HISTORY AND CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
In the year 395 the Roman world was divided into the empires of the East
and the West, and Constantinople became the rival capital of that on the
Tiber. Eighty-one years later (476) Odoacer, the barbarian, sacked Rome
and brought to an end the Western Empire, from which time Constantinople
claimed the sole heirship to the power of the Cæsars. In 800 Charlemagne
reëstablished the imperial power in western Europe, but within fifty
years it again fell to pieces in the hands of his less puissant sons.
The Greek emperors and people assumed the title of Romans. Their capital
was called New Rome.
There had occurred a similar breach between the Roman and Greek
churches. A doctrinal divergence had assumed irreconcilable proportions
in the sixth century. The controversy centred chiefly in the question of
whether the Holy Spirit proceeded equally from the Father and the Son,
or solely from the Father; the Roman Church maintaining the former
dogma, as expressed by the addition of the word “Filioque” to the Nicene
Creed, the Greek Church repudiating it. Many minor differences of
doctrine and discipline were also generated. Ecclesiastical separation
followed. After generations of wrangling, the Pope’s legates shook the
dust from their feet and departed from Constantinople, leaving on the
altar of St. Sophia a writ of excommunication and anathema. Thus the
last tie between the two peoples was sundered.
From 867 to 1057 the Basilian dynasty steadily compacted the power,
developed the governmental system, augmented the wealth, and extended
the area of the Greek empire. From 1057, however, under the dynasty of
the Comneni, Greek prestige has steadily declined. The strength of its
dominion had been largely due to the preservation of a municipal and
provincial spirit, a virtual independence of its various communities,
each seeking its own welfare, while all maintained their loyalty to the
central authority. Under the later Basilians ambitious emperors adopted
the policy of absorbing all the local rights into their personal
control. The Comneni continued this fatal policy, but their hands were
not strong enough to retain what they had grasped. The occupants of the
Greek throne were weak men. The names of Isaac, Michael, Nicephorus, and
Alexius are those of pygmies compared with the German emperors and the
popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Indeed, in the East the art
of statesmanship had been lost. The rulers of Constantinople were
intriguers, not diplomats. With them dissimulation took the place of
caution, trickery that of courage, and prosperity was measured only by
the number and value of the royal perquisites. The Oriental practice of
farming the revenue was the easiest method of obtaining income. He was
regarded as the wisest administrator who squeezed the largest amount
from the unwilling people. Officers were commissioned without salary or
even provision for their expenses, it being expected that they would
first of all feather their own nests. Even an emperor is accused of
fitting out vessels for piracy upon his own seas.
The personal character of the later Greek monarchs was equally
despicable with their system of government. Alexius Comnenus spent his
time in play. Andronicus was chiefly renowned for the magnificence of
his horse-shows, attendance at which was varied by drunken debauches and
acts of cowardly cruelty. Isaac was noted for the wasteful extravagance
of his table, the frequent changes of his apparel, and the peacock
magnificence of his public appearances. It is said that madmen were held
in honor as being under the special direction of Heaven, and it would
seem from their conduct that the emperors were ambitious to secure this
sole mark of the divine favor.
Such rulers, having lost the respect, could not hold the loyalty of
their subjects. The people no longer responded to the calls of the
throne for aid in the war-fields. Indeed, the independent peasant class,
having been reduced to virtual slavery, were more ready to admit a
change of rulers than to risk their lives for the support of such as
they had. The emperors were thus compelled to surround themselves with
mercenaries whom they hired in foreign countries. Slavonians, Italians,
Warings (Saxons who were crowded out of England by the recent Norman
conquest), filled the armies and oppressed the citizens. The Greek navy
was composed chiefly of Venetian bottoms, and manned by water-dogs from
every seaport in Europe. To these elements of decrepitude we must add
the ceaseless strife for occupancy of the imperial throne. During the
quarter-century ending with 1200 there were more claimants than there
were years.
This internal weakness of the Byzantine or Greek empire left it largely
the prey of enemies from without. Ever since their first irruption from
their original home in central Asia the Turks had menaced the imperial
provinces. They succeeded in wresting vast lands, and in either driving
out their Christian inhabitants or making them tributary to the cause of
Islam. Asia Minor was lost to the Greek, and the Moslem negotiated with
his foe from the banks of the Bosporus. During the twelfth century
scarcely a year passed which did not witness some battle between the
Byzantines and the Turks. Defeated by the crusaders, these quick-moving
hordes of the East found redress in ravaging some part of the empire.
When victorious in Syria they echoed their joy in new battle-shouts in
the direction of the Greek capital. Their swords dripped blood on the
shores of the Marmora and the Black Sea almost as frequently as on the
fields of Syria. In 1185 the emperor was compelled to purchase immunity
from attack by paying tribute to the Sultan of Iconium, and even to call
in the assistance of Saladin to secure him from the aggressions of other
Moslem hordes.
The Huns also assailed the Byzantine power. In 1184 Maria, dowager
empress at Constantinople, was put to death for having engaged these
ruthless people, under their king, Bela, to invade the empire.
Bulgarians, Patchinaks, Turkomans, Wallachs, and Servians raided in turn
the Balkan peninsula.
The crusaders also, with their enormous armies and the pilgrim hordes
that followed them, made the Greek lines their camping-ground, their
forage-fields, and their battle-sites, until Constantinople dreaded
these fellow-Christians as much as it feared the Infidels. Richard of
England took Cyprus from the Greeks and ultimately gave it to the
Templars. Henry VI. of Germany forced from the emperor five thousand
pounds of gold, as the price of the immunity of his lands from the
ravages of Western armies. The imperial treasury was so depleted that
the churches of Constantinople were rifled to raise what was thus called
the “German tax.”
Beyond the actual aggressions of the Latin Christians upon their Greek
brethren there was developed a deeper menace in the hatred which had
sprung up between the two peoples. Throughout Europe the eagerness to
exterminate the Moslems was almost matched by a purpose to subjugate the
Greek power. For this antipathy there were other and special occasions,
some of which we will narrate.
The Normans, who, under Robert Guiscard, had in 1062 conquered Sicily,
were the inveterate foes of Constantinople. Robert and his son,
Bohemond, invaded Epirus and Thessaly. In 1107 Bohemond repeated the
attempt to capture the western borders of the empire. In 1130 Roger of
Sicily made alliance with the German emperor for the same purpose.
William, son of Roger, in 1156 pillaged Corfu, Corinth, and some of the
Ægean Islands, and sent a fleet to parade his insults in the Bosporus
and Golden Horn, where his sailors shot gilded arrows against the very
palace walls.
About 1180 the Emperor Andronicus cruelly massacred the Latins in
Constantinople, dragging the sick from their beds in the hospital of St.
John, and decapitating the papal envoy, Cardinal John, whose head was
tied to a dog’s tail and dragged about the streets. William II. of
Sicily appointed a certain Tancred, his agent, to avenge these
atrocities. Tancred sacked Salonica and ravaged Macedonia and Thrace. In
1194 Henry, King of Sicily, claimed all these lands and held Irene,
daughter of the Emperor Isaac, as hostage. Thus the Sicilians were
always ready to leap at the throat of the Greek empire in sheer
vengeance, if not with thirst for the blood of spoil.
Another menace to the Eastern Empire was from the Italians, who were
represented by large colonies throughout the imperial territories, and
even in the capital itself, where they enjoyed for a time exceptional
privileges, such as being directly governed by their own ambassadors,
having favored rates of tariff on their commerce, often amounting to
free trade, and at times receiving high appointments in the service of
the empire. Yet these prosperous conditions were frequently interrupted
by quarrels with the Greeks, reaching on occasions to civil war within
the walls of the capital. Pisan and Genoese pirates ravaged the Ægean,
and even blockaded the Dardanelles against the passage of Greek ships.
In 1198 these freebooters defeated the imperial navy.
Venice, however, was the most formidable of these rivals for power
within the empire, as she had been at times the most favored nation. In
1171 the Venetians attacked Dalmatia and pillaged the Ægean, until they
were forced by herculean efforts of the Greek government to sue for
peace. Henry Dandolo conducted the mission for treaty, and during his
stay in Constantinople became blind. It is asserted by the Venetians
that his affliction was due to torture perpetrated upon him by command
of the emperor. It was a common practice of the Greeks to destroy the
sight of those they would render impotent to do them harm. This ancient
punishment was called abacination; the process was that of forcing the
victim to gaze into a basin of highly polished metal, which by its shape
concentrated the rays of sunlight and constituted a burning-mirror.
Whether this is the true explanation of his blindness or not, it is
certain that Dandolo ever after displayed an absorbing passion to wreak
vengeance upon the Greek power, and we shall find him foremost among its
foes in the fatal expedition called the fourth crusade.
But, aside from these inducements, the wealth of the city offered to the
covetous a prize second to none in the world. The situation of
Constantinople on the narrow highway of the Bosporus or Strait of St.
George, which connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, made it
mistress of the maritime commerce between Europe and Asia. Neighboring
countries contributed by their very geographical relation to the power
on the Bosporus. The Balkan peninsula, terminating in the classic land
of Greece, and fringed with the islands of the Ægean and the Adriatic;
the eastern provinces of Europe, drained by the Danube, whose mouth was
hard by; Russia from the Siberian snows to the temperate climate of the
Euxine; Asia Minor, the seat of ancient civilization in the middle
Orient, even to the entrance of Persia; the Holy Land, and the fertile
valley of the Nile—each of these, in extent and population enough for an
empire, and all of them lying in easy accessibility, fitted
Constantinople to be the natural capital of the greatest power in the
world.
Its immediate site, too, was inviting. Enthroned upon magnificent hills,
with the harbor of the Golden Horn as a safe refuge for its fleets, and
a salubrious climate assured by the perpetual breeze from either of the
great seas which lay at its feet, it was the especial abode of comfort
and splendor. In its stately palaces, churches, and public squares was
preserved the best art inherited from the ancient world, for which the
temples of Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the isles of the Mediterranean
had been rifled. Its merchants lived with the splendor of princes,
dwelling in palatial homes, adorning themselves with most costly robes
and rarest gems, and clothing even their horses with gold. To outrank
their subjects in splendor, princes lived in houses whose columns and
walls were sheathed in golden plates. The palaces of Blachern and
Bucolion were furnished with incredible treasures.
The Church of St. Sophia, says Benjamin of Tudela (1161), was richer
than “all other places of worship in the world.” To its magnificence
Ephesus had contributed eight pillars from the temple of Diana;
Aurelian’s Roman temple of the sun, eight columns of porphyry; the
temples of the Nile, twenty-four columns of polished granite. Its
vestries contained “forty-two thousand robes embroidered with pearls and
precious stones.” But St. Sophia was only one of many churches whose
golden domes flashed over the Bosporus. Other structures vied with the
temples. The hippodrome was nine hundred feet long, lined with tiers of
white marble seats, from which the spectators, in the intervals of the
races, admired the four horses in bronze which now surmount the entrance
of St. Mark’s in Venice. Columns, statues, baths innumerable, feasted
the eyes or invited the indulgence of the citizens.
Even more tempting to the covetous piety of the western Europeans were
the stores of sacred relics possessed by the churches and monasteries.
It was believed that more than half the objects of veneration associated
with dead saints throughout the world were in case or crypt within
Constantinople; and the common faith attributed to the army of saints
thus honored, and whose ghosts were presumably guarding their bones, the
preservation of the city during so many generations. Most of these
relics had been purchased at or stolen from their original
resting-places in different parts of the East; but many undoubtedly were
manufactured to gratify the credulity of the foreigners who thronged the
bazaars.
To the treasures of the capital itself must be added the wealth of the
territory subject to it. Western Europe, as we have seen, had been
impoverished by generations of feudal control; district had warred upon
district until the spoil was insufficient to evoke further forays. In
marked contrast, the Greek lands had been measurably protected by having
a central government. The ground was well tilled; many handicrafts were
developed. Instead of feudal towers, shadowing the lower classes with
desolation, were well-filled granaries and storehouses of goods. Fair
roads invited intercourse of adjacent communities; and at a time when
robbers infested the suburbs of every town, and lay in wait in every
forest of Europe, the shores of the Bosporus and the eastern end of the
Marmora were enlivened with cosey cottages and pleasant villas. The
Westerner cast envious glances about him whenever he passed the
beautiful city on the strait, and the early crusaders paused to wonder
if it would not pay them as well to extirpate the Greek heresies as to
slaughter the Moslems. This inquiry was keener from the fact that on
every side, as has been narrated, they saw evidences of weakness. While
amazed at the prosperity, they thought of the opportunities offered to
the sword.
The most envious eyes turned upon the Greek lands were those of the
blind old Dandolo. This remarkable man had become doge of Venice in
1192, at the age of seventy-two (some say eighty-two), and was to close
his octogenarian period with a series of exploits which might have been
the envy of the most daring and ambitious youth. To understand the final
diversion of the fourth crusade from its original religious purpose, we
must not lose sight of Dandolo’s sleepless purpose. This was not
recognized at the time, but is abundantly illustrated by the subsequent
events of the crusade, and confirmed by documents which have but
recently come to light.