Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (44 page)

And the revolt was already spreading across the island. By the end of April it had reached Messina, where the seventy Angevin vessels lying in the harbour were set on fire. Once again Charles was obliged to postpone his Greek expedition; ordering to Messina all the two hundred ships still lying in the mainland ports, he immediately flung the whole force that he had gathered for the conquest of Constantinople against the rebels. Meanwhile he set to work to raise yet another army, and on 25 July led it in person across the straits and laid siege to Messina. Throughout the summer this siege continued; but it was of no avail. On 30 August Peter of Aragon landed at Trapani at the head of an immense host and on 2 September entered Palermo, where he was proclaimed King of Sicily. (He would doubtless have preferred a proper coronation, but the French Archbishop of Palermo had been massacred and his colleague of Monreale had fled.) A fortnight later his ambassadors presented themselves before Charles of Anjou in his camp outside Messina.

For Charles the situation was now desperate. The speed of Peter's unopposed advance was a clear enough indication of his popularity in the island. It was also plain that the forces of the Aragonese, both on land and at sea, were more than a match for his own. If he remained where he was and attempted to resist them, there was a serious danger that their navy might institute a blockade; he would then be caught between their advancing army and the still unconquered Messina, with no possibility of retreat across the straits. The only sensible course was to return to the mainland while he could, reassemble his troops at leisure and make plans for a new invasion - perhaps at some more vulnerable point along the coast - the following year. Summoning what dignity he could, he told Peter's ambassadors that, while he naturally repudiated all their master's claims to the island, he was prepared to make a temporary withdrawal. The evacuation began at once, and continued at ever-increasing speed as the Aragonese army approached; but vast quantities of baggage and stores were left behind, together with a number of unfortunate soldiers whom the triumphant Messinans were only too happy to massacre before opening their gates to Peter on 2 October.

For Michael Palaeologus and his subjects, the war of the Sicilian Vespers and the consequent elimination of Charles of Anjou as a serious threat to Byzantium was, if not another miracle, at least a further proof that the Almighty was on their side. The Emperor himself had been in no way responsible for the incident at the church of Santo Spirito, nor for the events which followed. He had, however, by his diplomatic intrigues and his generous financial contributions to the Sicilian rebels, done much to prepare the ground; and in the short autobiographical note that he composed at the end of his life for the benefit of his son Andronicus he saw no reason to be over-modest about it:

The Sicilians, having nothing but contempt for the forces remaining to the barbarian King, had the courage to take up arms and deliver themselves from servitude; and were I now to dare to claim that God planned their liberation, and that he achieved it through my own hands, I should be speaking no more than the truth.

Even now, his anxieties were not over. The moment he realized that his Empire was no longer under immediate threat from the King of Sicily he set off on a campaign against the Turks, who had taken full advantage of his preoccupations in the West to increase their pressure along his eastern frontier; and no sooner had he returned from Anatolia than he was obliged to launch anot
her expedition against John the
Bastard of Thessaly - of which, owing to the death of his brother the
sebastocrator
and several other of his principal generals, he took personal command. Determined to destroy John once and for all, he did not hesitate to appeal to his son-in-law,' the Mongol Nogay, Khan of the Golden Horde, who immediately dispatched four thousand Tartar tribesmen to his aid.

But Michael was now in his fifty-ninth year, and his exertions had taken their toll. By the time he left his capital he was obviously far from well. The Empress Theodora did her utmost to persuade him to stay in Constantinople, at least until the following spring; but he refused to listen to her and in late November embarked at Selymbria, on the northern shore of the Marmara, just in time to encounter a violent storm which seems to have done some damage to his ship: he was obliged to land again at Rhaedestum (now Tekirdag), only some twenty miles further along the coast. Thence he continued his journey on horseback, but when he reached the little Thracian village of Pachomios he could go no further. He took to his bed, and on Friday, n December 1282 he died, proclaiming Andronicus, his son and co-Emperor, as his successor.

Andronicus's first decisive act as sole Emperor was also one of his wisest. Unhesitatingly he gave his orders, which were carried out the same night. His father's body was taken, under cover of darkness, to a distant place, where it was covered with earth to protect it from wild animals. There was no grave, no ceremony. According to Gregoras, Andronicus acted as he did out of disgust for Michael's betrayal of the Church - although, he adds, no son was ever more dutiful; but his real motive was almost certainly to save the body from insult. He had no delusions as to the late Emperor's unpopularity in the capital. Moreover, since Michael had never formally renounced the Roman faith, in Orthodox eyes - despite his papal excommunication — he had died a heretic; there could therefore be no question of a state funeral. If, as seemed likely, the Church were to show its disapproval by refusing him a Christian burial, it would surely be better to deny it the opportunity. For

1
Michael had given Nogay the hand of one of his illegitimate daughters, Euphrosyne, in about
1272.
Another, Maria, had been betrothed to the Mongol Ilkhan, Hulagu, in
1265.
He had died before the marriage and she had married his son Abagu instead. After Abagu's assassination by his brother Ahmet in
1281,
she returned to Constantinople, where she retired to the convent whose church was thereafter known, in her honour, as St Mar)' of the Mongols. Most of it still stands today, the only Byzantine church that has been continuously in Greek hands since before the Turkish conquest.

some years the body lay where it had been buried; much later, Andronicus had the remains transferred to the nearby monastery at Selymbria. But the Emperor in whose reign Constantinople had been reconquered, and who had saved his Empire from almost certain annihilation by the combined forces of Western Europe, was rewarded by what can only be described as a posthumous sentence of exile and never returned, in life or in death, to his capital.

Michael Palaeologus is principally remembered today for the recovery of Constantinople. For this, as we have seen, he deserves little of the credit. The Latins were already at their last gasp and could not in any event have held out much longer, while he himself was not even present when his troops first entered the city. But then he was never really a soldier-Emperor: nearly all the most important battles of his reign were fought without him. Though an outstanding general in his youth, after his accession he tended to leave the actual fighting to others, taking the field in person only when he felt it absolutely necessary to do so. This was not due to any lack of courage. It was simply because, in the circumstances then prevailing, military operations took second place to diplomacy - and in this field he was a master, perhaps the most brilliant that Byzantium ever produced. With virtually the whole European continent ranged against him, no one knew better than he when to act and when to prevaricate, when to stand firm and when to concede, when to conclude an alliance and when to arrange a marriage, when to threaten, when to cajole and when to bribe. To preserve the security of his Empire he was ready to make any sacrifice - even the independence of the Orthodox Church; yet when he died he left not only the Empire safer than at any time for the previous century, but the Church as free as it had ever been.

It could be argued that he was lucky; but so are most great men, and Michael Palaeologus was a great Emperor. Like all great men, he also had his faults. He was devious and duplicitous; though he would doubtless have argued that when his back was to the wall he had little choice in the matter, the fact remains that neither before nor after his accession did anyone really seem to trust him. Though temperamentally slow to anger, when finally roused he could be cruel and utterly without mercy. The reign of terror that he instituted in Constantinople in his determination to enforce Church unity was fearsome even by Byzantine standards. There was a vein of callousness too: quite apart from the murder of George Muzalon and his broth
er, his treatment of the child-
Emperor John Lascaris shocked all his contemporaries including his own family, and continues to sicken us today. Yet the more we read about him, the more the conviction grows that few if any of his predecessors could have guided the Empire with so sure a hand through one of the most dangerous periods in all its history. Lucky he may have been; but his people, in having him when they needed him most, were luckier still.

Their immediate posterity were less fortunate. Economically, thanks to his policies of bribery and appeasement, Michael left the Empire on the verge of bankruptcy. Militarily, his return to Constantinople and his continued preoccupation with Europe thereafter allowed the Turks and Mongols a virtually free rein in Anatolia, enabling them to consolidate and even to increase their conquests. He himself would once again have maintained that he had no alternative, that he possessed neither the manpower nor the resources to fight simultaneously on two fronts and that, of the two, the Western represented the more immediate danger. In the short term he would have been right. But to most thinking Byzantines it was clear that the paramount threat to their Empire came from the East, where the forces of Islam were a more formidable enemy, even if a less immediate one, than the King of Anjou could ever have been. If the capital had remained at Nicaea, Byzantine power in western Asia Minor would have held the balance well enough, particularly since the Seljuk Sultanate had never really recovered from its defeat by the Mongols at Kosedag in 1243; the transfer of the government back to Constantinople proved, in this respect, little short of disastrous.

There was nothing new in all this. Standing as it did at the juncture of two continents, Byzantium had always had to look to both East and West, and every
basileus
worthy of his salt had found himself obliged to concentrate on one or the other. Thus, in the circumstances, it is difficult to see how Michael could have acted otherwise than he did. If there is blame to be apportioned, we must surely look elsewhere: to the nations of the West - and in particular to the Orthodox Greek princelings of the Balkan peninsula - who were so blinded by their own ambition that they could not see the looming threat, not just to themselves but to all Christendom, from which a strong and united Byzantium might yet have saved them.

16

The Catalan Vengeance

[1282—1311]

In a warfare of twenty years a ship or a camp was become their country; arms were their sole profession and property; valour was the only virtue which they knew; their women had imbibed the fearless temper of their lovers and husbands; it was reported that with a stroke of their broad-sword the Catalans could cleave a horseman and a horse; and the report itself was a powerful weapon.

Gibbon (on the Catalans),
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Chapter LXII

The Emperor Andronicus II returned to Constantinople with one thought uppermost in his mind: to abrogate the Union of Lyon and to proclaim once again the full independence of the Orthodox Church. Although as co-Emperor he had been obliged to support his father's policies, in his heart he had always hated them. Deeply devout by nature and imbued with the traditional Byzantine passion for theology - his constant preoccupation with ecclesiastical affairs was to be one of his chief weaknesses as a ruler - he could never forget that his father had died under the ban
of the Church and was consequentl
y doomed, as he believed, to eternal damnation. He himself was determined not to suffer the same fate; and no sooner was he back in the capital than he made formal recantation of his earlier oaths of loyalty to Rome. The Patriarch John Beccus, who had been the principal champion of unity after the late Emperor himself, was stripped of his office and confined to a monastic cell; meanwhile the former Patriarch Joseph, now an old man in the last stages of decrepitude, was brought back to the Patriarchate on a stretcher and ceremonially reinstalled. Those -monks and laymen alike - whom Michael had imprisoned and mutilated for their faith were paraded through the streets and hailed as martyrs. In St Sophia there was a special service of
purification and rededication,
just as there had been after the departure of the Latins twenty-one years before.

All too soon, however, the mood of celebration changed to one of anger: calls were heard for revenge, for the trial and conviction of those who had betrayed their Church. Of these, the loudest and most insistent came from a group of schismatics known as the Arsenites. They took their name from the former Patriarch Arsenius who, having excommunicated Michael VIII for his treatment of John Lascaris, had been finally deposed in
1267.
Though Arsenius himself had by now been many years in his grave, they had steadfastly refused to recognize his later successors Joseph and John Beccus. Indeed, in the eyes of the more extreme members of the sect, Lascaris was still the rightful Emperor. Michael had been a usurper under the ban of the Church, and his son, having been crowned by Joseph, had no better claim.