DEATH AND RIVALRY had disorganized the leadership of Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century, creating a situation that was full of opportunity for the fanatically ambitious new pope, Innocent III. In 1199 Richard of England had been killed in battle by a random arrow. His deplorable brother John claimed the throne but was opposed by Richard’s nephew Arthur, who had the support of King Philip Augustus of France. The conflict could well lead to an English civil war, which was all right with Philip.
The thirty-two-year-old Emperor Henry VI had died at his Sicilian port of Messina, and the great Crusade he was planning to launch from that city died with him. His widow Constance, heiress to the kingdom of Sicily, entrusted the care of their little son to Innocent III and entrusted her island kingdom to him as well. There was civil war in Germany, where Henry’s brother, Philip of Swabia, claimed the right to be the new emperor. Innocent III disagreed and gave the imperial crown to Otto of Brunswick, who was more likely to do what he was told. Within the year, Otto refused to obey orders from the pope and was excommunicated from the Church and deposed from his throne.
Pope Innocent III was emerging as the strong man of Europe, which was very much in line with his dedication to establish papal supremacy over the secular world once and for all. He was pleased when the count of Champagne wrote to him expressing his desire to organize a new Crusade. Innocent was very much in favor, so long as it was a Crusade not led by a king or emperor. Then it could be a papal Crusade, commanded by a legate or noble who would take his orders directly from the pope.
Innocent’s principal agent to promote the French Crusade was the fiery priest Fulk of Neuilly, renowned for his oratorical powers and his fearlessness. In his sermons he did not flinch before the highest nobility, as he had proven when he had thundered a demand to Richard that he give up his “daughters”: Pride, Greed, and Lust. (Fulk could only seethe with anger at the way the English king agreed to give them up. Richard suggested that he would marry off his Pride to the Knights Templar, his Greed to the Cistercians, and his Lust to the bishops. They would all be perfect matches.)
An impressive array of nobles took the crusading vow: Geoffrey de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne and the chronicler of the coming Crusade; Simon de Montfort, who would one day lead a bloody Crusade against heretics in France; and Boniface of Montferrat, brother of that Conrad who had been murdered just before he was to have been crowned king of Jerusalem. The acknowledged military commander of the Crusade, with full papal approval, was Tibald, count of Champagne and Brie.
The leaders met to plan their strategy. They were reminded that King Richard, as well as others who had been to the Holy Land, had declared that Egypt was the soft underbelly of the Muslim empire. It was good logistically because the vital roles of transportation and supply could be filled by Christian ships, with little or no overland travel. It was unanimously agreed that Egypt would be the opening target. A party of six nobles under Geoffrey de Villehardouin was sent to negotiate with the Venetian Republic, the only possible source for sufficient ships to carry the multinational army that would leave the following year.
Before the arrangements could be made, Count Tibald died. The nobles decided that his successor as commander of the Crusade should be Boniface of Montferrat, not only because of his experience at war, but also because he was the uncle of Princess Maria of Montferrat, the heiress to the crown of Jerusalem. That status should guarantee a good working relationship for him with the resident barons of the Holy Land. A month after Tibald’s death in April 1201, the Crusaders reached agreement with Venice.
The Grand Council of Venice agreed that by the end of June 1202 they would provide transportation for forty-five hundred knights, nine thousand esquires and sergeants, twenty thousand foot soldiers, and twenty thousand horses. They would provide them all with food enough for one year. In addition, Venice would supply fifty war galleys, manned with Venetian troops, to protect the fleet and to fight alongside the Crusaders in Egypt. In payment, they would receive eighty-five thousand silver marks and 50 percent of all loot and land taken. The word went out to all who had taken the Crusader vow to gather at Venice by June of the following year.
Fate sent Boniface of Montferrat to spend the winter with his friend Philip of Swabia in Germany. The conversation turned frequently to Constantinople, because Philip’s wife was the Byzantine princess Irene Angelina. The deposed emperor Isaac Angelus, living with burned-out eyes in a dank dungeon, was her father. She had had little news of her younger brother Alexius, only that he was not imprisoned but living under house arrest with his uncle, Alexius III, who had seized the throne for himself.
It was a happy reunion when her brother Alexius actually came to Irene Angelina in Germany. Friends had helped the boy to stow away in a ship which had brought him to Sicily, and from there more friends had helped him get to his sister. With the heir to the imperial throne of Byzantium as their house guest and a great army assembling to go to the east, Philip and Boniface began to get ideas. They both hated the Greeks, and this was an opportunity too good to pass up. They began to put together a plan.
The Venetians were busy with intrigues of their own, an activity at which they were acknowledged experts. By no means did they want a Crusade against Egypt, which would cut off their lucrative trading centers there. If it is strange to think of a government that could contract to deliver an army to a country, then assure that country’s rulers that the army would never arrive, something must be understood about Venice. It was all business.
From the days centuries earlier when they had been driven to seek the protection of the islands and lagoons of the Adriatic Sea, the Venetians had looked more to the sea than to the land. Their economy was not based on farming and serfs, like the feudal economy that prevailed at the time, but on trading. Ultimately their government was made up entirely of the heads of great merchant families, who formed the Grand Council. The Council elected a duke (called a doge in the Venetian tongue) to serve for life, but not as an autocrat: The Venetians feared nothing more than one man trying to take over their city-state. They appointed a Council of Three to watch the doge. He could not receive an ambassador or even a messenger while he was alone, nor could he write or receive a letter privately. Discipline was fierce, and bronze heads of lions were placed throughout the city, into the open mouths of which anonymous accusations could be dropped in the black of night by any citizen who had any transgression to report. A galley hulk used to train those sentenced to be chained to the oars was moved to the Grand Canal right in front of the ducal palace, so that the whole world could see and be warned of the price of breaking the laws set by the Grand Council.
The council had one consistent goal in its lawmaking: to promote, protect, and expand trade. In the beginning the Venetians had produced little in the way of trade goods, counting primarily on selling dried fish and other products of the sea. Then they learned of the demand for healthy slaves. The first great surge in their economy came with raids on the Dalmatian coast, across the Adriatic, for prisoners to sell as slaves in North Africa. There they could buy products to bring home on their ships, to be traded overland into the continent of Europe. So many thousands of Slavs were taken for the slave trade that the word slav created the word “slave.”
The other Italian trading centers of Pisa, Genoa, and Amalfi, on the western side of Italy, tended in the beginning to trade in the western Mediterranean, so the Venetians concentrated on the opposite end of the sea. where goods came in all the way from an unknown world in the east. There wasn’t much in Europe that the easterners wanted, so Venice turned to the manufacture of trade goods, especially glass. When that led to the discovery of how to silver the glass to make a mirror, they had a valuable monopoly and passed laws to protect it. Had the United States existed then and made the discovery, it would have published the formulas and provided scholarships and transportation costs so that foreign students could come to learn how to make mirrors, but the Venetians had a different view of proprietary technology. They passed a law decreeing that death would be the fate of anyone who told an unauthorized person the secret of how to make a silvered mirror. Legend says that at one point a family of mirror-makers decided to leave to make a greater fortune elsewhere. The council sent agents, who followed them all the way to the Atlantic coast, to kill them where they were found.
The Venetian attitude toward religion was equally pragmatic. When the Venetians felt that they had outgrown their obscure patron saint, St. Theodore, they decided that in their power and glory they deserved no saint less than an apostle. They mounted a commando-style raid on Alexandria and stole the remains of St. Mark. Now that Venice possessed his bones, no one could doubt that St. Mark, San Marco, was the city’s patron saint. They built the magnificent San Marco cathedral to hold the saint’s tomb, the majestic square in front of it became the Piazza San Marco, and the Lion of St. Mark became the symbol of Venetian power.
The business of Venice came before the business of God, an attitude perhaps best summed up in the words of a doge on trial. It was the custom in Venice to conduct formal impeachment proceedings against any doge who lost a military campaign or a major battle. When one of the Grimani doges found himself in that situation, he pleaded in his own defense, “Does not my son, Cardinal Grimani, pass on to us all of the secrets of the Holy See so that we can look to our own best interests?”
That was the government that the Fourth Crusade planned to reply upon. The French nobles didn’t event suspect that while they were negotiating the transport of their army to Egypt, Venetian envoys were in Cairo negotiating more favorable trade concessions for themselves. The Crusade agreement was signed in April 1202, just two months before the Crusaders were to launch their Egyptian campaign, and only after the Venetians had assured the emissaries of Sultan al-Adil that Venice would participate in no aggression against Egypt.
In June the Crusaders were assembled, but not their money. Each man was to pay his own share, but many had spent all their funds getting to Venice. Appeals were made to the wealthier barons, some of whom contributed additional funds and even gold and silver objects to be melted down, but they could scrape together no more than fifty thousand marks. The Venetians had built the ships and accumulated the food stores, but would part with nothing until they were paid in full. The payment was still thirty-five thousand marks short.
For the three months the Crusaders camped on an island in the Venetian lagoon, hard pressed to come up with money with which to buy their daily food from their Venetian hosts. The Crusader nobles negotiated with the elderly doge Enrico Dandolo, who was especially interested in the thoughts of Boniface of Montferrat. The doge disliked the Greeks as much as Boniface did. He had suffered a face wound in a street fight in the Byzantine capital that had almost totally deprived him of his sight. Alexius III had taken a hard line with the Venetian traders, who depended upon their Greek trading stations to get furs from Russia and silk from the caravans that came overland from China. And now Boniface was playing host to the rightful heir, whose father had been deposed and blinded by Alexius III. Interesting.
In September 1202 the doge revealed the first part of his plan. The Venetians had lost the fortified city of Zara in their war with the king of Hungary over control of the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. If the Crusaders would recover Zara for Venice, the Venetians would postpone the collection of the thirty-five thousand marks due them until it could be paid from the loot of future conquests. The Crusaders argued bitterly over this proposed attack on fellow Christians but decided that they had no choice. In November the Crusader flotilla embarked on the two-day cruise down the Adriatic to Zara. The city resisted but finally surrendered after five days of fierce fighting. Because Zara had resisted and had caused Crusader casualties, the crusading army and the Venetian navy felt free to help themselves to anything of value. The battle was a decided economic success.
It was not regarded as a success in Rome, where the pope bellowed in rage that his crusading army had attacked a Christian city. He excommunicated everyone involved, but he released the Crusaders when he learned how they had been pressured into the attack by the Venetians. The doge paid no attention to the pope’s condemnation. Venice had profited.
As the expedition settled down in Zara for the winter, the master plan unfolded. Boniface received a message from young Alexius and Philip of Swabia that contained a formal offer.
If the Crusade would go to Constantinople to help Alexius regain the throne, the young prince would assure the success of the invasion of Egypt. First, he would pay the Crusader debt to Venice. Then he would fortify the Crusader army with ten thousand Byzantine soldiers. Once the war was won, he would maintain five hundred mounted men in the Holy Land to help the Christians to hold on to their gains. Most important of all, he would guarantee that the Greek Church would universally accept the primacy of the Roman Church, in full recognition of the supremacy of the pope. Some of the Crusaders objected to attacking Christians, but the Venetians were unanimous in their support of the plan, probably because it had been worked out with their doge in advance.
At first the pope was confused, but finally the end won out over the means. His personal control over the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine empire was too great a prize to be cast aside.
In the Holy Land, the news of the embarkation of the great Crusade had excited the local barons and the military orders, who prepared for its coming. Gilbert Erail, the Templar grand master, had died in 1201, and a career Templar, Philip de Plessiez, had been elected the thirteenth grand master. His priorities had quickly changed when a series of strong earthquakes hit Syria and the Holy Land. Men and funds that had been gathered by the Templars for the coming war in Egypt now had to be used to rebuild collapsed buildings and fallen walls and towers. Fortunately, the Muslims had the same problems, so that the rebuilding necessitated an unwritten truce.
Young Alexius arrived at Zara at the end of April 1203, and the crusading fleet sailed for Constantinople. With supply stops along the way, the fleet arrived before the Byzantine capital two months later. The Crusaders were awed by the magnificent walls and towers of the largest city they had ever seen. It had never been conquered by an enemy, but the Crusade had arrived at a good time. Alexius III had been so occupied with the politics of his palace revolution that he had neglected the defenses of the city. Almost all of the soldiers inside were mercenaries fighting for money, not in defense of their homes.
After skirmishes at nearby towns, the Venetians managed to break the chain that barred the harbor, and the fleet sailed in. Alexius III didn’t know what would happen next and didn’t wait to find out. He scooped up all of the precious gems and gold he could quickly lay his hands on and fled the city.
The officers of the court took the sightless Isaac Angelus from his filthy dungeon, bathed him, draped him in jeweled imperial robes, and sat him on the throne. They sent word to the Crusaders that Isaac’s crown had been restored, so there was no longer any need for war. The problem was that the Crusaders’ contract was with the young prince, not with his father the emperor. The Crusaders proposed that Isaac agree to the arrangement made with Alexius and, further, that Alexius be crowned a co-emperor with his blind father. It was an extraordinary suggestion, but acceptable if it prevented all-out war. Alexius IV was made co-emperor of Byzantium in a ceremony in the lofty cathedral of St. Sophia on August 1.
Now came the time for Alexius IV to keep his promises, which he found impossible to do. The Greek patriarchs and the people had no intention of recognizing the supremacy of the pope in Rome. To try to force them could easily lead to civil war. The political turmoil before and after the overthrow of Isaac Angelus had led to the rape of the imperial treasury, so there was not enough money to make the promised cash payments. None of his subjects liked the solutions Alexius came up with, as he forced new taxes on the people and sent parties of soldiers to seize gold and silver objects from the churches. These were not just the wealth of the Church, but religious symbols important to the popular devotions.
For the rest of the year Alexius IV struggled to raise the money he needed, while crusading soldiers wandered through the city drinking, whoring, and brawling. A band of French soldiers set fire to a mosque that was used by the local Muslims, and the fire spread to wipe out one whole section of the city.
In Byzantium it was only natural that antigovernment plots would be formed, and the strongest of them was led by Alexius Marzuphlus, son-in-law of the deposed Alexius III. He organized a riot against the Crusaders in January 1204. A few weeks later an embassy of the Crusaders was attacked by the crowd as they left the imperial palace.
A mob of Byzantine citizens crowded into St. Sophia to declare that Alexius IV was deposed. As their new emperor they proclaimed a Greek nobleman named Nicholas Canabus. Marzuphlus had no intention of letting someone else get the rewards of the revolt he had set in motion, so he gathered a band of armed followers and stormed into the imperial palace. Nicholas Canabus was dragged off to prison. So was young Alexius IV, although to a different fate. An executioner was sent to his dungeon to strangle the young co-emperor to death with a bowstring. His father, the blind Isaac Angelus, was savagely beaten and thrown into another dungeon, where he died a few days later. The city gates were closed and barred.
The Crusaders camped outside the city now knew that they had no choice but to storm the walls of Constantinople. As their anger grew, so did their confidence, and they called a council to choose their own Catholic emperor to rule when the city would be theirs. The Venetians had just one condition: If the emperor was to be a Frankish Crusader, the patriarch of the Roman Church must be a Venetian. Then they got down to the serious business of dividing up the anticipated spoils. The imperial palace, of course, must go to the new emperor, who would also have 25 percent of the capital city and the nation. The other 75 percent of the empire would be divided equally between the Crusaders and the Venetians. No mention was made of any Crusade to Egypt or the Holy Land.
The attack began on April 6, 1204, and lasted for just six days, with final victory coming from a unique Venetian invention and a fire that many historians believe was set by Venetian agents in the city. The Crusaders had made the land attack, while the Venetians took their ships to a point where the outer wall of the city came right to the water. Using spars, they built narrow bridges. One end of a bridge was raised to the top of a ship’s mast, then the other was raised and swung to the top of the wall. Knights on foot climbed ladders up the masts, then moved over the bridges, while cross-bowmen tried to reduce the Greek resistance on the wall in front of them. Once the Venetians had control of a small section of the wall, other men rushed over the narrow bridges to join them, to widen their position on the outer wall. The defenders fell back to the inner wall, but someone behind them set the nearby buildings on fire. Caught between the Venetians and the fire the defenders fled, and soon gates were opened to the Crusader army. The city was theirs.
All seemed in reasonably good order that night as the Venetian doge and the Crusader nobles gathered in the imperial palace. Then the explosive announcement was made that as a reward for its hardships and its victory, the army would have three days to do as it wished with the city. What the soldiers wished was drunkenness, desecration, thievery, rape, and murder.
Constantinople was the richest city in the world. It had an accumulation of nine hundred years of art treasures, built on a base of art and craftsmanship from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Venetians, knowing this, organized an orderly plunder of items they could take back to glorify their city. The army, with no such motivation, treated art like trash, smashing statues, slashing paintings, and breaking exquisite icons. Books beyond counting were destroyed, and priceless illustrated manuscripts found an unintended use as toilet paper. No palace, church, business, or house was left untouched. The wine was drunk, the women were raped. Convents were treated as cost-free houses of prostitution. Any nun who fought back, or any nun who was too old to interest even drunken soldiers, was killed and her body thrown out into the street. The butchery was universal: Those who did not resist were killed as quickly as those who did. If a soldier found a mother clutching her child, it was simply a matter of deciding which one to kill first.
The monumental cathedral of St. Sophia was an architectural wonder, the largest house of God in the world. Now it became the largest tavern in the world. Everything of value was stolen or destroyed, and the wine flowed like a river. One drunken prostitute, holding a sacred chalice filled with wine, sat on the patriarch’s throne to be cheered by the French soldiers as she sang them a bawdy song in their own language.
After the three-day debauchery the army was brought to a reasonable state of control, although many resisted the order that all loot taken should be delivered to collection points at three designated churches. Greek citizens were routinely tortured into revealing the treasure they had hidden while the city was under attack. Greed replaced lust, and a French count hanged one of his own knights who was found to be hiding some of the loot he had taken.
The first payment made from the plunder was the money still owed to Venice, then the rest of the treasure was divided equally with the Venetians. A distribution was made to the army on the basis of one share for a foot soldier, two shares for a mounted sergeant, and four shares for a knight. Not surprisingly, a noble’s share was many times that of a knight. After all that distribution of treasure, the balance remaining was four hundred thousand marks, which one chronicler noted was about seven times the annual royal revenue for the entire kingdom of England.
The Venetians carefully packed and stowed the art treasures to be taken home for the glorification of their city. Today, tourists to Venice, admiring the four magnificent bronze horses above the entrance to St. Mark’s Cathedral or the two great marble columns near the Grand Canal beside the ducal palace, are looking at a tiny part of the loot of Constantinople.
Next came the division of land. With the whole empire to hand out, there was more than enough. Commander Boniface of Montferrat received broad territories, including the island of Crete. The Venetians were happy to use part of their share of the loot to buy it from him, and it became an important Venetian trading center.
On May 16, 1204, in the restored cathedral of St. Sophia, the imperial crown of Byzantium was placed on the head of Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault. The Knights Templar sent a delegation to the coronation from the Holy Land, not so much to attend the ceremony as to make a fervent appeal for the original purposes of the Crusade. The delegation was disappointed and had to give up when the papal legate issued a formal decree that relieved every member of the Crusade from his vow to go to the Holy Land, so that each might stay in Byzantium to consolidate the great Catholic victory.
The loss of this crusading army wasn’t the only blow to the Knights Templar and the other leaders of the Holy Land. Local knights and barons from the Holy Land, learning that Greek lands were available for not much more than the asking, were departing in increasing numbers. Salvation could wait: This incredible opportunity for instant riches must be grasped now. The same attitude motivated fresh Crusaders leaving Europe, who changed their destinations from Acre to Constantinople. The new Latin emperor needed all the help he could buy and had plenty of land to buy it with. He welcomed the defectors with enthusiasm. Only the men recruited for the Knights Templar and the other military orders ever saw Outremer. The burden on the orders to protect the Holy Land was stronger than ever.
It did no good for the Templars to complain to the pope, because Innocent III saw the victory as one that spread his own authority. The entire Greek Church was now under his control. He would learn in time that he had temporarily gained the Greeks’ obedience, but would never own their hearts. Some of the Greeks ran to Nicaea in Turkey and set up a government-in-exile there. That, plus the growing power of the Turks, shut the door forever on the overland Crusader route from Constantinople to the Holy Land.
Other Greeks allied themselves with the Bulgarian tribes and made war on Byzantium. The following year they faced a Latin army led by the usurper emperor Baldwin, captured him, and led him off to die in a Bulgarian dungeon.
The Fourth Crusade did nothing to recoup the Holy Places of Jesus Christ. Although the pope for the moment was happy with the results, the Crusade had converted the rivalry of the Greek Orthodox Church to irreconcilable, seething hatred. The Turks benefited by having their strongest Christian enemy shattered for them by other Christians. The only winners were the Venetians, who had almost instantly become the strongest and richest naval power in the Christian world.
Most important, the Crusaders’ ideal had been corrupted from one of expanding the territories of God to extending the power of the pope. From this beginning, Innocent III would corrupt the crusading vision still further into a bloody instrument of papal power. And he would order the Knights Templar to help.