Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (26 page)

1 Diehl,
Figures Byzantines,
Vol. II, which includes scholarly but highly readable short biographies of both Andronicus and Agnes. What became of Theodora is unknown. She too may have come to an unpleasant end; but she was still relatively young, and it is more probable that she was packed off to end her days in a convent.

sacked, to the point where the soldiers of the Third Crusade, passing through these cities six years later, found them abandoned and in ruins.

There was trouble, too, in Asia - not from the Muslims but from the land-owning military aristocracy against which (despite being a part of it himself) Andronicus nurtured a particular hatred. Indeed, one of his distant cousins - Manuel's great-nephew Isaac Comnenus - went so far as formally to establish himself in the strategically vital island of Cyprus, declaring its political independence: the first step, it could be argued, towards the Empire's eventual disintegration.

The paramount threat, however, came from one of the oldest and most determined of all the enemies of Byzantium: Norman Sicily.

Early in January
1185
the Arab traveller Ibn Jubair was at the port of Trapani in western Sicily, having just taken passage on a Genoese ship to return to his native Spain. A day or two before he was due to depart, an order arrived from the government in Palermo: until further notice the harbour was to be closed to all outgoing traffic. A huge war fleet was being made ready. No other vessel might leave till it was safely on its way.

A similar order had been simultaneously circulated to every other port of Sicily: a security embargo on an unprecedented scale. Even within the island, few people seemed to know exactly what was happening. In Trapani, Ibn Jubair reports, everyone had his own idea about the fleet, its size, purpose and destination. Some said it was bound for Alexandria, where a Sicilian naval expedition had ended in disaster eleven years before; others suspected an attempt on Majorca, a favourite target for Sicilian raiders in recent years. There were also, inevitably, many who believed that it would sail against Constantinople. In the past year hardly a ship had arrived from the East without its quota of blood-curdling reports concerning Andronicus's latest atrocities; and it was now widely rumoured that among the increasing number of Byzantines taking refuge in Sicily was a mysterious youth claiming to be the rightful Emperor, Alexius II. If, as men said, this youth had actually been received by the King and had convinced him of the truth of his story, what could be more natural than that William the Good
1
should launch an expedition to replace him on his throne?

We shall never know whether such a claimant did in fact present

1 King William II (the Good) of Sicily had succeeded his father William I (the Bad) on the latter's death in 1166.

himself at the court in Palermo. There is nothing inherently improbable in the story.
Coups d'etat
of the kind that Andronicus had achieved normally produce a pretender or two: Robert Guiscard had unearthed one to strengthen his hand before his own Byzantine adventure in
1081,
and the Metropolitan Eustathius of Thessalonica - of whom we shall be hearing more before long - takes it for granted that a pseudo-Alexius was wandering through northern Greece shortly before the time of which Ibn Jubair was writing. But whether the rumour was true or false, we know for a fact that William did not lack encouragement for his enterprise: one of Manuel's nephews - irritatingly enough, also called Alexius - had recently escaped to Sicily and had been received at court, since when he had been urgently pressing the King to march on Constantinople and overthrow the usurper.

Throughout the winter of
1184-5
William was at Messina. He hated soldiering, and never went on campaign himself if he could avoid it; but on this occasion he had taken personal charge of the preparations. Though he admitted it to no one, his ultimate objective was nothing less than the crown of Byzantium; and he was determined that the force he sent out to attain it should be worthy of such a prize - stronger, both on land and sea, than any other ever to have sailed from Sicilian shores. And so it was. By the time it was ready to start, the fleet - commanded by his cousin Count Tancred of Lecce - is said to have comprised between two and three hundred vessels and to have carried some eighty thousand men, including five thousand knights and a special detachment of mounted archers. This huge land army was placed under the joint leadership of Tancred's brother-in-law Count Richard of Acerra and a certain Baldwin, of whom virtually nothing is known apart from an intriguing description by Nicetas:

Although of mediocre birth, he was much beloved of the King and was appointed general of the army by virtue of his long experience of military affairs. He liked to compare himself with Alexander the Great, not only because his stomach was covered - as was Alexander's - with so much hair that it seemed to sprout wings, but because he had done even greater deeds and in an even shorter time - and, moreover, without bloodshed.

The expedition sailed from Messina on
11
June
1185
and headed straight for Durazzo. Although William's attempt to seal all Sicilian ports had not been entirely successful - Ibn Jubair's Genoese captains had had little difficulty in bribing their way out of Trapani - his security precautions seem to have had some effect; it is hard to see how

Andronicus could otherwise have been caught so unprepared. As we know, he had long mistrusted Western intentions; and he must have been aware that Durazzo, as his Empire's largest Adriatic port and the starting point from which the main imperial road - the Via Egnatia -ran eastward across Macedonia and Thrace to Constantinople, was the obvious if not the only possible Sicilian bridgehead. Yet he had made little effort either to strengthen the city's fortifications or to provision it for a siege. When he did at last receive reports of the impending attack, he quickly sent one of his most experienced generals, John Branas, to take charge of the situation; but Branas arrived at Durazzo only a day or two before the Sicilian fleet, too late to accomplish anything of value.

Durazzo had already fallen once to the Normans,
103
years before. On that occasion, however, it had been after a long and glorious battle, fought heroically on both sides: a battle in which the Byzantine army had been led by the Emperor himself, the Norman by the two outstanding warriors of their age, Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund; in which Robert's wife, the Lombard Sichelgaita, had proved herself the equal in courage of both her husband and stepson; in which the stalwart axe-swinging Englishmen of the Varangian Guard had perished to the last man. This time it was a very different story. Branas, knowing that he had no chance, surrendered without a struggle. By
24
June, less than a fortnight after the fleet had sailed out of Messina, Durazzo was in Sicilian hands.

The subsequent march across the Balkan peninsula was swift and uneventful. Not a single attempt was made to block the invaders' progress. On
6
August the entire land force was encamped outside the walls of Thessalonica; on the
15
th the fleet, having sailed round the Peloponnese, took up its position in the roadstead; and the siege began.

Thessalonica was a thriving and prosperous city, with fifteen hundred years of history already behind it and a Christian tradition going back to St Paul. As a naval base it dominated the Aegean; as a commercial centre it vied with Constantinople itself, even surpassing it during the annual trade fair in October, when merchants from all over Europe gathered there to do business with their Arab, Jewish and Armenian colleagues from Africa and the Levant.
1
Thanks to this fair, the city also boasted a

1 The fair has continued, intermittently, until the present day. Thessalonica maintained its predominantly Jewish character throughout Ottoman times and up to the Second World War, when its entire Scphardic population of some fifty thousand was deported to Poland, never to return.

permanent Western mercantile community living in its own quarter just inside the walls. Largely composed of Italians, it was to prove of more than a little value to the besiegers during the days that followed.

Yet the principal blame for the disaster that overtook Thessalonica in the summer of
1185
must lie not with any foreigner but with its own military Governor, David Comnenus. Although he had strict instructions from the Emperor to attack the enemy at every opportunity and with all his strength,
1
and although - unlike Branas at Durazzo - he had had plenty of time to prepare his defences and lay in provisions, he had done neither. Within days of the beginning of the siege his archers had run out of arrows; soon there were not even any more rocks for the catapults. Worse still, it soon became clear that he had failed to check the water cisterns, several of which were found - too late - to be leaking. Yet at no time did he betray the slightest sign of shame or discomfiture. Nicetas Choniates, who seems to have known him personally, writes:

Weaker than a woman, more timid than a deer, he was content just to look at the enemy, rather than make any effort to repulse him. If ever the garrison showed itself eager to make a sortie he would forbid it, like a hunter who holds back his hounds. He was never seen to carry arms, or to wear a helmet or cuirass
..
. And while the enemy battering-rams made the walls tremble so that the masonry was crashing everywhere to the ground, he would laugh at the noise and, seeking out the safest corner available, would say to those around him, 'Just listen to the old lady - how noisy she is!' Thus he would refer to the largest of their siege-machines.

Nicetas was not himself at Thessalonica during those dreadful days; his account of them, however, is based on the best possible authority -that of Eustathius, the city's Metropolitan Archbishop. Though a Homeric scholar of repute, Eustathius was no stylist; neither, as a good Greek patriot, did he ever attempt to conceal his own detestation of the Latins, whom - with good reason in his case - he considered no better than savages. But his
History of the Latin Capture of Thessalonica,
turgid and tendentious as it is, remains the only eye-witness account we have of the siege and its aftermath. The story it tells is not a pretty one.

1 '
Andronicus's orders were "to see
that the city was preserved and, far from being afraid of the Italians, to leap on them, bite them and prick them." Those were his own exact words, though I believe that only he knew precisely what he meant. Those who liked to joke about such things gave them a most unseemly interpretation, which I have no intention of
repeating here’
(Nicctas).

Even had it been adequately prepared and defended, it is unlikely that Thessalonica could have held out very long against so furious and many-sided an attack as that which the Sicilians now launched upon it. The garrison resisted as bravely as its commander permitted, but before long the eastern bastions began to crumble. Meanwhile, on the western side, a group of German mercenaries within the walls was being bribed to open the gates. Early on
24
August, from both sides simultaneously, the Sicilian troops poured into the second city of the Byzantine Empire.

So huge an army from Sicily must have contained hundreds of soldiers of Greek extraction; hundreds more, from Apulia and Calabria as well as from the island itself, must have grown up near Greek communities, been familiar with their customs and religious traditions, even spoken a few words of their language. It would have been pleasant to record that these men had exerted a moderating influence on their less enlightened comrades; but they did nothing of the kind - or, if they tried, they failed. The Sicilian soldiery gave itself up to an orgy of savagery and violence unparalleled in Thessalonica since Theodosius the Great had massacred seven thousand of its citizens in the Hippodrome eight centuries before.
1
It is perhaps mo
re than coincidental that Eusta
thius puts the number of Greek civilian dead on this present occasion at the same figure; but even the Norman commanders estimated it at five thousand, so he may not be very far out. And murder was not all: women and children were seized and violated, houses fired and pillaged, churches desecrated and destroyed. This last series of outrages was surprising. In the whole history of Norman Sicily we find remarkably few cases of sacrilege and profanation, and none on such a scale as this. Even the Greeks, for all their poor opinion of Latin behaviour, were as astonished as they were horrified. Nicetas admits as much:

These barbarians carried their violence to the very foot of the altars, in the presence of the holy images
...
It was thought strange that they should wish to destroy our icons, using them as fuel for the fires on which they cooked. More criminal still, they would dance upon the altars, before which the angels themselves trembled, and sing profane songs. Then they would piss all over the church, flooding the floors with their urine.

Some degree of pillage had been expected; it was after all the recognized reward for an army after a successful siege, and one which the Greeks would not have hesitated to claim for themselves had the roles

1 See
Byzantium: The Early Centuries,
p. 112.