Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (41 page)

Or so at least it seemed.

Throughout that summer of 1274, all remained quiet on the Bosphorus; it was only with the return of the imperial envoys in the late autumn that clergy and people began to understand the full significance of what had occurred. The acknowledgement of papal primacy was bad enough, even though - as the Emperor constantly reminded them - the length and difficulty of the journey between Rome and Constantinople was enough to ensure that the Patriarchs would lose virtually nothing of their effective independence. When, he asked, would the Pope appear in Constantinople to take precedence over the Greek bishops, and how often would anyone cross so vast a sea to carry an appeal to Rome? But the betrayal — and in the eyes of many Byzantines, both clerical and secular, it was nothing less - went far deeper than that. Their Empire was, and had always been, a theocracy, their Emperor the Vice-Gerent of God on earth, Equal of the Apostles. Far more than the Patriarch, he symbolized the religious faith of his people. But he was not all-powerful. By what right, they demanded, had he consented to an alteration to the very cornerstone of their religion, the Orthodox creed itself? That creed had been slowly and painstakingly evolved by the seven great Ecumenical Councils of the Church; it could be properly amended only by another such council, at which all five Patriarchs must be present. Thus the Emperor had effectively ridden roughsh
od over the canon law, uncanoni
cally adopting a Western version of the
creed which was itself uncanoni
cal. In doing so, moreover, he had most surely given mortal offence to the Blessed Virgin, under whose special protection their city lay. Just seventy years earlier the people of Constantinople had forfeited that protection, with results that were still remembered by the entire adult population. What new tribulations must they now expect?

The Emperor's submission was also a bitter blow to their national pride. For centuries they had looked down on the West as being not only heretical but also crude and unsophisticated, barbaric and boorish; and the fifty-seven-year occupation of their city, during which they had been alternately bullied and patronized by a succession of semi-literate thugs, had given them no reason to change their opinions. Now, after only thirteen years of freedom, they saw themselves being harnessed once again to the Frankish yoke; and they were not prepared to submit without protest.

It seems to have been after a special service on 16 January 1275, at which the ceremony at Lyon was re-enacted in the chapel of the imperial palace, that the demonstrators first took to the streets; and feeling ran yet higher when the well-known unionist John Beccus - last encountered four years before when, as Chartophylax of St Sophia, he was one of his Emperor's chief emissaries to St Louis of France - was raised to the patriarchal throne. The Church was now more bitterly divided than at any time since the days of Photius over four centuries before; and the bitterness spread even as far as the imperial family itself, where the Emperor's sister Eulogia - who had by now taken the veil - showed herself so determined an opponent of her brother's policies that he was obliged to put her under arrest. Escaping soon afterwards, she fled to Bulgaria where she and her daughter Maria - who had married the Bulgar Tsar Constantine Tich as his second wife in 1272 - busied themselves planning an alliance with the Mamelukes of Egypt which, they hoped, would ultimately drive her brother from his throne.

This plan fortunately came to nothing; more worrying for the Emperor was the reaction of Nicephorus, ruler of Epirus - who had succeeded his father Michael a few years before - and his brother John the Bastard of Thessaly. These two, largely if not wholly for political reasons, made their territories the principal refuge of all those who continued to oppose the union. John indeed went further, setting himself up as a champion of Orthodoxy and later, on i May 1277, even summoning a 'synod' of fugitive monks to pronounce formal sentence of anathema on Emperor, Patriarch and Pope.

Had Michael Palaeologus for once misjudged the temper of his subjects? Perhaps he had, to some degree. Utterly convinced as he was that the action he had taken had been the only way to save the Empire from another potentially catastrophic Latin invasion, he had certainly hoped to induce them to take a similarly realistic view. But he had always known that he might fail to do so, in which case the consequences would simply have to be faced. As he saw the situation, he could not have acted otherwise than he did. For some weeks after the protests began in earnest, he was reluctant to inflict punishment upon the agitators; only when every attempt at persuasion failed did he reluctantly resort to force. Once his decision was taken, however, there were no half measures. Anti-unionists who refused to remain silent were imprisoned, exiled or blinded; others were tortured, yet others suffered confiscation of all their property. The monasteries, who headed the opposition, were treated with particular harshness: one dangerously voluble monk, Meletios by name, had his tongue cut out.

Union with Rome, by depriving the King of Sicily and the titular Latin Emperor, Philip of Courtenay — whose father Baldwin had died in 1273 — of any moral justification for their intended invasion, had temporarily saved the Greek Empire; it legitimized Michael's claim to Constantinople in the eyes of the West; it even eliminated papal opposition to his programme for finishing off the work he had started and clearing the last remnants of Latin occupation from the Balkan peninsula. But the cost, both to the Emperor and to his people, had been heavy indeed.

Long before the imperial envoys had even reached Lyon for the ceremony of union, their master's latest campaign in the Balkans was already under way; his troops had occupied the strategic port of Butrinto in Albania and the inland fortress of Berat, driving the Angevin army back to Durazzo and Avlona on the Adriatic. King Charles, seriously
alarmed, dispatched what reinforcements he could; but he was too fully occupied in Italy and Sicily fighting off the Genoese and their Ghibelline allies - who were making incessant raids on the Sicilian coastal towns, as well as those of Apulia and Calabria - to take any real offensive on his own account, and was obliged to accept severe losses in both men and territory. The following year the Emperor kept up the pressure, simultaneously launching a major attack on John the Bastard in Thessaly under the command of his brother, the Despot John Palaeologus, and sending a fleet of seventy-three ships to harass the Latins and intercept any aid that might be sent.

The Bastard, taken by surprise, found himself under siege in his castle of Neopatras; but he had been in tight corners before. One dark night he lowered himself by rope down the walls and, in the guise of a groom seeking a runaway horse, managed to pass unsuspected through the Greek camp. Three days later he reached Thebes, where the local ruler, Duke Jean I de la Roche, lent him three hundred horsemen. With these, hurrying back to Neopatras, he attacked the Greek army from behind. The Despot John did everything he could to rally his men, but panic seized them and they fled.

The effect of this victory - much enhanced by the courage and resourcefulness shown by the Bastard, who had not only beaten the imperial army but had also made it look extremely silly - was to put new heart into the Latin lords. Quickly collecting a number of Venetian vessels from Euboea and Crete and supplementing these with any others that they could find, they attacked the Greek fleet at Demetrias on the Gulf of Volos. At first the advantage seemed to be with the assailants: many of the Greek sailors were wounded, others were flung into the sea. Just in time, however, John the Despot arrived from Thessaly with a locally-gathered army;
1
and slowly the tide of battle turned. By evening nearly all the leaders of the Franks had been captured, and all but two of the Latin ships. Michael Palaeologus, when he heard the news of the two battles, made no secret of the fact that in his eyes the victory far outweighed the defeat. His brother the Despot John, however, took the opposite view. For him, not even his recent triumph could atone for the

1
It is hard to know exactly what happened at Demetrias. Gregoras insists that it was fought not on sea but on the shore, which would certainly make better sense of what follows. Another problem is that John is said to have heard of the battle while still at Ncopatras - i.e., within a day of that engagement - which would have given the Latins only a few hours in which to have got their navy together and launched their attack. But there is no doubt of the Greek victory, nor of its importance.

conduct of his army at Neopatras. No sooner was he back in Constantinople than he resigned his command and returned to civilian life, a sad and broken man. His natural successor would have been the
protostrator
1
Alexius Philanthropenus, who had commanded the fleet at Demetrias; but Alexius was still recovering from wounds sustained in the course of the battle, and the Emperor's choice fell instead on a renegade Italian whom we know only as Licario.

This man was, so far as we can gather, a member of a prominent Veronese family long resident on the island of Euboea - where, however, he had incurred the displeasure of the Latin rulers by an unseemly liaison with Felisa dalle Carceri, widow of one of them. In 1271 he had offered his services to the Empire. His first victory - the capture of the fortress of Karystos - had been rewarded by the grant of the whole of Euboea as an imperial fief, in return for a pledge of continued service with two hundred knights. In succeeding years he mopped up the entire island except the city of Chalkis, and also recovered a number of others: Skyros, Skopelos, Skiathos and Amorgos were captured from their Venetian lord Filippo Ghisi, who was sent back to Constantinople in chains; Ceos, Seriphos and Astipalaia followed soon after, as did San-torini and Therasia. Lemnos, thanks to the determination of its lord Paolo Navagaioso and his wife, surrendered only after a three-year siege.

The way now seemed clear for the final conquest of Euboea - of which only the capital, Chalkis, remained in Latin hands. A battle outside the walls resulted in the capture of one of the island's rulers, Felisa's brother Giberto da Verona, and of Jean de la Roche, Duke of Athens-Thebes; but before Licario could follow up his victory Jean's brother, Jacques de la Roche, Governor of Nauplia, arrived with a large army, while almost simultaneously came the news that the Byzantine army had suffered another serious defeat at the hands of John the Bastard. Chalkis, Licario decided, would have to wait. Returning to Constantinople with his prisoners, he was promoted by the Emperor to the rank of Grand Constable, commander of all the Latin mercenaries of the Empire — a post previously held by Michael himself. For Giberto da Verona, the shock proved too great: seeing one of the humblest of his erstwhile vassals arrayed in his sumptuous official robes and even whispering confidentially into the imperial ear, he died of apoplexy on the spot. Jean de la Roche was luckier; he was ransomed for 30,000 soldi, though he too died soon afterwards.

1
Technically, the commander of the vanguard and light cavalry.

As for Licario himself, his name vanishes from the chronicles as suddenly as it appears. There is no mention of his death - as there surely would have been had he been killed in battle - or of any disgrace; we can only assume that he too died of natural causes, probably in Constantinople. He never lived to capture Chalkis, or to assume over his native island the dominion that was rightly his; he deserves mention in these pages, however, as the most brilliant naval commander of his day and as one of the protagonists in the long struggle of Michael Palaeologus to regain his Balkan Empire.

This continuing warfare in the Balkans and the Aegean was a source of genuine sorrow to Pope Gregory; but he was enough of a realist to know that he could not prevent it, and in 127 5 he did at least succeed in arranging a year's truce between Michael Palaeologus and Charles of Anjou, thereby - as he hoped - allowing both of them time in which to consider the only military operation to which he would give his blessing: a new Crusade. It comes as something of a surprise to read that at this point Michael proposed that the Crusading armies, instead of coming by sea, should follow the route of the First Crusade - across the Balkans to Constantinople and then, once over the Bosphorus, through Asia Minor into Syria and Palestine. Such a plan sounds dangerous indeed. It would, apart from anything else, have involved a serious risk that the Latins might attempt another attack on Constantinople. True, it might also have led to the reconquest of Anatolia from the Turks and Mongols; but even if this proved possible, who was to guarantee that the recovered lands would be returned to their rightful suzerain? The thought of still more Latin princelings strutting about on imperial territory can have given Michael no pleasure at all.

On the other hand, if the Crusaders were coming in any event, was it not better that they should be put to good use? Here at least was a chance of ridding Anatolia once and for all of the infidel; when would there ever be another? And had not his great-great-great-great-grandfather Alexius Comnenus used the armies of the First Crusade in a similar way, with considerable success? Michael must have thought long and hard before making his proposal. Pope Gregory, however, was immediately interested. The idea of recovering the great Christian cities - even Antioch itself - could not have failed to appeal to him; this way, too, the armies would be spared the dangers of a long and uncomfortable sea voyage. Such was his enthusiasm that he even suggested a personal meeting with the Emperor as soon a
s possible after Easter 1276 in
Brindisi - or, if Michael hesitated (as well he might) to set foot in the Regno, across the Adriatic at Avlona.