Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (32 page)

The attack began on Friday morning,
9
April. It was directed against that same stretch of sea wall facing the Golden Horn where Dandolo and his men had distinguished themselves nine months before. This time, however, it failed. The new, higher walls and towers, no longer accessible from the Venetian mastheads, provided useful platforms from which the Greek catapults could wreak havoc among the besiegers below. By mid-afternoon the attackers had begun to re-embark their men, horses and equipment and beat their way back to Galata and safety. The next two days were spent in repairing the damage; then, on the

Monday following, the assault was renewed. This time the Venetians lashed their ships together in pairs, thus contriving to throw twice as much weight as before against each tower. Soon, too, a strong north wind blew up, driving the vessels far further up the beach below the walls than the oarsmen could ever have done and allowing the besiegers to work under cover of makeshift shelters stretched from one mast to another. Before long, two of the towers were overwhelmed and occupied. Almost simultaneously, the Crusaders broke open one of the gates in the wall and surged into the city.

Murzuphlus, who had been commanding the defenders with courage and determination, galloped through the streets in a last desperate attempt to rally his subjects. 'But', writes Nicetas,

they were all swept up in the whirlpool of despair, and had no ears either for his orders or his remonstrances . . . Seeing that his efforts were in vain, and fearing to be served up to the Franks as a choice morsel for their table, he took flight, accompanied by Euphrosyne, wife of the Emperor Alexius [III] and her daughter Eudocia, whom he passionately adored; for he was a great lover of women and had already repudiated two wives in a manner not canonical.

The three sought refuge with the ex-Emperor in Thrace, where Murzuphlus duly married Eudocia and began to gather his forces for a counter-offensive.

Once the walls were breached, the carnage was dreadful; even Villehardouin was appalled. Only at nightfall, 'tired of battle and massacre', did the conquerors call a truce and withdraw to their camp in one of the great squares of the city.

That night, a party of Crusaders, fearing a counter-attack, set fire to the district which lay between themselves and the Greeks . . . and the city began to blaze fiercely, and it burnt all that night and all the next day until evening. It was the third fire at Constantinople since the Franks arrived. And there were more houses burnt than there are to be found in the three greatest cities of the Kingdom of France.

After this, such few defenders as had not yet laid down their arms lost the spirit to continue. The next morning the Crusaders awoke to find all resistance in the city at an end.

But for the people of Constantinople the tragedy had scarcely begun. Not for nothing had the army waited so long outside the world's richest capital. Now that it was theirs and that th
e customary three days' looting
was allowed them, they fell on it like locusts. Never, since the barbarian invasions some centuries before, had Europe witnessed such an orgy of brutality and vandalism; never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time. Among the witnesses - helpless, horrified, almost unable to believe that human beings who called themselves Christians could be capable of such enormities - was Nicetas Choniates:

I know not how to put any order into my account, how to begin, continue or end. They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed to mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour. These heralds of Anti-Christ seized the chalices and the patens, tore out the jewels and used them as drinking cups
...
As for their profanation of the Great Church, it cannot be thought of without horror. They destroyed the high altar, a work of art admired by the entire world, and shared out the pieces among themselves . . . And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.

A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch's chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place .
..
nor was there mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God
...
In the streets, houses and churches there could be heard only cries and lamentations.

And these men, he continues, carried the Cross on their shoulders, the Cross upon which they had sworn to pass through Christian lands without bloodshed, to take arms only against the heathen and to abstain from the pleasures of the flesh until their holy task was done.

It was Constantinople's darkest hour - even darker, perhaps, than that, two and a half centuries later, which was to see the city's final fall to the Ottoman Sultan. But not all its treasures perished. While the Frenchmen and Flemings abandoned themselves to a frenzy of wholesale destruction, the Venetians kept their heads. They knew beauty when they saw it. They too looted and pillaged and plundered - but they did not destroy. Instead, all that they could lay their hands on they sent back to Venice — beginning with the four great bronze horses which had dominated the Hippodrome since the days of Constantine and which, from their platform above the main door of St Mark's, were to perform a similar function, for the best part of the
next eight centuries, over the
Piazza below.
1
The north and south faces of the Basilica are studded with sculptures and reliefs shipped back at the same time; inside the building, in the north transept, hangs the miraculous icon of the Virgin Nicopoeia - the Bringer of Victory - which the Emperors were wont to carry before them into battle; while the Treasury to the south possesses one of the greatest collections of Byzantine works of art to be found anywhere — a further monument to Venetian rapacity.

After three days of terror, order was restored. As previously arranged, all the spoils — or that part of them that had not been successfully concealed - were gathered together in three churches and careful distribution made: a quarter for the Emperor when elected, the remainder to be split equally between the Franks and Venetians. As soon as it was done, the Crusaders paid their debt to Enric
o Dandolo. These formalities sati
sfactorily concluded, both parties applied themselves to the next task: the election of the new Emperor of Byzantium.

Boniface of Montferrat, in a desperate attempt to recover his lost prestige and strengthen his own candidacy, had tracked down the Empress Maria, widow of Isaac Angelus, and married her. He need not have bothered. Dandolo refused outright to consider him and -since the Franks were divided while the Venetians voted as a single bloc - had no difficulty in steering the electors towards the easy-going and tractable Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, who on 16 May received his coronation in St Sophia — the third Emperor to be crowned there in less than a year. Although the newly-appointed Patriarch, the Venetian Tommaso Morosini,
2
had not yet arrived in Constantinople and so could not officiate at the ceremony, there can have been few among those present who would have denied that the new Emperor owed his elevation entirely to the Venetian Republic.

In return, Venice appropriated the best for her own. By the terms of her treaty with the Crusaders she was entitled to three-eighths of the city and the Empire, together with free trade throughout the imperial dominions, from which both Genoa and Pisa were to be rigorously excluded. In Constantinople itself, the Doge demanded the entire district

1
Alas, no longer. Some years ago the Italian authorities, pleading atmospheric pollution, saw fit to incarcerate them in a small, dark room within the Basilica and to replace them on the gallery with lifeless replicas in fibreglass.

2
'Fat as a stuffed pig,' snorts Nicetas, 'and wearing a robe so tight that it seemed to have been sewn on to his skin'. Though already a monk, Morosini had not taken orders at the time he was selected for the Patriarchate. He was ordained deacon at once, priest a fortnight later and bishop the following morning.

surrounding St Sophia and the Patriarchate, reaching right down to the shore of the Golden Horn; for the rest, he took for Venice all those regions that promised to reinforce her mastery of the Mediterranean and to give her an unbroken chain of colonies and ports from the lagoon to the Black Sea. They included Ragusa and Durazzo; the western coast of the Greek mainland and the Ionian Islands; all the Peloponnese; Euboea, Naxos and Andros; the chief ports on the Hellespont and the Marmara -Gallipoli, Rhaedestum and Heraclea; the Thracian seaboard, the city of Adrianople and finally, after a brief negotiation with Boniface, the all-important island of Crete. The harbours and islands would belong to Venice absolutely; where mainland Greece was concerned, however, Dandolo made it clear that as a mercantile republic Venice had no interest in occupying more than the key ports. For the rest, she was only too pleased to have the responsibility taken off her hands.

Thus it emerges beyond all doubt that it was the Venetians, rather than the French or Flemings - or even the Emperor Baldwin himself, who remained little more than a figurehead - who were the real beneficiaries of the Fourth Crusade; and that their success was due, almost exclusively, to Enrico Dandolo. From that day, four years before, when the Frankish emissaries had arrived on the Rialto to ask the Republic's help in their holy enterprise, he had turned every new development to Venetian advantage. He had regained Zara; he had protected Egypt from attack and so preserved Venice's commercial interests with the Muslim world; he had subtly redirected the Frankish forces towards Constantinople, while leaving the ostensible responsibility for the decision with them. Once there, his courage had largely inspired the first attack; his capacity for intrigue had brought down the Angeli, making essential a second siege and the physical capture of the city; his diplomatic skill had shaped a treaty which gave Venice more than she had dared to hope and laid the foundations for her commercial Empire. Refusing the Byzantine crown for himself - to have accepted it would have created insuperable constitutional problems at home and might well have destroyed the Republic - and declining even to serve on the electoral commission, he nevertheless made sure that his influence over the election (which was held under his auspices, in the old imperial palace that he had temporarily appropriated for himself) would be tantamount to giving Venice a majority and would ensure the success of his own candidate. Finally, while encouraging the Franks to feudalize the Empire - a step which he knew could not fail to create fragmentation and disunity and would prevent its ever becoming strong enough to obstruct Venetian expansion - he had kept Venice outside the feudal framework, holding her new dominions not as an imperial fief but by her own right of conquest. For a blind man not far short of ninety it was a remarkable achievement.

Yet even now old Dandolo did not rest. Outside the capital, the Greek subjects of the Empire continued their resistance. Murzuphlus was to cause no further trouble: soon after his marriage he was blinded in his turn by his jealous father-in-law, and when in the following year he was captured by the Franks they brought him back to Constantinople and flung him to his death from the column of Theodosius in the centre of the city. But — as the next chapter will tell — another of Alexius Ill's sons-in-law set up an Empire in exile at Nicaea, two of the Comneni did the same at Trebizond and, in Epirus, a bastard Angelus proclaimed himself an autonomous Despot. On all sides the erstwhile Crusaders had to fight hard to establish themselves, nowhere more fiercely than in Venice's newly-acquired city of Adrianople where, just after Easter, 1205, the Emperor Baldwin fell into the hands of the Bulgars and the old Doge, who had fought determinedly at his side, was left to lead a shattered army back to Constantinople. He is not known to have been wounded; but six weeks later he was dead. His body, rather surprisingly, was not returned to Venice but was buried in St Sophia - where, in the gallery above the south aisle, his tombstone may still be seen.

He had deserved well of his city; it is a source of greater surprise that the Venetians never erected a monument to the greatest of all their Doges. But in the wider context of world events he was a disaster. Though it cannot be said of him that he gave the Crusades a bad name, that is only because the record of those successive forays over the previous century had already emerged as one of the blackest chapters in the history of Christendom. Yet the Fourth Crusade - if indeed it can be so described - surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. Constantinople in the twelfth century had been not just the wealthiest metropolis of the world, but also the most intellectually and artistically cultivated and the chief repository of Europe's classical heritage, both Greek and Roman. By its sack, Western civilization suffered a loss greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century or the burning of the library of Alexandria by the soldiers of the Prophet in the seventh - perhaps the most catastrophic single loss in all history.

Politically, too, the damage done was incalculable. Although Latin rule along the Bosphorus was to last less than sixty years, the Byzantine