The empire’s involvement with the west derived partly from its historic
interest in the Italian peninsula (see above, chs. 3, 11, 15), and partly from
the consequences of its attempt to use western military power to restore
its position in Asia Minor. The relationship set up by the First Crusade
persisted and intensified throughout the twelfth century, tying the empire’s
eastern interests to its western relations, and making the viability of its traditional
role in the Christian orient dependent upon its standing among the
powers of the Latin west. The Second Crusade confirmed what John II had
belatedly begun to realise in the 1130s: that to succeed, and even to survive,
Byzantium needed to keep one move ahead of the crusading movement
in preserving the Latin settlements in Syria; it needed to participate as an
inside player in the power politics of western Christendom. In the thirty
years following the crusade,Manuel had done all in his power to make the
involvement inextricable and irreversible. The proliferation of ties with the
Latin world which he cultivated so assiduously at all levels was a natural
response to the growing volume of western business and religious interests
in the eastern Mediterranean. These would have affected Byzantium
regardless of imperial policy.
Yet the period followingManuel’s death and the overthrowof the regency
government of Alexios II saw reversion to something like the isolationism
of John II’s early years. Under Andronikos I Komnenos, Isaac II Angelos
and Alexios III Angelos, Byzantium opted out of the crusading movement
at a time when crusading activity was intensifying, and abandoned the
search for a high-level European entente with one or more of the major
western powers. To some extent this was the result of a backlash against
Manuel’s expensive Latinophilia, which was carried to even greater excess
by the regency government of Maria of Antioch; it proceeded inexorably
from the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople, mostly Pisans and
Genoese, which accompanied the seizure of effective power by Andronikos
Komnenos in 1182, as well as from his liquidation of the key members
of Manuel’s family through whom dynastic links to the west had been
forged: Manuel’s widow Maria of Antioch, Manuel’s daughter Maria and
her husband Renier of Montferrat, and the young Alexios II himself. That
Andronikos, who was probably older thanManuel, did not murder Alexios’
child fianc´ee, Agnes of France, but forced her to marry him, can hardly have
made her family warm to him. In the circumstances, it is not surprising
that when he was threatened with invasion by the king of Sicily, the only
western power prepared to ally with him was Venice, whose citizens had
been unaffected by the massacre of 1182 and were only too glad to take
advantage of the removal of the Pisans and Genoese. Nor is it surprising
that Andronikos considered that imperial interests in the east were better
served by alliance with the growing power of Saladin rather than with
the beleaguered Latin princes of Outremer, who no doubt remembered
Andronikos’ scandalous sexual adventures in Antioch and Jerusalem in
1166–7.22
It is perhaps more remarkable that no realignment was attempted after
1185 by Isaac II Angelos, who otherwise had every reason to reject his predecessor’s
reign as a tyrannical deviation from the normal course of imperial
policy. Isaac was not anti-western. Soon after his accession he took as his
second wife Margaret, a daughter of B´ela III of Hungary, and he invited
Conrad ofMontferrat, brother of the murdered Renier, to Constantinople,
where he played a large part in defeating a major revolt in 1187. Yet despite
receiving the title of caesar, which Renier had held, and the hand of the
emperor’s sister in marriage, Conrad became dissatisfied and moved on to
Syria, where he joined in the defence of Tyre against Saladin and became
a candidate for the throne of Jerusalem. Isaac’s renewal of Andronikos’
alliance with Saladin may have been a factor in Conrad’s disenchantment;
what is certain is that Saladin’s conquest of theHoly Land and the mobilisation
of the Third Crusade in response in 1188–9 only confirmed Isaac in the
alliance, from which he hoped to gain some sort of Byzantine dominion in
Palestine, including the occupation of all the episcopal sees and the Holy
Places, in return for obstructing the crusaders’ advance. The rapprochement
with Saladin should also be seen in the context of Isaac’s treaties with
Venice, which also took no part in the Third Crusade and stood to gain
at the expense of Genoa and Pisa from either a Byzantine or a Muslim
occupation of the coast of Palestine. In both alliances, one may detect the
influence of Isaac’s spiritual mentor,Dositheos, a Venetian-born monk who
had predicted Isaac’s rise to power and was duly rewarded, being appointed
patriarch, first of Jerusalem, and then of Constantinople.23
This disengagement from the Latin west – which was not total, since it
gave the Venetians an even more privileged position in Byzantine society
than they had enjoyed before 1171 – may have seemed more true to the
‘national’ interest, which was increasingly being seen in terms of Greek as
well as orthodox identity, thanManuel’s costly commitments to allies with
no love for the empire. Indeed, the process of dissolution had been started
by one of those allies, Manuel’s brother-in-law Bohemond III, who put
aside his Komnenian wife well before Andronikos’ usurpation. However,
the empire paid dearly for its withdrawal. The pirates who terrorised the
shipping and the coastal settlements of the Aegean world in the 1180s and
1190s came mainly from Pisa and Genoa, the cities which had suffered
most from the massacre of 1182. The Sicilian invasion of 1185, which took
Dyrrachium and went on to sack Thessaloniki, could have been prevented
if Andronikos had had firm alliances, or at least a proactive diplomacy, in
the west. By failing to anticipate the Third Crusade, and by allying with
Saladin instead of supporting the crusaders, Isaac II weakened his moral
claim for the restitution of the island of Cyprus when Richard I of England
(1189–99) conquered it from its self-proclaimed emperor, Isaac Komnenos,
in 1191: Cyprus was too important a source of supplies for the crusaders to
entrust it to an unfriendly power.
Isaac II also entered into a damaging confrontation with Frederick Barbarossa
when the latter came through Byzantine territory on the overland
route to Palestine in 1189–90. The damage was not so much in the humiliating
defeats inflicted by the German army, or in its systematic plundering
of much of Macedonia and Thrace from its base at Philippopolis, as in
the manifest contrast between Isaac’s inability to obstruct a crusade which
he wrongly assumed to be directed against Constantinople and Frederick’s
ability to threaten Constantinople if Isaac persisted in obstructing
him. The contrast was painfully apparent to Niketas Choniates, who was
assigned to Philippopolis at the time, and it was much appreciated by the
Serbs and Vlachs, then in revolt against Byzantine authority, who offered to
join forces with the Germans (see below, p. 688). Nor was the significance
of the episode lost on Frederick’s son Henry VI Hohenstaufen (1190–7),
whom Frederick had charged with collecting money and ships from Italy in
preparation for an assault on Constantinople. When Henry succeeded as
emperor after Frederick’s tragic death by drowning in Cilicia, he inherited
Frederick’s unfulfilled crusading ambitions and placed them high on his
agenda, along with his claim to the throne of Sicily which he derived from
his marriage to Constance, the aunt of William II of Sicily; William had
died childless in 1189. The danger from Henry VI spurred Isaac II into
diplomatic action. In 1192, he negotiated the renewal of the empire’s commercial
treaties with Pisa and Genoa, the two cities which Henry relied on
to provide him with ships for his conquest of Sicily. Isaac also married his
daughter Irene to Roger of Apulia, the son of Tancred of Lecce, who had
occupied the Sicilian throne in defiance of Henry’s claim. But Irene was
widowed a year later, and in 1194 she was among the spoils which fell to
Henry VI in his violent occupation of the Sicilian kingdom. He married
her to his brother Philip of Swabia, thus making her an instrument in his
policy of aggression against Byzantium.
It is uncertain whetherHenry VI ofHohenstaufen really intended to take
over the Byzantine empire by force, but he threatened to do so, and he used
the threat, first against Isaac II, and then against Alexios III, to try and extort
money and ships for his forthcoming crusade. Alexios accordingly levied
an extraordinary tax, the alamanikon, to pay the tribute.24 He was saved by
Henry’s sudden death in 1197. Yet the episode showed that however much
Byzantium wanted to opt out of the crusading movement, the crusading
movement would not leave it alone. It had relinquished the initiative,
but was still expected to pay the bill. On this point, the western empire
and the papacy, although in all other respects implacable enemies, were
in agreement. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) insisted on it in his letters to
Alexios III: Alexios ought to model himself on Manuel, whose devotion
to the cause of the Holy Land and the unity of the church had been
exemplary.25
Isolationism still might have worked, and the Byzantine empire might
just have been allowed to find a niche as a neutral regional power, if the
Fourth Crusade, preached in 1198, had gone according to its original plan of
sailing directly against Egypt. The crusade seems to have been intended to
bypass Byzantium completely, and the conquest of Egypt would not only
have liberated theHoly Land, but made the crusader settlements materially
self-sufficient. But the leadership failed to communicate its strategic vision
to the majority of crusaders. The army which assembled in Venice was well
below the numbers which the Venetians had estimated in building and
equipping the fleet. A detour via Byzantium thus seemed an irresistible
option, indeed, the only option for keeping the crusade on course, when
a pretender to the imperial throne conveniently turned up with a promise
of rich rewards if the crusaders restored him to what he plausibly claimed
was his rightful inheritance. The pretender was Alexios, son of the deposed
Isaac II Angelos, who had escaped from custody in Constantinople and
gone to join his sister Irene and her second husband, Philip of Swabia;
the promise, no doubt formulated on Philip’s advice and calculated partly
on the basis of the demands made by Henry VI, was to place the empire
under the obedience of the Roman church, to pay 200,000 silver marks
and supply provisions for every man in the army, to send 10,000 men with
the expedition to Egypt and to maintain 500 knights for the defence of
Outremer for the duration of his lifetime. As Isaac II later remarked, ‘this is
a big commitment, and I do not know how it can be kept’,26 especially since
Byzantium was to get no share in the conquest of Egypt. Whether or not the
crusade leaders knew that the offer was too good to be true, the diversion to
Constantinople attracted them for other reasons. It appealed to Boniface
of Montferrat, who saw a chance to claim the Byzantine inheritance of
which his brothers Renier and Conrad had been cheated. It appealed to
Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice, which stood not only to recover the
costs of the fleet, but also to improve its trading position in Constantinople
through the restoration of Isaac II, a much better friend than Alexios III
Angelos, who had tended to favourGenoa and Pisa despite his confirmation
of Venetian privileges in 1198. It could be made to appeal to the crusaders
from northern France by reminding them of the generosity with which
Manuel I Komnenos had treated their forebears.
The diversion of the Fourth Crusade was thus a reversion to a prevailing
tendency. Now, however, Byzantium had to promise much more than it
could expect in return, and Byzantium’s weakness could not really help
the crusading movement. The problem for both the Byzantines and the
crusaders was that the latter came to Constantinople in 1203 at the invitation
not of a reigning emperor, but of a rival claimant for power, and
that resources were dwindling rapidly. In 1197, Alexios III had only just
managed to raise the money to buy off Henry VI. By 1203 Alexios IV
had a much smaller resource base from which to make good his promises:
Alexios III had emptied the treasury on fleeing from Constantinople, and
he and his supporters in the provinces naturally denied the government
in Constantinople the provincial revenues which they controlled. Alexios
IV made himself unpopular in Constantinople by his demands for money,
by resorting to the requisitioning of church valuables and by consorting
with the crusaders; he then alienated the crusaders by failing to keep up his
payments. His overthrow and murder in a palace coup by Alexios Doukas
Mourtzouphlos relieved them of the embarrassment of making war on their
own prot´eg´e and gave their renewed attack on Constantinople the status
of a holy war against a traitor and regicide. Alexios V Doukas put up a
competent defence, but it could not prevent the Venetians from using their
ships to storm the low sea walls on the Golden Horn; and when the crusaders
entered the City the defence collapsed. The crusaders were thus able
to gorge themselves on the riches of Constantinople, set up a Latin regime
and divide up the empire on paper. However, making the division a reality
proved much harder, and in the end they held on to only a fraction of the
twelfth-century empire (see below, pp. 759, 763–5). The Fourth Crusade
never reached Egypt, and the Latin empire of Constantinople operated at
a loss.
World History
