Four Emperors

 

AUGUST 1203–APRIL 1204

Throughout the first assault on Constantinople, a substantial population of Italian merchants had remained within the city. The citizens of Amalfi and Pisa had loyally fought alongside their Greek neighbours when Dandolo attacked the sea walls. The Venetian merchants probably barred their doors and stayed inside. But as the Greek population surveyed the aftermath of this attack – hundreds of homes gutted by fire, an unpopular new emperor installed, a section of their walls demolished to emphasise the humiliation of their proud city – they erupted in fury. The merchants’ quarters were down by the Golden Horn, where they had wharves and warehouses. On 18 August a Greek mob descended on the hated Italians. Their rage centred on Venice but the rampage quickly became indiscriminate. They ransacked all the merchant dwellings, driving out loyal foreigners as well as the treacherous Venetians. ‘Not only were the Amalfitans … disgusted by this wickedness and recklessness but also the Pisans who had chosen to make Constantinople their home,’ reported Choniates in dismay. The Pisans and Venetians disliked each other intensely but mob violence had given them a common cause. Now gathered in the crusader camp they had a shared motive for revenge.

The following day a freelance force of Venetian and Pisan merchants and Flemish crusaders commandeered some fishing boats and sailed back across the Horn. The two groups probably had different goals. The crusaders were tempted by the chance to plunder the taunting mosque on the waterfront. The ousted merchants were bent on revenge. When the Muslims called for help, the Greek population ran out to repulse the intruders. Some of the Venetians and Pisans made it through the open gates and set upon the properties of their former Greek neighbours, ‘then they fanned out into various places and fired the houses’. It was the height of a long dry summer; an impatient wind was blowing steadily from the north. The close-packed wooden houses on the lower slopes started to crackle and burn. The fire, propelled by the wind, picked up speed and began advancing up the hills into the heart of the city.

Fires were a common hazard in Constantinople, but this, according to Choniates, ‘proved all the others to be but sparks’. A wall of flame ‘whooshed up unbelievably high’; it leaped gaps across the streets, tacking with the shifting course of the wind, advancing across a front hundreds of yards wide, veering unpredictably to leave areas untouched, then whipping back on itself. As night fell, cyclones of sparks were sucked skywards on the thermal updraft, and ‘balls of fire were hurled up from the inferno high into the sky so that remarkably they consumed buildings a good distance away’. The lines of flames divided and came together again ‘meandering like a river of fire … advancing gradually and leaping over walls to ravage the buildings beyond’.

In the dark, the crusaders looked on in horror from across the water at the long humped silhouette of city hills outlined in fire. Villehardouin watched ‘those great churches and rich palaces melt and collapse, and the wide merchant streets consumed by flames’. The noise was deafening. Buildings went up ‘like candle wicks’ and exploded; marble shattered, iron bubbled and melted like water hissing on fire. Choniates, who himself lost considerable property, witnessed the destruction as the flames tore through some of the ancient and magnificent public spaces of the city.

The fire licked the porch of Hagia Sophia but miraculously turned aside.

The city was divided by ‘an enormous abyss, like a river of fire’. Driven by the flames, people struggled to move their valuables to safe ground, only to find that the fire ‘taking a winding course and moving in zigzag paths and branching off in many directions and returning to its starting point, destroyed the goods that had been moved … The majority of the city’s inhabitants were stripped then of their possessions.’ Flying embers sucked out over the sea torched a passing ship. In the space of three days the fire cut a dark gash through the heart of urban Constantinople. Sporadic outbursts continued for days, the deep pits of smouldering embers whipped unpredictably back into ignition. From sea to sea, the inhabitants of the city, of whom probably only a small number actually died, found it cut in two by a blackened and smouldering strip of devastation. Choniates summed up the mood of the people with an anguished cry. ‘Alas! The most splendid and beautiful palaces filled with beautiful things and the greatest riches, which astonished everyone – all gone.’ Four hundred acres of the city had been atomised, and a hundred thousand people lost their homes, including Choniates himself.

Watching from their camp, the crusaders were struck dumb. ‘No one knew who started the fire,’ Villehardouin disingenuously proclaimed, figuratively staring at his shoes. Others were more honest; Baldwin of Flanders’s court poet was later to say quite openly that ‘he and we alike bear guilt for the burning of churches and palaces’. And the citizens of Constantinople knew exactly whom to hold responsible. Almost every westerner still residing in the city fled to the crusader camp. More than the treachery, the double-dealing, the mistaken intentions across the cultural divide, the events of 19–21 August marked a firebreak that could henceforth not be crossed. The crusading venture like a zigzagging fire was destroying everything in its ambient path. For the Venetians their long maritime adventure seemed to have no end in sight. They prepared to overwinter, drew their ships out of the water onto the banks of the Golden Horn and waited to see what would happen next.

*

In early November Alexius IV returned from his progress to the lands of Thrace. The expedition had been a relative success. He had subdued some cities previously loyal to his predecessor and mulcted them for cash. On his return he was accorded the welcome befitting a legitimate emperor; the populace and the crusader lords rode out to welcome him as he approached the gates. The Latins noticed a change in his manner; he was more self-confident, or as Villehardouin put it, ‘The emperor began to show disdain towards the barons and those who had helped him so much.’ The payments to the crusaders slowed down. At the same time his father, Isaac, as co-emperor, was pushed into the background. It was now Alexius’s name that was mentioned first in proclamations. Embittered, the older man began to defame his son, claiming, amongst other things, ‘that he kept company with depraved men whom he smote on the buttocks and was struck by them in return’. The blind old man fell prey to superstition and the toadying prophecies of monks. He was increasingly fearful of the mob; on the advice of his soothsayers he had one of the great totemic statues of the city – a monumental bronze image of a wild boar with raised bristles – removed from the Hippodrome and set up outside the palace in the belief that ‘it could restrain the mad fury of the populace’.

Such presentiments were not misplaced, even if Isaac’s mystical defences were unlikely to prove adequate. Constantinople was descending into chaos. ‘The wine-bibbing portion of the vulgar masses’, as the aristocratic Choniates haughtily dubbed them, marched on the Forum of Constantine in an equally superstitious fury, and smashed to pieces a beautiful bronze statue of Athena, ‘because the foolish rabble believed that she was turned towards the western armies’. Alexius meanwhile continued to melt down the valuables of the Church and taxed the nobles increasingly heavily to pay the crusaders. The proceeds were ‘simply thrown to the dogs’, according to Choniates.

It was not enough. By midwinter, funds were drying up. And in the shadows of the imperial court there waited another player in the game: Alexius Ducas, known colloquially as Murtzuphlus, meaning ‘gloomy’, because ‘his eyebrows were joined together and seemed to hang down over his eyes’. He was a nobleman with a long history of court intrigue. He was ambitious, fearless and totally opposed to pandering to the westerners. Alexius had freed him from prison for plotting against his predecessor; it was to prove a bad mistake. As the winter drew on and the crusaders became more importunate, Murtzuplus emerged as the leader of the increasingly popular anti-western faction. When Boniface of Montferrat made a direct appeal to Alexius to pay what was due, Murtzuphlus’s counter-counsel was blunt: ‘Ah, sir, you have paid them too much. Don’t pay them any more! You have paid so much you have mortgaged everything. Make them go away and then expel them from your land.’ Eventually the payments stopped altogether, yet Alexius kept playing for time. He continued to support the crusader camp with food. He was walking a delicate tightrope but events began to spiral beyond his control. On 1 December, there was a further outbreak of mob violence against westerners close to the city walls and an attack on the Venetian ships. To the Greeks it was now clear that the ships were the key to everything; destroy the fleet and the crusaders would be trapped and vulnerable.

*

Across the Golden Horn the want of money was starting to tell. Dandolo and the crusader lords held a summit; they resolved on an ultimatum. Six leading notables, three crusader lords and three Venetians, were despatched to the palace to deliver a blunt message to the emperor. ‘And so the envoys mounted their horses, buckled on their swords and rode together as far as the palace of Blachernae.’ This was not a desirable assignment. At the palace gate they dismounted and made their way between the customary lines of Varangian guards into the hall, where they found the twin emperors, father and son, seated on beautiful thrones, surrounded by ‘a large number of important lords, and it seemed to be the court of a rich prince’.

Apparently unintimidated, the envoys set out their case. To the feudal crusaders, the failure to pay was a breach of honour; to the bourgeois Venetians it was a broken contract. The words were straightforward. Tellingly they were addressed solely to Alexius: ‘You swore to them, both you and your father, to keep the agreement which you had sworn – and [we] have the documents. But you haven’t kept the terms as well as you should.’ They demanded that the contract be honoured. ‘If you do so it will be most agreeable to them. If not, understand that henceforward they will regard you as neither their lord nor their friend … Now, you have clearly heard what we have said and you must act as you please.’

To the westerners it was just plain speaking, but the Greeks ‘were astonished and outraged at this challenge and said that no one had ever been brazen enough to dare to defy the emperor of Constantinople in his own hall’. There was immediate uproar, expressions of extreme ill-will, hands reaching for sword hilts, shouts and curses. Turning abruptly on their heels the envoys fled to the gate with a rising fury speeding them away. They rode off in palpable relief, lucky to be alive. The breakdown was decisive: if the crusaders wanted the funds to reach the Holy Land, they would have to take them. ‘In this way,’ Villehardouin recorded, ‘the war began.’

But the matter was not quite settled. Dandolo, from the perspective of his ninety years, decided to make one more personal appeal to Alexius’s better nature. He sent a messenger to the palace, requesting a meeting at the harbour. Dandolo had himself rowed across in a galley, with three more galleys packed with armed men to guard him. Alexius rode down to the shore. The doge opened abruptly: ‘Alexius, what are you thinking of? Remember that it is we who dragged you out of misery and then made you lord and crowned you emperor. Will you not honour your commitments and not do anything more about it?’ The emperor’s response was firmly negative. Fury overcame the doge. ‘No? Contemptible boy,’ he spat, ‘we hauled you out of the dung heap and we’ll drop you back in it. And I defy you. Be fully aware that from now on I will pursue you to your utter destruction, with all the power at my disposal.’ With these words the doge left and returned to camp.

Initially, there was skirmishing along the shores of the Golden Horn, without particular advantage to either side, but the Greeks knew where the weakness of the crusaders lay. They continuously eyed the ships. Some time probably in mid-December, they launched a night attack on the Venetian fleet. A number of fireships were prepared, laden with dry timber and oil, and with a stiff breeze blowing across the Horn, they were ignited and cut loose ‘and the wind drove them at great speed towards the fleet’. It was only quick thinking by the Venetians which prevented disaster; rapidly boarding their own vessels they manoeuvred them out of the way of the guttering fireships. On the night of 1 January 1204, with conditions again favourable, the Greeks made a second attempt. The wind was again blowing hard towards the Venetian fleet; seventeen large ships were filled with timber, hemp, barrels and pitch. At the depths of midnight they set fire to the vessels and watched the fiery squadron surge across the harbour in a chained line. At the first call of the trumpets, the Venetians scrambled to their stations, cast off and tackled the approaching vessels. ‘And the flames burned so high’, recorded Villehardouin, ‘that it seemed that the whole world was burning.’ It was now that Venetian seafaring skill was put to the test.

A huge mass of Greeks came down onto the shoreline and hurled abuse at the detested Italians, ‘and their shouts were so loud that it seemed that the earth and sea shook’. Some climbed into rowing boats and shot at the Venetian vessels as they put out from the shore. Undaunted, the Venetians gingerly approached the fiery armada and managed to attach grappling hooks to the line, and ‘by brute force towed them out of the harbour in the face of their enemies’, where they released the fireships and the strong Bosphorus current swept them away flaming into the night. Without Venetian skill, Villehardouin acknowledged that ‘if the fleet had been burned they would have lost everything, because they would have been unable to depart by land or sea’.

Despite these determined assaults Alexius himself was conspicuous by his absence in the front line. The emperor was still trying to manage two counter-pressures, fearful that if the mood inside the city turned ugly, he might need to make yet another appeal to the crusaders. And they needed him alive too: it was Alexius with whom the deals had been struck all the way back in Corfu the previous spring. But Alexius’s equivocation was keenly felt by his own subjects.

Furthermore, according to Choniates, who watched all this unfold with aristocratic alarm, ‘The disgruntled populace, like a vast sea whipped up by the wind, contemplated revolt.’

Into this power vacuum, the shaggy-browed Murtzuphlus started to insert himself, energetically pressing forward with patriotic fervour in defence of the city, ‘burning with desire to rule and to gain the citizens’ favour’. On 7 January, ‘displaying proof of outstanding courage’, he led an attack on the hated intruders outside the walls. The Greeks were forced back and Murtzuphlus’s horse stumbled and fell; he was only rescued by a company of archers, but this attempt demonstrated his willingness to defend the mother city. Alexius meanwhile seemed happy to sit behind the walls and watch, while the Venetians used their galleys to plunder the shores of the Golden Horn and employed fire, now the most hated form of war, to inflict further damage on the city. When the crusaders embarked on a two-day punitive raid across the surrounding countryside, plundering and despoiling, the exasperation of the mob finally exploded: the boiling kettle began ‘to blow off steam of abuse against the emperors’.

On 25 January a rowdy crowd descended on the mother church of Hagia Sophia; under its domed and mosaicked canopy, they forced the senate and clergy to convene and demanded the appointment of a new emperor. Choniates was one of the city dignitaries present. The nobility were frozen with fear and indecision by this eruption of violent democracy. They refused to appoint any of their number; none wanted to be nominated, ‘for we realised full well that whoever was proposed for the election would be led out the very next day like a sheep to slaughter’. Recent history had thrown up such ephemeral emperors whose reigns, like the gaudy life of dragonflies, had passed before sunset. The mob refused to budge from the church without a candidate. Eventually they seized a hapless young aristocrat, Nicholas Kannavos, led him to the church, placed a crown on his head, proclaimed him emperor and retained him there. It was now 27 January. The city descended into factional chaos. With Kannavos in the church, blind Isaac now dying and Murtzuphlus waiting in the wings, Alexius did what Choniates predicted he would. He played his last card. He called on the crusaders to enter the palace and secure his position. That day Baldwin of Flanders came to discuss this plan.

Murtzuphlus was party to these deeply unpatriotic deliberations. He knew that a moment had come. He secretly called on the palace power brokers, one by one. He won over the chief eunuch with the promise of new positions; he then gathered the Varangian Guard ‘and told them about the emperor’s intention and convinced them to consider taking as the right action that which was desirable and pleasing to the [Byzantines]’. Finally he went to deal with Alexius.

According to Choniates, at the dead of night on 27 January he burst into the emperor’s chamber informing him that the Varangian Guard was massing at the door, ‘ready to tear him apart’ because of his friendship with the hated Latins. Terrified, confused and barely awake, Alexius begged for help. Murtzuphlus threw a robe over the emperor by way of disguise, led him out through a little-used door to ‘safety’ with the emperor gabbling pathetic thanks, and threw him, chained by the legs, into ‘the most awful of prisons’. Murtzuphlus donned the imperial regalia and was proclaimed emperor. In the swirling confusion there were now four emperors in the city: the blind Isaac, Alexius IV Angelus in prison, Alexius V Murtzuphlus in the palace, Kannavos as the plaything of the mob in Hagia Sophia. The elaborate dignity of the great empire had completely collapsed. Murtzuphlus moved fast to clear up the mess. When the Varangian Guard burst into Hagia Sophia, Kannavos’s protectors simply melted away. On 2 February, the innocent young noble, apparently a man of integrity and talent, was taken off and decapitated; on the fifth, Alexius V Murtzuphlus was crowned in Hagia Sophia with the customary splendour. The blind Isaac, when he was told of the palace coup, was seized by terror and conveniently died. Or he may have been strangled.

Outside the walls, the news of the coup was greeted as final proof of Byzantine duplicity: Murtzuphlus was not a legitimate emperor, he was a usurper – and a bloodthirsty one at that. According to the more lurid accounts, when he captured three Venetians he had them hung up by iron hooks and roasted alive, ‘with our men looking on, and they could not be spared from such a horrible death by any prayer or payment’. More prosaically, he cut off the crusaders’ food supply. The change of regime returned the crusaders to a state of chronic need. ‘Once again,’ one of the sources records, ‘there was a time of much scarcity within our ranks and they ate many horses.’ ‘The prices in the camp were so high’, reported Clari, ‘that a sestier of wine was sold there for twelve sous, fourteen sous, even at times fifteen sous, a hen for twenty sous and an egg for two cents.’ The crusaders embarked on another extensive raid to provision the army. They attacked the town of Philia on the Black Sea and were returning on 5 February with booty and cattle when Murtzuphlus, whose support now rested on the pledge rapidly to drive the Latins into the sea, rode out to intercept them. He took with him the imperial banner and a precious miracle-working icon of the Virgin, one of the most revered relics of the city, whose presence ensured victory in battle. In a fierce clash, the Greeks were rebuffed and the icon captured. Murtzuphlus rode back with a report that the battle had been won. Questioned as to the whereabouts of the icon and banner, he became evasive, declaring that they had been put away for safe-keeping. The following day, in an attempt to humiliate the upstart emperor, the Venetians put the imperial and sacred items on a galley and sailed up and down the city walls, taunting him with their trophies. When the Greeks saw this they turned on the new man; Murtzuphlus remained resolute. ‘Don’t be dismayed, for I will make them pay heavily and will fully avenge myself on them.’ He was already being backed into a corner.

A day later, 7 February, Murtzuphlus tried a different tack. He sent messengers to the crusader camp to ask for a parley at a site up the Golden Horn. Dandolo again had himself rowed across in a galley, while a party of horsemen came round the top of the Horn for extra security. Murtzuphlus rode up to meet the doge. The crusaders now felt no hesitation in speaking plainly to one who had, according to Baldwin of Flanders, ‘shut up his lord in prison and had snatched away his throne, after having disregarded the sanctity of an oath, fealty and a covenant – matters that are firmly binding even among infidels’. Dandolo’s requests were blunt: release Alexius from prison, pay five thousand pounds of gold, swear obedience to the pope in Rome. To the new anti-western emperor these conditions were of course ‘punitive and completely unacceptable’. While they were engrossed in these negotiations, ‘putting aside all other thoughts’, the crusader cavalry suddenly bore down on the emperor from the higher ground. Giving free rein to their horses, they closed on the emperor, who wheeled his horse and scarcely managed to escape the danger, while some of his companions were captured.’ This treacherous ruse confirmed what Choniates and the Greeks already felt, that ‘their immense hatred for us and our great quarrel with them prevented there being any reasonable relations between us’.

And it was reciprocated the following day. Murtzuphlus had drawn one conclusion from the meeting with Dandolo: that as long as Alexius was still alive, he provided a cause for the troublesome intruders and a threat to himself. On 8 February, according to Choniates, he went twice to offer Alexius, chained in his dungeon, a cup of poison. It was refused. He then, according to the unreliable Baldwin, strangled him with his own hands, ‘and with unheard-of cruelty, he tore apart the sides and ribs of the dying man with an iron hook that he held in his hand’. The Latins were ever ready to add extra gore to the blood-spattered chronicles of Constantinople. Choniates delivered a measured, if theologically more hair-raising account. Murtzuphlus ‘cut the thread of his life by having him strangled, squeezing out his soul, so to speak, through the strait and narrow way, and sprang the trap leading to hell. He had reigned six months and eight days.’ Within the context of the times, it was to prove quite a long reign.

Murtzuphlus gave out that Alexius had died, and buried him with honour. The crusaders were not deceived. Messages attached to arrows were shot over the walls to their camp proclaiming Murtzuphlus a murderer. To some, his death evoked no more than a shrug of the shoulders: ‘A curse on anyone who regrets that Alexius is dead.’ They merely wanted the resources to go on their crusade. But Alexius’s death provoked a new crisis. Murtzuphlus ordered them to depart and vacate his land, or ‘he would kill them all’. Now the Venetians had no hope of recouping their maritime costs and the Holy Land was receding by the day. The whole venture had been beset by continuous crisis management; the spring of 1204 was just a further astonishing twist. Time was now pressing hard on their heels: in March, the patience of the rank and file would finally expire; they would insist on being taken to Syria. They could not go back to Italy without acquiring undying shame; they did not have resources to attack the Holy Land; food was running out; the only course was to press forward: ‘Perceiving that they were neither able to enter the sea without danger of immediate death nor delay longer on land because of their impending exhaustion of food and supplies, our men reached a decision.’ Constantinople must be stormed.

This required yet another theological U-turn: if the taking of Zara had been a sin, Constantinople was a magnification of it. None of the leaders of the venture were unaware of the pope’s final prohibition: even if the Greeks did not bow to the Catholic Church in Rome, he had placed an absolute ban on using this as justification for attacks on their fellow Christians: ‘Let no one among you rashly convince himself that he may seize or plunder the Greeks’ lands on the pretext that they show little obedience to the Apostolic See.’ They were now going to do just that.

Dandolo, the crusader barons and the bishops met in yet one more crisis session. Moral justification was required for this further perversion of the crusaders’ pledge. Murtzuphlus had given them one and the clergy dutifully endorsed it: such a murderer had no right to possess lands, and all those who had consented to the crime were complicit in it. And, above and beyond all this, the Greeks had withdrawn from obedience to Rome. ‘So this is why we tell you’, said the clergy, ‘that the war is right and just and if you have a strong determination to conquer this land and bring it into obedience to Rome, those of you who die confessed will receive the same indulgence as has been granted by the pope.’ In plain words, taking the city could be counted as fulfilling the crusaders’ vows. Constantinople, by sleight of hand, had become Jerusalem. This was, of course, a lie – but it was swallowed, because it had to be. ‘You should know’, said Villehardouin, ever keen to airbrush the facts, ‘that this was a considerable comfort both to the barons and the pilgrims.’ The crusaders once more prepared to attack the city.