Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 Read online

  JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

  BYZANTIUM

  * * *

  The Decline and Fall

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 jtz, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Copyright © John Julius Norwich, 1995 The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  Filmset in 11/13pt Garamond Typeset by Datix International, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0-670-82377-5

  Contents

  List of Illustrations vii

  Acknowledgements xxxi

  Introduction xxxiii

  A Note on Names and Transliteration xxxvii

  The Rise of Alexius [1081] 1

  The Normans [1081-91 ] 13

  The First Crusade [1091-1108] 29

  Alexius - The Last Years [1108-18] 49

  John the Beautiful [1118-43] 63

  The Second Crusade [1143-9] 8^

  Realignments [1149-58] 102

  Manuel Comnenus - The Later Years [115 8-80] 119

  Andronicus the Terrible [ 1180-8 5 ] 140

  The Fall of Jerusalem [1185-98] 156

  The Fourth Crusade [1198-1205] 165

  The Empire in Exile [1205-53] l84

  The City Recovered [125 3-61 ] 201

  The Angevin Threat [ 1261-70] 215

  The Uncertain Unity [ 1270-8 2] 232

  The Catalan Vengeance [1282-1311] 25^

  The Two Andronici [1307-41] 273

  Civil War [ 1341-7] 293

  The Reluctant Emperor [1347-54] 307

  The Sultan's Vassal [1354-91] 324

  The Appeal to Europe [1391-1402] 349

  The Legacy of Tamburlaine [1402-25] 365

  2 3. Laetentur Coelil [142 5-48] 388

  24. The Fall [1448-53] 410

  Epilogue 438

  List of Emperors 451

  The Despotate of Epirus 452

  List of Muslim Sultans 45 3

  List of Popes 454

  Bibliography 45 5

  Index 462

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks, as always, to the staff of the London Library, without whose unfailing help and sympathy this book and its two predecessors could never have been written. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Judith Flanders, for her eagle eye, computer memory and flawless ear for the rhythm of language; and to Douglas Matthews, for compiling yet another immaculate index.

  Introduction

  It was on the day or rather the night of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summerhouse in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau or covered walk of Acacias which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene; the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all Nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

  So wrote Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when he finally completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Let no one think that I should dream of comparing my own modest attempt to tell the story of Byzantium with the greatest historical masterpiece of English literature; but it happens that after I typed the final full stop to this trilogy, at precisely 11.30 on a sultry July evening, I too walked out alone into a moonlit garden. And though I cannot pretend that my view was as spectacular as Gibbon's - or that I ever contemplated the establishment of my fame - I found that I could share at least one of the emotions that he describes. Now that my work is done I too feel that I am saying goodbye to an old and valued friend.

  The first part of this trilogy told the story of the Empire of Byzantium from its foundation by the Emperor Constantine the Great on Monday, 12 May 330 ad, to the establishment of its imperial Christian rival, the Holy Roman Empire, with the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800. The second followed its fortunes through the dazzling dynasty of the Macedonians to the apogee of its power under the terrible Basil II Bulgaroctonus, the Bulgar-Slayer, but ended on a note of ill omen: the first of the three great defeats of Byzantine history, suffered at the hands of the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071. This third and last volume shows just how fateful that defeat was to be, robbing the Empire of most of Asia Minor - the principal source of its manpower - weakening it and impoverishing it to the point where, rather more than a century later, it was powerless to resist the onslaught of the Fourth Crusade. The fifty-six years of Latin rule that followed, ending with the triumphant return of Michael VIII Palaeologus, seem at first sight to have been little more than an unedifying interlude; in fact they proved to be the second blow from which Byzantium never recovered. The story of the Empire's last two centuries, seen against the background of the growing power of the Turkish House of Othman, is one of helpless decline and makes, I fear, occasionally painful reading. Only the final chapter, tragic as it is, once again lifts the spirit — as all tales of heroism must inevitably do.

  In the Introduction to the first of these volumes I mentioned how forcibly I had been struck by the difference, from the point of view of a writer, between the history of the Byzantine Empire and that of the previous object of my attention, the Republic of Venice. As the centuries pass, these two histories become ever more intertwined, both before and after the tragedy of 1204-5, with the Serenissima becoming guilty of what might almost be described as a second betrayal - this time by apathy - in the final years of the Empire's existence; and it consequently seems worth while to press the comparison a little further. At first glance, the two have much in common. Venice was after all the child of Byzantium, and spent her formative years as a Byzantine colony, with all her early cultural influences coming directly from Constantinople. Both mother and daughter were of such beauty and opulence as to become legends — fabled across the world as cities of marble and malachite and porphyry, reputations so near the truth that many, seeing them for the first time, declared in amazement that the half had not been told them. Both endured for well over a thousand years - a period comfortably longer than that which separates us from William the Conqueror. Both, on occasion, wielded immense political power, and gained for themselves sinister reputations - deserved or not — for cruelty, duplicity and intrigue. Finally, both lasted too long and were obliged to suffer a slow and humiliating decline.

  But there the similarities end. Venice was a republic, and although technically an oligarchy was in fact a good deal more democratic than any other nation - with the arguable exception of Switzerland - in the world; God-fearing i
n her way, she was throughout her history resolutely opposed to any interference of the Church in her internal affairs, braving more than one papal interdict in consequence. Byzantium was somewhere between an autocracy and a theocracy, absolute power being vested in an Emperor who was himself the representative of the godhead on earth - isapostolos, the Equal of the Apostles. Venice was materialistic, hard-faced, down-to-earth; Byzantium was the most spiritually-orientated temporal state the Christian world has ever known, the Holy See not excluded. Venice, set amid the still, shallow waters of her lagoon, enjoyed a physical security unique in continental Europe; Constantinople lived under almost perpetual threat of attack. In her last, sad centuries, Venice gave herself over to the pursuit of pleasure and a degree of mild debauchery, finally surrendering to the young Napoleon in the most humiliating circumstances conceivable, firing not a single shot in her own defence. Byzantium, on the other hand, kept her soul intact. Three times in the last two hundred years, her Emperors sought to buy security by submitting her Church to Rome; but the people of Constantinople never wavered from their ancient and traditional faith. And when their time came they fought to the end for fifty-five desperate days, ten thousand against a quarter of a million, their last Emperor dying heroically on the battlements as the city's defences, so long believed impregnable, finally collapsed around him.

  Readers of the first two volumes of this history will not need to be reminded that it is in no sense a scholarly work. The four years of ancient Greek that constituted an important part of my public-school education have not enabled me to read the simplest of Greek texts without a lexicon at my elbow; I have consequently been forced to rely almost entirely on those authorities of whose work there exist either translations or summaries in secondary sources. This has in fact been less of a hindrance than I expected; particularly for the centuries covered by this present volume, these secondary sources are so copious that the difficulty has been less one of obtaining information than of selecting it. Besides, the need to cover a period of nearly twelve hundred years -since for the sake of clarity the curtain must rise some time before the Empire really begins and for that of tidiness it must fall a few years after it ends - in roughly as many pages means that at all costs the story has to be kept moving, and I make no pretence of doing anything more than skating over the surface of my subject — an activity which is, by its very definition, the negation of scholarship.

  But I am unrepentant. My aim has never been to cast new light on history. Since the day I put pen to paper, I have had two purposes only in mind. The first has been to make some small amends for that centuries-old conspiracy of silence that I remarked upon in the Introduction to the first volume: a conspiracy thanks to which countless generations of Western Europeans have passed through our various educational systems with virtually no knowledge of the longest-lived - and, perhaps, the most continuously inspired - Christian Empire in the history of the world. The second has been quite simply to tell a good story, as interestingly and as accurately as I can, to the non-specialized reader. I cannot hope that that reader, having reached the end of this final volume, will lay it down with the same regret that I feel on the completion of a long yet wholly enjoyable task; but he will, I trust, at least agree with me that the tale was worth the telling.

  John Julius Norwich

  Castle Combe, July 1994

  A Note on Names and Transliteration

  Consistency has always seemed to me a greatly overrated virtue, and I have made little or no effort to preserve it where the spelling of proper names is concerned. In general I have preferred the Latin versions to the Greek - Thessalonica for Thessaloniki, Palaeologus for Palaiologos, etc. - on the grounds that they will probably be more familiar to English readers. Where the Greek spelling has seemed more suitable, however, I have not hesitated to use it.

  I have found the Turkish undotted i (1) beyond me - not only because I speak no Turkish, but also because English readers almost invariably blame the publishers for defective type. I hope my Turkish friends will also forgive me for referring to Constantinople throughout, rather than Istanbul. As Sir Steven Runciman once wrote in a similar context, it would have been pedantic to do otherwise.

  The Rise of Alexius

  [1081]

  We have prepared a very fine dish, not without a rich, savoury sauce. If you would like to share in our feast, come as soon as you can and sit with us at this supreme banquet.

  Alexius and Isaac Comnenus to the Caesar John Ducas, February 1081.

  The Alexiad, II, 6

  On Easter Sunday, 4 April 1081, in the Great Church of St Sophia at Constantinople, the twenty-four-year-old general Alexius Comnenus formally ascended the throne of a sad and shattered Empire. It was now ten years since that Empire had suffered at the hands of the Seljuk Turks, just outside the little garrison town of Manzikert a few miles to the north of Lake Van, the most disastrous defeat in all its history: a defeat which had resulted in the capture of the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, the ignominious flight of the once-invincible Byzantine army and the gradual spread of the conquerors across Anatolia until some 30,000 square miles of the imperial heartland had been overrun by Turkoman tribesmen. At a stroke, Byzantium had lost the source of much of its food supply and most of its manpower. Its very survival was now in doubt.

  Had Romanus been allowed to continue as basileus once his liberty had been restored, he might have done much to redeem the situation. The Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan, preoccupied as he was by the far greater threat to his people presented by the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, had no real quarrel with the Empire. He and Romanus had got on surprisingly well together, and the treaty which they had concluded as the price of the latter's freedom made no extensive territorial demands. But Romanus was overthrown by a palace revolution in Constantinople and, after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to regain his throne by force, was blinded so brutally that he died soon afterwards; the treaty was abrogated by his pathetic successor Michael VII - cultivated and intelligent, but utterly unfit for the throne - and by Michael's two eminences grises, his uncle the Caesar John Ducas and the scholar Michael Psellus; and the way was open for the Seljuks to do as they liked.

  In the West, the horizon was equally black. On 16 April 1071 - just four months before Manzikert, but after a siege of nearly three years -the Normans of South Italy under their brilliant brigand of a leader Robert Guiscard had captured Bari. For over five centuries - since the time of Justinian - Bari had been an imperial city. Formerly the capital of a rich and prosperous province, in recent years it had become the Empire's only remaining outpost in the peninsula, the centre of a tiny enclave from which the banners of Byzantium fluttered alone in a turbulent and hostile land. On that day, the Saturday before Palm Sunday, those banners were struck - effectively for the last time. Henceforth, the phrase 'Byzantine Italy' would be a contradiction in terms. The following year had seen a dangerous uprising in Bulgaria, in the course of which a certain Constantine Bodin, son of Prince Michael of Zeta,1 had been crowned Tsar in the city of Prizren; order had finally been restored - at considerable cost - but revolution was in the air and no one doubted that there would be more trouble before long.

  Finally there was the problem of Rome. The Emperor Michael, in another sublime demonstration of political misjudgement, had appealed to Pope Gregory VII after the fall of Bari for help against the Norman menace; he was consequently in a poor position to object when Gregory began openly extending his influence over the eastern shores of the Adriatic - crowning a vassal named Demetrius Zvonimir King of Croatia in 107 5 and bestowing a second - papal - crown on Michael of Zeta two years later. Meanwhile both the Hungarians and the barbarian Pechenegs had gone back to their old tricks, throwing the whole Balkan peninsula back into chaos.

  With disasters like these occurring on every side, it was little wonder that various sections of the army should have broken out, not once but several times, in open revolt. The first insurrection had been led by a Norman soldier of fortune name
d Roussel of Bailleul, who had attempted to set up an independent Norman state in central Anatolia, much as his compatriots had recently done in South Italy. Roussel had been finally brought to heel by Alexius Comnenus, and after a brief spell in prison had subsequently fought at Alexius's side against two more claimants:

  1 Zeta (formerly known as Dioclea, and a semi-independent principality within the Empire) had rebelled in about 103; and had since refused to recognize Byzantine suzerainty.

  Nicephorus Bryennius, dux of Durazzo - one of the few officers to have distinguished himself at Manzikert - and an elderly member of the Anatolian military aristocracy named Nicephorus Botaneiates. In November 1077 Bryennius actually reached the walls of Constantinople before being driven back into Thrace; Botaneiates too made preparations for a direct attack on the capital, but in the event it was to prove unnecessary. In March 1078 riots broke out; Michael, totally unable to deal with them, fled for his life and sought refuge in the monastery of the Studium; and on the 24th of the month Botaneiates entered Constantinople in triumph. Faced as he was with a fait accompli, Alexius had no choice but to submit to the new Emperor, who granted him the personal rank of nobilissimus and the office of Domestic of the Schools, or commander-in-chief, in which capacity he was immediately sent off to deal with Bryennius. A few months later he brought back his second insurgent general captive to Constantinople; but instead of being received with gratitude as he expected, he was barely allowed to enter the city and was immediately ordered back to Anatolia, where another insurrection was already brewing. As for Bryennius, he was thrown into the palace dungeons where, shortly afterwards, his eyes were put out.

  Alexius, while obeying his orders, made no secret of his displeasure at the coldness of his reception, the reason for which he perfectly understood. Nicephorus Botaneiates was afraid, as well he might be. The old man - he was already well into his seventies - had already lost control. Over the next two years the Empire slipped further and further into chaos. Revolt followed insurrection; insurrection followed revolt. The Turks advanced relentlessly, until by 1080 Alp Arslan's son Malik-Shah had extended the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum till it covered all Asia Minor from Cilicia to the Hellespont. Meanwhile Nicephorus grew daily more unpopular. Previous usurpers - Nicephorus Phocas for example, or John Tzimisces, or Romanus Diogenes - had all claimed to be the guardians of such of their predecessors' children as they found to be their titular co-Emperors, thus giving themselves some slight semblance of legality; Botaneiates on the other hand had made no attempt to associate Michael VII’s four-year-old son Constantine with him on the throne and so remained, in the eyes of all right-thinking Byzantines, morally beyond the pale. Even more insensitively, on the death of his second wife soon after his accession, he had married the ravishing Empress Mary of Alania1 — more beautiful even, writes Anna Comnena,