The History of the Renaissance World (38 page)

But at Henry’s death in 1216, the crown of Constantinople was tossed into the air. His brother-in-law Peter claimed the throne; but Peter was in Western Francia, and as he journeyed towards his new capital city, he was waylaid. Young Michael of Epirus had died the year before; the Despotate was now ruled by his ambitious half brother, Theodore Comnenus Ducas. Theodore hoped to challenge the Latin Empire for control of the lands near the Black Sea, and when he learned that the new Latin Emperor was attempting to pass through his lands on the way to Constantinople, he ordered Peter taken prisoner.

Like Baldwin in the hands of the Bulgarians, Peter disappeared into the shadows; no one knew how or where he died. His wife Yolanda, who had traveled ahead of her husband, ruled as his regent (the “Latin Empress Consort of Constantinople”) until her own death in 1219, aged forty-four, mother of ten.

No one wanted to be the next emperor.

The shrunken, leaderless, beleaguered Latin Empire was no longer the prize it had once been. For nine hundred years, since Constantine had chosen the city on the Bosphorus as his own, Constantinople had been a glittering treasure: besieged, desired, aspired to. Now no one could be found to take its throne. Yolanda and Peter’s oldest son, Philip, was happily ensconced in Western Francia and refused to leave it. The title was offered instead to the couple’s second son, Robert of Courtenay; and after two years of stalling and delay, he finally accepted. He arrived at his new kingdom in 1221, to an underwhelmed subject population: “Robert dealt with affairs rather feebly,” says George Akropolites.
⁹

Meanwhile, over in the Empire of Nicaea, Theodore Lascaris was prospering. He had fought off an attack from the Sultanate of Rum, and in the climactic struggle had himself met the sultan on the battlefield, and killed him with his own sword. He also had added Paphlagonia to his dominions and annexed part of the Empire of Trebizond, enlarging Nicaea further. The senior churchman in his empire, the Patriarch of Nicaea, had begun to act as the head of the Greek church, taking it on himself to consecrate the Archbishop of Serbia with his own hands (the prerogative of pope or patriarch). What remained of Greek culture seemed, more and more, to be centered in Nicaea. It was, in the words of the contemporary Greek monk Michael Acominatus, a new “capital, hurled by the barbarian inundation, out of the walls of Byzantium to the shores of Asia,” a “miserable fragment” that had survived and prospered thanks to Theodore Lascaris himself. “You ought to be called forever the new builder and peopler of the city of Constantine,” Acominatus wrote, “. . . a savior and universal liberator . . . No one of the emperors who reigned over Constantinople I consider equal to you.”
¹⁰

In 1222, the year after the ineffectual Robert’s arrival in Constantinople, Theodore Lascaris died, not yet aged fifty. He left the enlarged Empire of Nicaea to his son-in-law John III Vatatzes.

31.1 Coin of John III, showing the seated Christ on one side and John with the Virgin Mary on the other.
Credit: © 2012 PBJI Ancient Coins

Like Henry of Constantinople, John was an energetic and competent soldier, a good strategist, and an ambitious man. In 1224, he captured most of the Latin Empire’s land south of the Sea of Marmara; and by 1225, Robert was begging him for a peace. The treaty the two emperors swore out left nothing to Robert but the city of Constantinople itself.

John III had barely begun his conquests; in the decades to come, he would fight against Epirus and Thessalonica as well as the Latin Empire. But like his father-in-law, he did so in the name of the true Constantinople. The coins he minted for himself showed, clearly, his place in the cosmos; on one side, the seated figure of Christ; on the other, John III and the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, clasping hands over the scepter of Nicaea.
¹¹

*
The split between the western and eastern branches of the Christian church is covered in Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
, pp. 584–595.

*
Despot
was the title often given, in Byzantium, to a high official who was also heir presumptive to the imperial throne; a
despotate
was the land ruled by the heir.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The First Delhi Sultanate

Between 1206 and 1236,
the Muslim kingdom in northern India asserts itself against Hindus,
but cannot survive the leadership of a woman

I
N
1202, the Muslim Ghurids had advanced into the Ganges valley, pushing the Sena into oblivion, welcomed by the people who had found the strict Hinduism of the Sena kings distasteful. The Ghurid sultan, Ghiyas ad-Din Ghuri, had only months to cherish his victory. He died of a sudden illness in Herat, back west of the Himalayas, leaving his brother Muhammad at the head of the brand-new Ghurid empire.

Muhammad Ghuri, deputized by Ghiyas to rule the Indian territories, had always been loyal to his older brother; now he was rewarded with the Ghurid crown. This was not good news for Ghiyas’s son Mahmud, who had expected to take over his father’s throne. Instead, Muhammad made his nephew deputy ruler of the western territories only. Mahmud was known for his love of wine and women, not for his skill as a governor, and Muhammad Ghuri was inclined to reward talent over blood. He had no children. Instead, the
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
tells us, he “purchased a number of Turkish slaves, and greatly valued them all, and raised them to competence and wealth.” Those slaves who served him well as soldiers were rewarded with deputy governorships of their own, so that Muhammad’s empire was ruled, under his watchful eye, by a network of nephews, cousins, and Turkish warriors who had begun their careers in slavery: the
mamluks
.
¹

“One obedient slave is better than three hundred sons,” an eleventh-century sultan had written, “for the latter desire their father’s death, the former his master’s glory.” The reliance of Islamic rulers on Turkish slave soldiers had been growing, over the previous decades. Young men bought at slave markets were placed in regiments, trained as soldiers, and separated from their old lives; given new names, new identities, cut off from all ties except those between slave and master. This dependence created loyalty; the master was the slave soldier’s employer, protector, and champion.
²

When the mamluks converted to Islam—as they almost always did, once they were placed in a world where Islam was all they knew—they were set free; Islamic law forbade Muslims to keep each other in slavery. Highly skilled, guaranteed security if they stayed, mamluks generally remained on in the service of their ex-master. They almost always became part of the most elite corps; the invention of the stirrup meant that mounted soldiers were now the most powerful fighting force in the world; cavalry charges had become vital for victory, and the Turkish soldiers had grown up on horseback.

Muhammad Ghuri had placed mamluks in powerful governing positions over his conquered cities. When he died unexpectedly, the mamluks reshaped India.

In 1206, he had just put down a rebellion in the Punjab and was traveling back to Lahore, in the Ghurid heartland. Camping beside the Indus during the night, he was asleep when an assassin emerged from the dark (or, in some accounts, from underneath the surface of the river), stabbed him to death, and disappeared. He had been king of the Ghurids for less than four years.

The
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
attributes the murder to “a disciple of the Mulahidah.”
Mulahidah
is the Persian name for a particular sect of Shi’ite Muslims
*
much feared (and grudgingly admired) by the Crusaders, who had another name for them: the Assassins. According to twelfth-century travelers’ tales, the Mulahidah lived in the impregnable fortress of Alamut, in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea, and swore absolute allegiance to a leader known as the Elder, or the Old Man. If he ordered them to kill his enemies, they went out, dagger in hand, to fulfill the command unquestioningly. “They believe,” writes the Crusader Jean de Joinville, in his
Chronicle of the Crusade
, “that when a man dies for his lord, or in any good cause, his soul goes into another body, better and more comfortable; and for this reason the Assassins are not greatly concerned if they are killed when carrying out the commands of the Old Man of the Mountain.”
³

This was colorful but not exactly accurate. The Mulahidah, better known to Western historians as the Nizari, had gathered, right at the end of the eleventh century, behind a charismatic Shi’ite leader named Hasan Sabbah, who hoped to lead a Muslim opposition against the advancing Turks. Sabbah had seized the mountain castle of Alamut around 1090, and with his followers had strengthened its defenses and then captured other nearby castles as well. By 1150, Sabbah had been followed by two successors, each of whom did the same, and his sect had established itself as a small mountain state, firmly opposed to Turkish power.

32.1 Ruins of the mountain fortress of Alamut.
Credit: © Getty Images

32.1 The Nizari

One of Sabbah’s political strategies had been the strategic murder, carried out by young devotees of the Nizari cause called
fidaiyan
(singular
fidawi
), of prominent Turkish leaders. The
fidaiyan
, not afraid to sacrifice their lives on their missions, were often successful, and increasingly feared; so much so that almost every twelfth-century assassination was chalked up to them by their Turkish and Sunni Muslim enemies. It was, in fact, hostile Sunni historians who first suggested that the
fidaiyan
were drugged with hashish into willingness to carry out their suicide missions.
Hashishin
became a derogatory Sunni term for the
fidaiyan
(who probably used no hashish at all); Crusader accounts picked up the term and Latinized it into
Assassin
; and thus the English language gained a new word for political killings,
assassination
.
⁴