The History of the Renaissance World (37 page)

Go-Toba, taken captive, was politely but firmly exiled to a distant island off the western coast, where he spent the last eighteen years of his life writing despairing poetry. The reigning emperor, his twenty-four-year-old son Juntoku, was exiled to a separate island.

To replace them, the
shikken
and his sister chose both another emperor and another Cloistered Emperor, coronating Go-Toba’s half brother Go-Takakura for the latter job (even though he had never been an actual emperor) and Go-Takakura’s ten-year-old son Go-Horikawa for the Chrysanthemum Throne itself. Permanent representatives of the shogunate were installed in Kyoto and given the job of directing the new royal family. Go-Toba’s supporters lost their estates; instead, the Hojo siblings awarded them to Kamakura supporters, displacing western support for the emperor and replacing it with eastern strength.
¹⁴

The grandly named Jokyu War had been brief, and Go-Toba’s rebellion had backfired. The shogunate at Kamakura had gained power, and Kyoto had lost it; the balance had tipped towards the shogun.

For the next two decades, it would sink yet further towards Kamakura. In 1224, the
shikken
Yoshitoki died at sixty-one; his son Yasutoki became the third
shikken
. When the redoubtable Masako died, the following year, Yasutoki finally had real power. Aged forty-two, he was an experienced soldier (he had led the attack on Kyoto in 1221) and well liked: “trustworthy and wise,” one account tells us, “. . . a compassionate man, benevolent towards the people . . . he appreciated the quality of reason.” Until his death in 1242, he worked to create the layers of administration that the shogunate lacked: inventing new positions for secretaries and executives, constructing a hierarchy of councils and committees, and collecting into a single lawbook the laws that would govern the Kamakura shogunate.

This book, the
Goseibai Shikimoku
, was a grab bag of fifty-one unconnected regulations, some new and some already long observed, disorganized and lacking in the “quality of reason” that Yasutoki prized. But it served the shogunate as a starting place; over decades, it would be amended, added to, and edited. And it concluded with a solemn promise that turned the shogunate firmly away from its untidy beginnings, towards a more rational future:

In deciding upon matters of right and wrong, the members of the Council will disregard family ties and likes and dislikes, and will follow where reason directs, stating their views according to the knowledge deep within their hearts, without fear of colleagues or powerful families.
¹⁵

Chapter Thirty-One

The Unwanted Throne

Between 1204 and 1225,
the Latin Empire at Constantinople is challenged
by three Greek empires, plus Bulgaria

A
S SMOKE ROSE
from the sacked buildings of Constantinople, the Count of Flanders ascended his new throne as Emperor. There he sat, in Constantine’s old place, with scepter in hand, dressed in silk and jewels, presiding over “great rejoicings,” over “feastings and ceremonies,” over the old empire of the Greeks: now, the empire of the Latins in the east.
¹

He did not rule all of Byzantium, though. In March, just before the final assault on the city, the Crusader leaders and the Venetian doge had agreed that conquered land (and any loot worth more than “five sous,” perhaps equivalent to $100) would be divided up fairly between the Venetians and the Crusaders. After Baldwin’s coronation, the division was made official in a signed treaty, the
Partitio Romaniae
. Baldwin I was given the entire Crusader share of Constantinople itself, which worked out to five-eighths of the city, plus Thrace, the northwest of Asia Minor, and a few outlying islands: the center of the empire. The Venetians took three-eighths of the city of Constantinople for their own, plus the scattering of islands between Venice and the Dardanelles: seafaring possessions, for a seafaring people.

And a third realm was created especially for the French Crusader Boniface, Marquis of Monferrat, who had been the other leading candidate to be elected emperor. “Each enjoyed the support and approval of many persons,” writes Gunther of Pairis, “and . . . one could not easily be preferred over the other.” Baldwin’s election had been by a slim margin, and the Crusaders were afraid that, in a fit of pique, he might go home and take his soldiers with him. So he was given a consolation prize: a principality of his own centered at Thessalonica, subject to Baldwin of Constantinople, but essentially Boniface’s to run as he pleased.
²

Another complication threatened Baldwin’s authority. There were
two
ex-emperors still wandering around Byzantium: Alexius III, the uncle of young (now dead) Alexius, who had precipitated the whole Crusade by stealing the throne from Isaac Angelus, and who had fled in July 1203 as the Crusaders approached; and the usurping Mourtzouphlus, who had murdered young Alexius and had escaped from Constantinople on the night of April 12.

31.1 The Successors of Byzantium

Mourtzouphlus, after hanging around Constantinople for a few months (“not yet removed more than four days’ journey,” says the Crusader Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who wrote an eyewitness account of the first years of the Latin Empire), had attempted to join forces with his predecessor; but Alexius III, welcoming him with deceptive friendship, had ordered Mourtzouphlus seized and blinded in the middle of the night. Not long after, Mourtzouphlus escaped and was captured by Baldwin’s men as he stumbled sightless through the countryside.

Mourtzouphlus was a king killer, a traitor; Baldwin and his nobles decided to make an example of the man who had dared to lift his hand against God-appointed authority. “There was in Constantinople,” writes Villehardouin, “a column, one of the highest . . . ever seen; and Mourtzouphlus [was] taken to the top of that column and made to leap down, in the sight of all the people, because it was fit that an act of justice so notable should be seen of the whole world. . . . [A]nd when he came to the earth he was all shattered and broken.” A few weeks later, Boniface found the other ex-emperor hiding in Thessalonica and imprisoned him.
³

But Baldwin’s rule remained precarious.

Just because Constantinople was under Crusader control did not mean that the rest of Byzantium was ready to fall meekly into line behind Baldwin I. To the people of the eastern empire, the western Crusaders were aliens: “Latins” instead of “Greeks,” speakers of alien tongues, holding allegiance to a different Church.
*
Since 1054, the Christians in the east had recognized the bishop of Constantinople, the Patriarch, as their head, but the new Latin emperor was loyal to the far-distant pope in Rome. At the time of the Crusader takeover, a Venetian “Patriarch” had been appointed by the victors to replace the native head of the eastern church, bringing it back under the authority of the pope; and the Greek bishops had been forced to swear obedience to Rome.
⁴

This only deepened the eastern resentment of the western interlopers; and within the year, three relations of the deposed royal house had challenged the new Latin emperor.

Alexius Comnenus, the twenty-two-year-old grandson of the much-tormented Andronicus (publicly and violently murdered by Constantinople’s people in 1185), had already proclaimed himself emperor at Trebizond, on the shores of the Black Sea. Late in 1204, Alexius III’s son-in-law, an experienced soldier named Theodore Lascaris, raised a rebellion against the Latin Emperor with the city of Nicaea as his headquarters. And early in 1205 Alexius III’s young cousin Michael declared himself ruler over the northwestern Greek region known as Epirus.

Now there were three “Greek” states—the Empire of Trebizond, the Empire of Nicaea, and the Despotate of Epirus
*
—each one ruled by Byzantine royalty, each king claiming to be the rightful successor to the Byzantine crown and the loyal protector of the Greek Orthodox Church. “And thenceforth,” Villehardouin tells us, “from day to day, did evil tidings begin to come to [Constantinople], that everywhere the Greeks were rising, and that wherever the Greeks found Franks occupying the land, they killed them. . . . Then the Emperor Baldwin and the Doge of Venice . . . took counsel together, for they saw they were losing the whole land.”
⁵

W
EST OF
C
ONSTANTINOPLE
lay the lands of the old Bulgarian empire, a kingdom established in the seventh century and then swallowed by Byzantium in the first decades of the eleventh. In the chaos surrounding the murder of the emperor Andronicus, three Bulgarian brothers (“descended from the family of the former kings,” according to a contemporary account) had raised a private army and declared Bulgaria free again. Their “empire” consisted only of a small patch of land on the southern banks of the Danube, and within a decade the older two brothers, Peter and Asen, had been assassinated by other Bulgarian rivals.
⁶

But the third brother, Kaloyan, had clung to power. He had fought his way into Thrace, and in 1204 had talked Innocent III into crowning him
basileus
, Emperor of the Bulgarians.

Byzantium had been the enemy of Bulgaria, and now the Latin Empire had succeeded to that position. As the Greeks revolted, Kaloyan came eastward to join them against Baldwin’s rule.

In April 1205, Baldwin I left Constantinople at the head of a Crusader army and marched west towards the rebellious city of Adrianople. Kaloyan was approaching from the other direction, intending (says Villehardouin) to “succour Adrianople with a very great host . . . full fourteen thousand . . . who had never been baptized.”
⁷

When the armies met, on the plain outside Adrianople, the Crusaders were badly outmaneuvered by the lightly armed, mobile Bulgarian army. A score of Crusader knights were taken prisoner; many more were killed on the field. Baldwin I himself was captured and hauled off into obscurity. His exact fate was never known, although the Constantinople native George Akropolites, born a generation later, passes on the rumor that Kaloyan himself killed Baldwin and turned his skull into a goblet (“after it had been cleaned of all its contents and decorated all around with ornament”).
⁸

With its emperor dead and its leaders in chains, the Latin army retreated from Adrianople. The Latin moment of dominance, the chance to seize the power of the old Byzantine empire, had passed by.

Over the next two decades, power seeped away from Constantinople; first slowly, and then in a torrent.

Baldwin’s brother Henry, a vigorous and competent military man in his early thirties, was crowned the second ruler of the Latin Empire. He fought back successfully against the aggressive attempts of Theodore Lascaris of Nicaea to expand his lands, finally forcing the Nicaeans to sign a temporary truce with Constantinople. In 1208, he managed to drive Kaloyan’s nephew and successor Boril back, capturing the southern Bulgarian city of Philippoupolis and making it part of the Latin Empire. And three years later, Henry forced young Michael, ruler of the Despotate of Epirus, to sign a peace treaty with Constantinople.