of discord seemed unchained, and the double scourge of civil war and
foreign invasion began to afflict the empire. In the twenty-four years
between 1057 and 1081 were pressed more disasters than had been seen in
any other period of East-Roman history, save perhaps the reign of
Heraclius. For now came the second cutting-short of the empire, the blow
that was destined to shear away half its strength, and leave it maimed
beyond any possibility of ultimate recovery.
Domestic troubles were the first inevitable consequence of the extinction
of the Macedonian dynasty. The aged Theodora had named as her successor on
the throne Michael Stratioticus, a contemporary of her own who had been an
able soldier twenty-five years back. But Michael VI. was grown aged and
incompetent, and the empire was full of ambitious generals, who would not
tolerate a dotard on the throne. Before a year had passed a band of great
Asiatic nobles entered into a conspiracy to overturn Michael, and replace
him by Isaac Comnenus, the chief of one of the ancient Cappadocian houses,
and the most popular general of the East.
Isaac Comnenus and his friends took arms, and dispossessed the aged
Michael of his throne with little difficulty. But a curse seemed to rest
upon the usurpation; Isaac was stricken down by disease when he had been
little more than a year on the throne, and retired to a monastery to die.
His crown was transferred to Constantine Ducas, another Cappadocian noble,
who was supposed to be second only to Isaac in competence and popularity.
Constantine reigned for seven troubled years, and disappointed all his
supporters, for he proved but a sorry administrator. His mind was set on
nothing but finance, and in the endeavour to build up again the imperial
treasure, which had been sorely wasted since the death of Basil II., he
neglected all the other departments of state. To save money he disbanded
no inconsiderable portion of the army, and cut down the pay of the rest.
This was sheer madness, when there was impending over the empire the most
terrible military danger that had been seen for four centuries. The safety
of the realm was entirely in the hands of its well-paid and
well-disciplined national army, and anything that impaired the efficiency
of the army was fraught with the deadliest peril.
The Seljouk Turks were now drawing near. Pressing on from the Oxus lands,
their hordes had overrun Persia and extinguished the dynasty of the
Buhawides. In 1050, they had penetrated to Bagdad, and their great chief,
Togrul Beg, had declared himself “defender of the faith and protector of
the Caliph.” Armenia had next been overrun, and those portions of it which
had not been annexed to the empire, and still obeyed independent princes,
had been conquered by 1064. In that year fell Ani, the ancient Armenian
capital, and the bulwark which protected the Byzantine Empire from Eastern
invasions.
The reign of Constantine Ducas was troubled by countless Seljouk invasions
of the Armeniac, Anatolic, and Cappadocian themes. Sometimes the invaders
were driven back, sometimes they eluded the imperial troops and escaped
with their booty. But whether successful or unsuccessful, they displayed a
reckless cruelty, far surpassing anything that the Saracens had ever
shown. Wherever they passed they not merely plundered to right and left,
but slew off the whole population. Meanwhile, Constantine X., with his
reduced army, proved incompetent to hold them back; all the more so that
his operations were distracted by an invasion of the Uzes, a Tartar tribe
from the Euxine shore, who had burst into Bulgaria.
Ducas died in 1067, leaving the throne to his son, Michael, a boy of
fourteen years. The usual result followed. To secure her son’s life and
throne, the Empress-dowager Eudocia took a new husband, and made him
guardian of the young Michael. The new Emperor-regent was Romanus
Diogenes, an Asiatic noble, whose brilliant courage displayed in the
Seljouk wars had dazzled the world, and caused it to forget that caution
and ability are far more regal virtues than headlong valour. Romanus took
in hand with the greatest vigour the task of repelling the Turks, which
his predecessor had so grievously neglected. He led into the field every
man that could be collected from the European or Asiatic themes, and for
three successive years was incessantly marching and counter-marching in
Armenia, Cappadocia, and Syria, in the endeavour to hunt down the
marauding bands of the Seljouks.
The operations of Romanus were not entirely unsuccessful. Alp Arslan, the
Sultan of the Seljouks, contented himself at first with dispersing his
hordes in scattered bands, and attacking many points of the frontier at
once. Hence the Emperor was not unfrequently able to catch and slay off
one of the minor divisions of the Turkish army. But some of them always
contrived to elude him; his heavy cavalry could not come up with the light
Seljouk horse bowmen, who generally escaped and rode back home by a long
detour, burning and murdering as they went. Cappadocia was already
desolated from end to end, and the Turkish raids had reached as far as
Amorium, in Phrygia.
In 1071 came the final disaster. In pursuing the Seljouk plunderers,
Romanus was drawn far eastward, to Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier.
There he found himself confronted, not by a flying foe, but by the whole
force of the Seljouk sultanate, with Alp Arslan himself at its head.
Though his army was harassed by long marches, and though two large
divisions were absent, the Emperor was eager to fight. The Turks had never
before offered him a fair field, and he relied implicitly on the power of
his cuirassiers to ride down any number, however great, of the light
Turkish horse.
[Illustration]
Our Lord Blessing Romanus Diogenes And Eudocia. (_From an Ivory at
Paris._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin,
1883._)
The decisive battle of Manzikert, which it is not too much to call the
turning-point of the whole course of Byzantine history, was fought in the
early summer of 1071. For a long day the Byzantine horsemen continued to
roll back and break through the lines of Turkish horse bowmen. But fresh
hordes kept coming on, and in the evening the fight was still undecided.
As the night was approaching, Romanus prepared to draw his troops back to
the camp, but an unhappy misconception of orders broke up the line, and
the Seljouks edged in between the two halves of the army. Either from
treachery or cowardice Andronicus Ducas, the officer who commanded the
reserve, led his men off without fighting. The Emperor’s division was
beset on all sides by the enemy, and broke up in the dusk. Romanus himself
was wounded, thrown from his horse, and made prisoner. The greater part of
his men were cut to pieces.
[Illustration]
Nicephorus Botaniates Sitting In State. (_From a contemporary MS._) (_From
"L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
Alp Arslan showed himself more forbearing to his prisoner than might have
been expected. It is true that Romanus was led after his capture to the
tent of the Sultan, and laid prostrate before him, that, after the Turkish
custom, the conqueror might place his foot on the neck of his vanquished
foe. But after this humiliating ceremony the Emperor was treated with
kindness, and allowed after some months to ransom himself and return home.
He would have fared better, however, if he had remained the prisoner of
the Turk. During his captivity the conduct of affairs had fallen into the
hands of John Ducas, uncle of the young emperor Michael. The unscrupulous
regent was determined that Romanus should not supersede him and mount the
throne again. When the released captive reappeared, John had him seized
and blinded. The cruel work was so roughly done that the unfortunate
Romanus died a few days later.
After this fearful disaster Asia Minor was lost; there was no chief to
take the place of Romanus, and the Seljouk hordes spread westward almost
unopposed. The next ten years were a time of chaos and disaster. While the
Seljouks were carving their way deeper and deeper into the vitals of the
empire, the wrecks of the Byzantine army were employed not in resisting
them, but in carrying on a desperate series of civil wars. After the death
of Romanus, every general in the empire seemed to think that the time had
come for him to assume the purple buskins and proclaim himself emperor.
History records the names of no less than six pretenders to the throne
during the next nine years, besides several rebels who took up arms
without assuming the imperial title. The young emperor, Michael Ducas,
proved, when he came of age, to be a vicious nonentity; he is remembered
in Byzantine history only by his nickname of Para-pinakes, the
“peck-filcher,” given him because in a year of famine he sold the measure
of wheat to his subjects a fourth short of its proper contents. His name
and that of Nicephorus Botaniates, the rebel who overthrew him, cover in
the list of emperors a space of ten years that would better be represented
by a blank; for the authority of the nominal ruler scarcely extended
beyond the walls of the capital, and the themes that were not overrun by
the Turks were in the hands of governors who each did what was right in
his own eyes. At last a man of ability worked himself up to the surface.
This was Alexius Comnenus, nephew of the emperor Isaac Comnenus, whose
short reign we related in the opening paragraph of this chapter.
Alexius was a man of courage and ability, but he displayed one of the
worst types of Byzantine character. Indeed, he was the first emperor to
whom the epithet “Byzantine,” in its common and opprobrious sense could be
applied. He was the most accomplished liar of his age, and, while winning
and defending the imperial throne, committed enough acts of mean
treachery, and swore enough false oaths to startle even the courtiers of
Constantinople. He could fight when necessary, but he preferred to win by
treason and perjury. Yet as a ruler he had many virtues, and it will
always be remembered to his credit that he dragged the empire out of the
deepest slough of degradation and ruin that it had ever sunk into. Though
false, he was not cruel, and seven ex-emperors and usurpers, living
unharmed in Constantinople under his sceptre, bore witness to the mildness
of his rule. The tale of his reign sufficiently bears witness to the
strange mixture of moral obliquity and practical ability in his character.
XXI. THE COMNENI AND THE CRUSADES.
Alexius Comnenus found himself, in 1081, placed in a position almost as
difficult and perilous as that which Leo the Isaurian faced in 716. Like
Leo, he was a usurper without prestige or hereditary claims, seated on an
unsteady throne, and forced to face imminent danger from the Moslem enemy
without, and from rival adventurers within. It may be added that the
Isaurian, grievously threatened as he was by the enemy from the East, had
no peril impending from the West. Alexius had to face at one and the same
time the assault of the Seljouks on Asia Minor, and the attack of a new
and formidable foe in his western provinces. We have already mentioned the
manner in which the Byzantine dominion in Italy had come to an end. Now
the same Norman adventurers who had stripped the empire of Calabria and
Apulia were preparing to cross the straits of Otranto, and seek out the
Emperor in the central provinces of his realm. The forces of the Italian
and Sicilian Normans were united under their great chief Robert Guiscard,
the hardy and unscrupulous Duke of Apulia. Just ten years before he had
captured Bari, the last Byzantine fortress on his own side of the straits;
now he was resolved to take advantage of the anarchy which had prevailed
in the empire ever since the day of Manzikert, and to build up new Norman
principalities to the east of the Adriatic. There seemed to be nothing
presumptuous in the scheme to those who remembered how a few hundred
Norman adventurers had conquered all Southern Italy and Sicily, and
swelled into a victorious army fifty thousand strong. Nor could the
invaders fail to remember how, but fifteen years before, another Norman
duke had crossed another strait in the far West, and won by his strong
right hand the great kingdom of England. Alexius Comnenus sat like Harold
Godwinson on a lately-acquired and unsteady throne, and Duke Robert
thought to deal with him much as Duke William had dealt with the
Englishman.
In June, 1081, the Normans landed, thirty thousand strong, and laid siege
to Durazzo, the maritime fortress that guarded the Epirot coast. The
Emperor at once flew to its succour. Always active, hopeful, and
versatile, he trusted that he might be able to beat off the new invaders,
whose military worth he was far from appreciating at its true value. He
patched up a hasty pacification with Suleiman, Sultan of the Seljouks, by
surrendering to him all the territory of which the Turk was in actual
possession, a tract which now extended as far as the waters of the
Propontis, and actually included the city of Nicaea, close to the
Bithynian shore, and only seventy miles from Constantinople.
The army with which Alexius had to face the Normans was the mere wreck and
shadow of that which Romanus IV. had led against the Turks ten years
before. The military organization of the empire had gone to pieces, and we
no longer hear of the old “Themes” of heavy cavalry which had formed its
backbone. The new army contained quite a small proportion of national
troops. Its core was the imperial guard of Varangians—the Russian, Danish,
and English mercenaries, whose courage had won the confidence of so many
emperors. With them marched many Turkish, Frankish, Servian, and
South-Slavonic auxiliaries; the native element comprised the regulars of
the three provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, all that now
remained in Alexius’ hands of the ancient East-Roman realm.
Alexius brought Robert Guiscard to battle in front of Durazzo, and
suffered a crushing defeat at his hands. The Emperor’s bad tactics were
the main cause of his failure: his army came upon the ground in successive
detachments, and the van was cut to pieces before the main body had
reached the field. The brunt of the battle was borne by the Varangians:
carried away by their fiery courage, they charged the Normans before the
rest of Alexius’s troops had formed their line of battle. Rushing on the
wing of Robert’s army, commanded by the Count of Bari, they drove it horse
and foot into the sea. Their success, however, disordered their ranks, and
the Norman duke was able to turn his whole force against them ere the
Emperor was near enough to give them aid. A fierce cavalry charge cut off
the greater part of the Varangians; the rest collected on a mound by the
sea-shore, and for some time beat off the Normans with their axes, as King
Harold’s men had done at Senlac on the last occasion when English and
Norman had met. But Robert shot them down with his archers, and then sent
more cavalry against them. They fell, save a small remnant who defended
themselves in a ruined chapel, which Guiscard had finally to burn before
he could make an end of its obstinate defenders.
The rest of Alexius’s army only came into action when the Varangians had
been destroyed. It was cowed by the loss of its best corps, fought badly,
and fled in haste. Alexius himself, who lingered last upon the field, was
surrounded, and only escaped by the speed of his horse and the strength of
his sword-arm. Durazzo fell, and in the next year the Normans overran all
Epirus and descended into Thessaly. Alexius risked two more engagements
with them, but his inexperienced troops were defeated in both. Disaster
taught him to avoid pitched battles, and at last, in 1083, after a more
cautious campaign, his patience was rewarded by the dispersion of the
Norman army. Catching it while divided, the Emperor inflicted on it a
severe defeat at Larissa, and forced it back into Epirus. After this the
war slackened, and when Robert Guiscard died in 1085 the Norman danger
passed away.
Thus one foe was removed, but Alexius was not destined to win peace.
Constant rebellions at home, and wars with the Patzinaks, the Slavs, and
the Seljouks filled the next ten years. Alexius, however, was never
discouraged: “eking out the lion’s skin with the fox’s hide,” he fought
and intrigued, lied and negotiated, and at the end of the time had held
his own and lost no more territory, while his throne was growing more
secure.
But in the fifteenth year of his reign a new cloud began to arise in the
west, which was destined to exercise unsuspected influence, both for good
and evil, on the empire. The Crusades were on the eve of their
commencement. Ever since the Seljouks had taken Jerusalem in 1075, four
years after Manzikert, the western pilgrims to the Holy Land had been
suffering grievous things at the hands of the barbarians. But all the
wrath that their ill-treatment provoked would have been fruitless, if the
way to Syria had not been opened of late to the nations of Western
Christendom. Two series of events had made free communication between East
and West possible in the end of the eleventh century, in a measure which
had never before been seen.
The first of these was the conversion of Hungary, begun by St. Stephen in
1000, and completed about 1050. For the future there lay between the
Byzantine Empire and Germany not a barbarous pagan state, but a
semi-civilized Christian kingdom, which had taken its place among the
other nations of the Roman Catholic faith. Communication down the Danube,
between Vienna and the Byzantine outposts in Bulgaria, became for the
first time possible, and ere long the route grew popular. The second
phenomenon which made the Crusades possible was the destruction of the
Saracen naval power in the Central Mediterranean. This was carried out
first by the Pisans and Genoese, whose fleets conquered Corsica and
Sardinia from the Moslems, and then by the Normans, whose occupation of
Sicily made the voyage from Marseilles and Genoa to the East safe and
sure. Four new maritime powers—the Genoese, Pisans, and Normans in the
open sea, and the Venetians in the Adriatic—had developed themselves into
importance, and now their fleets swept the waters where no Christian
war-galleys save those of Byzantium, had ever been seen before.
It was the fact that free access to the East was now to be gained, both by
land and sea, as it had never been before, that made the Crusades
feasible. Of the preaching of Peter the Hermit and the efforts of Pope
Urban we need not speak. Suffice it to say, that in 1095 news came to the
Emperor Alexius that the nations of the West were mustering by myriads,
and directing their march towards his frontiers, with the expressed
intention of driving the Moslems from Palestine. The Emperor had little
confidence in the purity of the zeal of the Crusaders; his wily mind could
not comprehend their enthusiasm, and he dreaded that some unforeseen
circumstance might turn their arms against himself. When the hordes of
armed Frankish pilgrims began to arrive, his fears were justified: the
new-comers pillaged his country right and left upon their way, and were
drawn into many bloody fights with the peasantry and the imperial
garrisons, which might have ended in open war. But Alexius set himself to
work to smooth matters down; all his tact and patience were needed, and
there was ample scope for his talent for intrigue and insincere diplomacy.
He had resolved to induce the crusading chiefs to do him homage, and to
swear to restore to him all the old dominions of the empire which they
might reconquer from the Turks. After long and tedious negotiations he had
his way: the leaders of the Crusade, from Godfrey of Bouillon and Hugh of
Vermandois down to the smallest barons, were induced to swear him
allegiance. Some he flattered, others he bribed, others he strove to
frighten into compliance. The pages of the history written by his
daughter, Anna Comnena, who regarded his powers of cajolery with greater
respect than any other part of his character, are full of tales of the
ingenious shifts by which he brought the stupid and arrogant Franks to
reason. At length they went on their way, with Alexius’s gold in their
pockets, and encouraged by his promise that he would aid them with his
troops, continue to supply them with provisions, and never abandon them
till the Holy City was reconquered.
In the spring of 1097 the Crusaders began to cross the Bosphorus, and in
two marches found themselves within Turkish territory. They at once laid
siege to Nicaea, the frontier fortress of the Seljouk Sultan. Encompassed
by so great a host the Turkish garrison soon lost heart and surrendered,
not to the Franks, but to Alexius, whose troops they secretly admitted
within the walls. This nearly led to strife between the Emperor and the
Crusaders, who had been reckoning on the plunder of the town; but Alexius
appeased them with further stores of money, and the pilgrim host rolled
forward once more into the interior of Asia Minor.
[Illustration]
Byzantine Ivory-Carving Of The Twelfth Century. (_From the British
Museum._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin,
1883._)
In 1097 the Crusaders forced their way through Phrygia and Cappadocia,
beating back the Seljouks at every encounter, till they reached North
Syria, where they laid siege to Antioch. Alexius had undertaken to help
them in their campaign, but he was set on playing an easier game. When
they were crushing the Turks he followed in their rear at a safe distance,
like the jackal behind the lion, picking up the spoil which they left.
While the Sultan was engaged with them Alexius despoiled him of Smyrna,
Ephesus, and Sardis, reconquering Western Asia Minor almost without a
blow, since the Seljouk hordes were drawn away eastward. It was the same
in the next year; when the Crusaders were fighting hard round Antioch
against the princes of Mesopotamia, and sent to ask for instant help,
Alexius despatched no troops to Syria, but gathered in a number of Lydian
and Phrygian fortresses which lay nearer to his hand. Hence there resulted
a bitter quarrel between the Emperor and the Franks, for since he gave
them no help they refused to hand over to him Antioch and their other
Syrian conquests. Each party, in fact, broke the compact signed at
Constantinople, and accused the other of treachery. Hence it resulted that
the Crusade ended not in the re-establishment of the Byzantine power in
Syria, but in the foundation of new Frankish states, the principalities of
Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli, and the more important kingdom of Jerusalem.
That he did not recover Syria was no real loss to Alexius; he would not
have been strong enough to hold it, had it been handed over to him. The
actual profit which he made by the Crusade was enough to content him: the
Franks had rolled back the Turkish frontier in Asia not less than two
hundred miles: instead of the Seljouk lying at Nicaea, he was now chased
back behind the Bithynian hills, and the empire had recovered all Lydia
and Caria with much of the Phrygian inland. The Seljouks were hard hit,
and for well-nigh a century were reduced to fight on the defensive.
Owing, then, to the fearful blow inflicted by the Crusades on the Moslem
powers of Asia Minor and Syria, the later years of Alexius were free from
the danger which had overshadowed the beginning of his reign. He was able,
between 1100 and 1118, to strengthen his position at home and abroad; the
constant rebellions which had vexed his early years ceased, and when the
Normans, under Bohemund of Tarentum, tried to repeat, in 1107, the feats
which Robert Guiscard had accomplished in 1082, they were beaten off with
ease, and forced to conclude a disadvantageous peace.