Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (13 page)

Their objective was Corfu, an important Byzantine outpost, defended by a strong and determined garrison. They besieged it for six months, and would probably have continued longer had they not received, in the spring of
1123,
a desperate appeal from Palestine: King Baldwin had been taken prisoner, and their help was essential if the Latin East were to survive. So the siege was raised and Corfu enjoyed a brief period of tranquillity; but over the next three years the Venetians continued to be active in the eastern Mediterranean, capturing Rhodes, Chios, Samos, Lesbos and Andros. When, early in
1126,
they sent troops to occupy Cephalonia, John Comnenus had had enough. His own fleet was powerless to stop the aggression, which was costing him far more than the commercial privileges he had withheld. In August that same year he swallowed his pride and restored them. Even taking account of the inevitable loss of Byzantine face, it was a small enough price to pay.

Where Hungary was concerned the Empire's problems had begun in
1095,
when the newly-enthroned King Coloman had dispossessed his brother Almus, whom he had later ordered to be blinded, together with the latter's son Bela. Shortly before John's acce
ssion, Almus had sought
refuge with his kinswoman - the future Empress Irene - in Constantinople, where he had been warmly received; he had even been granted an estate in Macedonia, which had rapidly become a centre for his many compatriots in exile, voluntary or otherwise. Coloman seems to have made no objection; but his brother and successor, Stephen II, growing increasingly concerned over the activities of these discontents, had made a formal protest to the Byzantine court - simultaneously demanding that Almus should be expelled from the Empire. John, predictably enough, had refused; and in the summer of
1128
Stephen attacked. Crossing the Danube, he captured Belgrade and Nish; then, continuing into what is now Bulgaria, he ravaged as far as Sardica (Sofia) and Philippopolis (Plovdiv) before retiring again to the north.

But the Emperor was also on the march. Reaching Philippopolis shortly after the Hungarian army had left it, he advanced northward -almost certainly up the valley of the Iskur
1
- to a rendezvous on the Danube with a flotilla from the imperial navy. Stephen had by now withdrawn to the north bank; he had fallen ill, but had given strict orders from his sickbed that his troops were on no account to follow him across the river. As it happened, they had no opportunity to do so. John found them encamped beneath the fortress of Haram - near the confluence of the Danube with its little tributary, the Nera - and used his ships to make his own secret crossing a mile or two downstream. He then fell on them from behind, pinning them against the bank. Of the survivors, some managed to escape but many more were taken prisoner. All the captured towns were recovered.

At some moment either shortly before or shortly after these events, John Comnenus fought a similarly successful campaign against the Serbs under their leader Bolkan, the Zhupan of Rascia, settling many of them in Asia Minor as he had the Pechenegs. Our knowledge of this episode -as indeed of all Serbian affairs at this time — is lamentably slight; but it seems clear enough that although the Serbs continued to resent imperial domination and to make periodical attempts - often supported by the Hungarians - to shake it off, they were never again to cause John any serious anxiety. By
1130
he was ready to leave Europe to look after itself, and to turn his attention once again to the East.

1
Some historians have suggested the Morava valley; but this would have involved a long and pointless detour to the west for both armies. Nicetas Choniates shifts the whole scene further north still, to the wooded hills between the Sava and the Danube nowadays known as the Frushka Gora; but again the balance of probability is against him.

In the decade that he had been away, the situation in Anatolia had changed considerably for the worse. The Danishmends had continued to spread at the expense of the Sultanate of Iconium, which had been virtually incapacitated by internal dissension; and their ruler, the Emir Ghazi - who had annexed Melitene in
1124
and had gone on to acquire Caesarea, Ankyra, Kastamon and Gangra
1
three years later - was now the most formidable power in all Asia Minor. Three years later, in February
1130
on the banks of the river Pyramus (now the Ceyhan) in Cilicia, his army had destroyed that of young Bohemund II of Antioch in a total massacre. Bohemund's head was brought to Ghazi, who had it embalmed and sent it as a gift to the Caliph in Baghdad.

John Comnenus shed few tears for the Prince of Antioch, whose principality he saw - with good reason - as rightly belonging to his Empire; but it was clear to him that Ghazi must be dealt with while there was still time. Between
1130
and
113
5
he led no fewer than five separate expeditions against the Danishmends. For the first three years he was seriously hampered by the intrigues of Alexius's third son, the
sebastocrator
Isaac, who was doing his best to form a league of all the enemies of the Empire with the object of supplanting his brother on the imperial throne; but in
1132
Isaac left for the Holy Land -whether for reasons of piety or for more unworthy motives we cannot tell - and thereafter John's progress was swift. During the remainder of that year and the beginning of
1133
he went from one success to the next, marching through Bithynia and Paphlagonia, capturing the important stronghold of Kastamon and advancing to well beyond the Halys river. As he advanced, Christians and Muslims alike from the towns and villages flocked to his banner, while several of the local Emirs surrendered at his approach.

On his return to the capital, he made a triumphal entry in the traditional manner - the first that Constantinople had seen since that of John Tzimisces in
972.
2
As befitted the troubled times, the ceremonial chariot that waited for him at the Golden Gate with its four snow-white horses was trimmed with silver rather than with gold; but the streets were decorated, as always on such occasions, with damasks and brocades, and rich carpets hung from the windows of the houses. The whole route from the Land Walls to St Sophia was lined with specially erected stands, where virtually the entire population of the city stood cheering

1
The modem Kayseri, Ankara, Kastamonu and Chankiri.

2See
Byzantium: The Apogee,
p.
224.

as the procession passed by: first the prisoners, next the fighting regiments, then the generals and finally the Emperor himself, on foot and carrying a cross. Like Tzimisces before him, he had refused to mount the chariot, preferring to give pride of place to the icon of the Virgin that had accompanied him throughout his campaigns.

But his work was not over: the following year saw him back in the field. The campaign was tragically interrupted by the sudden death in Bithynia of his wife Irene; he and his sons left the army at once in order to escort her body back to Constantinople. They returned, however, immediately after the funeral and rejoined the army on the road to Gangra where, towards the end of the summer, there came news of another, more welcome, death - that of the Emir Ghazi himself. The Emir's last hours must have been somewhat brightened by the arrival of an embassy from the Caliph, to inform him that he and his descendants had been awarded the title of
Malik,
or King, and to present him with 'four black flags, drums to be beaten before him whenever he appeared in public, a golden chain to wear about his neck and a golden sceptre with which the ambassadors were to tap him on the shoulder in recognition of his new rank and title'; but none of these were of much use to him. He expired almost at once, and the title passed to his son Mohammed.

The confusion which almost invariably followed the demise of a Muslim ruler ensured that the Byzantines could expect little opposition from the Danishmend army in the immediate future. Individual garrisons, on the other hand, could still give trouble. Gangra for example, although the Governor had recently died and left the command to his wife, put up so spirited a resistance that John decided to pass on to Kastamon, which Ghazi had recaptured in the previous year. It surrendered quickly enough - on one or two conditions that he was happy to accept - and he returned at once to Gangra, this time to besiege the city in earnest. The garrison held out for a little while, in the hopes that certain Turkish troops rumoured to be in the neighbourhood might come to their aid; but by this time the country was in the grip of an unusually hard winter and provisions were short. After a week or two, there being still no sign of a relief force, the Governor's widow sued for terms - among them permission to leave the city for any who wished to do so, and the return of some of the prisoners taken on the previous occasion. Once again John willingly agreed — though Cinnamus tells us that few of the inhabitants took advantage of his offer, many of them preferring to enlist in the ranks of his army.

Leaving a Byzantine garrison of two thousand men in Gangra, early in
11
3
5
the Emperor returned once again to his capital. During the last five years he had achieved much. For Ghazi's death he could hardly take the credit; nevertheless he had succeeded in everything that he had set out to do, restoring to the Empire extensive lands that had been lost to it for over half a century. The Turks were not beaten; but they had sustained several crippling blows and it would be some time before they could return to the offensive. He himself was now almost free to work towards the realization of his greatest ambition of all and to march, not against a Muslim army but against the two Christian states at that time occupying what he considered to be imperial territory: the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia and its close ally, the Norman Principality of Antioch.

Almost, but not quite. He had one other potential enemy to deal with before that ambition could be achieved. Roger of Sicily had worn his crown for little more than four years; since that time, however, he had gained steadily in power and influence, and he too dreamed of foreign conquest. The Apulian sea-ports were only some sixty miles from the imperial lands across the Adriatic, and the rich cities of Dalmatia constituted a permanent temptation to a little gentle freebooting which, in recent years, Sicilian sea captains had not always managed to resist. Other raids, on the North African coast, had indicated that the King of Sicily would not long be content to remain within his present frontiers and, if not checked, might soon be in a position to close the central Mediterranean at will. He was known, too, to have his eye on the Crusader states. As the cousin of Bohemund II he had a strong claim to Antioch; while the marriage of his mother Adelaide to Baldwin I as his third wife in
111
3
had been solemnized with the clear understanding that if it proved childless - which, given the ages of the parties concerned, it almost certainly would - the Crown of Jerusalem was to pass to her son. Baldwin's subsequent behaviour, by which he first spent all Adelaide's immense dowry, then had the marriage annulled and packed her off unceremoniously home to Sicily, was an insult that Roger never forgave; at least in his eyes, it in no way weakened his case. Admittedly he had no similar claim to Constantinople, but such considerations had inhibited neither his uncle Robert Guiscard nor his cousin Bohemund; and even if he were to confine his energies to the conquest of Crusader Outremer the long-term prospects for Byzantium would be grave indeed.

And so, early in
11
35,
ambassadors s
et out from the Bosphorus bound
for Germany and the court of the Western Emperor Lothair; and by autumn agreement had been reached. In return for generous financial support from Byzantium, Lothair would launch a major campaign in the spring of
1137
to crush the King of Sicily. John welcomed his envoys warmly on their return. With his rear now satisfactorily protected, he could at last set off for the East.

The story of the Armenian settlement of Cilicia — the region extending between the southern coast of Anatolia and the Taurus mountains, from near Alanya to the Gulf of Alexandretta - goes back to the early eleventh century when Basil II, during his surprisingly peaceful incorporation of most of Armenia into the Empire, offered in return to the Princes of Vaspurakan extensive territories running from Sebasteia to the Euphrates.
1
Similar grants were made by his successors, so that by
1070
or so there was a steady trickle of emigration from the harsh Armenian uplands to the warmer and more luxuriant country to the south. After Manzikert the trickle became a flood, gradually giving rise to a number of semi-independent principalities, for ever squabbling among themselves; and this was essentially the situation in Cilicia when the Crusaders passed through on their way to Palestine.

It did not last. Once the Frankish Crusader states had established some order in their own affairs, they decided to do the same in Cilicia -which, as their principal link with the West, they naturally wished to have under their control. Most of the Armenian princelings were liquidated; one family only was strong enough, or cunning enough, to survive - that of a certain Ruben, who claimed kinship with Gagik II, last of the Bagratid Kings of Armenia,
2
and had established himself in the Taurus in
1071.
His grandson, Leo, had succeeded to the throne of what was by now known as Lesser Armenia in
1129,
and three years later had embarked on an ambitious programme of conquest, capturing Tarsus, Adana and Mopsuestia - although whether he took them from the Byzantines or the Crusaders is, oddly enough, uncertain.
3
Before long, however, Leo overstretched himself: late in
1136,
a vendetta with the new Prince of Antioch, Raymond of Poitiers, led to his capture and