Sailing from Byzantium (5 page)

In the Dark Age that now began, Christendom slowly and organically split itself in two halves, a Latin Catholic half and a Byzantine Orthodox half. One rested on a foundation of Latin church writings, the other on Greek. For centuries both upheld the façade of a single unified church. But the cracks in that façade grew ever wider.

It wasn't just the church. Justinian's Reconquest crumbled away with the emperor's passing, and into the depopulated Italian peninsula poured a new group of barbarians, the Lombards, who unlike the Goths cared nothing for the prestige of the Roman past. Isolated by the collapse of Byzantine power and under threat from the Lombards, the popes eventually turned north for protection, to the rising power of the Franks. The union was consummated on Christmas Day in the year 800, when Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne “emperor” of a restored Roman empire. This was a deep affront to the Byzantines when they heard about it. At the time, the empress Irene ruled in Constantinople, and one of the pope's rationales for appropriating the title was that a woman could never be considered the rightful Roman ruler. Byzantine indignation was sharpened
by underlying suspicion that the pope was correct.
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Byzantines started lumping all Westerners together as Frangoi (Franks), perceiving them as an undifferentiated and dangerous barbarian horde.

In the years, decades, and centuries to come, wrangling over the title
emperor of the Romans
assumed almost comically exaggerated proportions. With a steadfastness that at times approached the delusional, the Byzantines always insisted that they alone were the true “Romans” and that only their emperor could claim the title, maintaining the fiction that Byzantine sway was universal among Christians and that Western kings ruled at their pleasure. But the reality fell short, even though Byzantium began to recover in the early ninth century. By then, the West's isolation had bred self-reliance—among its scrappy and ambitious feudal kings, the most powerful of whom, following the example of Charlemagne, couldn't help but covet the ultimate title, emperor of the Romans; and in the papacy, which, accustomed to standing alone, reserved the right to bestow that title.

Westerner and Byzantine no longer knew each other, and when introduced they busily erected walls of mutual contempt. Fortune has given us an illuminating window into this estrangement in the figure of Liudprand, a Lombard noble and diplomat who made two visits to Constantinople around the middle of the tenth century, in 949 and 968. The first was in the service of the Burgundian king; the second was on behalf of Liudprand's new master Otto the Great, duke of Saxony, German king, and eventually (inevitably, one might say) “emperor of the Romans.” Between these
visits, both of which the prolific Liudprand wrote about in copious detail, Otto appointed him bishop of Cremona, and so he is known to history as Liudprand of Cremona.

On his first visit he was favorably impressed by the Byzantine emperor Romanus I, and his descriptions dwell on the magnificence of Constantinople's palaces and court ritual, both of which far outshone anything in the West. Like the caliphs of Baghdad, the Byzantines deployed sophisticated devices at court to create an impression of awe-inspiring majesty. A gilded bronze tree stood next to the emperor's throne, with mechanical birds, also gilded, on its branches. Each bird sang the song appropriate to its species. Romanus himself sat on a huge throne guarded by mechanical golden lions, “who beat the ground with their tails and gave a dreadful roar with an open mouth and quivering tongue” as the visitor approached. Then, in a final demonstration of supernatural omnipotence, the throne itself rose magically into the air, up to ceiling level, emperor and all.
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When it descended seconds later the emperor was wearing a new, elaborate costume. Distance prevented any direct interaction, and the emperor communicated through a secretary with the now thoroughly softened-up visitor.

Two decades later, Liudprand was beyond being cowed by such tricks. Now he was bishop of Cremona, representing a rival emperor of the Romans. Romanus was gone, and the Byzantine ruler was Nicephorus II, upon whom the disenchanted Liudprand heaps the most delicious invective. “A monstrosity of a man, a dwarf, fat-headed and with tiny mole's eyes,” he begins, going on from there in a similar vein. In fact, Nicephorus was one of Byzantium's most impressive
warrior-emperors, the veteran of numerous campaigns against the Arabs and Slavs. But he had refused to acknowledge Otto as “emperor of the Romans,” which stuck in Liud-prand's craw.

So did everything else on this visit, including (literally) the food, which “smelt strongly of garlic and onions and was filthy with oil and fish sauce.” Byzantine customs had become very un-Roman, as Liudprand pointedly observes. With their long-sleeved robes, flowing hair, and jewelry, the Byzantines themselves were wily and effeminate, “idle liars of neither gender.” The Byzantine emperor drank bathwater; Otto was manly and honest, and he didn't eat smelly food.

The growing cultural divide found religious expression in the eleventh century, when, in a fit of pique, a supremely arrogant papal envoy named Humbert took it upon himself to excommunicate the patriarch of Constantinople. Humbert's temper tantrum, which happened in the year 1054, would later harden into final schism between the two churches, revealing that deeper things were at work than one inflated ego. One of them was Rome's addition of the
fil-ioque
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to the Latin creed earlier in the century: Catholics now professed that the Holy Spirit proceeded “from the Son” as well as from the Father. The Orthodox, meanwhile, clung to the original formulation that it proceeded only from the Father. Since 1054 the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople have not been in communion.

Strategically, too, the eleventh century proved, like the sixth, to be a fulcrum. When it began, Byzantium was at the height of its medieval prosperity and the West played second
fiddle. When it ended, Byzantium was in disarray and the West had embarked on a period of explosive growth.

The most visible sign was the launching of the First Crusade at the end ofthat century, to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks. These raucous expeditions brought Frangoi and Byzantines into close contact, because the route to the Muslim lands went through Byzantium. The Byzantines assumed that the conquered territory would be returned to Byzantine rule. The Crusaders had other ideas. Conquering Jerusalem, Antioch, and other former Byzantine cities, they set up Crusader kingdoms that didn't answer to the emperor in Constantinople.

Over the next century, through three Crusades, the increasingly desperate Byzantines (theoretically the hosts) managed to keep the disruptive Frangoi (theoretically the guests) under a semblance of control. But the gap between East and West had grown too wide. The façade of a Christian alliance would soon self-destruct in the most dramatic way imaginable.

On a fine spring morning in the year 1203, a vast invasion force assembled itself in and around the island port of Corfu, off the Adriatic coast of northern Greece. Unfurling their sails to a mild, favorable breeze, the ships began moving off southward. Those watching found it exhilarating. The fleet spread out on the glinting water as far as they could see. Leading the way were the ponderous but deadly warships, followed by transports laden with men and horses, then swift galleys rowed by slaves and prisoners of war. Scores of merchantmen with provisions and other goods kept pace with
the fleet. It was Saturday, May 24, the eve of Pentecost, and the fleet's objective, the fabled city of Constantinople, lay some five hundred miles to the east.

The ships belonged to the wealthy maritime republic of Venice, formerly a Byzantine province but now a rival. They carried about ten thousand Christian Crusaders from Western Europe, French and Norman knights mostly, who had hired the Venetian ships at an exorbitant sum. Constantinople was to be a supply stop for the pious knights of this Fourth Crusade, whose stated purpose was to overthrow the Muslim rulers of Egypt.

Leaving Venice late the previous summer, the Crusaders had proceeded south along the Dalmatian coast. That autumn they had conquered the Dalmatian port of Zara, a Christian city, but one controlled by Venice's rival, Hungary. The Venetians had demanded its capture in exchange for letting the Crusaders postpone paying off the huge fee the Venetians were charging for transportation. This cynical deal was struck by Venice's elderly, ambitious, and utterly unscrupulous doge, Enrico Dandolo. Crusaders, of course, weren't supposed to attack fellow Christians, and Pope Innocent III was duly outraged. He had already warned against such impious behavior, suspecting correctly that Dandolo coveted a much greater prize than Zara. The Crusaders had wintered in Zara before sailing southward to Corfu, picking up stragglers along the way.

The journey from Corfu to Constantinople took a month. In late June 1203, the Crusaders anchored for the first time within view of the Byzantine capital.

The sight of the city left them stunned. Nothing in Western Europe could have prepared them for Constantinople's size and magnificence. The largest city in the West at this time was probably Venice, whose population most likely
stood at around one hundred thousand. London and Paris, even Rome itself, were backwaters by comparison, with populations of perhaps twenty thousand to forty thousand. Going on figures he got from from Byzantine officials, the French knight Geoffroy de Villehardouin later estimated Constantinople's population at four hundred thousand. It was therefore something on the order of ten to twenty times larger than Paris.

“All those who had never seen Constantinople,” Geoffroy tells us in his chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, “gazed very intently at the city, never having imagined there could be so fine a place in all the world.” During the approach through the Sea of Marmara, as the Crusaders’ ships drew closer, the long, high, gray stone seawalls—which still crouch right at the edge of the rocky shoreline—had slowly grown from a dark smudge on the horizon to fill their sight. The walls continued as the ships rounded the promontory, and now on the hillside behind the walls the graceful porticoes and columns of the Great Palace complex came into view. Farther along were more sea walls and then the mighty, humped presence of Hagia Sophia, crowning the city's high ground, plainly visible from the Bosporus. “There was indeed,” Geoffroy continues, “no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight.”

Despite its staggering opulence and the continued prosperity of its trade—trade on which the Venetians’ own wealth depended, and which they longed to control— Constantinople and its empire had suffered decades of political instability and turmoil. Byzantium's sacred throne had been seized by one usurper after another, and internal dissension wracked the governing class and the imperial administration. The Crusaders rapidly found out the soft spot in the city's defenses. Westerners had traditionally been quartered
across the Golden Horn, in the Galata district. It was there, from the heights of the Galata Tower, that the great chain was winched up to seal off the harbor. By storming the tower, the Crusaders—led by the Venetians—were able to lower the chain and attack where the walls were weakest, deep inside the Golden Horn.
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Within weeks of arriving, they had occupied the city and installed their own puppet on the throne, Alexius IV, the son of a former emperor who had been overthrown some years earlier.

For the rest of that summer and fall, the Crusaders waited in Constantinople with their Venetian escorts as Alexius IV failed to meet his obligations to them—in particular, the payment of the huge fortune he'd agreed to fork over in return for the throne, money the Crusaders owed in turn to the Venetians. During this time, Alexius IV grew increasingly unpopular with his Byzantine subjects, who resented the Crusaders’ rough and imposing presence. Skirmishes broke out between rowdy Western knights and sullen Byzantine soldiers stationed in the city.

At length the popular resentment bubbled over, and in January 1204, Alexius IV was overthrown and executed by a leader of the Byzantine resistance, an elderly but energetic aristocrat named Alexius Ducas. Also known as Murtzuphlus or Bushybrow, he assumed the throne as Alexius V.

The Crusaders stepped up their demands for payment, but the new emperor refused them flatly. He would have been unable to cooperate even had he wished to do so, since (as his predecessor had discovered) the imperial treasury was empty. But the Crusaders needed to pay off the implacable Venetians, who threatened to simply sail away. The obvious
solution, as the wily Dandolo had foreseen, was for the Crusaders to capture and plunder the city for themselves.

They launched their offensive in early April. Though the desperate and demoralized Byzantines managed to drive back the first attack, psychologically the Frangoi had already made the conquest. Byzantine defenses crumbled a few days later, on April 13, when the Crusaders again breached the seawalls at their weakest point, near the inner tip of the Golden Horn. They set fire to the city. Alexius V gave up and fled with most of the Byzantine aristocracy on his heels. The Crusaders poured in.

The mayhem that followed is unique in history. For three days and nights, the Crusaders murdered, raped, looted, or destroyed everyone and everything they could get their hands on. Untold thousands perished; many more were brutalized, maimed, left homeless. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates witnessed it all before escaping the city two days after the pillage ended. The streets were filled with the screams and moans of the dying and wounded, he wrote later, as men were slain, women and girls raped, the elderly beaten, and the wealthy robbed. “Thus it was in the squares, thus it was in the temples, thus it was in the hiding places; for there was no place that could escape detection or that could offer asylum to those who came streaming in.”

Tragic as the human cost was, this isn't what makes the sack of Constantinople unique. The city had stood inviolate as the capital of Christendom for nearly nine centuries, since its founding as the New Rome in the early fourth century. A peerless collection of fine art, religious relics, and irreplaceable manuscripts filled its churches, monasteries, libraries, and palatial homes. Mosaics, icons, frescoes, ancient bronze and marble statues, precious metalwork, jeweled artifacts, silken wall hangings, painstakingly copied works of ancient
and medieval Greek literature—the scale of what the world lost in those three days can only be guessed, never known.