As the crusading French, Venetians and others celebrated their great victory in Constantinople, a victory they could scarcely have imagined was possible, others were keeping their head down or leaving the city entirely. Niketas, our Byzantine source, at first enjoyed the protection of a Venetian born acquaintance, a merchant of the city who clad himself all in armour and pretended to be one of the conquerors himself. The Venetian laid claim to Niketas’ household, declared that he had reached it and its spoils first, and turned back any would-be plunderers.
But as the pillaging and violence in the city heated up, this man despaired of successfully defending his claim and his friends, and he urged them to leave. So on April 17th, 1204, they made their way with infants and possessions on their shoulders, their servants, understandably, having abandoned them. They went as the “captives” of friendly Venetian Constantinoplites, going as if they had been taken at spear-point, yet there was danger all the same.
They inched along, exposed in the street, people they knew coming out to escort them on their way to the gates. Women and girls were in the centre, Niketas’ very pregnant wife included, and they rubbed their faces with mud to try and discourage unwanted attention. And passing soldiers, daggers at their belts and swords hanging by their horses, watched them closely. Some of these were loaded down with spoils already, while others would halt the party to see if there wasn’t a bit of fine cloth or silver hidden about them somewhere. Still, they made out. They made it out through the gates, where Niketas hurled himself to the ground and reproached the walls of his city.
How could they alone be insensible to this disaster? “Neither shedding tears nor lying in ruins upon the earth. ‘If those things for whose protection [they] were erected no longer exist, being utterly destroyed by fire and war, for what purpose [did they] still stand?’”
Niketas railed against those walls for a time, then turned aside, and he and his family went away weeping to the city of Selymbria, while behind them, the struggle for power and position within Constantinople was just beginning.
Hello, and welcome back. I’m Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, following the stories of medieval travellers of one kind and another, and the histories that surround them. If you enjoy what you hear, then please do consider signing up to my Patreon. There, for as little as $1 a month, you can prevent this podcast falling apart like the Latin occupation of Constantinople. And you can do that at patreon.com/humancircus or via my website at humancircuspodcast.com.
The other little project I’ve been dealing with recently is the Kickstarter I had running last month with medieval manuscript themed Christmas cards. I’m happy to report that the Kickstarter passed its modest goal, which I was pretty excited about. It’s the first time I’ve done something like that, I learned a lot in the process, and I’ll probably do something like it again in the future. And I recognized some of the names on that list, and I know that some of you helped make it successful, which I really do appreciate. So thank you very much.
And now, back to the story.
With the Halloween special and the episode on sacred theft, it feels like a long while since we’ve been talking about Robert, Geoffrey, and the rest, but that’s what we’ll be doing today. We’ll be finishing up their story, and that of the Fourth Crusade. So far I’ve covered the spoils of the crusaders’ victory at Constantinople, at least in terms of movable wealth, religious and otherwise, but there was another kind of treasure at stake, that of titles, and of one title in particular.
As as is often the case in this story, Geoffrey gives us a pretty positive presentation of things, and maybe a sanitized one? He says that as had been previously set out, a council of twelve men was chosen, ecclesiastics and Venetians, to select the new emperor, and though there was no shortage of applicants for the job, there were only ever two real choices: Boniface of Montferrat and Baldwin of Flanders.
In Geoffrey’s depiction, the leading lights of the crusade saw the situation clearly, and perceived equally well how it quickly it could all come apart, how severely an unhappy loser could harm them all were he to feel slighted enough to take his ball and go home. If the throne should go to Boniface, then what might Baldwin do out of bitter jealousy, and what if the reverse were true? And if the Venetians were to make the push for their own doge, if the Venetian Great Council should even allow it, then wouldn’t both men abandon them in anger?
These were not idle questions, and those who asked had other examples from previous crusades to ponder, with Geoffrey mentioning the 11th-century falling-out between Godfrey de Bouillon and Raymond de Saint-Gilles in particular. The solution they hit upon was for it to be arranged ahead of time that the loser of the election would receive a kind of consolation prize, a great gift of land that would insure they remained supportive, content, and in the region. Once that was all arranged, and with the agreement of both leading candidates, the election went ahead.
It was held in a rich chapel within a palace, the Boukoleon Palace according to Robert, and all around it, the crusading lords gathered, surrounded by their men, for all were eager to know the decision. They waited, and when the moment came, they watched the Bishop of Soissons emerge and speak the name of the new emperor: Baldwin of Flanders.
He was a reasonable choice, widely respected and in command of more men, and, quote, “A cry of joy was raised in the palace, and they bore the count out of the palace, and the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat bore him on one side to the church, and showed him all the honour he could. So was the Count Baldwin of Flanders elected emperor, and a day appointed for his coronation, three weeks after Easter (16th May 1204). And you must know that many a rich robe was made for the coronation.”
So that was all extremely pleasant and nice, but was it so?
Robert didn’t think it was. And admittedly, he was not an insider in all of this like Geoffrey. Rather, he’s thought to give us the word that was going around on things, and in this case, that word didn’t sound so good. He speaks of fifteen days of infighting over the composition of the electoral council itself, with each important lord kept putting forward his own men as simply the best and most reliable when it came to making really important choices like picking a good emperor, like picking someone like them. And then when it came time to hear the announcement, he says, the larger part “greatly feared and suspected that the Marquis [de Montferrat] would be named.” And when he wasn’t, then all were “right glad of it,” except of course for those who were “sore displeased thereat.”
So that doesn’t sound quite as chummy as in Geoffrey’s depiction, and, as I feel like I’ve said many times already in this story, the Niketas version made it all look even less amicable. Why was Baldwin chosen? According to Niketas, it was because the Venetian doge said so.
Boniface had been the leader of the crusade, had married Isaac’s widow and moved into the Boukoleon Palace, and he was assumed by many among both conquered and conquerors to be all but certain for the throne, but he was also a little tainted by his past-affiliation with Alexius, and then there was the fact that Dandolo didn’t want to give power to someone like Boniface, among other things a powerful Lombard lord whose people might easily sweep south and into Venice, should it ever come to that. He wanted someone more compliant, someone less ambitious, less experienced in statecraft, and less well-situated to bring his power to bear against the doge’s city if things went wrong. And Dandolo got just what he wanted.
The big day arrived, and all the abbots and barons on horseback brought the new emperor to the Hagia Sophia. There, he was dressed in robes and shoes set with precious stones, and a rich cloak with gems forming eagles “that shone so that it seemed as if the cloak were all alight.” He was taken before the altar, where the counts Louis and Saint-Pol carried banner and sword, and Boniface the crown. And the bishops came and blessed the crown, and they made the sign of the cross over it, and they placed it on his head.
Emperor Baldwin waited sceptre in hand while mass was sung. Then, a white horse was brought to him, and with no foreboding tumbles on the way, he was taken back to the Boukoleon Palace. He was set on the imperial throne, and all did him reverence. Then they feasted, the emperor “and all the barons in the palace with him,” and “when they had eaten, then the barons departed and all went their ways to their habitations, but the emperor remained in his palace.” The palace, remember, where Boniface had recently lived.
So what now? Baldwin had an empire in theory; the crusaders had all kinds of things, in theory, and Niketas writes of the Latin conquerors divvying up their world in a grab for territory. They had its most important city, so surely they had the whole thing, and could claim, trade, and tax, to their heart's’ content. From North Africa to Spain, to Persia, and to the northern regions, everything was apportioned. And Robert has something of the sort happening too, with Henry, the emperor’s brother, demanding one kingdom so that he might go off and conquer it, and Louis de Blois another, and Hugh of Saint-Pol a third, and so on. However, if anything was actually to be had from those kingdoms, then they were still going to need to go out and take them.
Emperor Baldwin himself went touring the countryside, his brother Henry going before him, not so much on a military campaign as a triumph proceeding westwards towards Adrianople. Everywhere he went, the people surrendered and honoured him, and all seemed well. But all was not well. There were various threads starting to unravel, and some sooner, some later, they were going to threaten the Latin Empire, its unity, and its existence.
One thread was that the conquerors would not be smoothly and seamlessly taking up the apparatus of the Byzantine rulers. Niketas wrote that Baldwin refused to receive leaders of the military and civil bureaucracy. He did not take them under his own rule, and he lost much potential support as well as valuable experience when he denied the local elite any way of finding a place in his new regime. He also offered no alternative employment to the kingdoms that were springing up everywhere within the old Byzantine territory, quote/unquote “empires” even, in the Greek successor states of Trebizond, Epirus, and Nicaea.
And while this was happening within that territory, there were equally important blunders to be made without. Potential Seljuk and Bulgarian alliances were going to be proudly rejected, and a basically inadequate military force was going to be exposed to hostility from too many sides.
But that was a little ways in the future still. For now, concern may have centred around two men. On the one hand was Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, and on the other a former emperor: Alexius Doukas, otherwise known as Mourtzouphlos.
The latter, you might be forgiven for having forgotten all about. Maybe you thought him dead, of betrayal, or plague, or public misadventure, or he just slipped your mind entirely, melting in among the other imperial also-rans of the early 13th-century. But he hadn’t gone anywhere, or at least, he hadn’t gone very far.
In Geoffrey’s account, we find him fleeing before the advance of crusaders coming out of Constantinople. We find him taking refuge with another old familiar face. We find him want to join forces with Alexius Angelos, and if you’re having trouble keeping track of your Alexiuses, that would be the treacherous brother that had displaced Isaac back in 1195, the uncle of the Alexius that the crusaders had originally brought to Constantinople to put on the throne. He was the one who now welcomed Mourtzouphlos in, who invited him to solidify their alliance by marriage to his daughter, who had him round to share a meal, and to go to the baths, and who then had him held down on the floor, and his eyes plucked out.
Geoffrey put the event to use, finding some propaganda value in the story. Look at this cruel brand of treachery, he said; can any people who were capable of such a thing ever have deserved to rule over the land? The justification of what he and his fellow crusaders had done was never far from his mind.
In Robert, the unfortunate Mourtzouphlos, who had after all only overthrown his ineffectual overlords and sought to defend his people - and seize supreme power along the way - hardly fared any better. There is no mention there of putting out the eyes, but there is mention that he was unlucky enough to come across Henry and his men in a narrow pass and so be taken prisoner. Emperor Baldwin conferred with his men, and some said the prisoner should be hung and others that he be drawn and quartered. But it was the doge who thought him too highly-born for hanging and suggested a more fitting end, and so Mourtzouphlos and his imperial ambitions were pushed from the top of the Column of Theodosius, and shattered on the ground below. “For a high man, high justice,” Dandolo is said to have joked.
The ex-emperor’s story was over, but there was plenty of ambition still to go around, and after this break, we’ll talk about some of that.
…
The other figure of immediate concern was of course Boniface. Geoffrey has him fully participating in Baldwin’s coronation, and with no sign of a grudge, but he also him pretty quickly maneuvering to better his situation. There was already a parcel of land allotted to him, but he pushed for a trade. Couldn’t he instead have the Kingdom of Thessalonica? It was closer to his wife’s brother, the King of Hungary, and besides, it was to have been his brother’s in 1180. And Baldwin agreed. Or according to Geoffrey he did. Robert has him refusing, saying he couldn’t give what wasn’t his but rather the Venetians’ and the Barons’, but still refusing. However it played out, at some point, things became less and less agreeable between the two.
They were on the move, heading west, Boniface generally a little behind as he was travelling with his wife, we read, and thus his household and all that goes with it. He was moving to install himself and his family in Thessalonica, while Baldwin was on his victory tour, accepting fealty and, as Geoffrey frames it, pursuing Alexius, the eye-gouger. At some point, Baldwin lingered, Boniface caught up and set his pavilions nearby, and tensions came out into the open.
They were heading towards Thessalonica, and Boniface made his feelings very plain. If they went any closer, if the emperor entered into his land, into Boniface’s land that he had heard was waiting ready to give itself up to him, then Boniface would follow him no further. In Robert, it’s very much an ultimatum: the emperor would turn aside or Boniface would go back to Constantinople and do what he must for himself. In Geoffrey, it’s more of a request: don’t go to Thessalonica. Let me. Let me install myself and gather up all resources that you need, and then let us go together against the Bulgarian king. Do not ruin my land. Baldwin’s response is also framed slightly differently in the two sources, but it would come to the same thing in the end.
In Robert, Boniface’s position is presented as being painfully unreasonable, an egotistical assault upon the crusaders’ cause, and it was responded to accordingly. Niketas on the other hand has Boniface dumbfounded at his comrade’s betrayal. And Geoffrey, who was back in Constantinople at the time, expressed bitterness towards both sides. Who had advised the emperor to deny Boniface’s request, and how ill-advised were they both? What ill-fortune had they brought upon themselves and upon Christendom itself? Whoever was the more ill-advised of the two, the Marquis de Montferrat was turning away in disgust and anger. Baldwin was going on to Thessalonica, and Boniface was going to go do as he’d said, and carve something out for himself.
Boniface and his people came first to a castle, very strong, and very rich, and called Demotica, and the people surrendered to him - because of treachery, Robert says; because they recognized his wife, the former empress, Geoffrey says. And then he went on to Adrianople, and this one wasn’t held by some local leader who’d had a series of emperors knocked from their perches above him and had little reason to hope that help would soon arrive. It wasn’t going to surrender immediately. This one was held by Eustace of Flanders. It was defended by the people who Emperor Baldwin had left there, and that was where Boniface was pitching his tents and pavilions and laying siege to his fellow crusaders, a sign of just how seriously things had gone awry.
Eustace responded to his awkward predicament by dispatching messengers for Constantinople where the Venetian doge and the Count of Blois governed in the emperor’s absence. And they and the other barons were incensed. What idiocy was this, that threatened to corrode all they had won by their conquests and bring it to ruin. They agreed to send negotiators to attempt to undo this war before it really got going, and naturally, one of those negotiators would be Geoffrey, who was well known and liked by Boniface.
The marquis received the envoys with good will. He heard them out, and he defended his actions as being provoked by the emperor’s obstinate refusal to give over what was his. But he agreed to turn his cause over to the care of the council in Constantinople. The siege was raised, and Boniface returned for now to his wife in Demotica, Geoffrey and the others went back to Constantinople, and messengers were sent out to inform Baldwin of what had happened.
It was fortunate for the crusaders that they did, and that they reached Baldwin when they did, because they didn’t find him idle. He had taken Thessalonica and then received word of Boniface’s doings behind him, and as you’d expect, he was no happier to hear the news than Louis and Dandolo had been. He and his men had set out immediately to relieve Adrianople and cut Boniface and his men to pieces. Fortunately for both sides, the messengers reached him first.
They told him that the barons in Constantinople sent health and greeting to him as their lord, but also that they complained to him and to God of those whose council had brought discord between and he and Boniface, cleverly making it an issue of bad advice and not a bad emperor; they said that they would not suffer him to go to war and asked him to submit to their ruling on the matter just as Boniface had. The emperor told them he would need some time, and he took the matter to his council.
Of course, this was the council that had in the first place advised him on the break with the marquis, and they were beyond angry at the challenge from Boniface and from the barons. And Robert has this anger extending well beyond the council. The outrage in the host was such that when they heard the arrangements that been made for peace, they voiced loudly that it would not matter; if they caught up to the marquis, they were still going to cut him up. And their mood was not at all improved when they heard from the very same messengers that in their absence from Constantinople, the remaining spoils had been divided. They were beside themselves then with righteous fury, on the cusp of killing the men who had brought the news in a violent mob action, and only the intervention of Baldwin and the others leaders managed to calm them slightly.
In the end, the men agreed not to kill the messengers, and Baldwin and his council agreed that they and could not lose the friendship of the doge and the others in Constantinople, and Boniface agreed to return to the city to hear what they had to say, though he didn’t actually promise to abide by it.
As he and his men made their way home, Boniface was being informed of this and summoned to do as he’d promised and present himself, but that must have been a difficult choice in itself. He had made some enemies by that point and knew full well that Baldwin bore no great love for him, knew that many others also were now against him. But he went. He went, he stuck to his demands, and he received what he had asked for all along: the Kingdom of Thessalonica, which he departed for with his wife and all his people. But neither he nor his emperor were going to have very long to enjoy their winnings, for though I’ve been focusing here to a large extent on the dangers they presented to each other, there were other threats on the immediate horizon.
One of those threats gets a bit of foreshadowing in Robert’s telling. Back when Mourtzouphlos had been emperor, there had come to the crusaders a man named John, seeking their aid in his cause, and promising his own aid in return. What he had wanted was to be crowned by them as King of Wallachia. It was a land within the empire, and he promised to hold it for them, and to come to Constantinople with 100,000 men, and if this was clearly an exaggeration, then it at least should be acknowledged that this John did have the friendship and service of the Cumans, the Turkic horse people with whom he regularly raided Byzantine lands. So absolutely, he could have pressed a substantial amount of weight down on the crusaders’ side of the scales, but they hadn’t been interested. They’d answered that “neither with him nor with his help had they any concern; and let him know of a surety that they would trouble him and work him evil if they could,” and Robert noted that this was and would be a “shame and grevious pity.”
So keep that in mind, as we roll things forward again to Emperor Baldwin’s reign, and as we see Boniface heading for Thessalonica and Baldwin and the doge continuing to divide up the land and send out lords to lay claim to it. And as Geoffrey tells it, “the covetousness of this world, which has worked so great evil, suffered them not to be at peace, for each began to deal wickedly in his land, some more, and some less, and the [people] began to hate them and to nourish a bitter heart.”
Boniface tasted a little of that bitterness as he made to move into his new home. The governor Baldwin had left in Thessalonica had most inconveniently died, and in the space he left, a high-ranking Greek had sized a few cities and made war on the marquis, while another Greek, who Boniface believed to be his ally, left the host without warning, occupied his own city, and also made war.
Meanwhile, Baldwin was having problems too. For one thing, his wife had died. She’d been pregnant when he’d left, so she hadn’t travelled with them, but since giving birth had left and made her way by sea to Acre. There she had heard that Baldwin had been made Emperor in Constantinople, but there too she took sick and passed away, one of many spouses who never saw their family again once they had departed. And in addition to this heavy personal blow, Baldwin was hearing that Adrianople was threatened once again, but this time not by his crusading rival. This time it was in revolt.
At times in this story, it’s been too easy to think of the protagonists of the Fourth Crusade as interacting with a kind of parade of NPCs, Alexius, Isaac, Alexius again, and Alexius again again, somehow wielding power over an all too vaguely conceived people, of a city, and of an empire. And, out of convenience, I’ve at times called those people Byzantine because that is what we tend to call them, but as you may already be aware, that’s not what they tended to call themselves. Rather, it’s a more modern term, derived from the pre-Constantine name of the city. “Greeks” came to be used at times, as the empire became more overwhelmingly, though never exclusively, Greek speaking, and that’s what Robert seems to call them but again, that’s not how they would self-identify. They knew themselves as Romans.
And the Romans were fighting back against the invaders. Roman leaders were opposing Boniface, as I mentioned a moment ago; they were fighting with Baldwin’s brother Henri; they were fighting with Geoffrey’s nephew, also named Geoffrey. I want to make clear here that they were not passive observers in this, bowing to whichever lord rode their way. They were rising up at Demotica and Adrianople, and there they were either asking for or accepting help from the man we’ve recently met as John, the one who was once to have looked to the crusaders for help and friendship, but received neither.
Now John the Wallach, as you might read of him in Robert’s telling, will also appear in history as Johanitsa, but if you go looking for him in your own research, you might do better to look for Kaloyan, the King of the Bulgarians. Having been rebuffed in his attempts to deal peacefully with his new neighbours, Kaloyan was now employing other means, and he was going to be there at Adrianople as Baldwin tried to take back the city from its rebellious Romans in the spring of 1205.
The crusader army that made to besiege Adrianople was not as large as it might have been, for there were many off fighting elsewhere at this point. When Baldwin and Louis de Blois departed from Constantinople, they went with the numbers they could pull together relatively quickly and joined the men that had mustered in the area. After them, came a force commanded by the old Venetian doge, even with his age and poor eyesight, his presence perhaps necessitated by the fact that there were few senior men left in the city. Most were away pursuing their prizes and carving out territories, and Count Hugh of Saint-Pol, who had remained, had died of gout. So Dandolo went himself.
They all gathered before Adrianople, in their pavilions outside of missile range, and prepared to besiege it. They first constructed siege engines, and then in the days that followed, they shot and were shot at. They dug beneath the walls, removing the soil as secretly as possible and shoring up the tunnels with dry timber. It was after a few weeks of this, that Kaloyan made his first move.
He started by sending out a Cuman raiding party, to attack the sheep and horse grazing around the edges of the besiegers’ camp, and in doing so to get a sense of his enemy’s organization and response. And the response to this probing attack was highly illustrative.
At first sight of the approach Cumans, the crusaders took immediately to lance and horse and charged. The raiders wheeled about, firing arrows behind them as they went, and the crusaders followed. They had not yet learned not to eagerly follow bodies of horse archers, lightly armed and on swift horses, that went easily into retreat, and they received heavy casualties before giving up the chase. Recognizing their foolishness, the emperor and his council let it be known that if they were attacked again, they were to form up before the camp and they were not to go charging after anyone.
But the next day, April the 14th, Kaloyan repeated the maneuver, and having read his opponent’s response to his feint, this time the trap was well and truly set. His Cuman allies, a larger party this time, did as they had before, rushing in as if on an attempted raid and then withdrawing as the response came, fleeing before that response, leading the crusaders on. Their pursuers, quite against the arranged plans and apparently at the instigation of Count Louis de Blois’s angry rush, followed even further than they had before, far enough to exhaust their heavy horses in the extended charge, and far enough to be among the pits that had been dug for the purpose, and which men and mounts plunged into, and among Kaloyan’s troops that had been hidden in ravines and around the hilltops above.
And I’ll read from Niketas here in describing what happened next.
The Latins, exhausted from the exertion of the chase, with horses thoroughly spent, were ensnared by the unwearied Cuman troops, cut off, and encircled. Overpowered by the multitude of Cumans in hand to hand combat, they were thrown from their horses. One was surrounded by many; the throats of the stiff-necked were exposed to the scimitar or to the noose, and many of their horses were mutilated. As [their enemy] fell upon them like a never-ending black cloud, they could not disentangle themselves from the horses or find any means of escape. So fell the flower of the Latin host and those who were far-famed for their prowess with the lance.
Those who could, fled, making for the camp, and it was Geoffrey de Villehardouin coming to meet them with a body of men around which they could rally that stopped the route from rolling right through and into the camp. Now, lesson at last learned, they held their ground in the face of Kaloyan’s attacks, waiting, not chasing, until night came, and their enemy at last retired. In the darkness, torches were lit in large numbers, as if an army remained to offer battle. Then Geoffrey, Dandolo, and the rest, slipped away, leaving no men but all their tents behind them, and marched until dawn, with Geoffrey commanding the rear-guard, ever uneasy that Kaloyan’s pursuit, when it inevitably came, might find them and finish the job.
It had been a disaster. Count Louis was dead, and many more with him, and Emperor Baldwin, well his fate was at first unknown. Robert reported that none ever knew what became of him, but as Niketas and Geoffrey noted, he was taken prisoner, and there are all sorts of stories of how he may have been abused, tortured, starved, or perhaps, depending on who you listen to, treated with perfect decency. Some would say his skull would become an ornamented drinking cup, and Niketas has Kaloyan ordering his limbs cut off at the knees and elbows before having him cast down into a ravine to live out a last three days in pain as food for the birds. What is certain is that Baldwin would die in captivity, one more emperor of Constantinople departing from our story.
And we’ll continue that story in just a moment. But first, a quick break.
…
In the days that followed, Geoffrey and Dandolo and the rest of the survivors would continue their flight from Adrianople, wary of the pursuing army that might easily destroy them, if only it caught them. One party of knights would split off, making their own way more quickly back to Constantinople where they’d spread dismay over the uncertain fate of their colleagues, and then later face recriminations for having cowardly abandoned them.
The rest of them were reinforced by groups that had been rushing to join the siege at Adrianople, the parties encountering each other with nervous aggression followed by relief, and then deep sadness. They made their way, day by fearful day, to Rodosto, a rich and strong port city whose Greek speaking Roman population did not, or could not, oppose the sudden arrival of this armed body of men. For now at least, the crusaders were safe. And they would be safe to watch bitterly as 5 ships of crusaders headed home from Constantinople arrived, refused their prayers to stay on, and then sailed away. Safe to curse the name of Peter of Frouville, who had abandoned all his people and belongings for a spot on one of those ships. Safe to call for Baldwin’s brother Henry to take his place. Safe, but not feeling terribly safe.
All about them on the land, Kaloyan’s forces went as they would. The crusaders had the worst of their encounters, but worse still was the lot of the Romans in the provinces where now-desperate crusaders plundered, and then Kaloyan’s men plundered again. As they marched from Rhaedestus to Constantinople, there was little the men of the fourth crusade controlled. They settled into strong points, few and far between, and they fought against a tide that rolled in against them, from the northwest, and from Roman leaders like Theodore Laskaris, first Emperor of Nicaea, from the southeast.
Help was sent for, to aid the cause of the Latin Empire, sent to the pope and any and all that would listen, but it wasn’t coming. If anything, as those 5 ships passing Rhaedestus indicated, it was leaving, and other blows were in store for the crusaders. In May of that year, just over a month after the flight from Adrianople, Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian doge, died in intestinal agony. He’d lived a remarkable life and, no matter where you sit on the spectrum of Dandolo legends, had clearly been an astonishingly vigorous 90-something, but that final campaign had been too much for him. And the crusade lost another of its leaders.
If all of this sounds like it’s spiralling towards disaster, straight from its flawed beginnings to its inevitable demise, then that’s not far from the truth. The record of what follows is full of Kaloyan’s victories, of cities sacked and their occupants slaughtered, whether Crusaders or Romans. Henry, initially regent and later emperor in replacement of his brother, did not roll over and die, but there was death all around. His marriage to Boniface’s daughter, which would have shored up the bond between to two, now more crucial than ever, was short lived, as the new empress soon died, thought not so soon that he couldn’t tell the marquis she was pregnant when the two next met, so perhaps her death was caused by childbirth. His forces campaigned on both sides of the water, and had some successes, but dealing with both Kaloyan and Theodore Laskaris was burdensome, especially when the two actually started cooperating, and Geoffrey attests that the crusaders were scattered and everywhere “distracted and oppressed by war,” and that Emperor Henry was himself torn. He wanted to relieve Adrianople from its suffering under one siege, but he needed to rescue Peter of Bracieux, and Payen of Orléans from another besieged city, and then the people of Thierri of Loos at quite another, or else lose them. He could not be everywhere.
But then, his luck seemed to turn. Theodore offered a truce, at a price, and he bought that truce, allowing him to finally, after a number of false starts in that direction, go and break up the siege of Adrianople, and even to briefly go on the offensive entering Kaloyan’s land and gather up many provisions. Finally, on his return to Adrianople, there was more good news. There was word from Boniface.
The marquis had really been off in his own world, engaged in all kinds of trouble around Thessalonica while Henry was putting out fires from Constantinople, with enemies everywhere between, and the two had not seen each other in some time. Now, messengers arrived from Boniface, asking for Henry to meet him by a certain river, and Henry happily agreed.
The two met in a fair field, and stayed there for two days, sharing news that the other would not have known. They said that “as God had granted that they should come together, so might they yet again defeat their enemies. And they made agreement to meet at the end of the summer, in the month of October, with all their forces, in the meadow before the city of Adrianople, and make war against [Kaloyan]. So they separated joyous and well content. The marquis went [west], and the Emperor Henry [east].”
They were never to make that appointment though. Not long after, Boniface’s rear guard would be ambushed as he travelled. He’d rush back and into the fight, but in the process he’d be wounded by an arrow beneath the shoulder, and he’d bleed and he’d bleed. His followers would try to keep him on his horse, but as he grew fainter, they lost hope, and abandoned him to his attackers and to his fate.
The crusaders were one lord less, their one-time leader mourned by Geoffrey as “one of the best barons and most liberal, and one of the best knights in the world!” But Niketas would take a very different angle, writing that his death, quote, “came to the delight of all Romans - this surly man was fond of gold, pertinacious, opinionated, a monster who preyed on Romans. To the Thessalonians the arrow was the answer to a prayer and truly believed to be wrought, if not discharged, by the hand of the Almighty … he was an unbearable and unappeasable evil. Having received the gaping wound, he was sent on his way to Hades by the Romans with malignant glee.”
The head of Boniface of Montferrat would be cut from his body and would be presented to Kaloyan as a gift, but Kaloyan himself wouldn’t have long to enjoy his present. He’d besiege the city that had recently been Boniface’s, but he’d encounter trouble, and there are all kinds of stories as to what kind.
My favourite is actually that of one of our sources here, Robert de Clari. He says that the trouble was inflicted by none other than St Demetrius, whose body lay in the city and was said not to allow the city to be taken by violence. Faced with this most recent threat, St Demetrius had appeared in the night, and in Kaloyan’ tent, and speared him where he slept. There were other versions, tellings that relied less on saints rising from the dead to distribute stabby justice in the darkness, more garden-variety betrayals and assassinations, but it all came to the same thing in the end. The Bulgarian menace that had haunted the crusaders and their Latin Empire was gone, but Baldwin, Dandolo, and Boniface too.
Emperor Henry wasn’t though, not quite yet. He survived Kaloyan’s challenge. Robert tells that he lived to marry the daughter of his successor, and to crown Boniface’s son in Thessalonica. But that was where he died, in 1216. His death, the same year as Pope Innocent III’s, ended what would turn out to be a unique period of relative calm in the rule of the Latin Empire, which would itself stagger on until 1261 when Constantinople was taken by the Nicaeans, some would say retaken by the Byzantines, and when our friends the brothers Polo would leave the city on a little business venture.
Even that wasn’t quite the conclusion of the story of the Fourth Crusade though. Of the crusader states that had sprung up during those years at the beginning of the 13th century, some would even be there to be absorbed into the Ottoman Empire when it came. That spiralling disaster I spoke of would go on spiralling on for a long time still, long after its initial protagonists had passed on from this world.
As for our narrators, Niketas would live out the rest of his life at the court of Theodore Laskaris, in Nicaea, dying around the same time as Henry. And Robert de Clari and Geoffrey de Villehardouin, would of course survive those tumultuous years to record their versions of events. And how Robert would end his, is, I think, a good note for us to end on too. I’ll be back in a few weeks with something new and medieval. Thanks for listening, everyone. To quote Robert de Clari:
Now have ye heard the truth, in what manner Constantinople was conquered, and in what way Count Baldwin of Flanders became emperor thereof, and my Lord Henry his brother after him; for he who was there and who saw these things and who heard the testimony thereof, Robert of Clari, Knight, hath also caused the truth to be put down in writing, how the city was conquered; and albeit he may not have recounted the conquest in as fair a fashion as many a good chronicler would have recounted it, yet hath he at all times recounted the strict truth; and many true things hath he left untold, because, in sooth, he cannot remember them all.
Sources:
Geoffrey de Villehardouin. Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople, translated by Frank T. Marzials. J.M. Dent, 1908.
Three Old French Chronicles Of The Crusades: The History Of The Holy War; The History Of Them That Took Constantinople; The Chronicle Of Reims, translated by Edward Noble Stone. University Of Washington Publications In The Social Sciences, 1939.
O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates, translated by Harry J. Magoulias. Wayne State University Press, 1984.
Madden, Thomas F. Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Madden, Thomas F. Venice: A New History. Viking, 2012.
Norwich, John Julius. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. Viking, 1995.
Queller, Donald E. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 1201-1204. Leicester University Press, 1978.