In a letter to Emperor Baldwin of 7 November 1204, Pope Innocent
expressed his joy at the capture of Constantinople and described it as ‘a
magnificent miracle’. In this letter, and one addressed to the clerics with the
crusading army (13 November), he portrayed the campaign as God transferring the
Byzantine Empire from ‘the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the
obedient, from schismatics to Catholics . . .’; this, he
concluded, ‘was done by the Lord and is wondrous in our eyes’. Innocent was
delighted and placed the Latin Empire under papal protection – a mark of
special favour – and decreed that the task of preserving the newly conquered
lands should be rewarded with the remission of sins (the same as for a crusader
to the Holy Land). In other words, he harnessed a fundamental element of the
crusading concept – the defence of Christian lands – to the immediate
priorities of Emperor Baldwin. At this point, perhaps rather naively
underestimating the work needed to consolidate the new conquests, the pope
still imagined that the crusade would be able to continue onwards to the
Levant.
A swathe of letters from early 1205 shows Innocent’s
euphoria continuing unabated. He seems to have been totally caught up in this
mighty step forward for the Catholic Church. For him, the momentous scale of
God’s judgement heralded a Golden Age that would see the liberation of the Holy
Land, the return of all schismatic Christians to St Peter’s see, the conversion
of many heathens and the salvation of Israel – the last of which would signify
the Second Coming and the End of Time. This was a remarkable agenda, but one
evidently conceivable within contemporaneous currents in papal thought. The
pope continued to profess his pleasure at the events in Constantinople: ‘I am
enveloped by great wonder, along with those who are with me, at the novelty of
such a miracle that has come to pass in these days.’
So content was Innocent that, for the moment, he overlooked
yet another arrogation of papal authority by the Venetians. The March Pact of
1204 had stated that the losing party in the imperial election should have the
right to provide a patriarch. Thus it fell to the doge’s churchmen to choose a
candidate and they elected Thomas Morosini as their head. Unsurprisingly, as a
Byzantine, Niketas Choniates found the presence of this man loathsome and he
offered a savage pen-portrait of the Venetian: ‘He was of middle-age and fatter
than a hog raised in a pit; his face was clean-shaven, as is the case with the
rest of his race, and his chest was plucked smoother than pitchplaster; he wore
a ring on his hand, and sometimes he wore leather coverings which were fitted
to his fingers.’ Innocent was more concerned with Thomas’s spiritual attributes
and acknowledged that he was of good character – notwithstanding the fact that
the process outlined in the March Pact was a serious transgression of papal
prerogatives. The agreement was, after all, a deal concluded between secular
parties (the Venetians and the other crusaders), but the relevant clause here
concerned election to one of the five patriarchal seats of the Christian
Church, something that those enjoined to the contract had no right to decide.
For this reason, Innocent had no hesitation in declaring the election void. Yet
such was the pope’s positive mood at this time that he listened to representations
from Baldwin, Boniface and the other crusade leaders that emphasised the huge
Venetian contribution to the campaign and argued that this merited a proper
reward. In response, Innocent conceded that Thomas was indeed a suitable
candidate for patriarch, regardless of his improper election. Then, most
realistically of all, ‘wishing to show favour to the Venetians in the hope that
they might be tied more strongly to the service of the Cross of Christ’, he
informed the churchmen in Constantinople that he now properly elected and
confirmed Thomas as the first Latin patriarch of Constantinople.
By the middle of 1205, however, events in the Holy Land and
Constantinople conspired to darken Pope Innocent’s mood considerably. The
situation in the Levant plunged into a new crisis with the death (from a
surfeit of fish) of King Aimery of Jerusalem, followed quickly by the demise of
his infant son. War between the Christian states of Antioch and Armenia, along
with a fear that the Muslims of Egypt and Damascus were poised to break a
treaty made with Aimery, created huge anxieties for the papacy. The Franks were
vulnerable enough anyway and these calamities threatened their fragile hold on
the Syrian coastline.
To compound these troubles Peter Capuano, the papal legate,
had left the Holy Land – against Innocent’s wishes – and travelled to
Constantinople. There, incredibly, he had released all the westerners from
their crusading vows. In other words, they were no longer obligated to go to
the eastern Mediterranean, the area that Innocent continued to see as the final
destination of the expedition and a region now in urgent need of help. Capuano
had, in effect, terminated the Fourth Crusade. His reasoning for this is not
explicit, although in the way that he had allowed the expedition to attack Zara
in order to preserve its unity, pragmatism was probably at the root of his
thoughts. He may have taken the view that the best way to sustain the fledgling
Latin Empire was to concentrate the crusaders’ efforts in and around
Constantinople and that this, rather than an exodus of men to the Holy Land,
was in the best interests of the Church. Whatever Capuano’s intentions were,
Pope Innocent was livid. On 12 July 1205 he wrote a stinging rebuke to the
legate: ‘We leave it to your judgement as to whether or not it was permissible
for you to transform – no, rather to pervert – such a solemn and pious vow.’
Ironically, therefore, an agent of the papacy brought the Fourth Crusade to a
close. Innocent’s grand design had been grounded on the shores of the Bosphorus
and, in the short term, his hopes of reclaiming Christ’s patrimony were ended.
In conjunction with this disastrous development, the pope’s
perception of the capture of Constantinople was changing. Stories concerning the
evils perpetrated by the crusaders during the sack of the city were growing
ever more unpleasant and troubling. As we saw earlier, the letters sent to Rome
by the expedition’s leadership had chosen to pass over the westerners’
brutality. But as the months went by, rumours carried by traders and travellers
were supplemented by information from returning crusaders, such as Bishop
Conrad of Halberstadt or Bishop Martin of Pairis, and exposed the full horrors
of the episode. Innocent was sickened by what he learned – what had seemed a
glorious success was in reality a sordid exercise in greed and violence. His
letters lamented: ‘By that from which we appeared to have profited up to now we
are impoverished, and by that from which we believed we were, above all else,
made greater, we are reduced.’ Innocent questioned why the Greek Church might
wish to express its devotion to the papacy – as the crusaders so proudly
claimed that it would – when it saw in the Latins ‘nothing except an example of
affliction and the works of Hell, so that now it rightly detests them more than
dogs’. He recounted the crusaders’ merciless slaughter of Christians of all
ages, men and women alike, ‘staining with blood Christian swords that should
have been used on pagans’. He grimly recited some of the other atrocities: the
rape of matrons, virgins, nuns; the sack of the churches and the violation of
sacristies and crosses. Initially Innocent seems to have believed that only the
imperial treasuries had been looted, but he was horrified to learn of the
plunder of churches across the city.
Innocent had also become aware of the Latins’ terrible
defeat at Adrianople, yet instead of lamenting the death of so many great
knights he described the episode as one of Divine Retribution for the crusaders’
deeds – an uncompromisingly harsh judgement on the loss of many genuinely pious
warriors. The pope felt that events of April 1204 damaged future calls for a
crusade because those who had been on the campaign would be returning home,
dispensed from their vows and laden with spoils.
The details of the sack caused Innocent to express doubts as
to the true motives of some of the crusaders. He had already been deeply
sceptical of the Venetians’ aims, but now, in a letter to Boniface of
Montferrat, he suggested that the marquis had ‘turned away from the purity of
your vow when [you] took up arms not against Saracens, but
Christians . . . preferring earthly wealth to celestial
treasures’. Innocent indicated that ‘it is reputed far and wide’ that the
crusaders had behaved disgracefully towards the people and churches of
Constantinople.
Yet alongside this anger there was also a sense of
puzzlement. As the contemporary churchman and writer Gerald of Wales stated:
‘The judgement of God is never unjust even if it is sometimes hard to
understand.’36 The pope struggled to reconcile the divinely approved outcome of
the expedition with news of the crusaders’ behaviour during the conquest. In
the final analysis Innocent had too much of a pragmatic streak to condemn the
crusaders wholeheartedly. He did not, for example, raise the question of
excommunicating the army for their deeds, let alone suggest a withdrawal from
Byzantium. The pope accepted God’s judgement against ‘an evil people’ (the
Greeks) and retreated behind rumination on ‘the incomprehensible ways of God’.
He concluded: ‘For who can know the mind of the Lord?’ He also urged Boniface
to hold, defend and even extend the lands he now ruled, which shows that
Innocent saw the new Latin Empire as a permanent feature of the political and
religious landscape. The pope instructed the marquis to do proper penance for
his sinful acts and to exert himself for the relief of the Holy Land because
‘through this [Byzantine] land, that [the Holy Land] can be easily recovered’.
If Innocent’s feelings towards the sack of Constantinople
now reflected a more accurate sense of what had really taken place, he could
not step back from the fact that the Catholic Church had, through its capture
of the patriarchal city of Constantinople, derived an enormous (if unforeseen)
benefit from the Fourth Crusade. There now remained the need to reinforce and
defend this land – yet another onerous responsibility for the head of the Latin
Church and one of the most far-reaching consequences of the campaign.
#
On 15 August 1261 – fifty-seven years after the Fourth
Crusade had sacked the Queen of Cities – Michael Palaeologus, the ruler of
Nicaea, processed into the Hagia Sophia where he was crowned emperor of
Byzantium. The Greeks had reclaimed Constantinople. Other spoils of the Latin
victories in 1204 – such as the principality of Achaea and the island of Crete
– remained in western hands but the heart of the conquest had been torn out.
As the first generations of Frankish settlers in the Holy
Land had discovered, large-scale backing from the West was needed to
consolidate their new territories. As early as 1211 Emperor Henry of
Constantinople (1206–16) wrote: ‘nothing is lacking for the achievement of
complete victory and for the possession of the empire, except an abundance of
Latins, since . . . there is little use in acquiring [land]
unless there are those who can conserve it’. Yet ultimately, the support of a
second Catholic satellite in the eastern Mediterranean proved too great a
demand on the physical and emotional resources of Europe.
In the course of the thirteenth century the scope of
crusading extended considerably. In 1208 Pope Innocent III launched the
Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics of southern France. There was
also, as before, continuous activity in the Baltic region and periodic
campaigns against the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. Crusading proved a
highly flexible concept and in the middle of the thirteenth century, as
relations between the papacy and Emperor Frederick II of Germany became
hostile, a holy war was preached against the most powerful secular figure in
the West. From the late 1230s a new and terrifying force began to appear on the
borders of eastern Europe and soon threatened the Levant as well. The fearsome
Mongol hordes were in the process of creating the largest land empire in the
history of the world, stretching from Hungary to the China Sea, and in 1241 the
papacy called for a crusade to combat this deadly menace. Given this
extraordinary level of crusading activity – not all of which was met with
approval or enthusiasm by the knightly classes of Europe – the chances of a new
and comparatively distant sphere of holy war attracting widespread support were
slim.
Probably the greatest obstacle to the flowering of the Latin
Empire was the situation in the Holy Land. By the mid-thirteenth century, after
decades of relative stability, the settlers’ position had deteriorated sharply.
In August 1244 at the Battle of La Forbie, 1,034 out of 1,099 knights from the
Military Orders were slain. This prompted the Seventh Crusade (1248–54), a
substantial expedition consisting of more than 2,500 knights, properly financed
by the French crown and the French Church, and led by the saintly King Louis
IX. The resources and motivation demanded by an undertaking of this scale could
not be summoned repeatedly, particularly if, as with Louis’s crusade, the
campaign failed.
The fundamental problem for the Latin Empire was that it
lacked the unparalleled cachet of the Holy Places. It could not boast of a
biblical past and it had not been seized from the hands of the infidel, but
rather from Christians, albeit heretics. Baldwin’s lands were in competition
with the allure of the Holy Sepulchre, quite apart from the existing regional
holy wars in Spain, the Baltic and the new campaigns in southern France, and
those against the Mongols and Frederick II of Germany. For this reason the
conquests of the Fourth Crusade were always destined to struggle for attention
except from those parties directly interested in the area, such as the
Montferrat dynasty or the Venetians. The fact that the Latin emperors were not
from a royal house of the West, coupled with a decline in the standing of the
counts of Flanders, reduced the obvious sources of help even further.
As early as 1204, the Latin Empire and the Holy Land
competed with each other for the attention of the Christian world. A letter
from the archbishop of Nazareth pleaded for assistance ‘for the recovery of the
patrimony of the Crucified One’; yet around the same time the papal legate,
Peter Capuano, released crusaders at Constantinople from their obligation to go
to the Levant so that they could stay to defend the new empire. The appeal sent
to the papacy in the aftermath of the Battle of Adrianople was another request
for help that reached the West just as the pleas from the archbishop of
Nazareth were being considered.
In the early years, the Latin conquerors and the papacy had
clung to the belief that their conquests might help the holy war against Islam,
but this optimism was utterly misplaced. Even Pope Innocent came to recognise
the conflict between consolidating the Latin Empire and liberating the Levant.
In 1211 he wrote to Emperor Henry and grumbled, ‘since you and other crusaders
have striven to capture and keep the
empire . . . principally in order that by this means you
may bring help more easily to the Holy Land, you have not only failed to
provide any assistance in this, but have also brought trouble and
damage . . .’ to those trying to resist the infidel.
In the aftermath of the conquest, the prospect of land and
money had attracted people from – of all places – the Levant. In 1202–3 the
Crusader States had experienced a plague, a colossal earthquake and were
confronted with a numerically overwhelming enemy. Thus, in the aftermath of the
conquest of Byzantium, many inhabitants of the Levant – unwilling to pass up
new opportunities to win land and money – eagerly decamped to Constantinople.
As we have seen, men such as Stephen of Perche, Reynald of Montmirail and
Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s nephew (as well as some recent settlers in the
kingdom of Jerusalem, such as Stephen of Tenremonde, a Fleming who had remained
after the Third Crusade) were quick to abandon the defence of the Frankish
East. Defections such as these caused Pope Innocent to complain that the exodus
of pilgrims from the Holy Land left it weakened. Of course, given their overall
vulnerability, the papacy was obliged to call for support for the Christians in
the new empire. Yet every time a crusade set out, or money was sent to
Constantinople, it meant less assistance for the Holy Land. Thus, far from
preparing a way to liberate Christ’s patrimony, the conquests of the Fourth
Crusade actually weakened it.
It was not, however, until 1224 that the first crusade
preached for the defence of the Latin Empire prepared to set out. This was a
northern Italian (Montferrese) expedition focused on the relief of
Thessalonica, but the leadership was delayed by illness and lack of funds and
by the time the crusade reached the area, the city had already surrendered to
the Greeks of Epirus.
Notwithstanding the adverse effects on campaigns to the Holy
Land, the papacy tried hard to persuade some potential crusaders that they
should fight for the Latin Empire instead of going to the Levant. In 1239
Richard of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III of England, and his companions
were asked to commute their vows to Jerusalem in return for a money payment to
help Constantinople or to go there in person, but they refused to be diverted
and to shed Christian blood. The popes raised direct clerical taxation in
Greece for the defence of the empire but the large-scale crusade that was
required to defeat the Byzantines never looked like materialising. In fact, by
1262 Pope Urban IV was so desperate to encourage a new expedition to regain
Constantinople that he offered free passage to participants (in contrast to the
payments to the Venetians required in 1204) and – astonishingly – an indulgence
of 40–100 days’ penance for simply listening to the crusade sermon in the first
instance.
The Latin emperors worked hard to gather men and money and
Baldwin II (1228–61) resorted to long tours around the courts of western Europe
(1236–9 and 1244–8) in the hope of securing support, but all he received were
polite displays of interest, small gifts and open-ended promises. Baldwin
himself cut an unimpressive figure and contemporaries described him as ‘young
and childish’ and not the ‘wise and vigorous’ figure needed.
In 1237 he had to pawn the Crown of Thorns, worn by Christ
on the Cross, to a Venetian merchant for 13,134 gold pieces. When he could not
redeem the debt, the relic was taken by agents acting for the pious King Louis
IX of France, who was so delighted with this treasure that he constructed the
magnificent Sainte-Chapelle in Paris especially for it.9 A year later Louis was
involved in a more secular transaction when Baldwin mortgaged him the title to
the county of Namur (a region of northern France – a link back to the emperor’s
Flemish forefathers) for 50,000 livres. By 1257 so impoverished was the empire
that Venetian creditors required Baldwin’s son Philip as surety for a loan, and
even the lead from the palace roof was being sold to generate cash.
In spite of this generally sorry tale on the mainland, the
fertility and relative security of the principality of Achaea (in the Peloponnese
peninsula), and the Venetian-controlled island of Crete, formed two regions of
economic strength. The export of bulk products, including wheat, olive oil,
wine and wool, as well as luxury items such as silk, created real wealth for
the Italians and the Villehardouin dynasty who ruled Achaea. The latter
fostered a flourishing court life and the chivalric traditions of the West
blossomed. On one occasion Geoffrey II (1229–46) rode through his lands
accompanied by 80 knights wearing golden spurs and the French spoken in Achaea
was said to be as good as that in Paris. Frescos depicting chivalric deeds
decorated palace walls, and tournaments and hunting were popular pastimes. The
capture of Prince William (1246–78) at the Battle of Pelagonia (1259) marked the
end of Achaean ascendancy, although the principality did survive through the
female line. Crete remained under Venetian rule until 1669 and was by far the
most durable manifestation of the Fourth Crusade.
Elsewhere the Latins were less successful. Boniface of
Montferrat did not enjoy his hard-won prize of the kingdom of Thessalonica for
long. In September 1207 he was killed in battle, and years of pressure from the
Greek rulers of Epirus led to their winning Thessalonica in 1224. It was,
however, the empire of Nicaea, based in Asia Minor, which posed the most potent
threat to the Latins. John III Vatatzes (1222–54), later canonised by the
Orthodox Church, pushed the westerners out of Asia Minor, established a
bridgehead at Gallipoli on the European side of the Bosphorus and later took
over Thessalonica to tighten the noose around Constantinople. John’s death
meant that the final push to eject the Latins came from his general, Michael
Palaeologus, who became regent for John’s young son and then seized the imperial
title for himself. The boy was, inevitably, imprisoned and blinded.
In July 1261, as the Greeks gathered for a full assault on
Constantinople, a sympathiser opened one of the gates and the Byzantine advance
party took the city with barely a struggle. Most of the Latin garrison was
engaged on a campaign elsewhere and the citizenry were generally pleased to see
the return of their natural lords. So unexpected was this turn of events that
Michael Palaeologus had yet to cross the Bosphorus. His sister, Eulogia, heard
the news early one morning and, as her brother lay sleeping in his tent, is
said to have crept in and tickled his feet with a feather. When he awoke she
told him that he was now the ruler of Constantinople. Playing along with her
lighthearted mood, Michael laughed, but refused to accept what he heard. Only
when a messenger entered with the imperial crown and sceptre did he believe it;
God had indeed delivered Constantinople back to the Greeks. The principal
achievement of the Fourth Crusade was thus wiped out.
In reality then, the Latin Empire proved to be an unwanted
burden that only hindered the cause of the Holy Land. It expired 30 years
before the fierce Mamluk dynasty prised the westerners from the city of Acre
(1291) to mark the end of Christian power in the Levant until the British
general, Edmund Allenby, entered Jerusalem in 1917. By one of history’s neater
ironies, in later centuries, as the reconstituted Byzantine Empire struggled
against the mighty Ottoman Turks, the papacy tried to rouse western Europe for
another crusade to help defend the Greeks. The effort failed and, when the
Ottomans took the city of Constantinople in 1453, it was finally lost to
Byzantium for ever.
