Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (10 page)

Arriving in Apulia early in 1105, he stayed there eight months; after an absence of nearly a decade, there was much work to be done on his long-neglected estates; meanwhile he took every opportunity to encourage groups of young Normans to follow his example and seek their own fortunes in the East. Then, in September, he moved on to Rome to see Pope Paschal II, whom he effortlessly convinced that the arch-enemy of the Crusader states of Outremer was neither the Arab nor the Turk, but Alexius Comnenus himself. So enthusiastically did Paschal accept his arguments that when the time came for Bohemund to go on to France he found himself accompanied by a papal legate with instructions to preach a Holy War against Byzantium.

The Prince of Antioch had spent much of his life fighting the Eastern Empire, and would soon be doing so again; yet never, before or since, did he do the Empire - or indeed, the whole Christian cause - so much harm as in those conversations with Pope Paschal. Henceforth the

1This was its classical name; it later became Misis, then Mamistra. Now it is Yakapinar.

2Anna Comnena ludicrously claims that in order to avoid capture Bohemund feigned death and he was put on board his ship in a carefully ventilated coffin, together with a dead cockerel to provide the necessary smell of putrefaction. One sometimes thinks that she would believe anything.

narrow, predatory policy that had been pursued by his father and himself became the official policy of Christendom. Those Crusaders -and they constituted the vast majority - who disliked the Byzantines, whether for reasons of jealousy or resentment, puritanical disapproval or sheer incomprehension, now found their prejudices endorsed by the highest authority and given official sanction. As for Alexius and his subjects, they saw their worst suspicions confirmed. The entire Crusade was now revealed as having been nothing more than a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy, in which the religious motive had been used merely as the thinnest of disguises for what was in fact unashamed imperialism. Not even Cardinal Humbert and the Patriarch Michael Cerularius, half a century before, had struck a more telling blow against the unity of the Churches of East and West.
1

In Paris, King Philip I gave Bohemund a warm welcome and granted him permission to raise recruits throughout his Kingdom; then, as a further sign of his benevolence, he bestowed on him the hand of his daughter Constance in marriage,
2
simultaneously offering his younger, illegitimate daughter Cecilia to Tancred. Bohemund stayed in France throughout 1106 - at Easter he met the English King Henry I in Normandy — collecting men and materials; then at the end of the year he returned with Constance to Apulia. Cecilia had already sailed off to Antioch, but he was in no particular hurry to follow her, and it was not till the autumn of 1107 that his new army was ready to sail. His plan was basically the same as that of Robert Guiscard a quarter of a century before: to land on the coast of Epirus in what is now Albania, to ensure a bridgehead by capturing the mighty fortress of Durazzo and then to march eastward on Constantinople.

This time, however, the fates were against him. The Apulians landed successfully enough near Valona; but Alexius had reinforced Durazzo, and the mercenaries he had hired from the Seljuk Sultan stoutly resisted every attempt to take it by storm. Bohemund, not greatly perturbed, settled down to a siege; but almost immediately he found himself blockaded by a Byzantine fleet, cutting off his communications with Italy throughout the winter. Then, as spring approached, so did Alexius with the main body of his army. The invaders, now surrounded by land

1
See
Byzantium: The Apogee,
pp. 315-22.

2
Although such distinguished alliances obviously did much to enhance the prestige of the House of Antioch, it must in fairness be admitted that Constance's slightly chequered past she had previously been married to the Count of Champagne, from whom she was divorced — made her a slightly less desirable
parti
than she might otherwise have been.

and sea, slowly fell prey to famine and malaria, and by September the Prince of Antioch had no choice but to surrender. Brought before Alexius in his camp on the bank of the Devol river, he was obliged to put his name to a treaty of peace, in which he expressed regret at having broken his former oath, swore fealty to the Emperor and recognized him as his suzerain for the Principality of Antioch, the borders of which were meticulously defined. Finally he agreed that the Latin Patriarch of the city should be replaced by a Greek.

The Treaty of Devol marked the end of Bohemund's career. Such was his humiliation that he returned- at once to Apulia, leaving Antioch in the hands of Tancred, with his two sons by Constance to inherit after him. He had been a fine soldier and a charismatic leader of men; but his ambition had betrayed him and brought him low. He died three years later in relative obscurity, never again having dared to show his face in Outremer. He was buried at Canosa in Apulia, where visitors to the cathedral can still see, huddled against the outside of the south wall, his curiously oriental-looking mausoleum - the earliest Norman tomb extant in South Italy. Its beautiful bronze doors, engraved with Arabic designs and a eulogistic inscription, open to reveal an interior bare but for two little columns and the tombstone itself - on which is carved, roughly yet somehow magnificently, one word only: BOAMVNDVS.

4

Alexius — The Last Years

[11
08-18]

Listening to them, you would think that my roads were covered with cheese, that my mountains ran with rivers of milk, that I was immeasurably rich, that I lived like a satrap, that the luxury of Media was as nothing in comparison with mine, and that the palaces of Susa and Ecbatana were hovels compared to my own dwellings.

Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid, on the imperial tax-collectors, Letter No. xli

Alexius Comnenus returned to Constantinople during the last weeks of 1108, well satisfied with what he had achieved. His Empire was, for the moment, at peace. It was true that Tancred of Antioch had already disavowed the Treaty of Devol, thus making it effectively a dead letter; but the treaty, having broken Bohemund, had served its purpose well enough and Tancred, together with his fellow-Crusaders, was temporarily too occupied with his Saracen enemies to cause any serious trouble to Byzantium. Thus, for the next two years, the Emperor was able to concentrate on domestic matters; and since the pressure of events in the international sphere has allowed little opportunity to consider these during the last two chapters, it might be as well for us, briefly, to do the same.

The first decade of Alexius's reign had been hard indeed. As a brilliant and apparently invincible young general during the reign of Nicephorus Botaneiates, he had appeared to many of his subjects as the only hope of survival that remained to a beleaguered Empire; but once the supreme power was in his hands, his magic had quickly faded. In the very year of his coronation, he had suffered at Durazzo the most shattering defeat of his career. Admittedly he had had his revenge at Larissa eighteen months later; but the Normans had been back again in 1084, and but for the sudden death of Robert Guiscard they might easily have advanced to Constantinople. Meanwhile, apart from one relatively
unimportant and indecisive campaign against the Emir Chaka of Smyrna, he had made no serious attempt to dislodge the Turks from Asia Minor. By Easter
1091,
after ten years on the throne and with virtually no major achievements to his credit, Alexius was generally accounted a failure; and people were beginning to wonder whether Byzantine Europe, under almost constant pressure from Normans, Pechenegs or Bogomils, was not going the same way as Byzantine Asia. Would there, they asked themselves, within a very few more years, be any Empire worthy of the name outside the walls of Constantinople itself?

The Patriarch of Antioch, John the Oxite, went further and, in the course of two bitter diatribes against the Emperor which were published at about this time, referred to this whittling away of the Empire as a
fait accompli.
The people, he continued, were depressed and disillusioned. In the past they had believed that defeats and reversals of fortune were God's punishment for their sins; now they increasingly felt that God was no longer concerned with them at all. The rich were becoming poor, and the poor - particularly those of Macedonia, Thrace and the northern Balkans - were facing starvation and death from exposure as they fled from the barbarian invaders. The only exceptions to the general misery were the members of the imperial family, 'who have become the greatest scourge upon the Empire and upon us all'.

The Patriarch may have been exaggerating a little; since Antioch was a good six hundred miles from the capital and still in Saracen hands, he was not in any case particularly well qualified to pronounce on the situation in the European provinces. But there was much truth in what he said. What is less certain is how justified he was in holding the Emperor responsible. It was not Alexius's fault that first the Normans and then the Pechenegs had devastated an immense area of the Balkan peninsula, burning towns and villages, killing thousands of their inhabitants and rendering many more thousands homeless. He had fought back fiercely and, only a few weeks after the Patriarch had launched his attack, had decisively defeated the Pechenegs at Levunium. The Normans, admittedly, were to take him a little longer, but it is hard to see how he could have done more than he did.

The accusations of nepotism are more difficult to answer; nor was the Patriarch of Antioch by any means the only man to make them. The chronicler John Zonaras bears him out:

He provided his relatives and some of his retainers with cartloads of public money and made them generous allowances,
so that they abounded in wealth
and kept retinues more appropriate for Emperors than for private citizens. Their dwellings were comparable to cities in size, and not unlike imperial palaces in the luxury of their appointments.
1

It could of course be argued that all reigning families, in all countries and periods, have enjoyed special privileges of one kind or another. We must also remember that, at least in the early years of his reign, Alexius had few people that he could trust outside his immediate family. Given the chaotic conditions prevailing in Byzantium during the middle decades of the eleventh century, the circumstances of his accession and the number of enemies he had in Constantinople, some degree of nepotism was surely permissible; without the support of a powerful family around him, he would not have remained
basileus
for long. Was he not to some extent justified, therefore, in raising his mother Anna Dalassena, his brother Isaac, his brother-in-law Nicephorus Melissenus, his son John, his son-in-law Nicephorus Bryennius and several other of his close relations to key positions, and rewarding them accordingly?

Perhaps he was; unfortunately, he did not content himself with loading the members of his family with highly remunerative offices and specially minted new titles; he gave them regional power as well. In former times, public lands — those, that is, which belonged to the state rather than forming part of the Emperor's personal demesne — were the direct responsibility of the imperial government; Alexius now granted to his relatives the administration of large tracts of such lands, together with their revenues. These grants, technically known as
pronoia,
were admittedly only temporary: he could take them back whenever he liked, and they anyway reverted to him on the death of the holder. But they were nevertheless a dangerous precedent, and a further drain on his hard-pressed treasury.

Already for a good half-century before his accession, the Byzantine economy had been in steady decline. We have already seen
2
how, twenty years before, the value of the gold
nomism
a
had already fallen by
25
per cent; under both Botaneiates and Alexius this debasement had continued, to the point where six different
nomismata,
of six different baser metals, were in circulation - though the imperial exchequer, which had minted them, at first insisted that all payments to itself should be made in the original gold. The resulting confusion caused economic chaos through-

1
Zonaras, Book III.

2
See p.
4,
note
2.

out the Empire. In
1092
Alexius introduced the gold
hyperpyron
('highly refined') which became the standard Byzantine coin for the next two centuries; but it was not until
1109
that he finally managed to restore some sort of order by establishing a proper rate for the whole coinage. The situation was still far from satisfactory; but at least it allowed an effective operation of the fiscal system - and that, for Alexius Comnenus, was the most important consideration.

It had to be. Through most of his reign, the Empire was facing attack either from the East or from the West, and quite often from both. He had inherited from his predecessors only a poorly-equipped and heterogeneous army and a small and long-neglected fleet — so ineffectual that when Robert Guiscard had sailed against him in
1081
he had had to seek aid from Venice. If Byzantium were to survive, the former had to be reorganized and strengthened, the latter rebuilt virtually from scratch; and neither of these objectives could be achieved without considerable cost. Alexius had set to work at once, seeking the money wherever it could be found; and ten years later, as we have seen, he scored important victories on both land and sea. For him, it had been a labour of love. He had always been, first and foremost, a soldier. The art of warfare fascinated him. As
The Alexiad
makes clear time and time again, he was never happier than when taking part in military exercises, transforming his soldiers from ill-disciplined barbarians into trained fighting men. And once he had moulded his army as he wanted it, he was determined to keep it to himself. He knew - no one better - how easy it was for a brilliant and successful commander to win the support of his soldiers and then, at the first sign of weakness in the government, to stage a
coup d'etat;
and he had no intention of allowing any of his own generals to topple him as he had toppled his predecessor. It was for this reason as much as for his genuine love of battle that he would assume personal command whenever possible, placing himself at the head of his troops and, incidentally, proving himself the greatest military commander that Byzantium had seen since Basil II nearly a century before.