarrel with them prevented there being any reasonable relations between us’.

And it was reciprocated the following day. Murtzuphlus had drawn one conclusion from the meeting with Dandolo: that as long as Alexius was still alive, he provided a cause for the troublesome intruders and a threat to himself. On 8 February, according to Choniates, he went twice to offer Alexius, chained in his dungeon, a cup of poison. It was refused. He then, according to the unreliable Baldwin, strangled him with his own hands, ‘and with unheard-of cruelty, he tore apart the sides and ribs of the dying man with an iron hook that he held in his hand’. The Latins were ever ready to add extra gore to the blood-spattered chronicles of Constantinople. Choniates delivered a measured, if theologically more hair-raising account. Murtzuphlus ‘cut the thread of his life by having him strangled, squeezing out his soul, so to speak, through the strait and narrow way, and sprang the trap leading to hell. He had reigned six months and eight days.’ Within the context of the times, it was to prove quite a long reign.

Murtzuphlus gave out that Alexius had died, and buried him with honour. The crusaders were not deceived. Messages attached to arrows were shot over the walls to their camp proclaiming Murtzuphlus a murderer. To some, his death evoked no more than a shrug of the shoulders: ‘A curse on anyone who regrets that Alexius is dead.’ They merely wanted the resources to go on their crusade. But Alexius’s death provoked a new crisis. Murtzuphlus ordered them to depart and vacate his land, or ‘he would kill them all’. Now the Venetians had no hope of recouping their maritime costs and the Holy Land was receding by the day. The whole venture had been beset by continuous crisis management; the spring of 1204 was just a further astonishing twist. Time was now pressing hard on their heels: in March, the patience of the rank
and file would finally expire; they would insist on being taken to Syria. They could not go back to Italy without acquiring undying shame; they did not have resources to attack the Holy Land; food was running out; the only course was to press forward: ‘Perceiving that they were neither able to enter the sea without danger of immediate death nor delay longer on land because of their impending exhaustion of food and supplies, our men reached a decision.’ Constantinople must be stormed.

This required yet another theological U-turn: if the taking of Zara had been a sin, Constantinople was a magnification of it. None of the leaders of the venture were unaware of the pope’s final prohibition: even if the Greeks did not bow to the Catholic Church in Rome, he had placed an absolute ban on using this as justification for attacks on their fellow Christians: ‘Let no one among you rashly convince himself that he may seize or plunder the Greeks’ lands on the pretext that they show little obedience to the Apostolic See.’ They were now going to do just that.

Dandolo, the crusader barons and the bishops met in yet one more crisis session. Moral justification was required for this further perversion of the crusaders’ pledge. Murtzuphlus had given them one and the clergy dutifully endorsed it: such a murderer had no right to possess lands, and all those who had consented to the crime were complicit in it. And, above and beyond all this, the Greeks had withdrawn from obedience to Rome. ‘So this is why we tell you’, said the clergy, ‘that the war is right and just and if you have a strong determination to conquer this land and bring it into obedience to Rome, those of you who die confessed will receive the same indulgence as has been granted by the pope.’ In plain words, taking the city could be counted as fulfilling the crusaders’ vows. Constantinople, by sleight of hand, had become Jerusalem. This was, of course, a lie – but it was swallowed, because it had to be. ‘You should know’, said Villehardouin, ever keen to airbrush the facts, ‘that this was a considerable comfort both to the barons and the pilgrims.’ The crusaders once more prepared to attack the city.

‘The Works of Hell’

APRIL 1204

Both sides had learned from the attack on Constantinople ten months earlier that while the land walls were invulnerable, the sea wall along the Golden Horn was low and fragile, given the Venetians’ naval skill. The hostilities were to be a complete rerun – for the Venetians it must have seemed like running in a dream.

The two opposing armies prepared accordingly. The Venetians readied their ships, reconstructed their flying bridges and shipboard catapults. The Franks rolled out their own siege engines and wheeled shelters that would allow their troops to work away at the base of the wall, protected from bombardment from above. This time there were refinements. The Venetians prepared wooden frames over their ships and covered them with nets made from vines ‘so that the stone-throwing catapults could not shatter the ships into pieces or sink them’. They had hides soaked in vinegar draped over the hulls to lessen the risk from flaming arrows and firebombs, and they loaded siphons of Greek fire onto their ships.

Murtzuphlus however had also analysed the problem of the low sea wall and devised an ingenious defence. On top of the regular line of battlements and turrets the Greeks now built grotesque wooden structures of immense height – sometimes seven storeys high, with each storey hanging pendulously further out, like fantastical medieval houses crowding over a street. The overhang was critical. It meant that anyone propping a ladder against the wall from below would be confronted with an insuperable obstacle, and the task was made more daunting by trapdoors in
the floors of the towers from which rocks, boiling oil and missiles could be rained down on the enemy. ‘There was never any city so well fortified,’ declared Villehardouin. The new emperor overlooked nothing. The turrets were protected with soaked hides; all the gateways were bricked up and Murtzuphlus erected his command headquarters, a vermilion tent, on a prominent hill in front of the monastery of Christ Pantepoptos – the All-seeing – which afforded him a panoramic strategic overview of the battlefield below.

These feverish preparations lasted most of Lent; the banks of the Golden Horn on both sides were abuzz with the sound of hammering and banging, the sharpening of swords on the blacksmiths’ anvils, the caulking of hulls, the fitting of the complex superstructures to the Venetian ships. In March the crusader leaders convened to work out a set of ground rules for a positive outcome: what would happen if they won? It was crucial to predetermine a division of spoils and the future of the city; experienced commanders knew well that medieval sieges could descend into fractious chaos at the moment of apparent victory. The March Pact set down rules for the division of booty: the Venetians to get three quarters of the proceeds until their debt of 150,000 marks was paid off; thereafter the spoils to be divided equally; an emperor to be chosen by a committee of six Venetians and six Franks; the crusaders to remain in Constantinople for another year. There was a further clause that was of little regard to the feudal knights of Europe but critical to the merchants from the lagoon: the chosen emperor would permit no trade with anyone at war with Venice. This provided the Venetians with a lockout of their maritime competitors – the Pisans and the Genoese. It was a potential goldmine.