It is easy to conceive of the crusades as a conflict between Latin Christian West and the Muslim Middle East, forgetting that between these two geographic/religious groupings stood an Orthodox Christian Empire -- Byzantium. Yet the latter both triggered the crusades and became a victim of them. Today I conclude my four-part series on the complex role played by Byzantium in the era of the crusades by looking at the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.
Ironically,
while the first three crusades had never been aimed at the capture of
Constantinople, persistent Byzantine suspicious that Constantinople was
the “real” target of Western armies became a self-fulfilling prophecy at
the start of the 13th century. From the perspective of the West, the
first hundred years of crusading history had been littered with examples
of Byzantine betrayal -- from the failure of the Byzantine Empire to
come to the aid of the crusaders at Antioch to Isaac II’s treaty with
Saladin at the moment of Jerusalem’s fall. With the notable exception of
Manuel I — who contemporary Western chroniclers universally praised —
the “Greeks” were seen as treacherous and cowardly. This had led to
repeated calls for the seizure of Constantinople starting with Bohemond
of Taranto in 1107. Throughout the 12th century, however, the voices
calling for an attack on the "treacherous" and "cowardly "Greeks" had
been firmly silenced by crusader leadership.
The start of the 13th century,
however, saw a new constellation of factors. On the one hand, Jerusalem
had been lost to the Sultan and a massive crusade to recapture it had
ended in only partial success. This discouraged Western interest in a
new crusade on the part of the land-owning, military class that needed
to provide both the resources and the manpower for such an undertaking —
although the tragic “Childrens’ Crusade” soon showed that popular
sentiment still favored efforts to regain control of the Holy City.
Meanwhile, in the Holy Land itself, the resources of Cyprus were
beginning to bolster the local nobility and feed an economic recovery
that laid the foundation for a partial recovery that would last a
half-century. In short, at the start of the century, retrenchment was
the order of the day.
Yet,
Venice had neither forgotten the injuries done it by the Byzantines nor
recovered from the commercial losses that resulted from their expulsion
from Constantinople. When some overly optimistic noblemen failed to
raise either the troops or the funds they anticipated for a new crusade,
Venice took advantage of the assembly of fighting men on its doorstep
to launch that has gone down in history as the "Fourth Crusade."
I have described the course of the so-called Fourth Crusade elsewhere. (See: https://defendingcrusaderkingdoms.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-hijacked-crusade.html)
What I wish to highlight here is that the Fourth Crusade did not, in
fact, either destroy the Byzantine Empire nor end all ties with the
West. To be sure, for the first several decades, the old Empire was
fractured and Frankish states established in the core in Constantinople
and Greece. But several competing successors jostling for the title of
heir continued to exist in Asia and the Balkans. Furthermore, these
successors reconquered Constantinople in 1261, and the restored
Byzantine empire survived nearly two-hundred years after that.
Chris
Wright in his fascinating article “On the Margins of Christendom”
highlights the extent to which the fall of Constantinople to the
crusaders in 1204 forced the Byzantines to face facts and recalibrate
their policies in a more realistic manner. No longer were the great
monarchs of Western Europe dismissed as “barbarians.” No longer were Western
culture and politics dismissed as irrelevant. The arrogance that placed
Constantinople at the center of the world was shattered. While rightly
feeling outraged and unjustly attacked, Byzantine elites for the first
time recognized that the earlier crusades had indeed been genuine
efforts to liberate the Holy Land, rather than cynical plots to destroy
the Byzantine Empire.
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| Mystra - A Byzantine Outpost in the Frankish Peloponnese |
Now,
defeated by the mercenaries of Venice, the spokesmen for the fragmented
Byzantine empire skillfully evoked crusader rhetoric to condemn both
what had happened and the Pope’s continued self-serving calls for new
crusades to defend Latin control of Constantinople. With the papacy
increasingly declaring “crusades” for its own political aims — against
heretics in the Languedoc, against the Hohenstaufens in Italy and
Sicily, against the successors of the Byzantine Empire — the concept of
crusading for Jerusalem became a Byzantine rather than a Latin theme, a
rod with which to beat the Latins with their own hypocrisy.
It
was in no small measure the disgust of the lay population with the
papal misuse of crusading rhetoric and privileges that led to a decline
in crusading enthusiasm until St. Louis revived it through his own
passionate commitment. Certainly, the repeated papal calls for
“crusades” to defend Latin conquests in the former Byzantine Empire fell
largely on deaf ears. By 1261 the embarrassment was over.
Constantinople was back in Orthodox hands.
It
was during the period of “exile” from Constantinople, however, that
Byzantine intellectuals started to differentiate themselves from
contemporary Rome (i.e. the Pope’s Rome) by focusing more on their Greek
roots. For the first time, some of the Byzantine elites began to call
themselves Greeks (Hellenes), rather than Romans -- although the
majority of the population continued to identify themselves as Romans.
Furthermore,
far from destroying all trust and cooperation between the Byzantine
Empire and the Western “barbarians,” the interlude of Western control of
the Eastern Roman Empire forced the restored Byzantine Emperors to
recognize their fellow monarchs in the West as equals rather than
inferiors. Furthermore, as the Turkish threat grew, the Byzantines were
forced again to seek Western aid and support, with only partial success.
Yet it is one of the ironies of history that one of the most harmonious
periods in West European-Byzantine relations was when cooperation
between the two power centers was already too late.
Sources and recommended reading:
Angold, Michael, “The Fall of Jerusalem (1187) as Viewed from Constantinople,” in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian Boas (London: Routledge, 2016), 289-309.
Chrissis, Nicolaos, “Byzantine Crusaders: Holy War and Crusade Rhetoric in Byzantine Contacts with the West (1095-1341),” in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian Boas (London: Routledge, 2016), 259-277.
Papayianni,
Aphrodite, "Memory and Ideology: The Image of the Crusades in Byzantine
Historiography, Eleventh - Thirteenth Centuries," in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian Boas (London: Routledge, 2016), 278-288.
Wright,
Chris, "On the Margins of Christendom: The Impact of the Crusades on
Byzantium," in ed. Conor Kostick (London: Routledge, 2011), 55-82.
Dr. Helena P. Schrader is the author of six books set in the Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades. Find out more at: https://www.helenapschrader.com/crusades.html
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