God's War: A New History of the Crusades

kingdom of Thessalonica was annexed by the Greeks of Epirus in 1224. The apparent unravelling of the achievement of 1204 provided a context and possibly a spur to the works of veterans such as Villehardouin (writing before 1212/13) and Robert of Clari (c.1216) in praise of deeds of the Fourth Crusade. While western rule in Athens, the southern Peloponnese and the Venetian maritime colonies persisted, and in places flourished, into the fourteenth century and beyond – Crete only fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1669–the imperial centre soon degenerated into a bankrupt husk, having to pawn relics such as the Crown of Thorns (in 1237) and, from the 1220s, sell the lead from the roofs of churches and palaces to survive.⁷³ Emperor Baldwin II cut a pathetic, forlorn figure when he toured the west in the 1240s trying to drum up support for his failing cause. The succession of regents, minors and guardians who held the imperial title (Henry of Flanders; Peter of Courtenay; Robert of Courtenay; Baldwin II; John of Brienne), after surviving the crisis of 1205–6, when the existence of the empire seemed in doubt, played an increasingly minor local role in the politics of the region, increasingly insignificant in comparison with the Greeks of Nicaea and, briefly, Epirus, and the Bulgarian empire. In 1261, Constantinople was recaptured almost without a murmur by a Nicaean reconnaissance force taking advantage of the absence of the Latin garrison on a raid up the Bosporus. The suddenness of its fall even caught the new emperor Michael VIII Palealogus of Nicaea totally by surprise. Yet the end could not have long been delayed. In contrast to parts of the Peleponnese, the Latin emperors’ attempts to reach accommodation with the Greeks failed. No attempts were seriously pursued to create a new imperial cultural identity. Latin Constantinople appeared a shabby outpost, increasingly irrelevant as well as impotent, neglected by the nobility and people of the west, to whom its original conquest had been represented as being such a vindicating triumph.

The prime export of the Latin empire, from the night of 12–13 April 1204 onwards, lay in relics. Such was the flood of them on to the western market that Innocent III issued instructions on how rationally to authenticate them. In Constantinople, tourists and sacred bargain hunters sought certificates guaranteeing that the piece of bone, wood, cloth or stone was genuine. Gunther of Pairis’s account of Abbot Martin’s grand larceny amid the fires and chaos of Constantinople sought to validate the great haul that constituted the most tangible profit of the enterprise for his abbey. Martin and his chaplain had stuffed their folded habits with over fifty treasures from the monastery of Christ Pantocrator, ranging from relics of the True Cross and Holy Blood, to stone chips from the main Holy Sites to miscellaneous physical detritus and body parts of saints, including ‘a not inconsiderable piece of St John’.⁷⁴ Similar motives of validation lay behind the descriptions of the deeds of the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt, both of which listed the sacred booty acquired by their episcopal heroes, in Conrad of Halberstadt’s case including distinctly secular trophies: jewels, silks and tapestries. Bishop Nivelo of Soissons stayed at Constantinople in 1204–5, sending home a number of choice high-prestige objects associated with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist and, when he returned, bringing with him pieces of the True Cross. Even Robert of Clari’s memoirs may be seen as adding lustre to his gifts of relics of the Passion at the monastery of St Pierre, Corbie.⁷⁵ These relics provided the Fourth Crusade’s most positive and lasting legacy in western Europe. The recipients of the holy treasure across northern France hoped to benefit through increased visitors to their new shrines. In places, entrepreneurial clerics transformed the fortunes of previously impoverished and obscure religious houses and churches. The struggling Cluniac house at Bromholm in Norfolk made its fortune after acquiring a piece of the True Cross purloined from the imperial chapel by an English priest in 1205.⁷⁶ The key to success lay in miracles. Across western Christendom, this new influx of divine favour manifested in these fresh agents of the miraculous provided its own justification for the enormities of 1204. More tangibly, miracles attracted pilgrims. Church income rose. The new buildings erected to house the relics and cater for the tourists employed local labour and skilled craftsmen. The increase in church profits generated higher incomes, which were used to improve estates, roads and bridges.

Whatever transcendent gains accrued, the relics of Byzantium contributed to patches of economic prosperity across Europe. Some relics could even play a political role. The Crown of Thorns pawned to the Venetians in 1237 and later sold to Louis IX of France prompted the construction of the luminous Sainte Chapelle in Paris and played a significant part in the manufacture of a Capetian religion of monarchy. The acquisition by wealthy nations of the cultural icons of conquered or exploited weaker lands is a staple of world history, as shown by glancing at Ancient Rome, nineteenth-century England or the United States of America in the past century. Byzantium was another prime example, a storehouse of classical and Christian artefacts, many of which had been translated, stolen or otherwise removed from provinces of the empire. After 1204, this process took another step, if in an unrefined, vicious and unwelcome manner. The transfer of treasure and relics stood as symbol of defeat, the four horses from the Hippodrome erected in front of St Mark’s in Venice, although only placed there after 1260, a careful, considered celebration of victory and a new imperialism.

The consequences of the Fourth Crusade were not measured in spiritual or material profit and loss alone. In his history of the Crusades, Runciman’s pro-Hellenist complaint has two barbs; the duplicitous destruction of a civilization and the gratuitous weakening of a bastion of Christendom against invasion from the east. The Byzantine empire never recovered from the events of 1203–4. Much of the damage was self-inflicted by the political chaos and myopic self-interest so vividly displayed in the tawdry or desperate parade of emperors. Much of the physical destruction in Constantinople came from the secondary effects of the conquest, the fires of 1203–4 and Alexius IV’s frenzied scrabbling for bullion. There is no convincing evidence that the crusaders plotted the violent overthrow of the Byzantine system until they were presented with no viable alternative in 1204. That is not to say that Greeks were not demonized, their religious observances despised and feared by western elites as much as the rest. Doctrinal differences and the traditional Greek lukewarm response to the call of the cross could be and were exploited. Baldwin declared in his coronation circular that Constantinople had been stormed ‘for the honour of the Holy Roman Church and for the relief of the Holy Land’, a not completely mendacious justification.⁷⁷

However destructive the sack of 1204, ultimately more damaging to the cohesion of Byzantium was the effect on church union and the inability of the Latins to re-establish a thriving capital. The failure of Latin – Greek accommodation and the inability of the Latins to suppress opposition changed the nature of the Greek polity as much as it failed to create a new Latin one. After 1204, independent, autonomous Greek statelets emerged, as at Nicaea/Smyrna, Epirus and Trebizond, with no constitutional relations with each other and owing no allegiance to a central Greek political authority. By 1261, this separatist tradition, unknown before 1204, had become enshrined as a feature of Byzantium, which persisted until the Ottoman conquests. Before 1204, Greek regional opposition had been reflected in central, imperial politics. Now the regions appeared entire to themselves. The Fourth Crusade had unstringed the lyre of universal order and degree. Between 1204 and 1261 Constantinople was no longer a centre of bureaucracy or consumption, had ceased to be a functioning capital except in name only. The restoration of 1261 could not recover its imperial dominance. The absence of metropolitan authority that had underpinned Byzantine power and unity before 1204 allowed the Orthodox church to fill the void. The role of emperor after 1261 was permanently weakened as the Christian religion rather than the Christian state acted as the chief source of cultural cohesion and political identity. This shift in authority was emphasized when successive Byzantine emperors over the next two centuries sought church union with Rome as the price for western military help. Thus the Fourth Crusade destroyed but redefined Byzantium, enshrining a political fragmentation that included the remaining western enclaves and was to be so brilliantly exploited by the Ottomans from the mid-fourteenth century.

This does not necessarily establish the Fourth Crusade’s blame for the later woes of eastern Europe, the second of Runciman’s complaints. He saw Byzantium so undermined by 1204 that it could ‘no longer guard Christendom against the Turk’. This ultimately handed ‘the innocent Christians of the Balkans’ to ‘persecution and slavery’.⁷⁸ This is a view clouded by a crude religious and cultural analysis. Many Christians in the Balkans, innocent or not, had fought for generations against the Greeks – Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians – just as they later fought against the Turks. Byzantium had hardly been universally beneficent in its rule. Equally, the failure of Byzantium to retain its own territorial integrity from 1180 or defend itself in 1203–4 did not suggest it could necessarily have presented much of a bastion against later Turkish attack. However unpleasant, the Fourth Crusade did not precipitate the triumph of the Turk. The occupation of parts of the Greek empire by Latins and Venetians at least ensured some continuing western investment in resistance to the Ottomans that outlasted the Byzantine empire itself. More widely, the assumption that Ottoman rule was per se bad, ‘worse’ than Greek imperial rule or that of fractious and often vicious Christian groups in the Balkans, depends upon racial and religious stereotypes and prejudices. Not all fourteenth-century Greeks preferred Byzantium to Latin or Turkish rule. The translation of later historical, religious or cultural prejudices to explain past phenomena is here unprofitable. However, it reflects the most enduring legacy of the Fourth Crusade, one that as recently as 2001