Following the disaster at Manzikert Byzantium lost its main Anatolian recruiting grounds and so, under the Comnenid dynasty, Byzantine forces were increasingly dominated by mercenaries, amongst whom Normans continued to form an important element. A polyglot army was recruited from these Normans plus Germans, Frenchmen and troops from the Crusader states, particularly from the Norman principality of Antioch, which was at various times a theoretical vassal of the Byzantine Empire. The main Byzantine armies were, in fact, remodelled along essentially Norman.-French feudal lines by the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, great emphasis being placed on heavy cavalry using the couched lance. This process led to further disaster at Myriokephalon in 1176, where the Byzantine Empire suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Seljuks second only to that suffered at Manzikert a century earlier. Crusaders from Antioch formed Manuel’s right wing at Myriokephalon. After the defeat the emperor also sent a letter to Henry II of England, praising the courage of Manuel’s Englishmen – almost certainly referring to Anglo.-Saxon troops in his service. Many Normans also fought for Byzantium against their fellow countrymen under Robert Guiscard of southern Italy. Others were recruited to fight Pechenegs and Seljuks in the 1080s and 1090s. ‘Franks’ were found in the garrison defending Iznik (Nicea) in 1113, Corfu in 1149 and Varna in 1193. Others were involved in the civil war of 1180, while ‘Franks’ served Theodore Lascaris, ruler of Iznik, in 1259.
The Emperor John Comnenus had been succeeded on the throne of Byzantium by his son Manuel, a young man still in his twenties, famous for his dark good looks and possessing none of his father’s xenophobic tendencies. His early life had been passed in close contact with the Frankish knights of Outremer, and his admiration for Western institutions had even led him to introduce knightly tournaments to Constantinople – an innovation which, particularly when he took part in them himself, scandalized his older subjects. He was, moreover, an intellectual and a scholar who cannot have failed to be impressed by the reports he had received of the growing brilliance of the court at Palermo which, thanks to Roger’s patronage of the arts and sciences, was rapidly becoming the cultural clearing-house of Europe, the one focal point where the leading thinkers of the three great civilizations of the Mediterranean – Latin, Greek and Arab – could meet together for their mutual enlightenment.
Manuel was fully aware of the danger posed by Norman Sicily. But he also knew that with two-thirds of Asia Minor – formerly the main recruiting-ground for Byzantine armies – now occupied by the Seljuk Turks and his western frontier also under constant pressure, his own Empire would have to fight for survival. Had his father been right in his determined hostility to the Sicilian Kingdom? Would it not be wiser to try and make common cause? Soon after his accession he sent an Embassy to Palermo to investigate the possibilities of an alliance, which he hoped might be cemented by the marriage of a Byzantine princess to one of the King’s sons.
If these negotiations had succeeded, the consequences for Venice might have been serious indeed, with Roger of Sicily exercising effective control of both sides of the straits of Otranto. But they failed, and Manuel turned instead to the still more important question of his own marriage, to the sister-in-law of the Emperor-elect Conrad, which took place at the beginning of 1146. Just three months afterwards, on Palm Sunday, there followed an event that was to affect the whole civilized world. St Bernard of Clairvaux launched the Second Crusade.
St Bernard’s excursions into the political sphere – which, unfortunately, he was throughout his life unable to resist – were almost invariably disastrous; but none ever proved so humiliating a fiasco as this immense expedition, led jointly by Conrad and King Louis VII of France with the purpose of recovering the city of Edessa from the Saracens and consolidating Frankish power in the Levant. Numberless thousands died before they ever reached the Holy Land; those that survived the journey fled after their first and only armed encounter. It is a measure of the paucity of our sources for the Venetian history of the time that we cannot be altogether sure whether Venice participated with a fleet or not. Although one chronicler – Marino Sanudo the elder, writing in the early fourteenth century – tells of the magnum auxilium sent by the Republic under the command of Giovanni Polani, the Doge’s brother, his report is unsubstantiated by any other historian of the Crusade and can almost certainly be discounted. But the Venetians were not to be left in peace for long. In the first weeks of 1148 they received an urgent appeal from Manuel: a Sicilian fleet had sailed against his Empire.
The commander of this fleet was George of Antioch, a Levantine Greek who had risen from humble origins to be the first holder of Norman Sicily’s proudest title – Emir of Emirs, at once the High Admiral and chief minister of the Kingdom. He had first taken Corfu, which had surrendered without a struggle and willingly accepted a Sicilian garrison of 1,000 men. Rounding the Peloponnese and dropping further armed detachments at strategic points along the coast, he had then sailed north again as far as Euboea, raiding and pillaging as he went. A particularly rich haul had been afforded by the ancient city of Thebes, centre of the Byzantine silk manufacture, whence not only bales of damasks and brocades but also a number of highly skilled Jewish workwomen had been seized and carried off to enrich the royal silk factory (which did double duty as a harem) at Palermo. Turning back, he had finally plundered Corinth, his vessels – according to his near contemporary, Nicetas Choniates – ‘by now so low in the water that they looked more like merchantmen than the pirate ships they really were’.
Nicetas was right: piracy it was. But it was also something more. King Roger was under no delusions. An attempted alliance between himself and the Byzantine Emperor having proved unworkable, he knew that it was only a question of time before Manuel, probably in conjunction with Venice and the Western Empire, launched a major offensive against him. His own pre-emptive action might precipitate the attack – no bad thing in itself if it caused Manuel to strike before he was ready – but it had at least assured him the possession of chosen strongpoints on the Balkan Peninsula and, in Corfu, the principal bridgehead from which any invasion of South Italy might be expected to come.
No Venetian ever gave anything for nothing, and Manuel had to grant further extensive trading privileges in Cyprus and Rhodes, as well as in his own capital, before he got what he wanted – the full support of the war fleet of the Republic for six months. Meanwhile he was working desperately to bring his own navy to readiness – some 500 galleys and 1,000 transports, a fitting counterpart to an army of perhaps 20,000 or 25,000 men.
From the outset, this formidable joint force was ill-starred. Though the rendezvous was fixed for April 1148, both sides were grievously delayed – the Greeks by a sudden invasion of the Kumans, a tribe from South Russia who chose this moment to sweep down across the Danube into imperial territory, the Venetians by the death of Doge Polani. It was autumn before the two navies could meet in the southern Adriatic, together to begin the siege of Corfu, and the following spring before the army could join them, accompanied by the Emperor himself in overall command.
The siege, Manuel discovered, on his arrival, was not going well. The citadel in which Roger’s garrison was holding out stood on a high crag, towering above the sea and safely beyond the range of Byzantine projectiles. Nicetas reported that the Greeks seemed to be shooting at the very sky itself, while the Sicilians could release deluges of arrows and hailstorms of rocks on to the besiegers. (People wondered, he could not resist adding, how they had taken possession of it so effortlessly the previous year.) More ominous still, perhaps, was the steady worsening of relations between Greeks and Venetians – reaching a climax when the latter occupied a neighbouring islet and set fire to a number of Byzantine vessels lying offshore. They later managed to seize possession of the imperial flagship itself, on which they performed an elaborate charade, making fun of the Emperor’s swarthy complexion by dressing up an Ethiopian slave in the imperial vestments and staging a mock coronation on deck in full view of their Greek allies.
Manuel was never to forgive the Venetians this insult. For the moment, however, they were his allies still, and indispensable ones at that. With patience, tact and all the charm for which he was famous, he somehow restored an uneasy harmony; then he himself assumed direct personal command of the siege operations.
Towards the end of the summer Corfu fell – probably through treachery, since Nicetas writes that the garrison commander subsequently entered the imperial service. The Emperor’s joy, however, must have been mitigated by the news that George of Antioch had now taken another fleet of forty ships through the Dardanelles and across the Marmara to the very walls of Constantinople. A landing had mercifully been prevented but the Sicilians, undeterred, had sailed on some way up the Bosphorus, pillaging several rich villas along the Asiatic shore, and on their return had even for good measure shot an impudent arrow or two into the gardens of the imperial palace. Nor, once he had recaptured Corfu, was Manuel able to follow up his victory. He was summoned urgently northward to deal with a new insurrection in the Balkans – in which Roger, whose diplomatic tentacles extended far beyond his own shores, may well have been subtly implicated.
So ended the war with Sicily, from which both Venice and Byzantium had expected so much. Apart from the reconquest of a single island captured barely two years before, it had achieved nothing. Sicilian garrisons still remained strung around the Greek coast; King Roger was as secure on his throne and as powerful in Europe and the Mediterranean as ever he had been. Looking back on it in historical perspective, we can now see that the most noteworthy aspect of the war was also perhaps the most unedifying: for in that first sorry fracas between the two so-called allies in the water off Corfu lay the seeds of a deepening hostility between Republic and Empire which were to come to their poisonous fruition, fifty-five years later, in the Fourth Crusade.
