The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (85 page)

T
HE EMPEROR OF
C
ONSTANTINOPLE
was facing a combination of Turkish attack and domestic revolt—both less theologically complicated than Henry IV’s problems, but equally damaging to royal power.

Romanos IV’s defeat at the Battle of Manzikert was matched, in the same year, by defeats in Italy. In 1071, while the Byzantine armies struggled in Asia Minor, Robert Guiscard and his Normans had conquered the last Byzantine strongholds in Italy. The empire of Constantinople now lay up against the Black Sea, pushed into smaller and smaller territory by the expanding kingdoms of the west and the swelling Turkish power in the east.

The new senior emperor Michael VII was bookish and self-absorbed and paid little attention. “Nothing pleased him more than reading books,” writes his tutor Michael Psellus with approval, but other chroniclers were less impressed: “While he spent his time on the useless pursuit of eloquence and wasted his energy on the composition of iambic and anapaestic verse (and they were very poor efforts indeed),” scoffed John Skylitzes, “he brought his empire to ruin.” In 1074, Michael VII’s uncle John Doukas led a rebellion against him; it was only quelled when Michael’s general Alexius Comnenus hired soldiers from the Seljuq Turks to beef up the sparse troops still loyal to the crowned emperor.
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This required Byzantium to come to some sort of treaty with the Turks—which was a dangerous act indeed.

In 1073, Alp Arslan had been murdered by a prisoner he was interrogating, and his rule over the Turks went to his son Malik Shah. Malik Shah, only eighteen, began his sultanate with Ghaznavids strong on his east, the sultan of Rum chafing for independence to the west, and Fatimid power reviving itself to the south. After losing the north of Syria to the Turks in 1070, the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt—which had been badly weakened by a six-year famine and mismanagement—had slowly begun to revive itself under the leadership of a general named Badr al-Jamali, who took control of the government in the name of the caliph and imposed a military dictatorship.
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Malik Shah fought hard to keep the Seljuq sultanate strong, and in most ways was triumphant. Necessity had forced Constantinople to suspend hostilities against the Turks; now Malik Shah threatened and tamed the sultan of Rum into temporary loyalty and reinforced the Ghaznavid border. Turkish armies, under the command of the general Atsiz ibn Abaq, pushed south all the way to Jerusalem, which up until now had been in the hands of the Fatimids of Egypt.

Atsiz and his soldiers laid siege to Jerusalem and forced the Fatimid defenders to surrender in 1073. Fatimid resistance in the city continued until 1077, but in that year Atsiz grew exasperated and massacred three thousand of its inhabitants—mostly Fatimid Arabs and Jews. This brought a final end to the Fatimid attempts to hold onto the city. It was now firmly under Malik Shah’s overlordship.
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In Constantinople, Michael VII was less successful. The army in Asia Minor grew exasperated with his weakness and proclaimed their general Nikephoros Botaneiates emperor at the city of Nicaea. Nikephoros marched towards Constantinople, and Michael VII, realizing that he could not muster enough support to resist the army, promptly abdicated and entered a monastery. He left his wife, Maria, behind, and when Nikephoros Botaneiates arrived in the city, he married Maria and was crowned emperor as Nikephoros III.
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This brought only more trouble, and it was trouble that stretched all the way west to Italy.

Before his abdication, Michael VII had promised his four-year-old son, Constantine, in marriage to the daughter of the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard, also known as Robert the Fox. This had been a desperate attempt by Michael VII to keep Guiscard from sailing east and attacking more Byzantine land after he had finished capturing the Byzantine territory in Italy. At the same time, Michael VII had put a large army under the command of his general Alexius Comnenus (the same general who had defeated his uncle John Doukas on his behalf) to prepare for a possible Norman invasion.

Now, against the wishes of his new wife, Nikephoros III disinherited her son and broke the betrothal to Guiscard’s daughter. Guiscard immediately began to gear up for a massive invasion in revenge, while the empress Maria—distraught over her son’s removal from the succession—appealed to the general Alexius to come and restore the little boy’s rights.

Alexius Comnenus was at this point a vigorous soldier of thirty, the most powerful man in the empire, and Nikephoros III, decades older, had counted on his support. When Alexius instead accepted Maria’s invitation and turned towards Constantinople, Nikephoros imitated his predecessor: he abdicated as soon as possible and got himself to a monastery before Alexius could enter the city with his soldiers. In 1081, Alexius was crowned emperor of Constantinople; less than a year later, Nikephoros died of old age in his monastery bed.

Alexius Comnenus kept faith with Maria and restored Constantine’s position as co-emperor; but, ignoring Robert Guiscard’s threats, he did not restore the Norman betrothal. Instead, he engaged his own young daughter Anna to the little boy, ensuring the succession for both Constantine and the Comnenus family.

This began a two-year war between the Normans of Italy, under Robert Guiscard’s command, and the Byzantine army. “It was love of power that inspired Robert and never let him rest,” wrote Alexius’s daughter Anna, who served as her father’s biographer. Anna is hardly an impartial witness, but there is no question that Guiscard hoped to add all of Byzantium to his empire. When he arrived at the Byzantine border, he had with him a monk who claimed to be the deposed Michael VII.

In Constantinople, it was widely believed that the man was an imposter, but Guiscard’s attacks continued. “Alexius knew that the Empire was almost at its last gasp,” Anna tells us. “The east was being horribly ravaged by the Turks; the west was in a bad condition, while Robert strained every nerve to put on the throne the pseudo-Michael who had taken refuge with him.” Alexius was an intelligent commander, but the Norman army was stronger; it pushed steadily forward into Byzantine territory. At the same time, Malik Shah was threatening to invade from the other side.
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Alexius needed help, and he turned to Henry IV of Germany.

Henry IV had spent the years between 1077 and 1081 putting down another revolt in Saxony. The duke of Swabia, Rudolf, had managed to get himself declared rival king by the German aristocrats in Saxony and Bavaria. Three years of civil war between king and anti-king had followed.

At first, Pope Gregory VII had announced his neutrality in the fight, but by 1080, Gregory VII had decided that Rudolf would be a better German king, much more likely to yield ultimate control of the church to the pope. At the celebration of Easter, he again excommunicated Henry IV and announced that Rudolf was the rightful king of Germany.
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This decision was so clearly political in nature that most of the German bishops—even those who had sided with the pope during the last clash with Henry IV—rejected the excommunication as unlawful. So did a number of the Italian bishops. In May of 1080, right after the Easter excommunication, Henry IV called his own synod. The loyal bishops called on Gregory VII to step down and elected the Italian archbishop Wibert of Ravenna to be pope in his place.

Henry IV planned to march down to Rome and install Wibert in St. Peter’s seat by force, but first he had to finish the civil war in his own kingdom. On October 14, his army was defeated by the rebels in Saxony; but in the fighting Rudolf was severely wounded, his right hand cut off. Two days later he died from his injuries, and the revolt against Henry IV fell apart.
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Henry spent a few more months mopping up the resistance—months that Robert Guiscard spent ravaging the Byzantine countryside. Desperate to rid himself of the Normans so that he could turn around and deal with the Turks, Alexius sent messengers to Henry IV, requesting him to move his army into Italy sooner rather than later; Henry’s invasion would force Robert to go back home and defend his Italian territory. “Although in other respects my affairs go well,” the emperor wrote to the German king, “to a very small degree they are in disarray and confusion because of the actions of Robert.” The casual wording was belied by the rest of the message: Alexius offered Henry IV the massive sum of 360,000 gold pieces to support the Italian campaign.
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Henry IV accepted, and in March of 1081 crossed over into Italy. Between 1081 and 1082 he attacked Rome three times, failing to breach the walls but coming closer and closer to conquest each time. Gregory VII sent desperate appeals to Robert Guiscard, over in Byzantium, but Guiscard was reluctant to abandon his invasion.

In his absence, Henry IV finally broke into the city of St. Peter. He entered Rome in June of 1083; Gregory VII walled himself up in a fortress on the west bank of the Tiber with his remaining supporters. For nearly a year, Henry IV worked to earn the loyalty of the Roman people, distributing gold liberally and slowly winning Gregory’s followers over to his side. By March of 1084, he was able to convince the Roman priests to support him in deposing Gregory. On Palm Sunday, March 24, Wibert was proclaimed the new pope; a week later, on Easter Sunday, he crowned Henry IV as Holy Roman Emperor.
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Henry was thirty-four years old and had spent nearly twenty years working towards this moment.
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Now Robert Guiscard finally and reluctantly returned to Italy, leaving his son Bohemund in charge of the Byzantine war. Henry IV heard of his approach and decided not to fight him. He and Wibert of Ravenna left Rome on May 21, three days before Guiscard’s arrival.

Guiscard marched into the city as a deliverer, and was instead forced to put down an immediate rebellion against his return, which he did with a fair amount of savagery. This restored the city to his control, but it made him so hated that he decided to retreat to the Norman lands in Italy, taking Gregory VII with him. The pope never returned to Rome; he died in 1085, on his deathbed absolving everyone he had excommunicated during his lifetime, “except Henry the so-called king and the archbishop of Ravenna.”
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Robert Guiscard, preparing to sail back to Byzantium (his son Bohemund had immediately started losing battles), died from a fever two months later. He was seventy years old and left behind a reputation for conquest that lasted for centuries. Two hundred years later, the poet Dante placed him in the sphere of Mars along with Charlemagne and other great commanders, and wrote of the Byzantine soldiers who

With Guiscard’s death, the serious threat to the western borders of Byzantium came to an end.

But the Turkish threat to the east continued. Malik Shah’s armies conquered Antioch, removing it from Byzantine control, and then pushed steadily into Asia Minor. As the Turks spread into Muslim land, they gradually adopted Islam; in the last years of his reign Malik Shah converted to the Shi’ite branch of the faith, the final step in making the Turks into a Muslim people.
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His death in 1092 did not bring an end to the Turkish threat, but it changed the Turkish alliance into a series of independent states. He left behind four sons and an ambitious brother, and as they fought over Malik Shah’s domain, they fractured it into pieces. The Sultanate of Rum broke free under Malik Shah’s former vassal, Kilij Arslan; Syria, Persia, Kirman (southern Persia), and Khorasan all separated from each other, each declaring itself a sovereign Turkish realm.

Seeing the opportunity to get back some of his conquered land in Asia Minor, Alexius Comnenus sent another message west, seeking more help for Byzantium. His old ally Henry IV was having difficulties: he was still king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, but the Lombards of northern Italy had rebelled against him, perhaps resenting the constant war Henry’s feud with the pope had inflicted on them. Henry IV’s declining power in Italy meant that his handpicked pope, Wibert of Ravenna, had also suffered from loss of authority; a new pope, Urban II, had been elevated in Rome in 1088.

83.1: Turkish Conquests

Henry IV had no energy to spare for Constantinople, and Wibert of Ravenna had no power, so Alexius sent his envoys to Urban II instead. They asked the pope to send Italian soldiers east to help Alexius push back the Turkish invasion. This was a relatively simple request—Alexius needed mercenaries—but Urban II transformed it into something new.

He was on a tour through Italy and Western Francia, designed to demonstrate that the pope’s authority—unlike the fractured authority of his predecessors—once again covered all of the Christian world.
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Now he would demonstrate that the authority of St. Peter’s heir stretched across the world.