City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (14 page)

The following day a freelance force of Venetian and Pisan merchants and Flemish crusaders commandeered some fishing boats and sailed back across the Horn. The two groups probably had different goals. The crusaders were tempted by the chance to plunder the taunting mosque on the waterfront. The ousted merchants were bent on revenge. When the Muslims called for
help, the Greek population ran out to repulse the intruders. Some of the Venetians and Pisans made it through the open gates and set upon the properties of their former Greek neighbours, ‘then they fanned out into various places and fired the houses’. It was the height of a long dry summer; an impatient wind was blowing steadily from the north. The close-packed wooden houses on the lower slopes started to crackle and burn. The fire, propelled by the wind, picked up speed and began advancing up the hills into the heart of the city.

Fires were a common hazard in Constantinople, but this, according to Choniates, ‘proved all the others to be but sparks’. A wall of flame ‘whooshed up unbelievably high’; it leaped gaps across the streets, tacking with the shifting course of the wind, advancing across a front hundreds of yards wide, veering unpredictably to leave areas untouched, then whipping back on itself. As night fell, cyclones of sparks were sucked skywards on the thermal updraft, and ‘balls of fire were hurled up from the inferno high into the sky so that remarkably they consumed buildings a good distance away’. The lines of flames divided and came together again ‘meandering like a river of fire … advancing gradually and leaping over walls to ravage the buildings beyond’.

In the dark, the crusaders looked on in horror from across the water at the long humped silhouette of city hills outlined in fire. Villehardouin watched ‘those great churches and rich palaces melt and collapse, and the wide merchant streets consumed by flames’. The noise was deafening. Buildings went up ‘like candle wicks’ and exploded; marble shattered, iron bubbled and melted like water hissing on fire. Choniates, who himself lost considerable property, witnessed the destruction as the flames tore through some of the ancient and magnificent public spaces of the city.

Porticoes collapsed, the most beautiful buildings in the squares were toppled, the tallest columns consumed like brushwood. There was nothing that could withstand the fury of the fire … and the buildings towards the arch of the Milion … crashed to the ground … the porticoes of Domninos were reduced to ashes … and the Forum of Constantine and everything lying between the northern and southern limits of the city was destroyed.

The fire licked the porch of Hagia Sophia but miraculously turned aside.

The city was divided by ‘an enormous abyss, like a river of fire’. Driven by the flames, people struggled to move their valuables to safe ground, only to find that the fire ‘taking a winding course and moving in zigzag paths and branching off in many directions and returning to its starting point, destroyed the goods that had been moved … The majority of the city’s inhabitants were stripped then of their possessions.’ Flying embers sucked out over the sea torched a passing ship. In the space of three days the fire cut a dark gash through the heart of urban Constantinople. Sporadic outbursts continued for days, the deep pits of smouldering embers whipped unpredictably back into ignition. From sea to sea, the inhabitants of the city, of whom probably only a small number actually died, found it cut in two by a blackened and smouldering strip of devastation. Choniates summed up the mood of the people with an anguished cry. ‘Alas! The most splendid and beautiful palaces filled with beautiful things and the greatest riches, which astonished everyone – all gone.’ Four hundred acres of the city had been atomised, and a hundred thousand people lost their homes, including Choniates himself.

Watching from their camp, the crusaders were struck dumb. ‘No one knew who started the fire,’ Villehardouin disingenuously proclaimed, figuratively staring at his shoes. Others were more honest; Baldwin of Flanders’s court poet was later to say quite openly that ‘he and we alike bear guilt for the burning of churches and palaces’. And the citizens of Constantinople knew exactly whom to hold responsible. Almost every westerner still residing in the city fled to the crusader camp. More than the treachery, the double-dealing, the mistaken intentions across the cultural divide, the events of 19–21 August marked a firebreak that could
henceforth not be crossed. The crusading venture like a zigzagging fire was destroying everything in its ambient path. For the Venetians their long maritime adventure seemed to have no end in sight. They prepared to overwinter, drew their ships out of the water onto the banks of the Golden Horn and waited to see what would happen next.

*

In early November Alexius IV returned from his progress to the lands of Thrace. The expedition had been a relative success. He had subdued some cities previously loyal to his predecessor and mulcted them for cash. On his return he was accorded the welcome befitting a legitimate emperor; the populace and the crusader lords rode out to welcome him as he approached the gates. The Latins noticed a change in his manner; he was more self-confident, or as Villehardouin put it, ‘The emperor began to show disdain towards the barons and those who had helped him so much.’ The payments to the crusaders slowed down. At the same time his father, Isaac, as co-emperor, was pushed into the background. It was now Alexius’s name that was mentioned first in proclamations. Embittered, the older man began to defame his son, claiming, amongst other things, ‘that he kept company with depraved men whom he smote on the buttocks and was struck by them in return’. The blind old man fell prey to superstition and the toadying prophecies of monks. He was increasingly fearful of the mob; on the advice of his soothsayers he had one of the great totemic statues of the city – a monumental bronze image of a wild boar with raised bristles – removed from the Hippodrome and set up outside the palace in the belief that ‘it could restrain the mad fury of the populace’.

Such presentiments were not misplaced, even if Isaac’s mystical defences were unlikely to prove adequate. Constantinople was descending into chaos. ‘The wine-bibbing portion of the vulgar masses’, as the aristocratic Choniates haughtily dubbed them, marched on the Forum of Constantine in an equally superstitious fury, and smashed to pieces a beautiful bronze statue of Athena,
‘because the foolish rabble believed that she was turned towards the western armies’. Alexius meanwhile continued to melt down the valuables of the Church and taxed the nobles increasingly heavily to pay the crusaders. The proceeds were ‘simply thrown to the dogs’, according to Choniates.

It was not enough. By midwinter, funds were drying up. And in the shadows of the imperial court there waited another player in the game: Alexius Ducas, known colloquially as Murtzuphlus, meaning ‘gloomy’, because ‘his eyebrows were joined together and seemed to hang down over his eyes’. He was a nobleman with a long history of court intrigue. He was ambitious, fearless and totally opposed to pandering to the westerners. Alexius had freed him from prison for plotting against his predecessor; it was to prove a bad mistake. As the winter drew on and the crusaders became more importunate, Murtzuplus emerged as the leader of the increasingly popular anti-western faction. When Boniface of Montferrat made a direct appeal to Alexius to pay what was due, Murtzuphlus’s counter-counsel was blunt: ‘Ah, sir, you have paid them too much. Don’t pay them any more! You have paid so much you have mortgaged everything. Make them go away and then expel them from your land.’ Eventually the payments stopped altogether, yet Alexius kept playing for time. He continued to support the crusader camp with food. He was walking a delicate tightrope but events began to spiral beyond his control. On 1 December, there was a further outbreak of mob violence against westerners close to the city walls and an attack on the Venetian ships. To the Greeks it was now clear that the ships were the key to everything; destroy the fleet and the crusaders would be trapped and vulnerable.

*

Across the Golden Horn the want of money was starting to tell. Dandolo and the crusader lords held a summit; they resolved on an ultimatum. Six leading notables, three crusader lords and three Venetians, were despatched to the palace to deliver a blunt message to the emperor. ‘And so the envoys mounted their horses,
buckled on their swords and rode together as far as the palace of Blachernae.’ This was not a desirable assignment. At the palace gate they dismounted and made their way between the customary lines of Varangian guards into the hall, where they found the twin emperors, father and son, seated on beautiful thrones, surrounded by ‘a large number of important lords, and it seemed to be the court of a rich prince’.

Apparently unintimidated, the envoys set out their case. To the feudal crusaders, the failure to pay was a breach of honour; to the bourgeois Venetians it was a broken contract. The words were straightforward. Tellingly they were addressed solely to Alexius: ‘You swore to them, both you and your father, to keep the agreement which you had sworn – and [we] have the documents. But you haven’t kept the terms as well as you should.’ They demanded that the contract be honoured. ‘If you do so it will be most agreeable to them. If not, understand that henceforward they will regard you as neither their lord nor their friend … Now, you have clearly heard what we have said and you must act as you please.’

To the westerners it was just plain speaking, but the Greeks ‘were astonished and outraged at this challenge and said that no one had ever been brazen enough to dare to defy the emperor of Constantinople in his own hall’. There was immediate uproar, expressions of extreme ill-will, hands reaching for sword hilts, shouts and curses. Turning abruptly on their heels the envoys fled to the gate with a rising fury speeding them away. They rode off in palpable relief, lucky to be alive. The breakdown was decisive: if the crusaders wanted the funds to reach the Holy Land, they would have to take them. ‘In this way,’ Villehardouin recorded, ‘the war began.’

But the matter was not quite settled. Dandolo, from the perspective of his ninety years, decided to make one more personal appeal to Alexius’s better nature. He sent a messenger to the palace, requesting a meeting at the harbour. Dandolo had himself rowed across in a galley, with three more galleys packed with armed men to guard him. Alexius rode down to the shore. The doge opened
abruptly: ‘Alexius, what are you thinking of? Remember that it is we who dragged you out of misery and then made you lord and crowned you emperor. Will you not honour your commitments and not do anything more about it?’ The emperor’s response was firmly negative. Fury overcame the doge. ‘No? Contemptible boy,’ he spat, ‘we hauled you out of the dung heap and we’ll drop you back in it. And I defy you. Be fully aware that from now on I will pursue you to your utter destruction, with all the power at my disposal.’ With these words the doge left and returned to camp.

Initially, there was skirmishing along the shores of the Golden Horn, without particular advantage to either side, but the Greeks knew where the weakness of the crusaders lay. They continuously eyed the ships. Some time probably in mid-December, they launched a night attack on the Venetian fleet. A number of fireships were prepared, laden with dry timber and oil, and with a stiff breeze blowing across the Horn, they were ignited and cut loose ‘and the wind drove them at great speed towards the fleet’. It was only quick thinking by the Venetians which prevented disaster; rapidly boarding their own vessels they manoeuvred them out of the way of the guttering fireships. On the night of 1 January 1204, with conditions again favourable, the Greeks made a second attempt. The wind was again blowing hard towards the Venetian fleet; seventeen large ships were filled with timber, hemp, barrels and pitch. At the depths of midnight they set fire to the vessels and watched the fiery squadron surge across the harbour in a chained line. At the first call of the trumpets, the Venetians scrambled to their stations, cast off and tackled the approaching vessels. ‘And the flames burned so high’, recorded Villehardouin, ‘that it seemed that the whole world was burning.’ It was now that Venetian seafaring skill was put to the test.

A huge mass of Greeks came down onto the shoreline and hurled abuse at the detested Italians, ‘and their shouts were so loud that it seemed that the earth and sea shook’. Some climbed into rowing boats and shot at the Venetian vessels as they put out from the shore. Undaunted, the Venetians gingerly approached
the fiery armada and managed to attach grappling hooks to the line, and ‘by brute force towed them out of the harbour in the face of their enemies’, where they released the fireships and the strong Bosphorus current swept them away flaming into the night. Without Venetian skill, Villehardouin acknowledged that ‘if the fleet had been burned they would have lost everything, because they would have been unable to depart by land or sea’.

Despite these determined assaults Alexius himself was conspicuous by his absence in the front line. The emperor was still trying to manage two counter-pressures, fearful that if the mood inside the city turned ugly, he might need to make yet another appeal to the crusaders. And they needed him alive too: it was Alexius with whom the deals had been struck all the way back in Corfu the previous spring. But Alexius’s equivocation was keenly felt by his own subjects.

The people of the city, who were at least brave, demanded of their emperor that he should be as loyal as they were and use his strength to resist the enemy alongside the army – unless, of course, he was only paying lip service to the Byzantine cause and deep-down favoured the Latins. But his posturings were meaningless, for Alexius shrank from taking up arms against the Latins.

Furthermore, according to Choniates, who watched all this unfold with aristocratic alarm, ‘The disgruntled populace, like a vast sea whipped up by the wind, contemplated revolt.’

Into this power vacuum, the shaggy-browed Murtzuphlus started to insert himself, energetically pressing forward with patriotic fervour in defence of the city, ‘burning with desire to rule and to gain the citizens’ favour’. On 7 January, ‘displaying proof of outstanding courage’, he led an attack on the hated intruders outside the walls. The Greeks were forced back and Murtzuphlus’s horse stumbled and fell; he was only rescued by a company of archers, but this attempt demonstrated his willingness to defend the mother city. Alexius meanwhile seemed happy to sit behind the walls and watch, while the Venetians used their
galleys to plunder the shores of the Golden Horn and employed fire, now the most hated form of war, to inflict further damage on the city. When the crusaders embarked on a two-day punitive raid across the surrounding countryside, plundering and despoiling, the exasperation of the mob finally exploded: the boiling kettle began ‘to blow off steam of abuse against the emperors’.