Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (31 page)

Soon after sunrise on the morning of
5
July, they crossed the Bosphorus and landed below Galata, on the north-eastern side of the Golden Horn. Being a commercial settlement, largely occupied by foreign merchants, Galata was unwalled; its only major fortification was a single large round tower. This tower was however of vital importance, for in it stood the huge windlass for the raising and lowering of the chain that was used in emergencies to block the entrance to the Horn.
1
To defend it a considerable force was drawn up, with the Emperor himself rather surprisingly at its head. Perhaps - though given the general demoralization of the Byzantines since the coming of the Angeli, it is far from certain - the defenders might have done better under different leadership; everyone knew how Alexius had seized the throne, and his character was not one to inspire either love or loyalty. In any case the sight of well over a hundred ships, disembarking men, horses and equipment with speed and precision - for the Venetians were nothing if not efficient - filled them with terror, and scarcely had the first wave of Crusaders lowered their lances for the attack than they turned and fled, the Emperor once again in the lead.

Within the Galata Tower itself, the garrison fought more bravely, holding out for a full twenty-four hours; but by the following morning it had to surrender. The Venetian sailors unshackled the windlass, and the great iron chain that had stretched over five hundred yards across the mouth of the Golden Horn subsided thunderously into the water. The fleet swept in, destroying such few seaworthy Byzantine vessels as it found in the inner harbour. The naval victory was complete.

1 The tower no longer stands, having been demolished in 1261. The present Galata Tower is a fourteenth-century replacement on a different site.

Constantinople, however, did not surrender. The walls that ran along the shore of the Golden Horn could not compare in strength or splendour with the tremendous ramparts on the landward side, but they could still be staunchly defended. Gradually the Byzantines began to regain the courage and determination that they had heretofore so conspicuously lacked. In all the nine centuries of its existence, their city had not once fallen to a foreign invader. Perhaps, until now, they had never really thought it could. Awake at last to the full extent of the danger that threatened them, they prepared to resist.

The assault, when it came, was directed against the weakest point in the Byzantine defences: the sea frontage of the Palace of Blachernae, which occupied the angle formed by the Land Walls and those following the line of the Horn, at the extreme north-west corner of the city. It was launched on the morning of Thursday,
17
July, simultaneously from land and sea, with the Venetian ships riding low in the water under the weight of their siege machinery: catapults and mangonels on the forecastles, covered gangplanks and scaling-ladders suspended by rope tackles between the yard-arms. The Frankish army, attacking from land, was initially beaten back by the axe-swinging Englishmen and Danes of the Varangian Guard; it was the Venetians who decided the day - and, to a considerable degree, Enrico Dandolo in person.

The story of the old Doge's courage is told not just by some biased latter-day panegyrist of the Republic, but by a Frankish eye-witness: Geoffrey de Villehardouin himself. He reports that although the Venetian assault craft had approached so close in-shore that those manning the ladders in the bows were fighting hand-to-hand with the defenders, the sailors were at first reluctant to beach the vessels and effect a proper landing.

And here was an extraordinary feat of boldness. For the Duke of Venice, who was an old man and stone-blind, stood fully armed on the prow of his galley, with the banner of St Mark before him, and cried out to his men to drive the ship ashore if they valued their skins. And so they did, and ran the galley ashore, and he and they leaped down and planted the banner before him in the ground. And when the other Venetians saw the standard of St Mark and the Doge's galley beached before their own, they were ashamed, and followed him ashore.

As the attack gathered momentum, it soon became clear to the defenders that they had no chance. Before many hours had passed, Dandolo was able to send word to his Frankish allies that no less than twenty-five towers along the wall were already in Venetian hands. By this time his men were pouring through breaches in the rampart into the city itself, setting fire to the wooden houses until the whole quarter of Blachernae was ablaze. That evening Alexius III Angelus fled secretly from the city, leaving his wife and all his children except a favourite daughter - whom he took with him, together with a few other women, ten thousand pounds of gold and a bag of jewels — to face the future as best they might.

Byzantium, at this gravest crisis in its history, was left without an Emperor; and it may seem surprising that a hastily-convened council of state should have fetched old Isaac Angelus out of his prison and replaced him on the imperial throne. Thanks to his brother's ministrations he was even blinder than Dandolo, and had moreover proved himself a hopelessly incompetent ruler; he was, however, the legitimate Emperor, and by restoring him the Byzantines doubtless believed that they had removed all grounds for further intervention by the Crusaders. So in a way they had; but there remained the undertakings made by young Alexius to Boniface and the Doge. These Isaac was now obliged to ratify, agreeing at the same time to make his son co-Emperor with him. Only then did the Franks and Venetians accord him their formal recognition, after which they withdrew to the Galata side of the Golden Horn to await their promised rewards.

On i August
1203,
Alexius IV Angelus was crowned alongside his father and assumed effective power. Immediately he began to regret the offers he had made so rashly at Zara in the spring. The imperial treasury, after his uncle's extravagances, was empty; the new taxes that he was obliged to introduce were openly resented by his subjects, who knew all too well where their money was going. Meanwhile the clergy -always an important political force in Constantinople - were scandalized when he began to seize and melt down their church plate and perfectly furious when they heard of his plans to subordinate them to the hated Pope of Rome. As autumn gave way to winter the Emperor's unpopularity steadily grew; and the continued presence of the Franks, whose greed appeared insatiable, increased the tension still further. One night a group of them, wandering through the city, came upon a little mosque in the Saracen quarter behind the church of St Irene, pillaged it and burnt it to ashes. The flames spread, and for the next forty-eight hours Constantinople was engulfed in its worst fire since the days of Justinian, nearly seven centuries before.

When the Emperor returned from a brief and unsuccessful expedition
against his fugitive uncle, it was to find most of his capital in ruins and his subjects in a state of almost open warfare against the foreigners. The situation had clearly reached breaking-point; but when, a few days later, a delegation of three Crusaders and three Venetians came to demand immediate payment of the sum owing to them, there was still nothing he could do. According to Villehardouin - who, predictably, was one of the delegates - the party narrowly escaped a lynching on its way to and from the palace. 'And thus,' he writes, 'the war began; and each side did to the other as much harm as it could, both by sea and by land.'

Ironically enough, neither the Crusaders nor the Greeks wanted such a war. The inhabitants of Constantinople had by now one object only in mind: to be rid, once and for all, of these uncivilized thugs who were destroying their beloved city and bleeding them white into the bargain. The Franks, for their part, had not forgotten the reason they had left their homes, and increasingly resented their enforced stay among what they considered an effete and effeminate people when they should have been getting to grips with the infidel. Even if the Greek debt were to be paid in full, they themselves would not benefit materially; it would only enable them to settle their own outstanding account with the Venetians.

The key to the whole impossible affair lay, in short, with Venice - or, more accurately, with Enrico Dandolo. It was open to him at any moment to give his fleet the order to sail. Had he done so, the Crusaders would have been relieved and the Byzantines overjoyed. Formerly, his refusal had been on the grounds that the Franks would never be able to pay him their debt until they in their turn received the money that Alexius and his father had promised them. In fact, however, that debt was now of relatively little interest to him - scarcely more than was the Crusade itself. His mind was on greater things: the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of a Venetian puppet on the throne of Constantinople.

And so, as prospects of a peaceful settlement receded, Dandolo's advice to his Frankish allies took on a different tone. Nothing more, he pointed out, could be expected of Isaac and Alexius, who had not scrupled to betray the friends to whom they owed their joint crown. If the Crusaders were ever to obtain their due, they would have to take it by force. Their moral justification was complete: the faithless Angeli had no further claim on their loyalties. Once inside the city, with one of their own leaders installed as Emperor, they could pay Venice what they owed her almost without noticing it and still have more than enough to finance the Crusade. This was their opportunity; they should seize it now, for it would not recur.

Within Constantinople too, it was generally agreed that Alexius IV must go; and on 25 January 1204 a great concourse of senators, clergy and people gathered in St Sophia to declare him deposed and elect a successor. It was during their deliberations - which dragged on inconclusively for three days before fixing on a reluctant nonentity named Nicholas Canabus - that the only really effective figure at that moment on the Byzantine stage took the law into his own hands.

Alexius Ducas - nicknamed Murzuphlus on account of his eyebrows, which were black and shaggy and met in the middle - was a nobleman whose family had already produced two Emperors and who now occupied the court position of
protovestarius,
with its rights of unrestricted access to the imperial apartments. Late at night he burst into where Alexius IV was sleeping, woke him with the news that his subjects had risen against him and offered him what he claimed was the only chance of escape. Muffling him in a long cloak, he led him by a side door out of the palace to where his fellow-conspirators were waiting. The unhappy youth was then clapped into irons and consigned to a dungeon where, having survived two attempts to poison him, he eventually succumbed to the bowstring. At about the same time his blind father also died; Villehardouin, with that impregnable
naivete
that characterizes his whole chronicle, attributes his demise to a sudden sickness, brought on by the news of the fate of his son; it does not seem to have struck him that so convenient a malady might have been artificially induced.'

With his rivals eliminated - and Nicholas Canabus having retired once again into the obscurity he should never have left - Murzuphlus was crowned in St Sophia as Alexius V. Immediately he began to show those qualities of leadership that the Empire had lacked for so long. For the first time since the Crusaders' arrival the walls and towers were properly manned, while workmen sweated day and night strengthening them and raising them ever higher. To the Franks, one thing was plain: there was to be no more negotiation, far less any question of further payments on a debt for which the new Emperor in any case bore no responsibility.

1 A fellow Crusader, Robert of Clary, probably comes closer to the truth when he writes:
'Si li fist lachier urn corde u col, si It fist estranler et sen pere Kyrsaac attsi.'
(He [Murzuphlus] had a cord put about his neck and had him strangled, together with his father Isaac.')

Their one chance was an all-out attempt on the city; and now that Murzuphlus had not only usurped the throne but had revealed himself as a murderer to boot, they were morally in an even stronger position than if they had moved against Alexius IV, a legitimate Emperor and their erstwhile ally.

An all-out attempt on the city: it was exactly what Enrico Dandolo had been advocating for months, and from the moment of Murzuphlus's
coup
the old Doge seems to have been recognized, by Venetians and Franks alike, as the leader of the entire expedition. Boniface of Montferrat strove to maintain his influence; with the imperial crown almost within his grasp, it was more than ever vital to him that he should. But his association with the deposed Emperor had been too close, and now that Alexius IV had gone he found himself in some degree discredited. Besides, he had links with the Genoese - and Dandolo knew it.

Early in March there began a series of council meetings in the camp at Galata. They were concerned less with the plan of attack - despite Murzuphlus's work on the defences, its success was apparently considered a foregone conclusion - than with the future administration of the Empire after its conquest. It was agreed that the Crusaders and the Venetians should each appoint six delegates to an electoral committee, and that this should choose the new Emperor. If, as was expected, they decided on a Frank, then the Patriarch should be a Venetian; otherwise vice versa. The Emperor would receive a quarter of the city and of the Empire, including the two chief palaces - Blachernae on the Golden Horn and the old palace on the Marmara. The remaining three-quarters should be divided equally, half going to Venice and half in fief to the Crusading knights. For the Venetian portion, the Doge was specifically absolved from the need to do the Emperor homage. All plunder taken was to be brought to an agreed spot and distributed in similar proportions. Finally, the parties were to undertake not to leave Constantinople for a full year - until March 1205 at the earliest.