Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (29 page)

Once over the straits, the imperial army marched via Philadelphia, Laodicea and Myriocephalum - where the whitened bones of Manuel's soldiers still littered the battlefield - to the Seljuk capital at Iconium Constant harassment by bands of mounted Turkish archers had already warned Frederick that the Sultan, despite their past communications, had no intention of allowing the army unimpeded passage through his territory; and it now emerged that he had sent an army of his own, under his son Qutb ed-Din, to protect the city. Only after a pitched battle before the walls was Frederick able to force an entry. Then, after a week's rest, he pressed on again through the Taurus towards the coastal city of Seleucia.

On i o June
1190,
after a long and exhausting journey through the mountains, Frederick Barbarossa led his troops out on to the flat coastal plain. The heat was savage, and the little river Calycadnus
1
that ran past Seleucia to the sea must have been a welcome sight. Frederick, who was riding alone a short distance ahead of the army, spurred his horse towards it. He was never seen alive again. Whether he dismounted to drink and was swept off his feet by the current, whether his horse slipped in the mud and threw him, whether the shock of falling into the icy mountain water was too much for his tired old body - he was nearing seventy - we shall never know. He was rescued, but too late. Most of his followers reached the river to find their Emperor lying dead on the bank.

1 In modern Turkish the Calycadnus is now less cuphonically known as the Goksu.

Almost immediately, the army began to disintegrate. The Duke of Swabia assumed command, but he proved no substitute for his father. Many of the German princelings returned to Europe; others took ship for Tyre, the only major port of Outremer still in Christian hands; the rump of the army, carrying with it the Emperor's body not very successfully preserved in vinegar, marched grimly on, though it lost many more of its men in an ambush as it entered Syria. The survivors who finally limped in to Antioch had no more fight left in them. By this time, too, what was left of Frederick had gone the same way as his army; his rapidly decomposing remnants were hastily buried in the cathedral, where they remained for another seventy-eight years - until a Mameluke army under the Sultan Baibars burnt the whole building, together with most of the city, to the ground.

Fortunately for Outremer, Richard and Philip Augustus arrived with their armies essentially intact; and it was thanks to them that the Third Crusade - although, since it failed to recapture Jerusalem, it too must ultimately be accounted a failure — was at least somewhat less humiliating than the Second. Acre was retaken, to become capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem for another century until the Mameluke conquest; but that Kingdom, henceforth reduced to the short coastal strip between Tyre and Jaffa, was a pale reflection of what Crusader Palestine had once been. It was to struggle on for another century, and when it finally fell to Baibars in
1291
the only surprise was that it had lasted so long.

On Christmas Day,
1194,
by virtue of his marriage nine years before to the Princess Constance, Frederick Barbarossa's son Henry VI had received the royal crown of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral. His wife was not with him. Pregnant for the first time at the age of forty, she was determined on two things: first, that her child should be born safely; second, that it should be seen to be unquestionably hers. She did not put off her journey to Sicily, but travelled more slowly and in her own time; and she had got no further than the little town of Jesi, some twenty miles west of Ancona, when she felt the pains of childbirth upon her. There on the day after her husband's coronation, in a large tent erected in the main square to which free entrance was allowed to any matron of the town who wished to witness the birth, she brought forth her only son whom, a day or two later, she presented in the same square to the assembled inhabitants, proudly suckling him at her breast. Of that son, Frederick - later to be nicknamed
Stupor Mundi,
the Astonishment of the World — we shall hear more as our story continues.

At the time of Frederick's birth, his father was already contemplating a new Crusade. Not surprisingly, Henry saw the debacle that had followed his own father's death as a humiliation for the Empire. Had Barbarossa lived, he had little doubt that Jerusalem would have been recovered; it was plainly his duty to retrieve the family honour. In doing so, he would also increase his prestige among the nobility of the Empire, both lay and ecclesiastical, and perhaps improve his own distinctly chilly relations with the Papacy, thereby indirectly facilitating his acceptance by his Sicilian subjects. In Easter week of
1195
he took the Cross; on Easter Day -
2
April - at Bari, he issued his public summons to the Crusade; and a few days later he wrote a firm letter to the Emperor Isaac, making it clear to him that he was expected to contribute to the coming expedition rather than to obstruct it - more specifically by the provision of a fleet. For good measure he added a demand that Isaac should return to him that part of the Balkan peninsula between Durazzo and Thessalonica formerly conquered by the Sicilian army, and finally that the
basileus
should pay compensation for the damages suffered by his father while crossing Byzantine territory.

The letter was a typical piece of imperial bluster; but it missed its target. On
8
April
1195
— quite possibly on the very day that his letter was written - Isaac Angelus fell victim to a
coup
engineered by his elder brother Alexius, who deposed and blinded him and had himself crowned Emperor in his stead. If Isaac had been a poor Emperor, it can only be said that Alexius III was a good deal worse. Given his weakness and cowardice, to say nothing of his lack of any semblance of administrative ability, it is difficult to understand why he should have coveted the throne as he did. Isaac had at least displayed some degree of energy where the Empire's external affairs were concerned; Alexius showed none. During the eight years of his reign the disintegration of the Empire became steadily more apparent, and he was to leave it, as we shall see, in a state of total collapse.

To Henry VI, these developments in Constantinople were of little interest; he had no intention of relaxing the pressure, and he soon discovered that Alexius was every bit as easily manipulated as his predecessor. Thus, when he demanded a heavy tribute to pay for his mercenary troops, the terrified Emperor immediately instituted a special tax known as the
Alamanikon,
or 'German levy', which made him more than ever unpopular with his subjects; and when even this proved inadequate, he supplemented it by stripping the precious ornaments from the imperial tombs in the church
of the Holy Apostles. Two years
later, in May
1197,
Alexi
us was obliged to stand impotentl
y by while his niece Irene, daughter of the blinded Isaac, was married off by Henry to his own younger brother, Philip of Swabia. This was a brilliant move on Henry's part. He had found Irene in Palermo, where she had formerly been married to the son of Tancred of Lecce, a bastard cousin of King William of Sicily who had seized the throne on William's death and had ruled, competently if illegitimately, over Sicily until his own death a little over four years later. Whether or not the rumours were true that Isaac had promised to accept the couple as his heirs, their marriage enabled Henry to pose as a defender of their rights; and it was to do much to strengthen Philip's position during the Fourth Crusade.

But the Fourth Crusade was not yet; and so what, it may be asked, became of the great expedition proclaimed by Henry in
1195?
Many of the foremost names in Germany had responded to his call: the Archbishops of Mainz and of Bremen, no fewer than nine bishops - one of whom, the Bishop of Hildesheim, was Chancellor of the Empire - the Dukes Henry of Brabant (Count-Palatine of the Rhine), Henry of Brunswick, Frederick of Austria, Berthold of Dalmatia and Ulrich of Carinthia, and countless lesser nobles. They had sailed from Messina throughout the summer of
1197
and on their arrival had immediately advanced against the Saracen foe. During the first weeks of their campaign they were relatively successful, advancing north as far as Sidon and Beirut, which were abandoned and destroyed at their approach. By the end of October, however, the news reached them that on
28
September Henry, who had remained in Sicily to deal with a major insurrection, had died of a fever at Messina. Many of the greater nobles decided to return at once to protect their interests in the later power struggle, and when later reports told of the outbreak of civil war in Germany most of the others followed. Thus it was that when, at the beginning of February
1198,
the German rank and file were preparing to confront an Egyptian army advancing up from Sinai, they suddenly realized that their leaders had deserted them and panicked. There followed a headlong flight northward to the safety of Tyre - where, fortunately, their ships were waiting. A week later they were gone. The second German expedition had been, if anything, a still greater fiasco than the first.

11

The Fourth Crusade

[i
198-1205]

You took the Cross upon your shoulders; and on that Cross and on the Holy Gospels you swore that you would pass over Christian lands without violence, turning neither to right nor. to left. You assured us that your only enemy was the Saracen, and that his blood only would be shed . . .

Far from carrying the Cross, you profane it and trample it underfoot. You claim to be in quest of a pearl beyond price, but in truth you fling that most precious of all pearls, which is the body of our Saviour, into the mud. The Saracens themselves show less impiety.

Nicetas Choniates, 'Alexius Ducas', IV, iv

The end of the twelfth century found Europe in confusion. The Empires of both East and West were rudderless; Norman Sicily was gone, never to return. Germany was torn apart by civil war over the imperial succession and both England and France were similarly - though less violently - occupied with inheritance problems following the death of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in
1199.
Of the luminaries of Christendom, one only was firmly in control: Pope Innocent III, who had ascended the papal throne in
1198
and had immediately proclaimed yet another Crusade. The lack of crowned heads to lead it did not worry him; previous experience had shown that Kings and princes, stirring up as they invariably did national rivalries and endless questions of precedence and protocol, tended to be more trouble than they were worth. A few great nobles would suit his purpose admirably; and Innocent was still casting about for suitable candidates when he received a letter from Count Tibald of Champagne.

Tibald was the younger brother of Henry of Champagne, Count of Troyes, who had been ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem - though he was never crowned King - from the time of his marriage to Amalric I's daughter Isabella in
1192
until his accid
ental fall from a window of his
palace at Acre in
1197.
He had not accompanied Henry to Palestine; but as the grandson of Louis VII and the nephew of both Philip Augustus and Coeur-de-Lion, he had the Crusades in his blood. He was energetic and ambitious; and when, in the course of a tournament at his castle of Ecri on the Aisne, he and his friends were addressed by the celebrated preacher Fulk of Neuilly, who was travelling through France rallying support for a new expedition to the East, he responded immediately. Once he had sent a message to Pope Innocent that he had taken the Cross, there could be no other leader.

It was clear to everyone, however, that major problems lay ahead. Coeur-de-Lion, before leaving Palestine, had given it as his opinion that the weakest point of the Muslim East was Egypt, and that it was here that any future expeditions should be directed. It followed that the new army would have to travel by sea, and would need ships in a quantity that could be obtained from one source only: the Venetian Republic. Thus it was that during the first week of Lent in the year
1201,
a party of six knights led by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, arrived in Venice. They made their request at a special meeting of the Great Council, and a week later they received their answer. The Republic would provide transport for four and a half thousand knights with their horses, nine thousand squires and twenty thousand foot-soldiers, with food for nine months. The cost would be
84,000
silver marks. In addition Venice would provide fifty fully-equipped galleys at her own expense, on condition that she received one-half of the territories conquered.

This reply was conveyed to Geoffrey and his colleagues by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo. In all Venetian history there is no more astonishing figure. We cannot be sure of his age when, on
1
January
1193,
he was raised to the ducal throne; the story goes that he was eighty-five and already stone-blind, though this seems hardly credible when we read of his energy - indeed, his heroism - a decade later on the walls of Constantinople. But even if he was in only his middle seventies, he would still have been, at the time of the Fourth Crusade, an octogenarian of several years' standing. A dedicated, almost fanatical patriot, he had spent much of his life in the service of Venice, and in
1172
had been one of the Republic's ambassadors on the abortive peace mission to Manuel Comnenus.