Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (38 page)

Michael Palaeologus - who had already built up for himself a formidable intelligence service - was well aware of these approaches to the Pope, which he looked upon with grave concern. He had long tried, without success, to reach some accommodation with Manfred; in the summer of 1262 he made another attempt. It happened that Manfred's half-sister Anna, widow of John Vatatzes, was still living at the imperial court; Michael now proposed to divorce his wife Theodora and marry her. Historians, ancient and modern alike, seem uncertain as to how to interpret this curious offer. Such a marriage could indeed hardly have failed to bring the two rulers closer together; on the other hand it would have provoked a major scandal at court and would almost certainly have resulted in the Emperor's excommunication by Patriarch Arsenius, who had already publicly censured his treatment of little John Lascaris.

George Pachymeres claims that Michael's real motive was 'burning love' for Anna. There is nothing inherently improbable in the idea; Michael (who had already sired two illegitimate daughters) might easily have succumbed to the charms of a woman who was still only thirty and - as far as we can judge - a good deal more attractive than her late husband's behaviour towards her might have suggested. But none of our other sources provide any corroboration for the theory, any more than does Michael's own subsequent decision to return her to her brother when he was persuaded to abandon the project under pressure from the Patriarch, Anna herself and his wife Theodora - who had no desire to end her days in a convent. In exchange, Manfred sent back the Caesar Alexius Strategopulus, who had been captured by the Despot of Epirus and handed over to him at his request; but Michael's long-desired political alliance remained a dream.

He was not unduly discouraged. There was plenty of work to be done nearer home, where he was determined to restore to the Empire the frontiers that had existed before 1204. He began in the Peloponnese, in 1262 releasing Prince William of Achaia from the prison in which he had languished during the three years since his captivity after the battle of Pelagonia, and receiving in return the all-important fortresses
of Monem
vasia, Mistra, Maina, Geraki and the district of Kinsterna - a significant first step in the re-establishment of imperial power in the peninsula. He and William then took solemn oaths never again to go to war against one another, the agreement being sealed by William's becoming godfather to the Emperor's son Constantine and being accorded the rank and title of Grand Domestic of the Empire.

The oaths, it need hardly be said, were broken almost as soon as they were made. In May 1262 at Thebes, William entered into an alliance with the Venetians against the Empire; and only two months later, at Viterbo,
1
he was party to a further agreement between Pope Urban, Baldwin, Venice and all the Latin barons of the Peloponnese, by the terms of which the Pope formally released him from his pledges to the 'Greek schismatics'. For Michael PalaeoTogus, this was provocation enough. In the first months of 1263 an imperial fleet of newly-built ships sacked the Frankish-held islands of Cos, Naxos and Paros, attacked the cities of Oreos and Karystos at the opposite ends of Euboea and finally

1 Vite
rbo, some sixty miles from Rome, had been chosen by Pope Alexander IV in 1257 as his principal place of residence. It was to continue in papal favour for the next twenty-eight years, until the death of Martin IV in 1285.

descended on the south-eastern Morea, where it seized much of the coast of Laconia; meanwhile an army of some fifteen thousand men - a third of whom were Seljuk mercenaries — under the command of the Emperor's brother, the
sebastocrator
Constantine, was carried by Genoese ships directly to Monemvasia, whence it advanced north-west to besiege Lacedaemon, the ancient Sparta. William of Achaia — now seriously alarmed - hurried to Corinth in an attempt to mobilize his fellow-princes, whereupon Constantine abandoned his siege and led the army in a series of forced marches across the Peloponnese to William's capital at Andravida.

For a moment it looked as though all Achaia was doomed; the situation was saved only by the courage of the
bailli
whom William had left in charge, a local Greek named John Katavas. Despite his advanced age and a bad attack of gout, Katavas hastily assembled the three-hundred-man garrison and led it out to a narrow defile near the imperial camp. When a quick reconnaissance revealed that the invaders were still resting after their long journey, he immediately gave the order to attack. Constantine and his men, taken off their guard, could offer little resistance. Many of them were slaughtered; the remainder sought refuge in the neighbouring forests. The
sebastocrator
himself, narrowly escaping with his life, fled back across the peninsula to Mistra.

Only a month or two later, off the little island of Spetsai, a mixed fleet of forty-eight imperial and Genoese ships sailing southward to Monemvasia encountered a substantially smaller Venetian force of thirty-two galleys. Precise details of the engagement that followed are unclear, but it ended in a crushing defeat for the Genoese, whose fleet - more than half of which had refused to fight - was ignominiously scattered. They lost one of their admirals and, we are told, up to a thousand of their men.
1
It was to be several years before they were once again a significant force in the eastern Mediterranean; more important still, they surrendered the respect of Michael Palaeologus, who paid for their naval patrols and demanded better returns for his money.

The Emperor had other reasons, too, for dissatisfaction. Since the Nymphaeum pact and the expulsion of the Venetians, the Genoese had been flooding into Constantinople, where they were now settling in such numbers - and trading so aggressively - as to constitute a serious threat to the native merchant community. Fully conscious of the extent to

1
For the figures we have to rely on Martino da Canale, a Venetian. He puts the casualties for his own side at 420.

which the Byzantines depended on their shipping, they were constantly increasing their handling charges on Greek goods; and the growing hostility that they aroused was rapidly assuming dangerous proportions. It was surely with these considerations in mind as well as his understandable disgust with their performance at Spetsai that, in the autumn of 1263, Michael abruptly dismissed their remaining fleet of some sixty galleys and ordered it to return home. This was not the end of the Nymphaeum agreement; before long Genoa sent him a number of replacements which, with rather bad grace, he accepted. But this halfhearted reconciliadon proved short-lived: in the following year a conspiracy was discovered on the part of the Genoese
podesta
in Constantinople, Guglielmo Guercio, to betray Constantinople to King Manfred of Sicily. Confronted by the Emperor in person with incontrovertible evidence of the plot, Guercio immediately confessed his guilt, whereupon he and his countrymen were banished altogether from the city. Just three years after the Treaty of Nymphaeum, the Genoese alliance had ended in disaster.

More than ever now, Michael Palaeologus needed friends. Manfred had ignored his overtures; King Louis was too fully occupied with his own crusading campaigns to give much thought to Byzantium. There remained Pope Urban. He was no less hostile than before; but his hostility sprang, not from any personal animosity to Michael of the kind that he felt towards Manfred, but simply from a natural desire to see Constantinople once again subject to Rome. On the other hand, his relations with the Hohenstaufen faction were steadily worsening, he was fully aware of Manfred's long-term ambitions and would, as Michael well knew, infinitely prefer a heretic Greek Emperor on the Bosphorus to the King of Sicily. It looked as if he might be ready to strike a bargain.

Now it so happened that in Constantinople at the time was a certain Nicholas, the Latin Bishop of Crotone in Calabria. He was, like most of his fellow-Calabrians, a Greek; and for many years he had maintained regular contacts with the Empire, having formerly corresponded with both John Vatatzes and Theodore Lascaris. Michael could wish for no better intermediary; and the Bishop accordingly left for Rome in the spring of 1263 with a letter to the Pope, hinting at the possibility of a union of the two Churches. Whether this letter also suggested a joint alliance against the King of Sicily we shall never know; but it certainly had the desired effect. Replying on 18 July, the Pope announced his intention of sending to Constantinople four Franciscan nuncios, armed with full powers to seal a union in his name. Meanwhile, in the expectation that the Emperor and the Prince of Achaia would soon be co-religionists, he adjured them both to cease hostilities forthwith.

Here, however, Urban asked too much. If Michael were to subject the Eastern Church to Roman authority, he would do so on his own terms; he remained as determined as ever he had been to drive the Latins out of Greece. In early October, therefore, he resumed the war against William, claiming that the non-appearance of the promised nuncios could only mean that the Pope had changed his mind. At the time it must have seemed a fairly unconvincing excuse, given that the journey from Rome to Constantinople could easily take three months or more. By the following spring, when the Franciscans had still not arrived, the Emperor's case was admittedly stronger; as things turned
out, however, it mattered littl
e.

Once again the
sebastocrator
Constantine led his army across the Peloponnese against the Achaian capital of Andravida; once again the Latins rode out to meet him; and about ten miles from the city, just outside the little town of Sergiana, the two armies met. Hardly had the battle begun when the Grand Constable
Michael Cantacuzenus - Constan
tine's second-in-command, but by far his superior in ability and courage - fell from his horse and was cut to pieces. The sight was too much for the
sebastocrator,
who immediately withdrew from the field and led his army back to besiege the relatively inconsequential fortress of Nikli in northern Laconia. Here, however, a further catastrophe awaited him. The five thousand Seljuk mercenaries, who had not been paid for the past six months, suddenly demanded their wages and, when they still did not receive them, deserted
en masse
to the enemy.

At this point the wretched Constantine, somewhat unconvincingly pleading sickness, abandoned what was left of his army and returned to well-deserved obscurity in the capital. William of Achaia, on the other hand, seized the offensive and invaded the Byzantine lands of the southern Peloponnese where, thanks largely to the renegade Turks, he scored a crushing victory over the Greek forces and advanced to Mistra. Here at last the Greeks managed to put up a successful resistance. They could not, however, prevent William's army from ravaging the neighbourhood as far as the walls of Monemvasia before it retired once again to Nikli.

Fortunately for Michael Palaeologus, William now decided to call a halt. For all his military successes, the war had brought devastation to much of his territory and ruin to many of
his subjects; the loss of life,
too, had been considerable.
1
So anxious was he for a period of peace that for some time he seriously entertained a Byzantine proposal for the marriage of his daughter and heir Isabella to Andronicus Palaeologus, Michael's eldest surviving son, despite the fact that his whole principality would then have passed to the Empire after his death. It was only under pressure from his Latin vassals - who had no wish to see their estates swallowed up, quite possibly in their own lifetimes - that he finally broke off negotiations.

To the Emperor, who had been within an ace of acquiring the entire Morea without sacrificing another man or loosing a single arrow, this decision must have come as yet another bitter blow. Frustrated, humiliated and friendless as ever, he had no choice but to turn again to Rome. After his recent quite unfounded accusations of bad faith — to which the Pope had replied by giving the Achaian war the status of a Crusade — he knew that he had no right to expect a favourable reception to any new overtures; his only hope lay in making Urban an offer that he could not refuse:

To the venerable father of fathers, most blessed Pope of old Rome, father of our Majesty, Lord Urban, supreme and sacrosanct Pontiff of the Apostolic See . . .

In the past, legates and nuncios were often sent back and forth, but they could not speak to each other and, since they conversed through ignorant interpreters, they seldom arrived at the real truth. This gave birth to a constantly increasing hatred between brothers, an extinction of love and a veiling of the True Faith
...

But a voice from the West touched our heart, and there came to our Empire Nicholas, the venerable Bishop of Crotone. And he revealed to us all things, one after another, and so we find the holy Roman Church of God to be not different from ours in the divine dogma of its Faith, but feeling and chanting these things almost with us. We therefore venerate, believe in, and uphold the sacraments of this Roman Church. To the Mother of our Church in all things, all peoples, all patriarchal sees and all nations, in devotion, obedience and love of this Church shall be subjected by the power of our Serene Highness.

Even this necessarily abbreviated version of the letter is enough to explain why the Pope rose at once to the bait. Not only would the Byzantine Emperor be a faithful and obedient member of the Church of Rome; Manfred would have to renounce his dreams of Constantinople. Moreover, Michael had not even confined himself to the question of