God's War: A New History of the Crusades (86 page)

ZARA

Whatever the murmurings and dissent, temporarily, the leadership’s obfuscation worked. Early in October, the great fleet set sail. Strangely, it left without its supposed leader, Boniface of Montferrat. Nervous, perhaps, at such a controversial operation, he may have been more concerned to explore the wider diplomatic possibilities for the crusade army opened up by the presence in Italy for most of 1202 of the Byzantine claimant, Alexius Angelus. Boniface was hardly missed. The size and quality of the fleet impressed not just those it carried. The citizens of the coastal cities of the northern Adriatic in its path quickly submitted to Venice. Zara would have followed suit if the unity of its opponents had not suddenly collapsed. Confronted with the prospect of dispossessing co-religionists, the consciences of many rebelled, ironically provoking not just a serious crisis for the crusade but the very thing they most opposed, a violent attack on the Christian city. The day after the fleet arrived on 11 November 1202, the Zaran authorities sought a negotiated surrender that would give the Venetians the city and its possessions in return for sparing the lives of its inhabitants. With the approval of most of the crusader leadership, Dandolo was prepared to accept the terms. But the Zarans withdrew their offer after contact with a group of crusader dissidents led by Simon of Montfort and Robert of Boves. They told the Zarans that the crusaders would never help the Venetians fight for Zara, so the city had nothing to gain by surrender, as there would be no attack. Unfortunately for them, the Zarans believed this, thus passing up a chance of a peaceful settlement.
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Whatever else, the crusader force knew how to invest a city. Scores of siege engines, presumably carried with the fleet in pre-fabricated sections as on the Third Crusade, were erected. When direct assault achieved nothing, mining was begun. The odds were clear. On 24 November Zara surrendered.
The lives of the surviving citizens were in theory spared, although some killing occurred. The city and its contents were divided between the crusaders and the Venetians, who settled for the winter as uneasy neighbours in the conquered port.

The failure of the initial peace negotiations exposed the divisions of opinion within the crusader army and its peculiar political dynamics. Having scuppered the discussions with the Zarans, the faction hostile to the diversion provoked uproar when Abbot Guy of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, an associate of Simon of Montfort, produced a letter from Innocent III expressly forbidding an attack on Zara on pain of excommunication and cancellation of the crusade indulgences. The Venetians, incandescent with rage and unmoved in purpose, insisted that the crusaders honour their agreement to help capture Zara, Dandolo declaring: ‘I will not in any degree give over being avenged on them [the Zarans], no, not even for the pope’.
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Abbot Guy only narrowly avoided being beaten up. Once again the crusade leaders found themselves in a moral trap, to keep faith with their allies or to obey the pope (and canon law). Either way incurred dishonour. There seems to have been a view among those most committed to the Venetian alliance that the conundrum could be solved satisfactorily and honour saved by fulfilling their obligations, even the distasteful ones, in sequence. Once all intervening agreements with the Venetians had been concluded, then the original oath to recover Jerusalem would fall into place. This perception of the crusade as a series of contracts was shared by participants on opposite sides of the arguments over the diversions. Those wishing to preserve the Venetian alliance – and transport – could claim that the best interests of the crusade were served by keeping the expedition and abiding by accords freely negotiated, a sort of moral pragmatism. Their opponents countered with a far simpler slogan. Simon of Montfort was recorded as saying, ‘I have not come here to destroy Christians’.
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Yet, as in Venice, the pragmatists prevailed. Simon withdrew from the crusader camp, taking no part in the siege. The following spring, he left the army altogether with a large group of sympathizers. After some help from the king of Hungary, ‘our enemy’ Villehardouin called him, they reached Italy and sailed to the Holy Land.
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The crisis at Zara revealed just how secular the direction of the crusade had become. A striking feature of the whole campaign was the lack of ecclesiastical lead, partly the result of the absence of a papal legate. Peter
Capuano, after his mealy-mouthed approval of the Zara plan, had not accompanied the fleet from Venice but had gone to Rome, whence he departed for the Holy Land to await events and, he presumably hoped, the arrival of the crusade. Without the authority of even a pusillanimous legate, the churchmen with the crusade army alternately squabbled among themselves on partisan lines mirroring those within the soldiery or followed the wishes of the commanders. At Zara, the majority – how large is impossible to guess – of the barons persisted in supporting the Venetians. Their actions were later justified to the pope as driven by necessity rather than choice. Yet to maintain the approval of the rank and file, they deliberately suppressed the papal letter. It would be facile to argue that the less exalted crusaders possessed greater religious commitment than their more sophisticated leaders. However, away from the baronial council, the issues appeared clearer, the ambition to recover Jerusalem more direct, attitudes reflected in a number of surviving accounts from sources not privy to the pressures on the high command. The profile of popular opinion in the army of the Fourth Crusade matches those found during the First and Third. The ‘commons’, their own term, were far from simple or ignorant.
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They appeared well informed, articulate and capable of exerting organized, precise, effective political influence, reminiscent of the early weeks of 1099 or the Palestine war of 1191–2. Leaders could not ignore the led; hence the repeated concealment during the Fourth Crusade. A number of eyewitnesses away from the baronial council were highly critical of the Venetians, if not their own leadership, and recorded extensive discontent with some of the decisions reached. After Zara fell there was serious rioting between crusaders and Venetians; little love appeared lost. A sense of exploitation was, perhaps, inevitable. In the winter of 1202–3, defection became endemic, some giving up altogether, but most apparently intent on travelling directly to the Holy Land. This raises the two related questions of how the leadership was able to push through their decisions and why they chose to do so.

One largely passive factor working for the leaders lay in the accustomed acceptance of decisions by troops tied into command structures by loyalty or cash. Robert of Clari’s attitude of neutral acceptance of the turns of events may have been widespread. His complaints revolved around the treatment of the less important or poor in the distribution of booty, not how or where it was won. Yet, deference was a negotiable commodity rather than a fixed asset. Without money or the means to
provide largesse, lords lost authority. It is no coincidence that the crusade followed the course determined by the wealthiest lords, in particular Boniface of Montferrat and Baldwin of Flanders. Neither can it be surprising that the consent or instigation of the Venetian shippers exerted a decisive influence, especially once the crusade left Venice. As Simon of Montfort discovered in the winter of 1202–3, finding alternative travel arrangements was not easy. Groups of ‘menues genz’, non-aristocrats, sought to hire merchant ships or even horse transports. One ship carrying 500 defectors foundered with all hands. Escape overland risked attack by local bandits.
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Without a strong contrary motive, staying with the Venetian fleet made sense.

The leadership may also have possessed another trump card. The process of reaching decisions in the crusader army followed an almost constitutional pattern. Whatever the high command of perhaps a dozen or so magnates decided required the approval of the wider council of barons. Counsel and consent lay at the heart of all western European political structures of the period. The crusade army, a political society in microcosm, formed no exception. Some major decisions were put to an even wider body of all self-funding
crucesignati
. However, beyond them, perhaps literally when they met together, were the ranks of the paid troops. Baldwin of Flanders led more archers and crossbowmen than any other commander; many were probably professionals retained for pay. The division of paid soldiers envisaged in the Treaty of Venice, if, as is probable, a proportion had been recruited, were presumably under the control of Boniface of Montferrat. At the first assault on Constantinople in July 1203, the marquis’s division was described as ‘mult granz’, very large, and was in the rear while Count Baldwin’s professional force was in the van.
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Paid troops lent their commanders considerable, if mute, practical influence over the direction of the crusade as their support – and menace – did not demand consultation. The presence of mercenaries proved vital in another sense. From November 1202, defections from the army were frequent and significant. As the numbers left dwindled, a narrowly avoided split at Corfu in May 1203 threatened the whole expedition. By that time it is possible that more
crucesignati
had either abandoned the crusade or had gone to the Holy Land than were with the leaders in the Adriatic. Without the mercenaries the rump of the army could not have continued, still less triumphed.

The reasons why the leadership were so eager to endorse the diversions
to Zara and then Constantinople were pragmatic, ambitious and opportunistic: to secure the expedition’s funding and material resources on the one hand and, on the other, to attempt to realign the politics of the eastern Mediterranean in favour of Rome, Outremer and the crusade. They were fully aware of the moral difficulties, even without the words of Simon of Montfort and the abbot of Vaux ringing in their ears. The apparent contradiction of crusaders fighting Christians – ‘detestable and unlawful’ according to Gunther of Pairis
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– was balanced by claims of justice, recorded by a number of witnesses: justice for past Venetian wrongs at the hands of Zarans; justice for the wronged Alexius Angelus. The Greek claimant provided what Dandolo was recorded as seeking for an attack on Byzantium, a ‘raisnable acoison’, a reasonable cause or good excuse.
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Writing to the crusader army in January or February 1203, Innocent III, while forbidding the crusaders from ‘invading [or] violating the lands of Christians in any manner’, entered a caveat: ‘unless, perchance they wickedly impede your journey or another just or necessary cause’, in which cause an exception could be made but only with papal guidance.
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At the time, Innocent may have had the Venetians rather than the Greeks in mind, especially as he had already rejected Alexius Angelus’s attempt to win papal approval for his restoration. The crusaders at Zara could not be so detached or theoretical. Legal and moral niceties could cost lives and decide the fate of the crusade, in the winter of 1202–3 far from simply academic considerations. However, moral posturing was not the preserve of only one side of the argument. Despite the outrage expressed against it, crusader attacks on Christians had not been seen as too shocking in the past – except by the victims. Towns on the Danube – Balkan road east had been attacked or threatened on each of the first three major expeditions. The cities of Thrace and Cyprus, and Messina in Sicily, had all fallen to the soldiers of the Third Crusade. As even the pope admitted, there were circumstances where such fratricidal violence by
crucesignati
was legally permissible, notably obstruction, a conveniently vague concept and reality. The principle proclaimed by Simon of Montfort was not as immutable as he pretended, as his own later career as leader of crusaders in Languedoc amply demonstrated.

In early December, Boniface of Montferrat finally reached Zara, followed, by the end of the month, by a delegation from Philip of Swabia and his brother-in-law Alexius Angelus. In return for placing Alexius on
the Byzantine throne, they offered the crusaders union of the Greek Orthodox church with Rome; a gift of 200,000 silver marks; provisions for every man in the army; 10,000 Greeks to accompany the crusaders to Egypt; and the promise of a permanent Byzantine garrison of 500 knights in Outremer.
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The timing and content were well judged to appeal to their audience, suggesting at the least careful preparation if not active collusion with elements of the crusade leadership, especially Boniface of Montferrat. What was being offered amounted to the realization of western expectations regarding Byzantium and the crusade and a revolution in relations between the Greek church and Rome. The well-informed Venetians probably recognized the inflated implausibility of some of the details, while acknowledging the potential benefits of changing the Greek regime, not least to their commercial position. The convenience of the plan’s presentation just as the crusaders were contemplating the next season’s campaign was hardly fortuitous. But the prospect on offer was little short of momentous.

BYZANTIUM AND THE CRUSADE

No such thing as a ‘western attitude’ to Byzantium existed in the twelfth and early thirteenth century. It remains a myth of crusading historiography. Instead, a variety of responses was determined by region, status, the nature of the contact or its timing. On the levels of silks, saints, soldiers, trade and icons, exchange between western Europeans and the Greeks was habitual, customary and usually mutually beneficial. While differences in religious observance increasingly grated on a western ecclesiastical establishment eager to impose discipline and achieve uniformity, there were few awkward diplomatic or political absolutes, except, perhaps, for Byzantine foreign policy’s single-minded Palmerstonian pursuit of material interests rather than set alliances or ideological posturing, a stance that so irritated successive popes and crusade leaders. Over the politics of Italy, the Danube basin, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Outremer and the Near East, western European powers and Byzantium competed, cooperated and coexisted. Whatever else, the scheme put to the crusader army at Zara spoke of contact, not alienation. It also recognized the implosion of Byzantine power since the death of Manuel I in 1180.
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