The Fourth Crusade

Event and Context

Michael J Angold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317880547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Fourth Crusade (1202-4) was one of the key events in medieval history

The fall of Constantinople to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade in April 1204 was its climax. It ensured that Byzantium's days as a great power were over. It equally ensured that westerners would dominate the Levant – the lands of the old Byzantine Empire –until the end of the middle ages. This book asks just how important was the Fourth as a turning point in the Middle East.. The broad setting is the encounter of Byzantium with the West within the framework of the crusades. Differences of outlook and interest meant that this encounter was soon overburdened with mutual distrust. 1204 was some kind of a solution and created situations scarcely conceivable even two years before when the fourth crusade set sail from Venice.

Part 1

THE FOURTH CRUSADE

chapter 1

SOURCES AND PERSPECTIVES

I

The conquest of Constantinople in April 1204 by the Venetians and the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade still has the capacity to amaze and sometimes to enrage. The sequence of events has often been recounted and, thanks most recently to the work of D. E. Queller, is scarcely in doubt. It begins with Pope Innocent III issuing a crusading bull on 15 August 1198. This was the first important act of his pontificate. The recovery of Jerusalem was always among the pope’s chief concerns, but at first there was only a muted response to his appeal. He had to wait more than a year before the crusade began to take shape, when the count of Champagne together with many other prominent figures of northern France and the Low Countries took the cross. These crusaders then concluded a treaty with Venice in April 1201, which secured shipping to transport them to their destination: Egypt no less, but this was kept a secret. By the summer of the next year it had become apparent that the crusade might have to be aborted because troops were not reaching Venice in the numbers anticipated. It meant that the crusade leaders could not pay the Venetians in full. It was therefore agreed to help the Venetians conquer the Dalmatian port of Zara. At the same time, the crusade leaders made a deal with a Byzantine prince: they would put him on the throne of Constantinople and he would support the crusade with men and money. The crusaders were as good as their word. The young Alexius Angelus was duly crowned emperor in St Sophia on 1 August 1203. The new emperor agreed to pay the costs of the Venetian fleet for a year from the end of September and retain the crusaders in his service until the beginning of March, when it was assumed that they would set sail for the Holy Land along with Byzantine reinforcements. It never happened. Relations between the crusaders and Byzantines quickly deteriorated, leaving the crusaders marooned outside the walls of Constantinople. In February 1204 the crusade leaders finally decided on the conquest of Constantinople. Their first assault on 9 April was driven off by the defenders, but a new attack three days later was successful. The crusaders had conquered Constantinople and overthrown the Byzantine Empire. Robert of Clari, who was there when the city was stormed, catches the scale of the crusaders’ victory when he proclaims that ‘never was there seen nor won in all recorded time so great, so noble or so rich a prize, not in the time of Alexander nor in the time of Charlemagne nor before nor after’.¹

Establishing the sequence of events is only a beginning. The meaning or significance of the conquest of Constantinople elicits contradictory judgements. For Sir Steven Runciman ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’. Its ‘effects were wholly disastrous’.² It made the schism between the Latin and Orthodox churches irreparable. D. E. Queller is not much interested in the consequences of the conquest of Constantinople. He is content to observe that it ‘was the most improbable of outcomes’.³ John Godfrey described it felicitously as ‘a tale of men enmeshed in the toils of their own miscalculations’.⁴ Others have seen the fall of Constantinople as the all too likely consequence of the failure of the Byzantine system of government, while Michael Hendy has dismissed it as ‘one of the most boring and stultified topoi of all medieval history’.⁵ Such a range of views points to underlying disagreements over the interpretation of the conquest of Constantinople. Was it just an accident or was it a natural consequence of deteriorating relations between Byzantium and the West? Does the moral dimension have any place in the assessment of an event that occurred so long ago? Are events even worth bothering about? Are they not just the froth of history? ‘Ce n’est que l’écume’ was a mantra of those loosely dubbed the Annales school, who dismissed narrative history or l’histoire événementielle as irrelevant to the proper study of history, which required the investigation of deep structures and long-term trends. Paradoxically, it was work by two of the most distinguished Annalistes – Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – which demonstrated the limitations of such a blanket dismissal of the study of events. While Duby demonstrated the value of placing an event in its historical and historiographical context,⁶ Ladurie elaborated the notion of the ‘key event’. This he understands as a liminal zone where existing circumstances are changed out of all recognition. As he puts it: ‘Once one has reached this zone, factors which are often mysterious delineate poles of necessity within fields of possibilities: once they have surfaced their existence is obvious – but a moment before their appearance, they were as unpredictable as they were unprecedented.’⁷ In other words, there are some events which are capable of effecting transformations unlikely or even impossible otherwise.

It would be unrealistic to suppose that a new set of circumstances emerged out of nothing. It is true that at the outset none of the participants in the Fourth Crusade envisaged or sought the eventual outcome. But there was a long history of tension between Byzantium and the West made still more intractable by the mutual obligations imposed by the crusade. Equally, a recurring pattern of Byzantine history was one of periods of stable and effective government interspersed with dynastic crises which left Byzantium vulnerable to foreign intervention. In other words, the potential for significant change was already there. 1204 acted as a catalyst. In other circumstances it would not have been unreasonable to expect the Byzantine Empire to recover from its difficulties at the end of the twelfth century and to reclaim its domination of the Levant. It did not happen and the reason it did not happen was because the fall of Constantinople to the crusaders crystallised trends that had been working against Byzantium for a century or more. It meant that a new logic would begin to apply.

The assumption being made here conforms to Ladurie’s idea of the transforming power of the event: that there are moments when, for whatever reason, long-term trends impinge directly on the surface of events, creating a new set of circumstances which make possible the replacement of the old order and certainties by others. But this is to objectify. It is trying to understand the processes of historical change from a modern standpoint. It can be done with very little attention being paid to how contemporaries regarded the events in which they were enmeshed. So we have to probe a little deeper and consider a possibility ignored by Ladurie. Is an event not somehow an artificial creation: a conspiracy between modern historians and their sources? Historians are almost bound to be the prisoners of the distorted image of the truth contained in their sources. However discerning they may be, they never quite escape the inadequacy of their material. This is perhaps the most serious objection to narrative history that has to be addressed. It goes without saying that the investigation of past events begins as an exercise in historiography. It soon becomes clear that contemporaries were interested in establishing what happened, insofar that it enabled them to ascribe meaning to events, in a way that inevitably distorts and eventually mythologises the past. This process is important in itself because an understanding of the past, however distorted, was integral to the priorities and ideals of a society and not just to some vague sense of identity. Happily, contemporaries were often bitterly opposed about the interpretation that should be put on events. These conflicts allow modern historians the latitude they need to exercise their historical judgement as to the significance of an event. Even where there is no conflict or where an agreed interpretation eventually obtained, modern historians can penetrate behind the mask of self-deception thus created by earlier chroniclers and historians, because at some stage the interpretation will lose its value and either be quietly dropped or given a new twist.

Fresco with the figure of a Franciscan friar. Part of a cycle of St. Francis, fragments of which are preserved in the Kalenderhane Cami, Istanbul. This was originally the church of the Theotokas Kyriotissa, taken over during the Latin Empire by the Franciscans. It is one of the few traces of Latin occupation of Constantinople that has survived.

Source: Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 22 (1968), Plate 24, Detail of Friar from Upper Left Scene. Reproduced with permission of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Washington, D.C., copyright 1968.

But can we ever do more than play back what our sources tell us? With the proviso that we cannot escape seeing and understanding the past through the spectrum of our sources, we can adopt a variety of strategies in our approach to the sources. The most common is simply to identify the inaccuracies and distortions they contain and seek to rectify these. Less common is the exploitation of these inaccuracies and distortions. Their value lies in the way that they represent at one or two removes the understanding of the past entertained by the leading players in any event. That understanding would have little objective value, but objectivity has done much to sanitise and neutralise the past. Greater subjectivity gave the past more immediacy and cogency. The past was understood as a guide to present actions. Decisions were shaped by a view of the past. The assumption is too often that events unfolded in some mechanical way; or that the participants were at the mercy of events. In fact, events are made up of thousands of deliberate decisions: some successful, others not. In the case of the Fourth Crusade it is possible to work out the process of decision-making, at least for the most important decisions. We are best informed about the crusader leadership and theirs was the active role, but its members had to take into account other decisions: those made by the Byzantine government and, above all, those taken by the papacy. Nothing will have worked out exactly as planned, but our sources are rich enough to allow us an insight into the way in which events are shaped. The understanding of the past they reveal – however distorted it might seem to us – was essential to the way problems were confronted and decisions made. In that sense, our sources are not just a guide to the unfolding of events, but part of the historical process.

II

The conquest of Constantinople in 1204 by the Venetians and the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade produced a veritable torrent of contemporary narratives and comment. It reflects the intense interest that the fall of Constantinople aroused among contemporaries. Perhaps the only comparable event of the Middle Ages hitherto had been the crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. It raises the question of whether the importance of an event is to be judged by the degree of contemporary interest.

There are three major narrative sources for the events of 1204. On the Byzantine side there is the History of Nicetas Choniates. His account of the fall of Constantinople and its aftermath constitutes Books VII–IX of his history of Byzantium in the twelfth century. Nicetas Choniates was born around the middle of the twelfth century.⁸ He made his career in the Byzantine administration, eventually reaching the position of grand logothete under Alexius III Angelus (1195–1203). The grand logothete was the administrative head of the Byzantine civil service. It does not mean that Nicetas Choniates therefore belonged to the inner circle around the emperor, which was responsible for the formulation of policy. It does mean, however, that he was extremely well informed about the reaction of the Byzantine regime to the new crusade which was assembling at Venice. He had connections throughout the Byzantine administration and the Patriarchal Church – his brother Michael was archbishop of Athens. Nicetas Choniates lived through the events of 1203–4. He has left an eyewitness account of events. Nothing he says can easily be dismissed. He presents the Fourth Crusade as a Venetian-inspired act of revenge against Constantinople. It was certainly much more complicated than this. What he is expressing are the fears of the Byzantine government as they confronted the news that Venice was cooperating with a new crusade. Nicetas Choniates is a great historian in the sense that he knows how to shape events. We may now disagree with the meaning that he ascribes to events, but it will have been shared with most of the Byzantine elite. To that extent, Choniates allows us access to the reactions to and assessments of the Fourth Crusade which prevailed in Byzantine ruling circles.

On the surface, Choniates saw the fall of the city of Constantinople to the crusaders as divine judgement for the sins of the Byzantines. More subtly, he presented 1204 as the culmination of the deterioration of Byzantium’s body politic. His explanation, as Jonathan Harris has recently reminded us, centres on ‘the character and actions of the imperial incumbent’.⁹ Emperors failed to measure up to the demands of the time and failed to provide the drive and direction needed. To blame the emperor when things went wrong was a normal Byzantine procedure. But Nicetas Choniates was an acute enough historian to use it to explore Byzantium’s internal weaknesses as the Fourth Crusade approached. It enabled him to reveal its vulnerability to an attack from the West. Equally, it set in relief the dynamism of the West, which only exposed Byzantine weaknesses. A reading of Nicetas Choniates suggests that in one way or another the West would dominate Byzantium. It is an impressive analysis, which fits with a modern prejudice that empires fall because of internal weakness rather than because of external pressures.

Recently, Paul Magdalino has urged caution about accepting Nicetas Choniates’s interpretation of events.¹⁰ He takes issue not so much with Nicetas Choniates’s largely flattering portrait of Manuel I Comnenus, but with modern historians’ willingness to overinterpret Choniates, so that they trace Byzantine decline back to the reign of Manuel I Comnenus. Nobody would wish to deny that it was only after Manuel’s death tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps and plates
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations of sources most frequently cited
• A Note on transliteration of proper names
• Maps
• Part 1 The Fourth Crusade
• Part 2 The Consequences of the Fourth Crusade
• Part 3 The Myth of Byzantium: Destruction and Reconstruction
• Further Reading
• Index