Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (27 page)

been reversed. But these atrocities were something different, and Baldwin took firm measures at once. The city had been entered during the early hours of the morning; by noon he had managed to restore a semblance of order. Then the logistical problems began. Thessalonica was not equipped to cope with a sudden influx of eighty thousand men. Such food as there was tended to disappear down Sicilian gullets, and the local population soon found itself half-starved. The disposal of the dead presented further difficulties. It was several days before the task was completed, and long before that the August heat had done its work. An epidemic ensued which, aggravated by the overcrowding - and, Eustath-ius maintains, the immoderate consumption of new wine — killed off some three thousand of the occupying army and an unknown number of the local inhabitants.

From the start, too, there were serious confessional troubles. The Latins took over many of the local churches for their own use, but this did not stop certain elements of the soldiery from bursting into those that had remained in Greek hands, interrupting the services and howling down the officiating priests. A still more dangerous incident occurred when a group of Sicilians, suddenly startled by the sound of urgent, rhythmic hammering, took it to be a signal for insurrection and rushed to arms. Only just in time was it explained to them that the noise was simply that of the
semantron,
the wooden plank by which the Orthodox faithful were normally summoned to their devotions.
1

Within a week or two an uneasy
modus vivendi
had been established. Baldwin showed himself a tactful commander and Eustathius, though technically a prisoner, seems to have done much to prevent unnecessary friction. His flock, for their part, soon began to discover that there was money to be made out of these foreigners who had so little understanding of real prices and values. Before long we find him lamenting the ease with which the ladies of Thessalonica were wont to yield to the Sicilian soldiers. But the atmosphere in and around the city remained explosive, and to Greek and Sicilian alike it must have been a relief when the army drew itself up once more in line of battle and, leaving only a small garrison behind, headed off to the East.

i The beating of the
se
mantron
is of considerable symbolic significance. The Church represents the ark of salvation; and the monk who balances the six-foot plank on his shoulders and raps his tattoo on it with a little wooden hammer is echoing the sound of Noah's tools, summoning the chosen to join him. In Ottoman times, when the ringing of church bells was forbidden, the
semantron
continued in regular use. It is seldom heard nowadays, except on Mount Athos - where it remains the rule — and in a few isolated rural monasteries.

By this time Andronicus had dispatched no less than five separate armies to Thessalonica to block the enemy advance. This fragmentation of his forces seems to have been yet another indication of the Emperor's growing instability: had they been united under a single able commander they might have saved the city. As it was, all five retreated to the hills to the north of the road whence, apparently hypnotized, they watched the Sicilian army march on their capital. Baldwin's vanguard had thus pressed as far as Mosynopolis, nearly half-way to Constantinople, when there occurred an event that changed the entire situation - completely and, so far as the invaders were concerned, disastrously. Driven now beyond endurance, his subjects rose up against Andronicus Comnenus and murdered him.

In Constantinople as elsewhere, the news from Thessalonica had brought the inhabitants to the verge of panic. Andronicus's reactions were typical of his contradictory nature. On the one hand he took firm action to repair and strengthen the city's defences. The state of the walls was carefully checked, houses built too closely against them were destroyed wherever it was considered that they might provide a means of entry for a besieging army; a fleet of a hundred ships was hastily mobilized and victualled. Though this was less than half the size of the Sicilian naval force — now reported to be fast approaching - in the confined waters of the Marmara and the Bosphorus it might yet serve its purpose.

But at other moments and in other respects the Emperor seemed totally indifferent to the emergency, drawing back further and further into his private world of pleasure. In the three years since his accession his life had grown steadily more depraved.

He would have liked to emulate Hercules, who lay with all the fifty daughters of Thyestes in a single night;
1
but he was nevertheless obliged to resort to artifice as a means of strengthening his nerves, rubbing himself with a certain balm to increase his vigour. He also ate regularly of a fish known as the
scincus,
which is caught in the river Nile and is not dissimilar to the crocodile; and which, though abhorred by many, is most effective in the quickening of lust.

By now, too, he was developing a persecution mania that led him to new extremes of cruelty. A day on which he ordered no one's death,

1 Nicctas nods here. Their father was not Thyestes but Thespius. This thirteenth labour of Hercules must have been the most arduous of the lot, but its success rate was remarkable: all the girls produced male children, in many cases twins.

writes Nicetas, was for him a day wasted: 'men and women lived only in anxiety and sorrow, and even the night afforded no rest, since their sleep was troubled with hideous dreams and by the ghastly phantoms of those whom he had massacred.' Constantinople was living through a reign of terror as fearful as any in its long, dark history - one which reached its culmination in September
1185,
with the issue of a decree ordering the execution of all prisoners and exiles, together with their entire families, on charges of complicity with the invaders.

Fortunately for the Empire, revolution came just in time to avert tragedy. The spark was fired when the Emperor's cousin Isaac Angelus, a normally inoffensive nobleman who had incurred Andronicus's displeasure when a soothsayer had identified him as successor to the throne, leaped on the imperial henchman sent to arrest him and ran him through with his sword. Then, riding at full gallop to St Sophia, he proudly announced to all present what he had done. The news spread: crowds began to collect, among them Isaac's uncle John Ducas and many others who, though they had played no part in the crime, knew that in the existing atmosphere of suspicion they would be unable to dissociate themselves from it. Therefore, says Nicetas, 'seeing that they would be taken, and having the image of death graven on their souls, they appealed to all the people to rally to their aid'.

And the people responded. The next morning, having spent the night in the torchlit St Sophia, they hurried through the city calling every householder to arms. The prisons were broken open, the prisoners joined forces with their deliverers. Meanwhile, in the great church, Isaac Angelus was proclaimed
basileus.

One of the vergers climbed on a ladder above the high altar and took down the crown of Constantine to place it on his head. Isaac showed reluctance to accept it - not for reasons of modesty nor because of any indifference towards the imperial diadem but because he feared that so audacious an enterprise might cost him his life. Ducas, on the other hand, stepped forward at once, and taking off his cap presented his own bald head, which shone like the full moon, to receive the crown. But the assembled people cried out loudly that they had suffered too much misery from the grizzled head of Andronicus, and that they would have no more senile or decrepit Emperors, least of all one with a long beard divided in two like a pitchfork.

When the news of the revolution reached Andronicus on his country estate of Meludion, he returned to the capital confident in his ability to reassert his control. Going straight to the Great Palace at the mouth of the Golden Horn he ordered his guard to loose its arrows on the mob

and, f
inding the soldiers slow to obey, seized a bow and began furiously shooting on his own account. Then, suddenly, he understood. Throwing off his purple cloak and boots, he covered his head with a little pointed bonnet 'such as the barbarians wear' and, hastily embarking his child-wife and his favourite concubine Maraptica - 'an excellent flautist, with whom he was besottedly in love' - on to a waiting galley, he fled with them up the Bosphorus.

Simultaneously the mob broke into the palace, falling on everything of value that it contained. Twelve hundred pounds of gold bullion alone and three thousand of silver were carried off, and jewels and works of art without number. Not even the imperial chapel was spared: icons were stripped from the walls, chalices snatched from the altar. And the most venerable treasure of all - the reliquary containing the letter written by Jesus Christ in his own hand to King Abgar of Edessa - disappeared, never to be seen again.

The Emperor, the Empress and Maraptica were soon caught. The ladies, who behaved throughout with dignity and courage, were spared; but Andronicus, bound and fettered with a heavy chain about his neck, was brought before Isaac for punishment. His right hand was cut off and he was thrown into prison; then, after several days without food or water, he was blinded in one eye and brought forth on a scrawny camel to face the fury of his erstwhile subjects. They had suffered much from him, and were eager for their revenge. As Nicetas reports:

Everything that was lowest and most contemptible in the mob seemed to combine . . . They beat him, stoned him, goaded him with spikes, pelted him with filth. A woman of the streets poured a bucket of boiling water on his head
.
..
Then, dragging him from the camel, they hung him up by his feet. He endured all these torments and many others that I cannot describe, with incredible fortitude, speaking no other word among this demented crowd of his persecutors, but
O Lord, have pity on me; why dost thou trample on a poor reed that is already quite broken?
...
At last, after much agony, he died, carrying his remaining hand to his mouth; which he did, in the opinion of some, that he might suck the blood that flowed from one of his wounds.

He had been, as Eustathius of Thessalonica observed, a man so full of contradictions that he can with equal justice be extravagantly praised or bitterly condemned; a colossus who possessed every gift save that of moderation and who died as dramatically as he had lived; a hero and a villain, a preserver and a destroyer, a paragon and a warning.

Isaac Angelus, when at last he accepted the crown, inherited a desperate situation. At Mosynopolis, the invaders' advance column was less than two hundred miles from Constantinople; their fleet, meanwhile, was already in the Marmara, awaiting the army's arrival before launching its attack. Immediately on his accession, he sent Baldwin an offer of peace; when it was refused, he did what Andronicus should have done months before - appointed the ablest of his generals, Alexius Branas, to the supreme command of all five armies, sending with him the most massive reinforcements that the Empire could provide. The effect was instantaneous: the Greeks were infused with a new spirit. They saw too their enemy grown overconfident; no longer expecting resistance, the Sicilian soldiers had dropped their guard and relaxed their discipline. Carefully selecting his place and his moment, Branas swooped down upon them, routed them completely and pursued them all the way back to the main camp at Amphipolis.

It was, wrote Nicetas, a visible manifestation of the Divine Power:

Those men who, but a short while before, had threatened to overturn the very mountains, were as astonished as if they had been struck by lightning. The Romans,
1
on the other hand, no longer having any commerce with fear, burned with the desire to fall upon them, as an eagle falls upon a feeble bird.

At Dimitriza,
2
just outside Amphipolis on the banks of the river Strymon - now the Struma - Baldwin at last consented to discuss peace. Why he did so remains a mystery. The defeat at Mosynopolis had not affected the main body of his army, encamped in good order around him. He still held Thessalonica. Though the new Emperor in Constantinople was not senile as his predecessor had been, he was not in his first youth; and his claim to the throne was certainly weaker than that of Andronicus or, arguably, of Manuel's nephew Alexius, who had accompanied the army all the way from Messina and was seldom far from Baldwin's side. But winter was approaching, and the autumn rains in Thrace fall heavy and chill. To an army that had counted on spending Christmas in Constantinople, Mosynopolis had probably proved more demoralizing than its strategic importance really warranted.

The Byzantines always so described themselves, seeing their Empire as the unbroken continuation of that of ancient Rome. The word
Womios
is still used, on occasion, by their descendants today. See Patrick I^eigh Fermor's brilliant essay on the subject in
Woumeli
(London, 1966).

This place-name is something of a mystery, since there is no trace of it along th
e Strymon. Chalandon calls it De
metiza, then adds in brackets - without giving his authority - the obviously Turkish word Demechissar. If he is right, it is tempting to see this word as a corruption of Demir-Hisar, i.e. Iron Fort; in which case we may be talking about the modern Greek town of Siderokastron, which today stands just where Dimitriza might have been expected to be.

Alternatively, Baldwin may have had a darker purpose. The Greeks certainly claimed that he did. On the pretext that he intended to take advantage of the peace negotiations to catch them in their turn unprepared, they resolved to strike first; and on
7
November they did so -'awaiting', Nicetas himself assures us, 'neither the sound of the trumpets nor the orders of their commander'. The Sicilian army was taken unawares. Its soldiers resisted as best they could, then turned and fled. Some were cut down as they ran; many more were drowned as they tried to cross the Strymon, now swift and swollen from recent rains; others still, including both Baldwin and Richard of Acerra, were taken prisoner — as was Alexius Comnenus, whom Isaac subsequently blinded for his treachery. Those who escaped found their way back to Thessalonica, where a few managed to pick up ships in which to return to Sicily. Since, however, the bulk of the Sicilian fleet was still lying off Constantinople waiting for the land army to arrive, the majority were not so lucky. The Thessalonians rose up against them, taking a full and bloody revenge for all that they had suffered three months before. Of the titanic army which had set out so confidently in the summer, it was a poor shadow that now plodded back through the icy mountain passes to Durazzo.