The Byzantine Empire Part 13

[Ill.u.s.tration]

View Of Constantinople. (From The Side Of The Harbour.)

Boniface of Montferrat and Doge Dandolo gradually talked over the more scrupulous Baldwin and his friends, and the crusading fleet was launched against Constantinople, after a treaty had been signed which bound Alexius Angelus and his blind father, Isaac II., to pay the Crusaders 200,000 marks of silver, send ten thousand men to Palestine, and acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope over the Eastern Church. In these conditions lay the germs of much future trouble.

The Crusading armament reached the Dardanelles without having to strike a blow. The slothful and luxurious emperor let things slide, and had not even a fleet ready to send against them in the Aegean. He shut himself up in Constantinople, and trusted to the strength of its walls to deliver him, as Heraclius and Leo III. and many more of his predecessors had been delivered. If the siege had been conducted from the land side only, his hopes might have been justified, for the Danes and English of the Varangian Guard beat back the a.s.sault of the Franks on the land-wall. But Alexius III., unlike earlier emperors, was attacked by a fleet to which he could oppose no adequate naval resistance. Though the Crusaders were driven off on sh.o.r.e, the Venetians stormed the sea-wall, by the expedient of building light towers on the decks, and throwing flying bridges from the towers on to the top of the Byzantine ramparts. The blind Doge pushed his galley close under the wall, and urged on his men again and again till they had won a lodgment in some towers on the port side of the sea-wall.

The Venetians then fired the city, and a fearful conflagration followed.

Hearing that the enemy was within the ramparts, the cowardly Alexius III.

mounted his horse and fled away into the inland of Thrace, leaving his troops, who were not yet half beaten, without a leader or a cause to fight for. The garrison bowed to necessity, and the chief officers of the army drew the aged Isaac II. out of his cloister prison and proclaimed his restoration to the throne. They sent to the Crusading camp to announce that hostilities had ceased, and to beg Prince Alexius to enter the city and join his father in the palace.

The end of the expedition of the Crusaders had now been attained, but it may safely be a.s.serted that the chief feeling in their ranks was a bitter disappointment at being cheated out of the sack of Constantinople, a prospect over which they had been gloating ever since they left Zara. They spent the next three months in endeavouring to wring out of their triumphant proteges, Isaac and Alexius, every bezant that could be sc.r.a.ped together. The old emperor, already blind and gout-ridden, was driven to imbecility by their demands: his son was a raw, inexperienced youth who could neither be firm, nor frank, nor dignified in dealing with any one.

He angered the Franks by insincere diplomacy, and the Greeks by his reckless schemes for extracting money from them. The winter of 1203-4 was spent in ceaseless wrangling about the subsidy due to the Crusaders, till Alexius, growing seriously frightened, began exactions on his subjects which drove them to revolt. When he seized and melted down the golden lamps and silver candelabra which formed the pride of St. Sophia, stripped its eikonostasis of its rich metal plating, and requisitioned the jewelled eikons and reliquaries of every church in the city, the populace would stand his proceedings no longer. They would not serve an emperor who had sold himself to the Franks, and only reigned in order to subject the Eastern Church to Rome, and to pour the h.o.a.rded wealth of the ancient empire into the coffers of the upstart Italian republics.

In January, 1204, the storm burst. The populace and troops shut the gates of the city, and fell on the isolated Latins who were within the walls.

They were not long without a leader; a fierce and unscrupulous officer named Alexius Ducas put himself at their head and determined to seize the throne. Isaac II. died of fright in the midst of the tumult; his son Alexius was caught and strangled by the usurper. Thus the Angeli ceased out of the land, and Alexius V. reigned in their stead. He is less frequently named by chroniclers under his family name of Ducas, than under his nickname of "Murtzuphlus," drawn from the bushy overhanging eyebrows which formed the most prominent feature of his countenance.

Alexius Ducas had everything against him. He was a mere usurper, whose authority was hardly recognized beyond the walls of Constantinople. The Angeli had so drained the treasury that nothing remained in it. Twenty years of indiscipline and disaster had spoilt the army; the fleet was nonexistent, for the admirals of Alexius Angelus had laid up the vessels in ordinary, and sold the stores to fill their own pockets. Nevertheless Murtzuphlus made a far better fight than his despicable predecessor and namesake. He collected a little money by confiscating the properties of the unpopular courtiers and ministers of the Angeli, and used it to the best advantage. The army received some of the arrears due to them, and Alexius spent every spare moment in seeing to their drill and endeavouring to improve their discipline. He strengthened the sea-wall, whose weakness had been proved so fatally four months ago, by erecting wooden towers along it, and building platforms for all the military engines that could be found in the a.r.s.enal. He ordered, too, the enrolment of a national militia, and compelled the n.o.bles and burghers of Constantinople to take arms and man the walls. To the discredit of the Byzantines this order was received with many murmurs: the citizens complained that they paid taxes to support the regular army, and that they therefore ought to be excused personal service. Little good was got out of these new and raw levies; they swelled the numbers of the garrison, but hardly added anything appreciable to its strength.

Alexius Ducas himself with his cavalry scoured the country round the Crusading camp every day, to cut off the foraging parties of the Franks, and when not in the field, rode round the city superintending the works, inspecting the guard-posts, and haranguing the soldiery. If courage and energy command success, he ought to have held his own. But he could not counteract the work of twenty years of decay and disorganization, and felt that his throne rested on the most fragile of foundations.

The Crusaders took two months to prepare for their second a.s.sault on Constantinople, which they felt would be a far more formidable affair than the attack in the preceding autumn. They directed their chief efforts against the sea-wall, which they had found vulnerable in the previous siege, and left the formidable land-wall alone. The s.h.i.+ps were told off into groups, each destined to attack a particular section of the wall, and covered with as many military engines as they could carry. Flying bridges were again prepared, and landing parties were directed to leap ash.o.r.e on the narrow beach between the wall and the water, and get to work with rams and scaling ladders. The attack was made on April 8th, at more than a hundred points along two miles of sea-wall, but it was beaten off with loss. Alexius Ducas had made his arrangements so well, that the fire of his engines swept off all who attempted to gain a footing on the ramparts.

The s.h.i.+ps were much damaged, and at noon the whole fleet gave back, and retired as best it could to the opposite side of the Golden Horn.

Many of the Crusaders were now for returning; they thought their defeat was a judgment for turning their arms against a Christian city, and wished to sail for the Holy Land. But Dandolo and the Venetians insisted upon repeating the a.s.sault. Three days were spent in repairing the fleet, and on April 12th a second attack was delivered. This time the s.h.i.+ps were lashed together in pairs to secure stability, and the attack was concentrated on a comparatively small front of wall. At last, after much fighting, the military engines of the fleet and the bolts of its crossbowmen cleared a single tower of its defenders. A bridge was successfully lowered on to it, and a footing secured by a party of Crusaders, who then threw open a postern gate and let the main body in.

After a short fight within the walls, the troops of Alexius Ducas retired back into the streets. The Crusaders fired the city to cover their advance, and by night were in possession of the north-west angle of Constantinople, the quarter of the palace of Blachern.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Byzantine Reliquary. (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

While the fire was keeping the combatants apart, the Emperor tried to rally his troops and to prepare for a street-fight next day. But the army was cowed; many regiments melted away; and the Varangian Guard, the best corps in the garrison, chose this moment to demand that their arrears of pay should be liquidated; they would not return to the fight without their money! The twenty years of disorganization under the Angeli was now bearing its fruit, and deeply was the empire to rue the next day.

Alexius Ducas, in despair at being unable to make his men fight, left the city by night. He was soon followed by the last Greek officer who kept his head, the general Theodore Lascaris, who endeavoured to make one final attack on the Crusaders even after his master had departed. Next morning the Franks found themselves in full possession of the city, though they had been expecting to face a hard day of street-fighting before this end could be attained.

In cold blood, twelve hours after all fighting had ended, the Crusaders proceeded with great deliberation to sack the place. The leaders could not or would not hold back their men, and every atrocity that attends the storm of a great city was soon in full swing. Though no resistance was made, the soldiery, and especially the Venetians, took life recklessly, and three or four thousand unarmed citizens were slain. But there was no general ma.s.sacre; it was l.u.s.t and greed rather than bloodthirstiness that the army displayed. All the Western writers, no less than the Greeks, testify to the horrors of the three days' carnival of rape and plunder that now set in. Every knight or soldier seized on the house that he liked best, and dealt as he chose with its inmates. Churches and nunneries fared no better than private dwellings; the orgies that were enacted in the holiest places caused even the Pope to exclaim that no good could ever come out of the conquest. The drunken soldiery enthroned a harlot in the patriarchal chair in St. Sophia, and made her rehea.r.s.e ribald songs and indecent dances before the high altar. There were plenty of clergy with the Crusading army, but instead of endeavouring to check the sacrilegious doings of their countrymen, they devoted themselves to plundering the treasuries of the churches of all the holy bones and relics that were stored in them. "The Franks," remarked a Greek writer who saw the sack of Constantinople, "behaved far worse than Saracens; the infidels when a town has surrendered at any rate respect churches and women."

After private plunder had reigned unchecked for three days, the leaders of the Crusaders collected such valuables as could be found for public division. Though so much had been stolen and concealed, they were able to produce no less than 800,000 in hard gold and silver for distribution.

The sum was afterwards supplemented by the use of a resource which makes the modern historian add a special curse of his own to the account of the Crusaders. Down to 1204 Constantinople still contained the monuments of ancient Greek art in enormous numbers. In spite of the wear and tear of 900 years, her squares and palaces were still crowded with the art-treasures that Constantine and his sons had stored up. Nicetas, who was an eyewitness of all, has left us the list of the chief statues that suffered. The Heracles of Lysippus, the great Hera of Samos, the bra.s.s figures which Augustus set up after Actium, the ancient Roman bronze of the Wolf with Romulus and Remus, Paris with the Golden Apple, Helen of Troy, and dozens more all went into the melting-pot, to be recast into wretched copper money. The monuments of Christian art fared no better; the tombs of the emperors were carefully stripped of everything in metal, the altars and screens of the churches sc.r.a.ped to the stone. Everything was left bare and desolate.

Such was "the greatest conquest that was ever seen, greater than any made by Alexander or Charlemagne, or by any that have lived before or after,"

as a Western chronicler wrote, while the Greeks grew hyperbolical in lamentation, as they saw "the eye of the world, the ornament of nations, the fairest sight on earth, the mother of churches, the spring whence flowed the waters of faith, the mistress of Orthodox doctrine, the seat of the sciences, draining the cup mixed for her by the hand of the Almighty, and consumed by fires as devouring as those which ruined the five Cities of the Plain."

At last the Crusaders sat down to divide up their conquests. They elected Baldwin of Flanders Emperor of the East, and handed over to him the ruined city of Constantinople, half of it devoured by the flames of the conflagrations that attended the two sieges, and all of it plundered from cellar to attic. Four-fifths of the population had fled, and no one had remained save beggars who had nothing to save by flight. With the capital Baldwin was given Thrace and the Asiatic provinces-Bithynia, Mysia, and Lydia, all of which had still to be conquered. His colleague, Boniface of Montferrat, was made "King of Thessalonica," and did homage to Baldwin for a fief consisting of Macedonia, Thessaly, and inland Epirus. The Venetians claimed "a quarter and half-a-quarter" of the empire, and took out their share by receiving Crete, the Ionian Islands, the ports along the west coast of Greece and Albania, nearly the whole of the islands of the Aegean, and the land about the entrance of the Dardanelles. They seized on every good harbour and strong sea-fortress, but left the inland alone; commerce rather than annexation was their end. The rest of the empire was parcelled out among the minor leaders of the Crusade; they had first to conquer their fiefs, and were then to do homage for them to the Emperor Baldwin. Most of them never lived to accomplish the scheme. Meanwhile a Venetian prelate was appointed patriarch of Constantinople, and news was sent to the Pope that the union of the Eastern and Western Churches was accomplished, by the forcible extinction of the Greek patriarchate.

It only remains to speak of Alexius Ducas, the fugitive Greek emperor. He fell into the hands of the Crusaders, was tried for the murder of the young Alexius Angelus, and suffered death by being taken to the top of a lofty pillar and hurled from it. The Greeks saw in this strange end the fulfilment of an obscure prophecy about the last of the Caesars, which had long puzzled the brains of the oracle-mongers.

XXIII. THE LATIN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF NICAEA. (1204-1261.)

Seldom has any state dragged out fifty-seven years in such constant misery and danger as the Latin Empire experienced in the course of its inglorious existence. The whole period was one protracted death-agony, and at no date within it did there appear any reasonable prospect of recovery. Thirty thousand men can take a city, but they cannot subdue a realm 800 miles long and 400 broad. Far more than any government which has since held sway on the same spot did the Latin Empire of Romania deserve the name of "the Sick Man." It is not too much to say that but for the unequalled strength of the walls of Constantinople the new power must have ceased to exist within ten years of its establishment.

But once fortified within the ramparts of Byzantium the Franks enjoyed the inestimable advantage which their Greek predecessors had possessed: they were masters of a fortress which-as military science then stood-was practically impregnable, if only it was defended with ordinary skill, and adequately guarded on the front facing the sea. As long as the Venetians kept up their naval supremacy in Eastern waters, the city was safe on that side, and even the very limited force which the Latin emperor could put into the field sufficed, when joined to the armed burghers of the Italian quarters, to defend the tremendous land wall.

From the first year of its existence the Latin Empire was marked out by unfailing signs as a power not destined to continue. The intention of its founders had been to replace the centralized despotism which they had overthrown by a great feudal state, corresponding in territorial extent to its predecessor. But within a few months it became evident that the conquest of the broad provinces which the Crusaders had distributed among themselves by antic.i.p.ation, was not to be carried out. The new emperor himself was the first to discover this. He set out with his chivalry to drive from Northern Thrace the Bulgarian hordes, who had flocked down into the plains to profit by the plunder of the dismembered realm. But near Adrianople he met Joannicios, the Bulgarian king, with a vast army at his back. The Franks charged gallantly enough, but they were simply overwhelmed by numbers. The larger part of the army was cut to pieces, and Baldwin himself was taken prisoner. The Bulgarian kept him in chains for some months, and then put him to death, after he had worn the imperial crown only one year [1205].

Henry of Flanders, the brother of Baldwin, became his successor. He was an honest and able man, but he could do nothing towards conquering the provinces of Asia, pus.h.i.+ng the Bulgarians back over the Balkans, or conciliating the subject Greek population. All his reign he had to fight on the defensive against his neighbours to the north and south. By the time that he died the empire was practically confined to a narrow slip of land along the Propontis, reaching from Gallipoli to Constantinople. Nor was the chief of the minor Latin states any better off; Boniface of Montferrat had fallen in 1207, slain in battle by the same Bulgarian hordes which had cut off the army of his suzerain Baldwin. With his death it became evident that the kingdom of Thessalonica was no more able to conquer all the old Byzantine provinces in its neighbourhood than was the empire of Constantinople. Boniface's son and heir was a mere infant; during his minority the lands of his kingdom were lopped away, one after another, by the Greek despot of Epirus, the able Theodore Angelus. At last the capital itself was retaken by the Greeks in 1222, and the kingdom of Thessalonica came to an end.

The Latin states in the southern parts of the Balkan Peninsula fared somewhat better. William of Champlitte had contrived to hew out for himself a princ.i.p.ality in the western parts of the Peloponnesus, and had organized there a small state with twelve baronies and 136 knights fees.

The resistance of the natives in this district was particularly weak, and one battle sufficed to give William all the coast-plain of Elis and Messenia. Yet he did not succeed in subduing the mountaineers of the peninsula of Maina, or the coast towns of Argolis and Laconia, so that the Greeks still had some foothold in the peninsula.

Another small Latin state was set up by Otho de la Roche in Central Greece, where as "Duke of Athens" he ruled Attica and Boeotia. He treated his Greek subjects with more consideration than any of his fellow Crusaders, and was rewarded by obtaining a degree of respect and deference which was not found in any other Latin state. Though the smallest, the duchy of Athens was undoubtedly the most prosperous of the new creations of the conquest of 1204.

Meanwhile it is time to speak of the fortunes of those parts of the Eastern Empire which the Franks did not succeed in seizing when Constantinople fell. The provinces had hitherto been accustomed to accept without a murmur the ruler whom the capital obeyed. But in 1204 it was found that the centralization of the Byzantine Empire, great as it was, had not so thoroughly crushed the individuality of the provinces as to make them submit without resistance to the Latin yoke. Wherever the provincials found a leader, whether a member of one of the ex-imperial houses, or an energetic governor, or a landholder of local influence, they stood up to defend themselves. The Byzantine Empire, like some creature of low organism, showed every sign of life in its limbs, though its head had been shorn off. Wherever a centre of resistance could be found the people refused to submit to the piratical Frank, and to his yet more hated companions the priests of the Roman Church.

Of the nine or ten leaders who put themselves at the head of provincial risings three were destined to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Of these the most important was Theodore Lascaris, the last officer who had attempted to strike a blow against the Franks when Constantinople fell.(30) He might claim some shadow of hereditary right to the imperial crown as he had married the daughter of the imbecile Alexius III., but his true t.i.tle was his well-approved courage and energy. The wrecks of the old Byzantine army rallied around him, the cities of Bithynia opened their gates, and when the Latins crossed into Asia to divide up the land into baronies and knights fees, they found Theodore waiting to receive them with the sword. His defence of the strong town of Prusa, which successfully repelled Henry of Flanders, put a limit to the extension of the Frank Empire; beyond a few castles on the Bithynian coast they made no conquests. Having thus checked the invaders, Theodore had himself solemnly crowned at Nicaea, and a.s.sumed imperial state [1206].

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Finial From A Byzantine MS. (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

Having beaten off the Latins, Theodore had to cope with another who aspired like himself to pose as the rightful heir to the imperial throne.

Alexius Comnenus, a grandson of the wicked emperor Andronicus I., had betaken himself to the Eastern frontiers of the empire when Constantinople fell, and obtained possession of Trebizond and the long slip of coast-land at the south-east corner of the Black Sea, from the mouth of the Phasis to Sinope. He aspired to conquer the whole of Byzantine Asia, and sent his brother David Comnenus to attack Bithynia. But Theodore defended his newly won realm with success; Comnenus gained no territory from him, and was constrained to content himself with the narrow bounds of his Pontic realm, where his descendants reigned in obscurity for three hundred years as emperors of Trebizond. A greater danger beset the empire of Nicaea when the warlike sultan of the Seljouks came down from his plateau to ravage its borders. But the valour of Theodore Lascaris triumphed over this enemy also. In the battle of Antioch-on-Maeander he slew Sultan Kaikhosru with his own hand in single combat, and the Turks were beaten back with such slaughter that they left the empire alone for a generation.

Meanwhile a third Greek state had sprung into existence in the far West.

Michael Angelus, a cousin of Alexius III. and Isaac II., put in a claim to their heritage, though he was disqualified by his illegitimate birth. He was recognized as ruler by the cities of Epirus, and proclaimed himself "despot" of that land. Raising an army among the warlike tribes of Albania, he maintained his position with success, and discomfited the Franks of Athens and Thessalonica when they took arms against him. He died early, but left a compact heritage to his brother Theodore, who succeeded him on the throne, and within a few years conquered the whole of the Frank kingdom of Thessalonica.

It was soon evident that there would be a trial of strength between the two Greek emperors who claimed to succeed to the rights of the dispossessed Angeli. The Latin Empire was obviously destined to fall before one of them. The only doubt was, whether the Epirot or the Nicene was to be its conqueror. This question was not settled till 1241, when the two powers met in decisive conflict.

By this time Theodore Lascaris had been succeeded in Asia by his son-in-law John Ducas,(31) and Theodore of Thessalonica by his son John Angelus. At Constantinople the succession of Latin emperors had been much more rapid. Henry of Flanders had died in 1216; he was followed by Peter of Courtenay, who was slain by the Epirots in less than a year. To him succeeded Robert his son, and when Robert died in 1228 his brother Baldwin II., reigned in his stead. The young Courtenays were both thoroughly incapable, and saw their empire melt away from them till nothing was left beyond the walls of Constantinople itself.

John III. of Nicaea was an excellent sovereign, a very worthy heir to his gallant father-in-law. Not only was he a good soldier and an able administrator, but by constant supervision and strict frugality he had got the financial condition of his empire into a more hopeful condition-a state of things which had never been seen in Romania since the time of John Comnenus, a hundred years before. In 1230 the troops of Nicaea crossed into Europe, and drove the Franks out of Southern Thrace, while in 1235 John Ducas laid siege to Constantinople itself. But the time of its fall was not yet arrived, and when a Venetian fleet approached to succour it the Emperor was constrained to raise the siege.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Fountain In The Court Of St. Sophia.

Recognizing that Constantinople was not yet ripe for its fall, John Ducas resolved to measure himself with his rivals the Angeli of Thessalonica. He beat their forces out of the field, and laid siege to their capital in 1341. Then John Angelus engaged to resign the t.i.tle of emperor, call himself no more than "despot of Epirus," and to acknowledge himself as the va.s.sal of the ruler of Nicaea. This satisfied Ducas for a time, but when Angelus died, four years later, he seized Thessalonica and united it to the imperial crown. The heir of the Angeli escaped to Albania and succeeded in retaining a small fraction only of his ancestral dominions [1246].

John Ducas died in 1254, leaving the throne of Nicaea to his son Theodore II., who bid fair to continue the prosperous career of his father and grandfather. He drove the Bulgarians out of Macedonia, and penned the Albanians into their hills. But he became subject to epileptic fits, and died after a reign of only four years, before he had reached the age of thirty-eight [1258].