Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (42 page)

But on 10 January - just three months before the appointed meeting -the Pope died at Arezzo; and though his gentle and peace-loving successor Innocent V was to maintain close contacts with the Greek ambassadors he was a good deal less eager for a Crusade, and proved interested neither in the idea of the land expedition nor in that of a meeting with the Emperor. Both plans were accordingly abandoned. This was the last time in history that a united Christendom might -just possibly - have expelled the Turks from Anatolia and returned it, after two hundred years, to Byzantium. The opportunity, for reasons that will become all too clear by the end of this chapter, would never recur.

Innocent - Pierre de Tarentaise — was another Frenchman; and his election had naturally raised the spirits of Charles of Anjou, who had intrigued shamelessly on his behalf and who at once hurried to the papal court. Charles could not forgive Michael for having outwitted him at Lyon; nor had he ever concealed his disgust at Pope Gregory's policy of good relations with Byzantium. His designs on Constantinople were as determined as ever they had been, and when he found that the new Pope was no more sympathetic to them than his predecessor, we have it on the authority of both Pachymeres and of a contemporary Sicilian chronicler, Bartolomeo of Neocastro, that he chewed his sceptre in his rage. But Innocent died in his turn after a pontificate of five months; his successor, Adrian V, after only five weeks; while Adrian's successor John XXI lasted just seven months before the ceiling of his new study in the palace at Viterbo fell on him and crushed him to death.
1
Only in November 1277 did the College of Cardinals, after sitting for six months in their fourth conclave in a year and a half, finally succeed in defying the endless machinations of Charles of Anjou by electing a Pope who was to reign long enough to make a lasting mark on papal policy.

Giovanni Gaetani Orsini, who took the name of Nicholas III, was a member of one of Rome's oldest and most powerful families. As such he

1
John was the only Portuguese ever to reach the papal throne, and the only Pope to achieve Dante's Paradise. He may also have been the only doctor: his
Book of the Eye
enjoyed much popularity, although according to Mgr. Mann
{The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages,
Vol. XVI) 'some of his remedies we should even now consider disgusting, and others are too curious to be set down here'. In fact he was only the twentieth pontiff to bear the name of John, but certain misguided chroniclers had unfortunately counted John XV twice.

had little patience with Charles's constant interference in papal affairs, and still less with his openly imperialist claims. For years the King of Sicily had used his title of Senator of Rome to sway - or attempt to sway - papal elections, bribing French and Italian cardinals alike to vote for his own candidates, just as he had taken advantage of the Imperial Vicariate of Tuscany to further his political ambitions in the peninsula. Within weeks of his election, the new Pope had stripped him of both positions. He also absolutely forbade Charles to pursue his plans for an attack on Constantinople. This last prohibition was not prompted by any particular sympathy for Michael Palaeologus, nor indeed for the Byzantine Empire as a whole; Nicholas simply saw the East and the West as two opposing forces, with the Papacy holding the balance between them and ensuring that neither became too powerful. But Michael cared little what Nicholas thought; for him it was enough to see his enemy humbled, his Empire free at last of the menace that had hung over it for so long.

In one respect the Pope remained every bit as firm as his predecessors: he was determined that the Byzantine Empire, having accepted ecclesiastical union at Lyon, should give proof that that union was now complete and that the Greek Church was prepared to obey in every detail, in liturgy as well as in doctrine, the dictates of Rome. Michael Palaeologus had already gone a long way in this direction. Apart from the ceremony at Lyon, he had agreed to that of January 1275 in Constantinople which had caused the first riots; and in April 1277, in the Palace of Blachernae and in the presence of the Patriarch, the senior clergy and the papal nuncios, he and his son Andronicus - co-Emperor since 1272 — had taken further oral oaths in ratification of those sworn on their behalf at Lyon by George Acropolites, after which they had signed various documents in Latin confirming the points covered. These included the
filioque,
the doctrine of purgatory, the seven sacraments as maintained in Rome, the use of unleavened bread in the Mass and of course papal supremacy, with the right of appeal to the Holy See. After this, all should have been well; unfortunately the Greek clerics had refused to make similar personal avowals, while the collective letter drafted on their behalf by Patriarch John Beccus had been transparently ambiguous on several major issues. A few months later, a synod at St Sophia had tried to show its sincerity by anathematizing Nicephorus of Epirus and John the Bastard for maintaining the old Orthodoxy — in answer to which, as we have already seen, John had had a similar sentence pronounced against Michael, John Beccus and Pope Nicholas in return; but to the Roman
Curia the
sincerity of the Greek Church in Constantinople continued to be deeply suspect.

Nic
holas III was determined to settl
e the matter once and for all. He possessed little of the patience of Gregory X, and none of his diplomatic finesse. In the spring of 1279 he sent Bishop Bartholomew of Grosseto at the head of a new embassy to the Emperor, with a whole series of categorical demands. First, 'the Patriarch and the rest of the clergy of every fortress, village or any other place, individually and collectively, must recognize, accept and confess with a sworn oath the truth of the faith and primacy of the Roman Church . . . without any condition or addition'. A full text of the required oath was appended. Secondly, 'those who exercise the office of preachers must publicly and carefully instruct their congregations in the true faith, and chant the Creed with the addition of the
filioque.
In order to ensure that this was done, the papal legates were personally to visit all the chief cities of the Empire and collect, from everyone they found in cathedrals, churches and monasteries, duly witnessed individual professions of faith and acceptances of papal supremacy. Signed copies of these were to be sent to Rome. Only then could the Greek clergy apply for confirmation of the offices they held; meanwhile all such offices would be considered uncanonical and would not be recognized in Rome. Nicholas specifically refused the Emperor's earlier requests - which had been repeated in the Patriarch's letter - that the Greeks should be allowed to preserve their ancient rites dating from before the schism: 'unity of faith,' he wrote, 'does not permit diversity in its confessors or in confession.' Finally, the Pope announced his intention of appointing a cardinal-legate, with his official residence in Constantinople.

To Michael, who had continually reassured his subjects that their capital would remain free of permanent papal representatives, this last demand must have been particularly irksome; but his whole position where Rome was concerned was rapidly becoming intolerable. His own Church — most of whose members had never wanted unity in the first place - made no secret of its anger at this continuing harassment by successive Popes, and he knew that he could press it no further. To make matters worse he had recently had a serious difference of opinion with John Beccus, as a result of which the latter had tendered his resignation and withdrawn to the monastery of the Mangana. This awkward fact he was able to conceal from the nuncios, by telling them that the Patriarch had merely retired for a well-earned rest and somehow persuading Beccus to maintain this fiction by receiving them in his retreat; but there was no way, as he well knew, of satisfying their demands. He could only do his utmost not to offend them more than necessary and try once again to temporize; and for this he needed ecclesiastical support. Summoning all the senior churchmen to the palace, he spoke to them more frankly than ever before:

You well know with what difficulty the present agreement was achieved
...
I
am aware that I have used force against many of you and have offended many friends, including members of my own family
...
I believed that the affair would be ended and that the Latins would demand nothing more
..
. but thanks to certain people who are determined to create discord they are now demanding further proof of union. That is the purpose of the present mission. I wished to inform you of this in advance so that when you hear the envoys you will not be unduly disturbed or, observing my own conduct towards them, suspect me of bad faith.

As God is my witness, I shall not alter one accent, one iota of our faith. I promise to uphold the divine Creed of our fathers, and to oppose not only the Latins but anyone who would call it in question. If I receive the envoys cordially it will do you no harm. I believe that we should treat them kindly, lest we create new problems for ourselves. For this new Pope is not so well-disposed towards us as was Gregory.

His words had their effect. The Greek prelates listened to Bishop Bartholomew in silence and managed somehow to remain
polite. But they refused adamantl
y to swear the required oaths. The best the Emperor could do was to secure another written declaration similar to that of two years before; but many of those who had signed on the first occasion refused to do so again, and he was obliged to invent a number of fictional bishops and forge their signatures before the document looked even moderately impressive. Meanwhile, to convince the nuncios of his sincerity, Michael had them taken to the imperial prisons, where they could see for themselves the treatment accorded to those - including members of the imperial family - who had opposed the union. Finally on i September, in their presence, he and Andronicus repeated their former oaths both orally and in writing.

There was no more to be done. Bartholomew and his fellow-envoys may or may not have been persuaded of the good faith of Michael and his son; but with regard to the body of the Greek Church they can have only been confirmed in their previous suspicions. Whatever the documents they carried back with them might suggest, true ecclesiastical unity remained a chimera. In Byzantine hearts, the schism still ruled as strongly as ever.

*

If Pope Nicholas III had failed to bring the Empire back whole-heartedly into the Roman fold, he had been no more successful in reconciling it with Charles of Anjou. True, he had forbidden Charles to launch his threatened invasion; but his repeated efforts to achieve a treaty of peace between the two rivals had been ignored by both of them — Charles because he still harboured dark designs on Constantinople, and Michael because a treaty might have tied his hands in the Balkans, where his undeclared war against the princes of Achaia, Epirus and Thessaly was now yielding rich rewards.

William of Achaia had died on i May 1278, a year after the death of his son-in-law and heir Philip of Anjou. Thus, by the terms of the Treaty of Viterbo in 1267, Charles himself had inherited the principality and with it the overlordship of all Eastern Europe sdll in Latin hands. To Michael Palaeologus, this development caused little concern: henceforth Achaia, instead of having a prince of its own who could be a focus for its people's loyalty, was to be just one of many territories under a foreign, absentee ruler for whom - preoccupied as he was with Constantinople - it was relatively unimportant. The rapacity and corruption of the successive
baillis
whom Charles sent out as governors in his name soon brought the local populations, Latin and Greek alike, into a state of open revolt: and the imperial troops, working out of their two chief bases at Monemvasia and Mistra, were able to continue the reconquest of the Morea even faster than before.

Charles hardly bothered. The Peloponnesian ports and harbours would have been useful to him had he been planning a naval expedition against the Empire; but his lack of sufficient naval transport and his failure to reach an agreement with Venice — which had in fact made a new treaty with Michael in 1277 - ruled out any such possibility. The attack would therefore have to be made by land. True, the Pope had forbidden it; but the Pope was already in his sixties and would not last for ever. In any case Charles was quite prepared to defy him if necessary. When the moment finally came, the Angevin armies would have to take the Via Egnatia, the time-honoured route across the neck of the Balkan peninsula, which would in turn necessitate a bridgehead in Albania or northern Epirus. This region too was now coming under increasing Byzantine pressure; and on 10 April 1279 Charles concluded a formal treaty with Prince Nicephorus whereby, in return for military assistance against the Empire, Nicephorus declared himself a vassal of the King of Sicily and ceded to him a number of important strongholds.

For the next eighteen months a steady stream of men and horses poured across the Adriatic, where they were assembled into a fighting force by Hugh the Red of Sully, one of Charles's most trusted generals. With them came immense quantities of arms and siege engines and another small army of sappers, engineers and carpenters to provide technical support. The death of Nicholas III - which had occurred, most conveniently, in August 1280 - meant the end of the papal ban; and in the late autumn of that year the army of some eight thousand, including two thousand cavalry and a large force of Saracen archers, moved eastwards across Albania to the Byzantine fortress-town of Berat. Standing as it did on a high rock dominating the western end of the Via Egnatia, Berat represented the first link in the chain of strongholds that Sully planned to forge across the whole breadth of the peninsula, and he at once gave orders for a siege. As befitted its importance, the town possessed a strong and well-equipped garrison; but the size of the Angevin army suggested that it would not easily be discouraged, and the local commander very understandably sent messengers to Constantinople with an urgent appeal for reinforcements.