Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (39 page)

1
Sanudo tells us that one unfortunate lady lost seven successive husbands on the field of battle -though whether she was Greek or Latin he does not reveal.

ecclesiastical union; he went on to offer active support in the Crusade to the Holy Land on which Urban still set his heart. The papal reply, dated 23 May 1264 and addressed 'to Palaeologus, Illustrious Emperor of the Greeks', was drafted in the same fulsome - occasionally almost unctuous

terms. Once again it was entrusted to Nicholas of Crotone, whom it named leader of a plenipotentiary papal legation that included two more Franciscans, Gerard of Prato and Raynerius of Sens.
1

It arrived in the high summer, and negotiations began immediately; but if the Pope had expected to dictate terms, he was quickly disappointed. The Emperor's representatives explained at the outset that they could not settle matters by themselves; they insisted on the contrary that all the questions at issue, both political and ecclesiastical, must first be discussed by a full council. The papal leg
ates had no choice but to agree
—a major concession in itself, and as it turned out a fatal one, since before such a council could be convened Urban died suddenly at Perugia, on 2 October 1264.

Even more than the return of Byzantium to the Latin fold, the chief preoccupation of Pope Urban during the last year of his life had been his arch-enemy, Manfred of Sicily. Their quarrel was not just a personal one: by now the age-old rivalry between the Papacy and the Western Empire had cut a great rift across the Italian political scene, polarizing itself into two opposite camps: the Guelfs - who were, roughly speaking, the papal party - and the Ghibellines, who supported and were supported by the Hohenstaufen. Nevertheless, Urban detested Manfred. In particular, he still bitterly resented the latter's seizure in 1258 of the Kingdom of Sicily (which included much of South Italy and now had its capital at Naples) from Manfred's six-year-old nephew Conradin, an action which had brought his dominions right up against the southern frontier of the Papal State. The Regno - as that Kingdom was generally called - was, by tradition, under papal suzerainty; and from the moment of Manfred's
coup d'etat
the Papacy had been looking for another, friendlier prince with whom to replace him. Several had been considered, including Edmund of Lancaster, son of Henry III of England; but the choice had finally fallen on Charles, Count of Anjou and Provence, the younger brother of King Louis of France.

1 What, we
may ask, of the four Franciscans who had been dispatched to Constantinople the previous year? Urban asked that they too should be included in the legation if they were still in the
city;
but they seem to have vanished without trace.

No two brothers could have been more different. Unlike the saintly Louis, Charles was the very archetype of the younger son who cannot forgive fate for the accident of his birth. Cold and cruel, self-seeking and consumed with ambition, he asked nothing better than to take over Manfred's Kingdom in the papal name. The new Pope, Clement IV -another Frenchman - completed the arrangements that Urban had begun; Charles formally accepted the offer; his wife (who fully shared his ambitions) pawned her jewels to pay for the expedition; Louis gave his reluctant consent; and at Whitsun 1265 the new King arrived in Rome. It was typical of Charles's megalomania that he should immediately have installed himself at the Lateran Palace. He was a natural autocrat, with an unshakeable belief in himself as the chosen instrument of the Almighty. Against his army of thirty thousand Crusaders — for Pope Clement had by now declared the war a Crusade - Manfred stood little chance. On 26 February 1266, outside Benevento, he went down fighting. Only after three days was his body discovered; denied by Charles a Christian burial, it was laid beneath the bridge at Benevento, with every soldier in the French army casting a stone on the cairn as he passed. Manfred's wife, Helena of Epirus, and his three young children were imprisoned at Nocera. Of the four, three never appeared again; one son was still there forty-three years later. Charles was not a man to take chances.

In 1268 he proved it more conclusively still. Manfred's nephew Conradin marched south from Germany in a last desperate attempt to save his family's inheritance. On 23 August Charles shattered his army at Tagliacozzo; Conradin himself was captured, subjected to a travesty of a trial, found guilty of treason and beheaded in the market square of Naples. He was just sixteen, and the last of the Hohenstaufen.

Tagliacozzo marked the supplanting of the Germans by the French as the rulers of South Italy. Now it was Charles and the Guelfs who were everywhere supreme, just as it had been Manfred and the Ghibellines a decade before. To Michael Palaeologus, closely watching developments from Constantinople, the change was distinctly unwelcome. Manfred had been trouble enough; Charles, he strongly suspected, would be far, far worse - and events were soon to prove him right. For the next sixteen years his struggle with the King of Sicily was to continue, a duel between titans that was to dominate the rest of his life.

Charles started as he meant to continue. He had not been a year on the throne before, by dint of some distinctly shady diplomatic business, he had acquired the island of Corfu and part of the coast of Epirus, a perfect springboard for any invasion of imperial territories in Greece or Macedonia; and in May
1
267, after a month of discussions at the papal court in Viterbo with Pope Clement, Prince William of Achaia and the deposed Emperor Baldwin — who had never given up hope of regaining his throne - he put his seal on two treaties which made his long-term intentions clearer still. The first provided for the marriage of William's daughter Isabella - who had been formerly intended for Andronicus Palaeologus — to Charles's son Philip of Anjou, and their inheritance of the principality on William's death. The second, amounting as it did to nothing less than a detailed exposition of Charles's plans for a restoration of the Latin Empire on the Bosphorus, deserves a short summary here.

The King of Sicily undertook that, within six or at the most seven years, he or his heirs would provide two thousand cavalry to fight for Baldwin. In return, Baldwin would cede to him suzerainty over the principality of Achaia; all the Aegean islands except Lesbos, Samos, Chios and Cos; one-third of the expected conquests, to exclude Constantinople and the four islands above-named but including Epirus, Albania and Serbia; the Kingdom of Thessalonica if Hugh, Duke of Burgundy (to whom Baldwin had given it in fief the previous year) failed to fulfil his obligations; and, finally, the imperial throne itself in the event of Baldwin and his son Philip of Courtenay dying without legal heirs. Meanwhile Venice would regain all her former rights in the Empire and, to seal the new alliance, Philip of Courtenay would marry Charles's daughter Beatrice as soon as she reached marriageable age.

It was, by any standards, an astonishing document. True, the King of Sicily did not succeed in laying direct claim to the imperial throne; Baldwin and Pope Clement (who was already becoming a little uneasy at the speed with which Charles was building up his position) would have seen to that. But it did immediately secure for him - in return for the vague promise of scarcely significant reinforcements, a long time in the future - what was in effect a small empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and one which would allow him to move against Constantinople equally easily by land and sea. No wonder Michael Palaeologus felt anxious when he heard the news. He too was now seriously threatened. He too, like Baldwin before him, might well find himself - if Charles of Anjou had his way - Emperor in a beleaguered city.

Although the death of Pope Urban had inevitably led to a suspension of negotiations on the union of the Churches, it was plain to Michael that after Benevento an improvement in hi
s relations with the Papacy was
more necessary than ever; and he took the earliest opportunity of reopening his correspondence with Rome. Clement IV, however, immediately showed himself to be a good deal less tractable than his predecessor, categorically rejecting a council of the kind the Greeks had proposed since, as he put it, 'the purity of the faith could not be cast into doubt'. Thus there could be no discussion of the
filioque
clause, nor of the use of leavened bread, nor of the all-important question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction - nor, in short, of any of the theological and liturgical differences that had separated the Eastern and the Western Churches for centuries past. Instead, Clement sent the Emperor the text of a 'confession of faith', which he insisted must be accepted unconditionally before any further progress could be made. His letter ended:

..
. With the opportunity afforded by this missive, we proclaim that neither are we wanting in justice (as we should not be) towards those who complain that they are oppressed by your Magnificence, nor shall we desist from pursuing this matter in other ways which the Lord may provide for the salvation of souls.

Whether or not the final clause accurately reflected the divine purpose of the Angevin army, the implied threat was clear enough.

Equally clear was the fact that if the Pope maintained this position there could be no question of Church union. The overwhelming majority of the Orthodox clergy were opposed to it in any case; if they were to be persuaded to accept it at all, it would certainly not be on the terms now proposed. Sensibly, Michael chose in his reply to ignore these altogether, and to concentrate instead on his promise to participate in a Crusade to the Holy Land - in which he also undertook to enlist the invaluable support of the King of Armenia. But Clement would not be mollified, and when he died in November 1268 the two sides were still as far apart as ever they had been.

Even an uncooperative Pope, however, was better than no Pope at all. Charles's influence was strong in the Curia, and for the next three years he succeeded in keeping the pontifical throne without an occupant, thus enabling himself to act as he liked towards the Byzantines - or, indeed, anyone else — without any restraint from Rome. By now, fortunately, Michael had acquired two allies. At the end of 1267 he had signed a new agreement with Genoa, by the terms of which he had welcomed back

1 The word - literally meaning 'and from the Son' - used to signify the Western belief that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father
and the Son
rather than directly and excl
usively from God the Father. See
Byzantium: The Apogee,
p. 85.

those Genoese who had been expelled after the Guercio incident, ceding to them the whole district of Galata on the further side of the Golden Horn.
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Then, in the first weeks of the following year, he signed another - with Genoa's arch-rival, Venice.

As early as 1264 Michael had sent ambassadors to the Rialto, and in 1265 he had approved a compact offering to Venice privileges which, if they did not quite equal those which she had formerly enjoyed, represented at least an immense improvement on the existing state of affairs. At the time the Venetians had refused to ratify; the Byzantine East was still in turmoil, the future of the Empire still uncertain, and they saw no point in committing themselves. Four years later, however, the situation had changed. During the interim, not only had the lack of a proper base in the Levant left them dangerously vulnerable to attacks by the Turkish and Albanian corsairs who infested the eastern Mediterranean; they were also gravely concerned at Charles's acquisition of Corfu and part of the Epirot coast, from which vital strong-points he was perfectly capable of blockading the entire Adriatic if he chose. Against these considerations, the vague undertakings of the second Treaty of Viterbo carried little weight. In November 1267 Doge Renier Zeno sent two of his most experienced diplomats to the Bosphorus with full powers to conclude a treaty, and on 4 April 1268 that treaty was signed - to be ratified in Venice less than three months later.

It was, admittedly, to remain in force for a mere five years; but during that time the Venetians promised non-aggression, the withholding of all help to the enemies of the Empire and the liberation of their Greek prisoners in Crete, Modone and Corone, the three principal bases remaining to them in Greek waters. In return, the Emperor undertook to respect Venetian settlements both there and elsewhere, and once more to allow Venetian merchants freedom to reside, travel and trade, without let or hindrance or the payment of duties, throughout his dominions. Two concessions only were missing: Venice's three-eighths share of city and Empire - though it had gradually become in practice more of a titular claim than a genuine economic benefit - and the exclusivity that she had previously enjoyed. For, Michael insisted, the Genoese would retain all their existing rights. The dangers of the old policy, by which

1 It has been suggested that Michael put the Genoese in Galata to avoid any repetition of the Guercio conspiracy. In fact, however, the district had been favoured by them throughout the days of the Latin Empire and even before. They certainly showed no dissatisfaction with the arrangement, and Galata continued to be predominandy Genoese until the Turkish conquest.

one of the republics was given full imperial preference at the expense of the other, had now been conclusively demonstrated. Henceforward there would be free competition between them - though they were specifically enjoined not to attack each other in the straits or the Black Sea - and Byzantium could profit by their rivalry without driving the less favoured party into the arms of its enemies.

But if Michael's military and diplomatic position was stronger than it had been at any time since the reconquest, that of his enemy was rapidly growing stronger still; for Charles of Anjou, now freed of all papal constraints, was openly preparing for war against the Greek Empire. Dockyards throughout the Regno were working overtime; food, money, troops, supplies of provisions of every kind were sent urgently to the Morea, which Charles intended to make the principal bridgehead of his expedition. To prevent leaks of strategic information, all commercial traffic was banned between Italy and Greece. Charles was also busy building up a network of alliances with the princes of central Europe: Bela IV of Hungary, Stephen Urosh I of Serbia and Constantine Tich of Bulgaria - whose wife Irene, sister of the blinded and captive John Lascaris, never allowed him to forget Michael's treatment of her brother.
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In his determination to leave nothing to chance, he even sent ambassadors to the Seljuk Sultan, the King of Armenia and the Mongol Khan; and in August 1269 he succeeded in concluding a commercial treaty with the imperial ally Genoa, thus confirming the furious Michael in his frequently-expressed opinion that the Genoese were not to be trusted. (A similar approach to Venice came to nothing.) Meanwhile the ex-Emperor Baldwin had signed a treaty with Theobald of Champagne, King of Navarre, promising him a quarter of all future conquests -though without prejudice to the agreements already made with Charles, the Duke of Burgundy or the Venetians. With virtually the whole of western and central Europe now ranged against him, the future of Michael Palaeologus and his Empire looked bleak indeed.