Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (35 page)

The effective elimination of the fourth participant in the struggle for supremacy led inevitably to a radical realignment among the other three. No longer would John Asen make diplomatic overtures to the Latins on the Bosphorus; it now seemed to him that Vatatzes would be a far more useful ally, particularly since he was on the point of another decision, even more far-reaching: to abandon the Church of Rome.

Western Christianity, despite Kalojan's conversion, had never taken root among the Bulgars, among whom the old Byzantine traditions had always prevailed; besides, any future offensive against the Latin Empire would be a lot easier to justify if the Tsar were not seen to be attacking his co-religionists. A quarrel with Pope Gregory in 1232 gave him just the excuse he needed, and the break was made. With the ready consent of the Patriarch of Nicaea - together with those of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch - a Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarchate was once again established, with its seat at Trnovo; and three years later in Gallipoli John Asen signed a treaty of alliance with Nicaea, which was subsequently sealed in Lampsacus by the marriage of his daughter Helena -rejected by young Baldwin seven years before - to the son of John Vatatzes, Theodore II Lascaris. In the late summer of 1235 the combined forces of Orthodoxy were outside the walls of Constantinople, besieging the city by land and sea.

Once again the Latins were under threat. Despite his age, John of Brienne fought like a tiger for the defence of his Empire, and Venetian ships provided invaluable support; when, however, the siege was resumed in the following year Constantinople would surely have been doomed but for a sudden change of heart on the part of John Asen, who awoke one morning to the realization that an energetic Greek Empire would constitute an infinitely more serious threat to Bulgaria than an exhausted Latin one and called off the attack, even going so far as to send ambassadors to Nicaea to retrieve the unfortunate Helena. In the summer of 1237 he went further still, allowing a large band of Cumans, fleeing from the Mongol invasion of the lower Danube basin, to cross his territory and take service with the new Emperor Baldwin - John of Brienne having died, aged nearly ninety, the previous March; and that autumn he himself led an army of Bulgars, Cumans and Latins against Tzurulum, one of the most important Nicaean strongholds in Thrace.

That siege was still in progress when disaster struck. Messengers arrived with the news that Trnovo was in the grip of a furious epidemic, which had already carried off the Tsar's wife
, one of his sons and the recentl
y-installed Patriarch. To John Asen, this could only be the judgement of heaven. He immediately withdrew from the siege (which was successfully continued by his Cuman and Latin allies) and made peace with Vatatzes, to whom he was to give no further trouble. Soon, however, he began to look for a new wife; and somehow his prisoner Theodore of Thessalonica - whom he had recently had blinded for plotting against him - managed to persuade him to marry his daughter

Irene. The diplomatic advantages to John Asen of such a marriage are not altogether clear; to Theodore, on the other hand, they were immediate. As the Tsar's father-in-law, he was at once released from his captivity and returned in disguise to Thessalonica, where he deposed his brother Manuel and enthroned instead his own son John, restoring to him the title of Emperor.

The year 1241 proved a watershed in the history of all the contesting Empires. Before it was over, three of the protagonists in the long drawn-out struggle for Constantinople were in their graves: John Asen of Bulgaria, Manuel of Thessalonica and Pope Gregory IX, one of the most redoubtable and consistent champions of the Latin Empire. More important still, that same year also saw the Mongol horde under its leader Batu Khan sweep through Moravia and Hungary into the Danube basin, leaving the Bulgars little opportunity to involve themselves in further adventures to the East. Thus another once formidable nation was effectively eliminated. The power of Thessalonica had already been broken at Klokotnitsa. The Latin Empire, which had been steadily cut down to the point where it amounted to little more than the city of Constantinople itself, had survived only thanks to dissension among its enemies. Of those enemies, there now remained but one: the Empire of Nicaea, whose ruler John Vatatzes continued to prepare, with steadily increasing confidence, for the reconquest of the ancient capital.

He still had the problem of Thessalonica to settle. Although the so-called Empire was no longer a threat from the military point of view, legally it remained a rival claimant to Constantinople - a position that clearly could not be tolerated. Its Emperor John he knew to be a weak and pious figurehead, who longed only to enter a monastery; the real power, such as it was, was back in the hands of Theodore, as ambitious - despite his blindness - as he had ever been. Thus it was Theodore whom, towards the end of 1241, John Vatatzes invited to Nicaea as his guest. The invitation was accepted, and the old man was received with every courtesy; only when he came to take his leave was it politely explained to him that his departure would unfortunately not be possible. He was in fact a prisoner, and a prisoner he remained until the following summer, when Vatatzes escorted him back to Thessalonica with a considerable army and then sent him as an envoy to his son to negotiate a treaty. The result was that John, like Manuel before him, agreed to exchange the title of Emperor for that of Despot, and acknowledged the supremacy of Nicaea.

While Vatatzes was still in Thessalonica, word was brought to him that the Mongols had invaded the Seljuk lands of Asia Minor and were already on the very threshold of his own dominions. For the next few years the situation looked grave indeed, especially after June 1243, when the invaders defeated the Sultan Kaikosru II at the battle of Kosedag and forced him to pay tribute. The Emperor of Trebizond, who had been a vassal of the Sultan, suffered much the same fate and was obliged to transfer his allegiance to the Mongol Khan. In face of the common danger, Vatatzes concluded an alliance with Kaikosru, but the precaution proved unnecessary: the Mongols moved away again, leaving the Nicaean lands untouched and his own position
vis-a-vis
his neighbours stronger than ever.

In 1244 he was able to strengthen it still further. His first wife Irene, daughter of his predecessor Theodore Lascaris, had died; and John now married Constance, the illegitimate daughter of Frederick II. Frederick had no quarrel with the Emperor Baldwin, to whom he was distantly related; but having been brought up in the largely Greek court of Palermo he knew and understood the Greeks, spoke their language perfectly and sympathized with them in their long exile from their rightful capital. He was therefore delighted with the match - though the same could not be said for the twelve-year-old Constance, who found herself rechristened with the more Byzantine name of Anna and wedded to a man exactly forty years older than herself, a man moreover whom everyone knew to be engaged in a shameless affair with one of her own waiting-women. Pope Innocent IV was deeply shocked by the marriage, just as the Patriarch of Nicaea was horrified by Vatatzes's treatment of his luckless young wife; but the friendship between the two Emperors remained unaffected.

With the Mongols gone - leaving a broken Sultanate behind them -John Vatatzes could now turn his attention back again to the Balkans. The Bulgar Empire too had been crippled by this most recent of the barbarian invasions; while the death in 1246 of Tsar Coloman, John Asen's twelve-year-old son, and the succession of his still younger half-brother Michael, further troubled the waters in which Vatatzes cheerfully intended to fish. By the autumn of that year he had taken Serres, and from there had occupied all the territory between the Strymon and Maritsa rivers together with a good deal of western Macedonia. He was still encamped at Melnik on the Strymon when a group of Thessalonians arrived with a proposal. When the Despot John had died two years before, his father Theodore had replaced him with his younger brother

Demetrius; but Demetrius had proved dissolute and pleasure-loving, and a large number of his subjects had now had enough, of him and his entire family. If the Emperor would guarantee to the city the continuation of its ancient rights and privileges, it would be surrendered to him without a struggle. Vatatzes asked nothing better. In December he entered Thessalonica unopposed, exiled old Theodore to a country estate and took Demetrius back to Asia Minor as his prisoner, leaving as his European Viceroy his distant kinsman Andronicus Palaeologus.

One more enemy was left to conquer before he could concentrate on Constantinople. Some nine years before, the region of Epirus had separated from Thessalonica and set itself up once again as an independent despotate under Michael II, an illegitimate son of its original founder Michael I. It too had taken advantage of the Mongol occupation of Bulgaria, and had regained much of the territory conquered by John Asen in 1230; around Ochrid and Prilep, it now shared a common frontier with the Empire of Nicaea. John Vatatzes did not attack it: in such wild and mountainous terrain a war might go on for years. Instead, in 1249 he concluded a treaty of friendship with Michael, sealing it by betrothing his granddaughter Maria to Michael's son Nicephorus.

All would have been well if the aged Theodore, still making as much trouble as ever, had not persuaded his nephew to renounce the treaty and take up arms once again against the Nicaean Empire. In 1251 Michael obediently did so, capturing Prilep and advancing as far as the Axius river (now the Vardar). John Vatatzes was taking no more chances. He crossed to Europe with the largest army he could raise, and early in 1253 forced the Despot's surrender. Michael had good reason to regret his foolishness: he was obliged to cede not only the territory he had recently occupied but also all that region of western Macedonia that he had conquered from the Bulgars and part of Albania as well. His son Nicephorus was carried off to the court of his grandfather-in-law-to-be as a hostage for his future good behaviour. As for the old, blind, insufferable Theodore, he too was shipped across the Marmara, to end his days in the prison he so richly deserved.

13

The City Recovered

[1253-61]

If we have just retaken the city in spite of the resistance of its defenders
...
it is only as a result of the Divine Power which on the one hand renders impregnable (when it so desires) those cities which seem the most feeble, and which on the other enfeebles those which appear the most invincible. We have undergone so many failures to take Constantinople (although we were greater in number than the defenders) because God wished us to know that the possession of the city was a grace dependent on his bounty. He has reserved for our reign this grace, which obliges us to eternal gratitude, and in according it to us he has given us the hope of retaking the provinces which we lost with it.

The Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus to his people, quoted by George Pachymeres

The Latin Empire was tottering. Already in 1236 young Baldwin, now nineteen, had left for Italy in a desperate attempt to raise men and money, and Pope Gregory IX had appealed to the conscience of Western Christendom to save Constantinople from the barbarous schismatics who threatened it; but the response had been half-hearted. Despite the death of John of Brienne in 1237, Baldwin had remained away for nearly four years, his return delayed — he claimed — by personal business in France and by the deliberate machinations of Frederick II; it was not until the first weeks of 1240 that he had returned to the Bosphorus, in time to receive his imperial coronation during Holy Week. Behind him had marched an army of some thirty thousand men; but when they discovered that he had no means of paying them they soon dispersed. This chronic shortage of money was also responsible for another decision that had a disastrous effect on morale within Constantinople, among Greeks and Latins alike: the pawning to Venice of the city's most hallowed possession, the Crown of Thorns that Christ had worn on the Cross. When the moment came to redeem it their Emperor was unable to do so: the opportunity was seized instead by St Louis of France, and the precious relic was shipped off to Paris, where Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle to receive it.
1

Baldwin had obviously developed a taste for the West, and it is difficult to blame him; a tour of the courts of Europe, even cap in hand, must have been vastly preferable to life in gloomy, beleaguered Constantinople. In
1244
he was off again - to Frederick II (whom he begged to use his good offices to extend the current truce with John Vatatzes); to Count Raymond in Toulouse; to Innocent IV in Lyon (with whom he attended the Great Council in
1245
at which Frederick, already twice excommunicated, was declared deposed); to St Louis in Paris; and even to London, where King Henry III made a small and distinctly grudging contribution to his funds. But Constantinople was by now past saving; when the wretched Emperor returned in October
1248
it was to find himself in such financial straits that he was obliged to start selling off the lead from the roof of the imperial palace. Even then, he would probably have been surprised to learn that he was to reign for another thirteen years; nor, very probably, would he have done so if his enemy in Nicaea had survived much longer than he did. But on
3
November
1254,
while still in his early sixties, John Vatatzes died in Nymphaeum; and with the succession of his son Theodore much of the momentum that he had generated was lost.

It is another of the ironies of history that John III Vatatzes, who was more responsible than any other single man for the eventual reconquest of Constantinople, did not live to enter it in triumph. During the last ten years of his life his health had been steadily deteriorating, the epileptic fits to which he had always been subject becoming increasingly frequent and at times tending seriously to unbalance him. There had, for example, been an extraordinary occasion in
1253
when the most brilliant of his younger generals, Michael Palaeologus, had been arraigned on a charge of conspiracy. George Acropolites — whose chronicle is our principal Greek source for this period of imperial exile - records that the accusation was based on nothing more than a conversation overheard between two private citizens, one of whom later claimed that he had been misinterpreted. The Emperor, however, had not only decided to pursue the matter but had ordered that, to prove his innocence, Michael should submit to ordeal by red-hot iron - a Western custom previously unheard-of in Byz
antium. Fortunately for all con
cerned,