Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (6 page)

Then, and only then, came the real tragedy. Despite all the depredations it had suffered, Rome still offered the Guiscard's men possibilities of plunder on a scale such as few of them had ever before experienced; and the entire city now fell victim to an orgy of rapine and pillage. For three days this continued unabated - until the inhabitants, able to bear it no longer, rose against their oppressors. Robert, for once taken by surprise, found himself surrounded. He was saved in the nick of time by his son Roger Borsa, who in an uncharacteristic burst of activity smashed his way through the furious crowds with a thousand men-at-arms to his father's rescue - but not before the Normans, now fighting for their lives, had set fire to the city. The Capitol and the Palatine were gutted; churches, palaces and ancient temples left empty shells. In the whole area between the Colosseum and the Lateran hardly a single building escaped the flames. When at last the smoke cleared away and such Roman leaders as remained alive had prostrated themselves before the Duke of Apulia with naked swords roped round their necks in token of surrender, their city lay empty, a picture of desolation and despair.

A few weeks later, Robert Guiscard returned to Greece. As Anna Comnena has occasion to point out, he was nothing if not tenacious. Though now sixty-eight, he seems to have been in no way discouraged at the prospect of starting his campaign all over again; and in the autumn of 1084 he was back, with Bohemund, his two other sons Roger and Guy, and a new fleet of 150 ships. At the outset, things could hardly have gone worse: bad weather delayed the vessels for two months at Butrinto, and when at last they were able to cross the straits to Corfu, they were set upon by a Venetian fleet and soundly beaten in pitched battle twice in three days. So severe were their losses that the Venetians sent back their pinnaces to the lagoon with news of the victory; but they had underestimated the Guiscard. Few of his ships were in fit condition to venture a third battle; but seeing the pinnaces disappear over the horizon and recognizing the opportunity of taking the enemy by surprise, he quickly summoned all those vessels that were somehow still afloat and flung them forward in a last onslaught.

He had calculated it perfectly. Not only were the Venetians unprepared; their heavier galleys, already emptied of ballast, stood so high in the water that when, in the
heat of the battl
e, their entire complements of soldiers and crew dashed to the same side of the deck, many of them capsized. (So, at least, writes Anna Comnena; though her story is hard indeed to reconcile with what we know of Venetian seamanship.) Anna reports 13,000 Venetian dead, together with 2,500 prisoners - on whose subsequent mutilations at the hands of their captors she dwells with that morbid pleasure that is one of her least attractive characteristics.
1
Corfu fell; and it was a generally happier and more hopeful army that settled down into its winter quarters on the mainland.

But in the course of the winter a new enemy appeared - one more deadly to the Guiscard's men than the Venetians and the Byzantines together. It was a raging epidemic - probably typhoid - and it struck without mercy. By spring five hundred Norman knights were dead, and a large proportion of the army effectively incapacitated. Yet even now Robert remained cheerful and confident. Of his immediate family only Bohemund had succumbed, and had been sent back to Bari to recuperate; and in the early summer, determined to get his men once again on the move, he dispatched Roger Borsa with an advance force to occupy Cephalonia. A few weeks later, he himself set off to join his son; but now, as he sailed southward, he felt the dreaded sickness upon him. By

1 Anna goes on to describe a fourth battle, in which she claims that the Venetians had their revenge; but there is no trace of such an engagement in the Venetian records, and since we know that Doge Selvo was deposed as a result of the Corfu catastrophe, it looks as though she is guilty of a particularly unscrupulous piece of wishful thinking.

the time his ship reached Cape Ather, the northernmost tip of the island, he was desperately ill. The vessel put in at the first safe anchorage, a little sheltered bay still called, in his memory, by the name of Phiscardo. Here, on 17 July 1085, he died, his faithful Sichelgaita beside him.

The past four years had seen the two greatest potentates of Europe -the Eastern and Western Emperors - fleeing at his approach, and one of the most redoubtable of medieval Popes rescued and restored by his hand. Had he lived another few months, he might well have achieved his ambitions; and Alexius Comnenus might have proved one of the more transitory - possibly even the last - of the Greek Emperors of Byzantium. With the Guiscard's death, the Empire was delivered from immediate danger. Immediately and inevitably, his sons and nephews plunged into quarrels over the inheritance and soon lost sight of the grand design that had dominated his last years. But they did not altogether ignore the new horizons that he had opened up to them. Henceforth we find the Normans of the South looking with increasingly envious eyes towards the East; and in only twelve years' time we shall find Robert's son Bohemund carving out for himself, at the Emperor's expense, the first Crusader principality of Outremer.

'The Empire was delivered from immediate danger': for anyone attempting to write its history, these are brave words. Byzantium was never safe for long. Her western neighbours were at the best of times unreliable, betraying her as they did time and time again; those to the east were almost invariably hostile — and were destined, one day, to deliver her death blow. More continually troublesome than either, however, over the centuries, were those who came from the north: the barbarian hordes - Goths and Huns, Avars and Slavs, Gepids and Bulgars, Magyars and Uzz - who descended in wave after wave from the steppes of Central Asia and who, if they never succeeded in capturing Constantinople, continued by their very existence to threaten it and seldom left the Emperors and their subjects altogether free from anxiety.

Now, with the temporary disappearance of the Normans from the scene, it was the turn of the Pechenegs. They were by no means new arrivals. For more than two hundred years they had been a force to be reckoned with; over that time they had proved themselves the most grasping (as well as the cruellest) of the tribes, and readers of the previous volume may remember how, in the middle of the ninth century, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus had warned his son Romanus to keep them happy at all costs with pacts, alliances, treaties of friendship and an endless stream of expensive gifts.
1
Recent Emperors, however, had ignored this advice, and the Pecheneg menace, aided and abetted by Bogomil
2
heretics in the eastern Balkans, had steadily increased. In the spring of 1087 a huge barbarian army, estimated by Anna at eighty thousand, invaded the Empire; three years later, after several desperate battles in which victories were scored on both sides, it stood within reach of Constantinople.

Nor were the Pechenegs and the Bogomils the only enemies with whom Alexius had to contend. The Turkish Emir of Smyrna, Chaka by name, had over the previous decade extended his power along the entire Aegean coast. He had lived for a year or more in Constantinople, where Nicephorus Botaneiates had finally granted him the tide of
protonobilis
simus;
but his ambitions, like those of Robert Guiscard before him, were directed at nothing less than the Byzantine throne. The Pecheneg invasion gave him just the opportunity he had been awaiting. For some time he had been preparing a fleet, and in the late autumn of 1090 he had little difficulty in capturing the key Byzantine islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Rhodes. Fortunately for Byzantium, Alexius too had been building up his navy; and early the following year an imperial squadron under the command of his kinsman Constantine Dalassenus drove back the Emir from the entrance to the Marmara. But Chaka was by no means beaten, and there is little doubt that he would have renewed his attempt had he not been murdered by his Sultan, Kilij Arslan, at a banquet in 1092.

Meanwhile the Pechenegs kept up the pressure on Constantinople. Alexius fought hard: he could hold them at bay, but with his chronic shortage of manpower it was impossible to drive them back to the lands from which they had come. And so, in desperation, he resorted to one of the oldest of Byzantine diplomatic tricks: to enlist the help of one tribe against another. It was a dangerous ploy, since there was always a risk that the two would join forces, and that the Empire would consequently find itself with two barbarian enemies instead of one; but his principal source of manpower had been lost at Manzikert and he had little choice. And so, just as Leo the Wise had called in the Magyars against Symeon of Bulgaria almost exactly two centuries before,
3
Alexius Comnenus now appealed to the Cumans.

1 See
Byzantium: The Apogee,
p. 16411.

1
The Bogomils were a ne
o-Manichacan, puritan sect who believed the material world to be the creation and dominion of the Devil. Originating in tenth-century Bulgaria, they had spread rapidly through the Balkans and parts of Asia Minor and were later to g
ive rise to the Albigensians (Ca
thars) of south-west France.

3 Sec
Byzantium: The Apogee,
p. 108.

The Cumans have already appeared in these pages under the name of Scythians, by which in former times they were more usually known.
1
A race of nomad warriors and cattle-breeders of Turkic origin, they had appeared from the East in the eleventh century and had settled in what is today the Ukraine. They had no fundamental quarrel with the Pechenegs — the two tribes had plundered Thrace together in 1087 and seem to have enjoyed it thoroughly - but Alexius made them an offer they could not refuse and they willingly answered his call. They arrived in the late spring; and on Monday, 28 April 1091 the two armies faced each other under a hill known as Levunium, near the mouth of the Maritsa river.

That evening the Emperor called his soldiers to prayer. 'At the moment', writes Anna,

when the sun set below the horizon, one could see the heavens lit up, not with the light of one sun, but with the gleam of many other stars, for everyone lit torches (or wax tapers, according to their means) and fixed them on the points of their spears. The prayers offered up by the army no doubt reached the very vault of heaven, or shall I say that they were borne aloft to the Lord God Himself?

They certainly seem to have been; for in the battle that was fought the next day the Pechenegs - whose women and children, as was the barbarian custom, had followed them to war - suffered a defeat so crushing that they were almost wiped out as a race. Anna goes further and states that they were totally annihilated; she exaggerates, but only a little. Some of the prisoners survived and were taken into imperial service; the vast majority - they are still said to have outnumbered their captors by thirty to one - perished in a general massacre.

Neither the imperial army nor Alexius Comnenus as its commander
2
emerges with much credit from the bloodbath of Levunium; the fact remains, however, that it was by far the most decisive victory to have been won by the Byzantine army in the field since the days of Basil II. Not only did it deliver the Empire for the next thirty years from the Pecheneg menace; it provided a healthy example for other tribes, together with a vitally necessary tonic for Byzantine morale. More important still,

1
A still more familiar appellation to many people might be that of Polovtsi, who captured and danced for - Prince Igor of Kiev in the old Russian folk talc and Borodin's opera.

2
Anna exonerates her father from any involvement in the massacre; but then she would, wouldn't she?

it secured the Emperor's own position. He had, it must be remembered, seized the throne by force. Many an ambitious young commander from any one of a dozen noble Byzantine families could have boasted as good a claim to it, and Alexius's obvious ability had in the past offered him small protection against the intrigues of jealous rivals. Now at last he had proved himself capable of restoring to Byzantium at least part of her former greatness. The
basileus
who, a few days after the battle, rode proudly through the Golden Gate of Constantinople and down the decorated streets to the Great Church of St Sophia - his subjects meanwhile cheering him to the echo — could look to the future, as never before in the ten years since his accession, with confidence and hope.

3

The First Crusade

[1091—1108]

They assembled from all sides, one after another, with arms and horses and all the panoply of war. Full of ardour and enthusiasm, they thronged every highway; and with these warriors came a host of civilians, outnumbering the grains of sand on the sea shore or the stars in the heavens, carrying palms in their hands and bearing crosses on their shoulders. There were women and children too, who had left their own countries. Like tributaries joining a river, they streamed from all directions towards us.

The Al
exiad,
X,
5

Some time towards the end of 1094, Alexius Comnenus received an embassy from Rome. Urban II had now been seven years on the pontifical throne, years during which he had worked hard to improve relations between Constantinople and the Holy See. Some efforts had already been made on both sides to re-establish contact after the ridiculous and quite unnecessary schism of 1054,' notably on the part of the Emperor Michael and Pope Gregory VII; but on hearing of Michael's deposition Gregory had summarily excommunicated the usurper Nice-phorus Botaneiates, and in 1081 he had extended the sentence to Alexius. It is doubtful whether the ban of the Church caused the
basileus
much concern - although he was a deeply religious man, he had scant respect for the Pope's authority in matters spiritual - but such a gesture hardly made for good relations, and his esteem for Gregory had sunk still further when he heard of his alliance with the hated Duke of Apulia. The Pope, meanwhile, had been similarly appalled to learn that Henry IV was in the pay of Alexius, and by the time of his death in 1085 relations between Rome and Constantinople were as bad as they had ever been.