Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (34 page)

This treaty marked the beginning of Nicaean prosperity. The young Empire had finally obtained formal recognition by the Crusaders of its right to exist; moreover, its western borders were now as secure as those on the east. Almost simultaneously, the Ladn Empire began to decline. The widowed Emperor Henry, forced against his better judgement into a dynastic marriage with a Bulgar princess, found himself enmeshed in a
hopeless tangle of Balkan politi
cs; then, on 11 June 1216 at the age of only forty, he died suddenly at Thessalonica. By far the most capable of the Latin rulers of Constantinople, in barely a decade he had transformed a lost cause into a going concern. Unlike his insufferable brother Baldwin, he had respected the rights and the religion of his Greek subjects and had even achieved a balance of power with Nicaea. Had his successors possessed a fraction of his ability, there might never again have been a Greek Emperor on the throne of Byzantium.

Despite his two wives, Henry of Hainault had died childless; and to succeed him the Frankish barons in Constantinople elected his brother-in-law Peter of Courtenay, husband of his sister Yolanda. Peter, who was then in France, set out for the East in the first weeks of 1217. He had hoped to stop in Rome for a full-scale imperial coronation by Pope Honorius III; and he made no secret of his disappointment when the Pope, fearful that if the ceremony took place in St Peter's he might claim the crown of the Western Empire as well, insisted on holding it in the church of S. Lorenzo, outside the walls. A week or two later he set sail for Durazzo, accompanied by a Venetian fleet and an army of 5,500 men, with the object of recovering the city from the Despot of Epirus, Theodore Ducas; but the expedition ended in fiasco when the city proved impregnable and Peter was captured, together with a good many of his men, in the mountains of Albania. He was thrown into an Epirot prison and never heard of again.

The Empress Yolanda on the other hand, who had wisely decided to travel out with her children by sea, arrived without mishap in Constantinople, where she was almost immediately delivered of a son, Baldwin. Her first-born, the Marquis Philip of Namur, having categorically refused to accompany the rest of his family to the East, she then governed as Regent until her death in 121
9,
confirming her brother's conciliatory policy towards Nicaea by giving her daughter Mary to Theodore Lascaris as his third wife. News of this step, however, was received with horror in Epirus, where Theodore Ducas, not content with the capture - and quite possibly the murder - of Peter of Courtenay, was becoming less and less inclined to accept Lascaris as the lawful
basileus.

Ducas's star was rising fast. Morally he was in a somewhat equivocal position, having spent the first five years after the fall of Constantinople in Nicaean territory with Theodore Lascaris to whom, after his imperial coronation, he had sworn an oath of fealty; he had eventually joined his brother Michael at Arta only on Michael's urgent summons. Since then, however, the situation had changed. Nicaea's treaty of 1214 with the Franks had been, to Theodore, an unpardonable betrayal; and the subsequent behaviour of its Emperor, who seemed to have spent much of his time fighting the distant Empire of Trebizond instead of preparing for the recapture of the capital, had strained his loyalty to near breaking point. Lascaris's marriage to a Latin princess was the last straw.

Such, at least, was his public position. The truth was a good deal simpler. Theodore could never be satisfied with the Despotate of Epirus. Unlike his bastard brother, he was the legitimate son of the
sebastocrator
John Angelus Ducas and thus the great-grandson of Alexius I Comnenus. With Comnenus, Angelus and Ducas blood in his veins - a fact which he emphasized by regularly styling himself with all three names - he could consequently boast a far stronger claim to the imperial throne than Theodore Lascaris.
1
His immediate ambitions were now focused on Thessalonica; but Thessalonica was, after all, only the second city in the Empire: in the eyes of Theodore Angelus Ducas Comnenus, it was little more than a stepping-stone to his ultimate goal, Constantinople itself.

Things had not gone well for Thessalonica since Boniface of Montfer-rat had established himself there after the Fourth Crusade. Boniface had been killed fighting the Bulgars in 1207, and the Kingdom

1 The genealogy becomes a little complicated here, largely because of the understandable reluctance of the
se
bastocrator
John (father of Michael and Theodore) to assume his father's name of Angelus, preferring to adopt that of Ducas, to which his only claim was through his grandmother; but a glance at the Comnenus and Angelus family trees should make the position clear.

had since been governed by his widow, acting as Regent for her son Demetrius. It had been further weakened by the departure of many of his knights to their various homelands and - though it was still the Latin Empire's most important vassal - since the arrival of the Empress Yolanda it could no longer rely on the firm support from Constantinople that it had enjoyed in Henry's day. When Theodore marched into Thessaly and Macedonia in
121
8
it was plain that its days as an independent Crusader state were numbered. In fact, the Despot met with spirited resistance; and it was only in the autumn of
1224,
after a long and arduous siege, that Thessalonica finally fell. With it fell its Latin Kingdom. Theodore now ruled supreme from the Adriatic to the Aegean, over a dominion which included Epirus, Aetolia, Acarnania, Thessaly and most of Macedonia. Soon afterwards - though the precise date is uncertain — in open defiance of Theodore Lascaris, he was crowned by the Bishop of Ochrid (who had a running feud with the Patriarch of Nicaea) as Emperor of the Romans.

Thus it was that, in place of the single Empire that had existed little more than a generation before, there were now three - two Greek and one Latin. And not far away there loomed yet a fourth: for the second Bulgarian Empire also was steadily increasing in strength. Tsar Kalojan had taken full advantage of the Fourth Crusade and the general Balkan disarray that followed it to extend his rule over much of Thrace and Macedonia. His nephew Boril had been rather less successful; but in
121
8
Boril had been overthrown and blinded by his cousin John II Asen, and John too coveted Constantinople. Of the four powers, by far the weakest was the Latin Empire itself, by
1225
reduced to the region immediately to the north and west of the capital and a small area of Asia Minor south of the Marmara. The Empress Yolanda had died in
121
9,
leaving the throne to her son Robert; but Robert was a weak and feckless youth — one authority, a certain Aubrey de Trois-Fontaines, describes him as being
quasi rudis et idiota —
and was totally outclassed by Theodore, John Asen and John Vatatzes, who had inherited the Empire of Nicaea from his father-in-law Theodore Lascaris in
1222.

Lascaris had been a great ruler, who had achieved more than most people in
1205
would have thought possible. Since he left no sons, the choice of Vatatzes, husband of his eldest daughter Irene, had seemed an obvious one; it failed, however, to find favour with his two surviving brothers, who promptly made their way to Constantinople and persuaded the young Emperor to make a military intervention on their behalf. Robert, with characteristic stupidity, agreed; he achieved nothing, and his army was cut to pieces by Vatatzes at Poimanenon, where Theodore Lascaris had suffered a similar - though ultimately less disastrous -defeat at the hands of the Latins, twenty-odd years before. He had still not recovered from the blow when, a few months later, came the news of the capture of Thessalonica. It was too much for him. From that moment on he gave himself up to a life of pleasure, seducing women -
Greek and Frankish indiscriminately - robbing churches and monasteries of their remaining treasures, making scarcely any attempt to govern what was left of his Empire. He also became infatuated with the daughter of a comparatively low-born French knight killed at the battle of Adrianople, whom he secretly married and installed in the Palace of Blachernae. This time it was his barons who could bear it no longer. One night several of them burst into the imperial bedchamber, where they slashed the girl's nose and lips until she was almost unrecognizable, seized her mother and subsequently drowned her. Typically, Robert took no action against them but at once fled to Rome, where he lodged a formal complaint with Pope Gregory IX. Gregory showed him little sympathy and told him to return to Constantinople; but he had got no further than Clarenza in the Morea - the modern Killini - when he died, in January 1228.

The Emperor Robert left no legitimate children; and since his brother and successor Baldwin II was still only eleven, once again a Regent had to be found. The first choice of the barons of Constantinople fell on his sister Mary, widow of Theodore Lascaris, who had returned to the city after the death of her husband; but she died a few months later, and the search was renewed. A somewhat surprising applicant was John Asen of Bulgaria, who suggested a dynastic marriage between Baldwin and his daughter Helena, after which he proposed to take the Empire under his own protection and restore to it all its conquered territories, Thessalonica included. But the barons rejected him out of hand, and turned instead to the most distinguished of living Crusaders: the former King of Jerusalem, leader of the Fifth Crusade
1
and papal marshal John of Brienne.

There was only one drawback: John, having been born in about 1150, was now nearly eighty years old. But he was still remarkably spry - his daughter by his third wife, Berengaria of Castile, was still only four -and no one else could match his record. In 1210, at the age of sixty, he

1 Proclaimed by Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Fifth Crusade was fought mostly in Egypt and has little direct relevance to our story.

had married the seventeen-year-old Queen Maria of Jerusalem. She had died in childbirth two years later, and John had ruled as effective King on behalf of his infant daughter Isabella until her marriage in 1225 to the Western Emperor Frederick II,
Stupor Mundi
- immediately after which he had been deposed by his new son-in-law on the grounds that, with his daughter now married, he no longer had any legal claim to the throne. Furious, he had fled to Rome, where he had appealed to Pope Honorius. Honorius had been sympathetic; he could not give him back his Kingdom, but he had appointed him Governor of his Tuscan patrimony. When two years later Gregory IX had succeeded to the papal throne and had been almost immediately attacked by imperial troops, John had rallied instandy to his defence.

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, came the call to Constantinople. John was not at first over-eager to accept, but when Gregory insisted -here was, after all, an unrepeatable opportunity to increase papal influence over the Latin Empire - he finally allowed himself to be persuaded. He made, however, a number of conditions to protect his own future after Baldwin had reached his majority. The young Emperor must immediately marry Maria, his four-year-old daughter, who must in turn be given a suitable dowry in the form of land; he himself must be recognized as
basile
us
in his own right for the rest of his life, with Baldwin succeeding him on his death; and at the age of twenty Baldwin, if not yet Emperor, should be invested with the Empire of Nicaea, together with all Frankish possessions in Asia Minor. Even then, John did not leave at once for Constantinople. It was early in 1229 before the barons gave their approval to his terms; and there was still a campaign to be fought against his hated son-in-law before he could leave Italy. Only in the autumn of 12 31 did he finally appear off the Golden Horn. A few days later he was crowned Emperor in St Sophia.

During this three-year interregnum, the balance of power in the Balkans had suffered a radical change. To the Emperor Theodore, waiting in his capital at Thessalonica, Constantinople - now without even a Regent to provide leadership - appeared more vulnerable than ever it had been; on the other hand, he had the Bulgars to consider. Only a year or two before, he and John Asen had concluded a treaty of peace; scarcely had they done so, however, than the Tsar had offered to recover Thessalonica for the Latins. The man could clearly not be trusted. Besides, with so dangerous a threat to the north, how could he possibly regain his ancient heritage? There was but one solution: the Bulgar menace must be eliminated. In the early spring of 1230, Theodore led his army across the frontier. Asen made a great show of outraged innocence, marching out against the invaders with the text of the peace treaty emblazoned across his standard; and in April 1230, near the little village of Klokotnitsa on the Maritsa river between Adrianople and Philippopolis, the two armies joined in battle.

It was all over quite quickly. Despite his courage, his confidence and his unbroken record of victories, Theodore found that he had met his match at last. His army was shattered, he himself taken prisoner. To be sure, his brother Manuel was allowed to stay on in Thessalonica with the title of Despot; but this was only because he was married to Asen's daughter. Manuel continued - much to the amusement of John Vatatzes and his Nicaean subjects - to sign decrees in the crimson ink reserved for Emperors; apart from that, he was an obvious puppet of his father-in-law and made little pretence of being anything else.

The Latins had been saved from almost certain destruction - and by a nation that they had previously spurned. Any gratitude that they might have felt must however have been overshadowed by alarm, as they watched John Asen advance unopposed across Thrace, Macedonia and Albania, effortlessly appropriating Theodore's former domains until he could claim as Bulgar territory the whole of the northern Balkans, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. In an inscription in the church of the Forty Martyrs at his capital of Trnovo he proudly recorded his conquests. He was now, he claimed, master of all the lands between Durazzo and Adrianople; only Constantinople with its immediately adjacent towns remained in Frankish hands — 'and these too are subject to my authority, for they have no Emperor but myself and they obey my will, for God has so ordained it'. Even in theoretically independent Serbia he was able to replace Stephen Radoslav, who was Theodore's son-in-law, with Stephen Vladislav, who was one of his own. Nor was the Bulgar Tsar the only beneficiary of Klokotnitsa. Away in his palace at Nymphaeum, John Vatatzes was also quietly rejoicing. For a moment it had seemed as if Theodore might become a serious rival, and that Constantinople might fall to Thessalonica rather than to Nicaea; that danger was now past, never to return.