Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (17 page)

St Bernard, now fifty-five, was far and away the most powerful spiritual force in Europe. To the twentieth-century observer, safely out of range of that astonishing personal magnetism with which he effortlessly dominated all those with whom he came in contact, he is not an attractive figure. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain that resulted from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a blazing religious zeal that left no room for tolerance or moderation. His public life had begun in
1115
when the Abbot of Citeaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, had effectively released him from monastic discipline by sending him off to found a daughter-house at Clairvaux in Champagne. From that moment on his influence spread; and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was constantly on the move, preaching, persuading, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy in which he believed the basic principles of Christianity to be involved. The proposed Crusade was a venture after his own heart. Willingly he agreed to launch it — at the assembly that the King had summoned for the following Palm Sunday at Vezelay in Burgundy.

At once the magic of Bernard's name began to do its work; and as the appointed day approached men and women from every corner of France began to pour into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the basilica, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside; and here, on
31
March
1146,
Bernard made one of the most fateful speeches of his life, with King Louis - already displaying on his breast the cross which the Pope had sent him in token of his decision - standing beside him. The text of what he said has not come down to us; but with Bernard it was the manner of his delivery rather than the words themselves that made the real impact on his audience. As he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of these, cut in rough cloth, had already been prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the Abbot flung off his own robe and began to tear it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.

It was an astonishing achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. And yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done.

Some time during the summer of
1146
Manuel Comnenus received a letter from Louis VII, attempting to enlist his sympathies for the coming Crusade. Manuel was fonder of Westerners and the Western way of life than any previous
basileus;
nevertheless, he found the prospect of another full-scale incursion into his Empire by undisciplined French and German armies - for St Bernard had gone on from France to Germany, where his message had been received with equal enthusiasm - unpalatable in the extreme. He fully understood the extent of the nightmare that the First Crusade had caused his grandfather half a century before, and had no wish to see it repeated. Admittedly he was having a good deal of trouble with the Sultan of Iconium, against whom he was at that moment involved in the second of two fairly indecisive campaigns; it was just conceivable that the new wave of Crusaders might be better behaved than their predecessors and even turn out to be a long-term blessing; but he doubted it. His reply to Louis was as lukewarm as it could be made without actually giving offence. He would provide food and supplies for the armies, but everything would have to be paid for. And all the leaders would be required once again to take an oath of fealty to the Emperor as they passed through his dominions.

Any faint hopes that Manuel might have entertained about the quality of the new champions of Christendom were soon dashed. The German army of about twenty thousand that set off from Ratisbon in May
1147
seems to have included more than its fair share of undesirables, ranging from the occasional religious fanatic to the usual collection of footloose ne'er-do-wells and fugitives from justice, attracted as always by the promise of plenary absolution offered to all who took the Cross. Hardly had they entered Byzantine territory than they began pillaging, ravaging, raping and even murdering as the mood took them. Often the leaders set a poor example to their followers. Conrad himself - who had at first refused to have anything to do with the Crusade but had repented the previous Christmas after public castigation by Bernard - behaved with his usual dignity; but at Adrianople (Edirne) his nephew and second-in-command, the young Duke Frederick of Swabia (better known to history by his subsequent nickname of Barbarossa), burnt down an entire monastery in reprisal for an attack by local brigands, massacring all the perfectly innocent monks. Fighting became ever more frequent between the Crusaders and the Byzantine milita
ry escort which Manuel had sent
out to keep an eye on them, and when in mid-September the army at last drew up outside the walls of Constantinople - Conrad having indignantly refused the Emperor's request to cross into Asia over the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), avoiding the capital altogether - relations between German and Greek could hardly have been worse.

And now, even before the populations along the route had recovered from the shock, the French army appeared in its turn on the western horizon. It was smaller than the German, and on the whole more seemly. Discipline was better, and the presence of many distinguished ladies - including Queen Eleanor herself - accompanying their husbands doubtless exercised a further moderating influence. Progress, however, was not altogether smooth. Not surprisingly, the Balkan peasantry was by now frankly hostile, and asked ridiculous prices for what little food it had left to sell. Mistrust soon became mutual, and led to sharp practices on both sides. Thus, long before they reached Constantinople, the French had begun to feel considerable resentment against Germans and Greeks alike; and when they finally arrived on
4
October they were scandalized to hear that the Emperor had chosen that moment to conclude a truce with the Turkish enemy.

Although King Louis could not have been expected to appreciate the fact, it was a sensible precaution for Manuel to take. The presence of the French and German armies at the very gates of his capital constituted a far more serious immediate danger than the Turks in Asia. The Emperor knew that in both camps there were extreme elements pressing for a combined Western attack on Constantinople; just a few days later, indeed, St Bernard's cousin Geoffrey, Bishop of Langres, was formally to propose such a course to the King. Only by deliberately spreading reports of a huge Turkish army massing in Anatolia, and implying that if the Franks did not make haste to pass through the hostile territory they might never manage to do so at all, did Manuel succeed in saving the situation. Meanwhile he flattered Louis - and kept him occupied -with his usual round of lavish entertainments and banquets, while arranging passage over the Bosphorus for the King and his army at the earliest possible moment.

As he bade farewell to his unwelcome guests and watched the ferryboats shuttling across the straits, laden to the gunwales with men and animals, Manuel foresaw better than anyone the dangers that awaited the Franks on the second stage of their journey. He himself had only recently returned from an Anatolian campaign; though his stories of gathering Turkish hordes had been exaggerated, he had now seen the

Crusaders for himself and must have known that their shambling forces, already as lacking in morale as in discipline, would stand little chance of survival if suddenly attacked by the Seljuk cavalry. He had furnished them with provisions and guides; he had warned them about the scarcity of water; and he had advised them not to take the direct route through the hinterland but to keep to the coast, which was still under Byzantine control. He could do no more. If, after all these precautions, the Crusaders insisted on getting themselves slaughtered, they would have only themselves to blame. He for his part would be sorry - but not, perhaps, inconsolable.

It cannot have been more than a few days after bidding them farewell that the Emperor received two reports, from two very different quarters. The first, brought by swift messengers from Asia Minor, informed him that the German army had been taken by surprise by the Turks near Dorylaeum and virtually annihilated. Conrad himself and the Duke of Swabia had escaped, and had returned to join the French at Nicaea; but nine-tenths of their men now lay dead and dying amid the wreckage of their camp.

The second report brought him less welcome news: the fleet of King Roger of Sicily was at that very moment sailing against his Empire.

The Sicilian fleet was commanded by George of Antioch, a renegade Greek who had risen by his own brilliance to the proudest title his adopted country had to offer: Emir of Emirs, High Admiral and Chief Minister of the realm.
1
It had sailed in the autumn of
1147
from Otranto and had headed straight across the Adriatic to Corfu. The island fell without a struggle; Nicetas tells us that the inhabitants, oppressed by the weight of Byzantine taxation and charmed by the honeyed words of the admiral, welcomed the Normans as deliverers and willingly accepted a garrison of a thousand men.

Turning southward, the fleet then rounded the Peloponnese, leaving further detachments at strategic positions, and sailed up the eastern coast of Greece as far as Euboea. Here George seems to have decided that he had gone far enough. He turned about, made a quick raid on Athens and then, on reaching the Ionian islands, headed eastward again up the Gulf of Corinth, ravaging the coastal towns as he went. His progress,

1
It is perhaps worth mentioning here that the word
admiral,
found with minor variations in so many European languages, is derived through Norman Sicily from the Arabic word
emir;
and in particular from its compound
emir-ai-bahr,
Ruler of the Sea.

Nicetas tells us, was 'like a sea monster, swallowing everything in its path'. One of his raiding parties penetrated inland as far as Thebes, centre of the Byzantine silk manufacture. Together with innumerable bales of rich damasks and brocades, George also seized a large number of women workers, expert alike in the cultivation and exploitation of the silkworm, the spinning of the silk and its subsequent weaving, and brought them back triumphantly to Palermo.

The news of the Sicilian depredations stung Manuel to a fury. Whatever he might have thought about the Crusade, the fact that a so-called Christian country should have taken deliberate advantage of it to launch an attack on his Empire disgusted him; and the knowledge that the admiral concerned was a Greek can hardly have assuaged his wrath. A century before, Apulia had been a rich province of the Byzantine Empire; now it was little better than a nest of pirates. Here was a situation that could not be tolerated. Roger, 'that dragon, threatening to shoot the flames of his anger higher than the crater of Etna . . . that common enemy of all Christians and illegal occupier of the land of Sicily',
1
must be driven for ever from the Mediterranean. The West had tried to do so, and failed; now it was the turn of Byzantium. Given adequate help and freedom from other commitments, Manuel believed that he could succeed. The Crusading armies had passed on. He himself had already concluded a truce with the Turks, and this he now confirmed and extended. It was essential that every soldier and sailor in the Empire should be free for the grand design that he was planning, a design that might well prove to be the crowning achievement of his life: the restoration of all South Italy and Sicily to the Byzantine fold.

The problem was to find suitable allies. With France and Germany out of the running, Manuel's thoughts turned to Venice. Her people, as he well knew, had long been worried about the growth of Sicilian sea power. No longer could they control the Mediterranean as once they had done; and while the bazaars of Palermo, Catania and Syracuse grew ever busier, so affairs on the Rialto had begun to slacken. Moreover, if Roger were to consolidate his hold on Corfu and the coast of Epirus he would be in a position to seal off the Adriatic; and Venice might at any moment find herself under a Sicilian blockade. The Venetians bargained a little, of course - they never gave anything away for nothing - but in March
1148,
in return for increased trading privileges in Cyprus, Rhodes and Constantinople, Manuel got what he wanted: the full support of

1
Imperial Edict of February
1148.

their fleet for the six months following. He himself was meanwhile working feverishly to bring his own navy to readiness; John Cinnamus, by now his chief secretary, estimates its strength at five hundred galleys and a thousand transports - a worthy complement to an army of perhaps twenty or thirty thousand men. The army he entrusted as usual to the Grand Domestic, Axuch; the navy to his brother-in-law, Duke Stephen Contostephanus, husband of his sister Anna. He himself would be in overall command.

By April this huge expeditionary force was ready to leave. The ships, refitted and provisioned, lay at anchor in the Marmara; the army waited for the order to march. Then, suddenly, everything went wrong. The Cumans swept down over the Danube and into Byzantine territory; the Venetian fleet was held up by the sudden death of the Doge; and a succession of freak summer storms disrupted shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. It was autumn before the two navies met in the southern Adriatic and began a joint sea blockade of Corfu. The land attack, meanwhile, was still further delayed. By the time he had dealt with the Cumans it was plain to Manuel that the Pindus mountains would be blocked by snow long before he could get his army across them. Settling in in winter quarters in Macedonia he rode on to Thessalonica, where an important guest was awaiting him. Conrad of Hohenstaufen had just returned from the Holy Land.