Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (33 page)

Empire never recovered its strength, or any considerable part of its lost dominion. Under firm and forceful leadership - which would not be lacking in the century to come - a strong and prosperous Byzantium might have halted the Turkish advance while there was still time. Instead, the Empire was left economically crippled, territorially truncated, powerless to defend itself against the Ottoman tide. There are few greater ironies in history than the fact that the fate of Eastern Christendom should have been sealed - and half Europe condemned to some five hundred years of Muslim rule — by men who fought under the banner of the Cross. Those men were transported, inspired, encouraged and ultimately led by Enrico Dandolo in the name of the Venetian Republic; and, just as Venice derived the major advantage from the tragedy, so she and her magnificent old Doge must accept the major responsibility for the havoc that they wrought upon the world.

12

The Empire in Exile

[1205-53]

It is not so much a difference of dogma that turns the hearts of the Greeks against you as the hatred of the Latins which has entered into their spirit, in consequence of the many and great evils which the Greeks have suffered from the Latins at various times, and are still suffering day by day.

Barlaam of Calabria to Pope Benedict XII,
c.
13
40

In contrast to Doge Dandolo, who now proudly styled himself 'Lord of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Roman Empire', the Emperor Baldwin I cut a sorry figure. When another three-eighths of the Empire had been parcelled out among the Frankish knights as imperial fiefs, he was left with just a quarter of the territory that had been ruled by his immediate predecessors. Essentially it comprised Thrace — though not of course Adrianople, which had gone to the Venetians - and the northwest region of Asia Minor, together with certain islands of the Aegean including Lesbos, Samos and Chios; but even this pathetically diminished patrimony was contested. Boniface of Montferrat in particular, who had been virtually certain of the throne and was furious at having been passed over, angrily refused the Anatolian lands he was offered and instead seized Thessalonica, where he established a kingdom extending over a large part of Macedonia and Thessaly. Somehow, too, he managed to assume the suzerainty over the lesser Frankish rulers springing up to the south, notably the Burgundian Otto de la Roche in Boeotia and Attica (the so-called Duchy of Athens) and the Frenchman William of Champlitte - soon to be succeeded by the house of Villehardouin - in the Peloponnese.

It comes as no surprise to learn that the new rulers were detested throughout these formerly Byzantine lands. Economically there were few major changes: apart from the fact that taxes were henceforth paid to a Latin landlord rather than to a Greek, provincial and country life probably continued much as it had always done. Morally and spiritually,

however, the climate was entirely altered. Not only were the Franks overbearing and arrogant, making no effort to conceal their scorn for what they considered an inferior as well as a subject race; they were also staunch upholders of the Church of Rome, and unhesitatingly imposed the Latin rite wherever they could. For the local proletariat and the peasantry there was little to be done; sullenly, resentfully and with bitterness in their hearts, they accepted the inevitable. The aristocracy, on the other hand, was a good deal less submissive; many Greek nobles left their ancestral lands in disgust and moved to one of the Byzantine successor states in which the national spirit and the Orthodox faith were still preserved.

Of these states, the largest, the most powerful and by far the most important was the so-called Empire of Nicaea, of which Alexius Ill's son-in-law Theodore Lascaris was recognized as Emperor in 1206, being crowned there two years later. It occupied a broad strip of land at the western extremity of Anatolia, averaging some two hundred miles across and extending from the Aegean to the Black Sea coast. To the north and west lay the Latin Empire; to the south and east, the Seljuk Sultanate. Although the official capital remained Nicaea - which after 1208 was the seat of the Patriarch and where all the imperial coronations took place -Theodore's successor John III Vatatzes was to establish his chief residence in the Lydian
city of Nymphaeum (now Kemalpas
a) which was far better placed from the strategic point of view; and for most of the fifty-seven-year period of exile from Constantinople it was from here rather than from Nicaea that the Empire was effectively governed.

The two other successor states were less important. Situated as they were, one on the Adriatic coast and the other at the south-eastern extremity of the Black Sea, they were too remote to exert much influence on the march of events; nor could they ever boast the special prestige which the presence of the Patriarchate conferred upon Nicaea. The Despotate of Epirus (to use its later title) was founded soon after the capture of Constantinople by a certain Michael Comnenus Ducas, the illegitimate son of the
sebastocrator
John Angelus Ducas (grandson of Alexius I Comnenus through his daughter Theodora) and thus a cousin of Isaac II and Alexius III, although - not altogether surprisingly -neither he nor his father ever used the name of Angelus themselves. From his capital at Arta he established control over the entire northwestern coast of Greece and part of Thessaly - a domain which was soon to be substantially increased by his half-brother Theodore who, succeeding him in 1215, captured Thessalonica from the Latins nine
years later and promptly had himself crowned Emperor as a rival to John Vatatzes of Nicaea. This rivalry, however, did not last long: in 1242 Vatatzes obliged Theodore's son John to renounce the imperial title in favour of that of
despotes,
and four years later he appropriated Thessalonica for himself.

Unlike Nicaea and Epirus, the Empire of Trebizond was not the result of the fall of Constantinople. Indeed, it had been founded in April 1204 - within days of the disaster - by Alexius and David Comnenus, grandsons of the Emperor Andronicus through his son Manuel, who had married a Georgian princess. After the fall of Andronicus in 1185 the young brothers had been taken for safety to Georgia, where they had been brought up at the royal court. Determined to continue the Comnenus dynasty in opposition to the Angeli, they had captured Trebizond -with the help of the Georgian Queen Thamar - in April 1204. Later in the same year David had pushed west along the Black Sea coast with his army of Georgians and other mercenaries to occupy Paphlagonia as far as Heraclea; but much of this territory was lost soon afterwards, and for the greater part of its 257-year history - for it was to continue after the recovery of Constantinople and did not ultimately fall to the Turks until 1461 — the Trapezuntine Empire was confined to a narrow strip of coastline rather less than four hundred miles long between the Pontic mountains and the sea.

As ruler of what was generally accepted as Byzantium in exile, Theodore I Lascaris of Nicaea faced initial difficulties which to lesser men would have been insurmountable. Quite apart from his rivals in Epirus and Trebizond - where in the autumn of 1204 David Comnenus was already advancing westward with alarming speed - petty Greek principalities were springing up like mushrooms within his own borders: one in Philadelphia, another in the valley of the Meander, yet a third in the obscure little town of Sampson near Miletus. Then, as the terrible year drew to its close, a Frankish army led by Baldwin himself, with his brother Henry and Count Louis of Blois, crossed the straits and began to move across Asia Minor. Theodore - who had been obliged to build up a whole new administrative machine as well as an army - was still hopelessly unprepared; and on 6 December 1204 he suffered a calamitous defeat at Poimanenon, some forty miles south of the Marmara - probably the modern Eski Manyas - giving the Franks control of the whole coastal region of Bithynia as far as Brusa (Bursa). Had they been able to continue their advance another sixty miles to Nicaea itself, Theodore's

Empire might well have been annihilated almost at its birth; fortunately for him, however, they were recalled in the nick of time by a serious crisis in the Balkans.

For Baldwin's arrogance had caught up with him. The Greek landowners in Thrace, who had initially been prepared to accept their Frankish overlords, now found themselves treated as second-class citizens. They rebelled, summoning to their aid the Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan and offering him the imperial crown if he could drive the Latins from Constantinople. The Tsar asked nothing better. Earlier in 1204 he had already been crowned King (though not Emperor) by Innocent Ill's envoy and had accepted the jurisdiction of Rome; this, however, in no way diminished his alarm at the proliferation of Latin states throughout the peninsula, and he was as anxious as were the Byzantines themselves to rid the land of the Crusader blight. By the beginning of 1205 he was on the march; and on 14 April he virtually annihilated the Frankish army outside Adrianople, killing Louis of Blois and taking prisoner the Emperor himself, who never regained his freedom and died soon afterwards. Thus, just a year after the capture of Constantinople, the power of the Latins was broken. In all Asia Minor, only the little town of Pegae (now Karabiga) on the southern shore of the Marmara remained in Frankish hands.

Now at last Theodore Lascaris could settle down in earnest to the forging of his new state - following, however, the old Byzantine pattern in every detail, for he never for a moment doubted that his countrymen would be back, sooner or later, in their rightful capital. Such members of the imperial household, officers of state and civil servants as he was able to track down were restored to their former posts; exiled bishops and other distinguished ecclesiastics were summoned to Nicaea, and -after the death of the Patriarch, who had stubbornly refused to leave his own place of refuge in Didymotichum - it was they who were invited to elect his successor. Their choice fell on a certain Michael Autorianus who, some time during Holy Week in 1208, crowned and anointed Theodore as
basileus.

There were now effectively two Eastern Emperors and two Patriarchs, the Latin in Constantinople and the Greek in Nicaea. Clearly there could never be peace between them: each was determined to destroy the other. Baldwin's brother and successor Henry of Hainault was for the first eighteen months of his reign fully occupied with Kalojan, who by the summer of 1206 had sacked Adrianople, mopped up most of Thrace and advanced to the very walls of the capital; but on 26 October 1207, while preparing to besiege Thessalonica, the Bulgar Tsar was murdered by a Cuman chieftain
1
and Henry was able to increase the pressure on his rival in Nicaea. He did not march at once - he too, like Theodore, had had to set up a proper government and administration - but in 1209, conquering with some difficulty his Crusader scruples, he concluded a military alliance with Kaikosru, the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, who also saw the establishment of a new Greek state in western Asia Minor as a provocation and a threat.

The Sultan, his forces now supplemented by a contingent of Frankish troops, was already preparing an expedition against Nicaea when he received an unexpected visitor: the former Emperor Alexius III. Towards the end of 1204 Alexius had fallen into the hands of Boniface, in whose castle of Montferrat he had spent several years as a prisoner. In 1209 or 1210, however, he had been ransomed by his cousin Michael, Despot of Epirus, and had made his way to Iconium in the vague hope that the Sultan might help him recover his throne. Now Kaikosru, it need hardly be said, was not interested in replacing the Greek Emperor so much as in eliminating him altogether; on the other hand he immediately recognized Alexius as a useful pawn in the diplomatic game, enabling him to set himself up as champion of a legitimate ruler against a parvenu usurper.
With the ostensible aim of overthrowing Theodore and installing Alexius in his place, in the spring of 1211 he invaded Nicaean territory. The two sides - each of which had a contingent of Latin mercenaries at its core - were evenly matched, and there were several hard-fought though indecisive battles; but during the last, near Antioch on the Meander, the Sultan was unhorsed and killed - if Greek sources are to be believed, by the Emperor Theodore himself in single combat. The Seljuk army took to its heels; Alexius III was taken prisoner once again and dispatched to a monastery, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

The victory brought Theodore little territorial gain; but it eliminated his last Greek rival and - since Kaikosru's successor Kaikawus immediately came to terms - freed him at least temporarily from the Seljuk threat, enabling him to concentrate his forces exclusively against the

1 In his last campaigns Kalojan had killed as many Greeks as he had Latins, to the point where he proudly styled himself
Romaioctonos
('killer of the Romaioi', i.e., the Byzantines) on the analogy of Basil II
Bulgaroctonos.
Not surprisingly he was by now detested by the Greeks, who saw the date of his death - the
feast-day of St Demetrius of The
ssalonica - as a clear indication that he had really been killed by the saint himself. The fact remains that it was Kalojan alone who had saved the Nicaean Empire from destruction by Baldwin three years before, and who had thus made it possible for the Greeks to regain Constantinople half a century later.

Crusaders. Here, alas, he was less successful. On 15 October 1211 beside the Rhyndacus river his army suffered another defeat by Henry, who advanced to Pergamum and Nymphaeum; but the Latins, by now once again hard pressed by the Bulgars in their rear, proved unable to pursue their advantage. In late 1214 the rival Emperors concluded a treaty of peace at Nymphaeum: Henry would keep the north-west coast of Asia Minor as far south as Atramyttion (now Edremit); all the rest as far as the Seljuk frontier,
including the territories recentl
y conquered by the Latins, would go to Theodore.