Alexios’ appeal toUrban II was brilliantly conceived, but Byzantium gained
very little from the crusade. In its wake Byzantine forces recovered the rich
coastlands of western Anatolia, which they might reasonably have expected
to achieve anyway. The shadow of 1204 looms over Alexios’ achievements
and calls in question the success of his restoration of the Byzantine empire.
His reputation has also suffered among modern historians because of the
Alexiad, his daughter Anna Komnena’s history of his reign. It is judged to
lack objectivity, being too obviously an exercise in filial piety and too much
of an idealisation. It is all these things, but it also provides a consummate
portrait of an age, which, when allowance is made for bias, carries conviction.
34 Anna Komnena’s assessment of her father’s greatness is borne out
by his administrative and fiscal reforms and his church settlement, about
which she has relatively little to say. These aspects of her father’s reign have
to be pieced together from the documentary sources. They provide the best
evidence for Alexios’ achievement in restoring the empire.
Anna Komnena breathes not a word about her father’s appeal to Pope
Urban II which triggered the crusade. This may have been because she did
not knowabout it or because she did not connect her father’s appeal with the
crusade, but more probably, she was trying to protect her father’s reputation.
By the time she was writing – some thirty years after her father’s death – it
was apparent that the crusade was the cutting edge of western expansion.
It was Alexios’ task to come to terms with western encroachment, which
had begun to make itself felt from the middle of the eleventh century and
which took various forms. Least harmful appeared to be the commercial
activities of Venetian and other Italian merchants. They offered a solution
to Byzantium’s need for naval assistance, and early in his reign Alexios
engaged the services of the Venetian fleet. In 1082 he granted the Venetians
special privileges in Constantinople and exemption from the payment of
customs duties throughout the empire.35 It appeared a very good bargain.
In 1111 Alexios entered into a similar arrangement with the Pisans, reducing
their customs duty to 4 per cent. He was angling for their support in his
plans – which never came to anything – to bring the crusader states under
Byzantine control. Alexios was using the Italians much as the emperors of
the tenth century had used the Rus: to strengthen the empire’s naval and
commercial resources. The appeal toUrban II was intended to complement
this by harnessing the military potential of the Franks. Alexios could not
have imagined that it would trigger off a crusade, nor that this would cease
to be a cooperative venture and be turned against Byzantium.
Within Byzantium the crusade not only hardened attitudes towards
the west, it also created tensions. Opinion polarised between those who
favoured continuing cooperation with the west and those who rejected this
approach, preferring to fall back on ‘splendid isolation’. This put added
pressure on the fault-lines that existed within the Komnenian settlement:
between the emperor and church; between autocracy and aristocracy;
between the Komnenian ascendancy and the excluded; between the capital
and the provinces. Alexios hoped that an understanding with the west
would provide Byzantium with the additional resources needed to restore
its position as a world power. He could not have foreseen how it would
undermine Byzantium from within. This was the true nature of Alexios’
failure. It was counterbalanced by his success in restoring the integrity of
the imperial office and the soundness of imperial administration. For more
than half a century after his death Byzantium remained a great power.
World History
