Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (80 page)

The most decisive battle in the Byzantine confrontation with the Seljuk Turks was at Manzikert in Asia Minor in 1071, at which the reigning Emperor Romanus was not only crushingly defeated, but suffered the humiliation of being taken prisoner. Even though he was treated graciously and released on the payment of a large ransom, there were major consequences. Asia Minor was increasingly undermined by Seljuk raids, and more and more territory passed out of Byzantine control. Most of the holy mountains which had become so important within Byzantine monasticism suffered badly in these invasions, with monks fleeing or being enslaved, and now Mount Athos, far away in secure Macedonia, was left gradually to emerge as the most significant among them. In 1081 the most successful of the imperial generals, Alexios Komnenos, seized power and established his dynasty on the throne, fighting on all fronts to save the empire from disintegration. As emperor, Alexios found that neither his family nor his army could be fully trusted in his struggles, and it may have been this insecurity which made him look beyond his frontiers for allies.
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He repeatedly appealed to Western leaders for help against various enemies, and in 1095 for the first time he was given a serious hearing. It was this request which led Urban II to launch the publicity campaign which triggered the First Crusade (see pp. 383-4).

The Crusades proved a long-term disaster for the empire, despite the competence of Alexios and his Komnenian successors, who did their best to restore the fortunes of the Byzantine imperial machine during the twelfth century. If the gradual drifting apart of East and West had led to mutual incomprehension and hostility, their newly intimate contact frequently made relations even more tense. Even during the success of the First Crusade, the arrival of large armies from the West in Byzantine territory was alarming and disruptive, while Latins rapidly began fomenting a self-justifying tale back home that the Byzantines were treacherously sabotaging their own heroic efforts. That mutual ill-will strengthened as the Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149 failed to achieve its objectives in Palestine and Damascus. The whole miserable expedition was characterized by acute suspicion between Latins and Greeks and major indiscipline among crusader armies, whose remnants struggled back from the Holy Land to Western Europe taking their resentments with them. Some might have noted the contrast between this fiasco and Portuguese Christians' simultaneous capture of Lisbon from the Muslims with the help of another group of crusaders, operating as far from the Byzantines as it was possible to be in southern Europe. The worse the Latins behaved - and there was much worse to come - the more they peddled the notion that Byzantines were devious, effeminate and corrupt, and really deserved any unpleasantness that was done to them.

Problems ranged beyond the activities of the crusaders themselves. The growing claims of the papacy to universal monarchy were offensive not merely to the Oecumenical Patriarch, but to any Eastern churchman, since the East had remained closer to the older idea of the collective authority of bishops throughout the Church. With considerable justification, Easterners saw Westerners as innovators, while Latin diplomats raked up previous bombastic claims to authority from Rome all the way back to Pope Hormisdas in the sixth century (see p. 326). When a delegation of Greeks to the Holy Roman Emperor broke their journey at the Abbey of Monte Cassino in 1137, they observed to the monks that the Bishop of Rome behaved more like an emperor than a bishop.
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At about the same time that the Western canon lawyer Gratian was compiling a law code which looked to the pope as the Universal Bishop, the greatest canon lawyer of the Eastern Empire, Balsamon (supplanted in his see of Antioch by a patriarch who owed allegiance to Rome after appointment by Latin crusaders), wrote bitterly about Western Christians in his own law compilation. He expanded words from Psalm 55: 'Their words are smoother than oil, Satan having hardened their hearts'.
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One symptom of the growing insecurity in the empire which went right back to the death of Basil II in 1025 was a new-found intolerance of any dissidence to the imperial Church. This contrasted with the more pragmatic attitude of the Macedonian imperial dynasty during the ninth century, but it was also a logical development of the urge to define and catalogue which had also characterized Orthodoxy under Macedonian rule. The first symptom of the new mood was a fatal weakening of the imperial policy of tolerance for Miaphysites in the eastern frontier provinces after Basil's death; when the new emperor abruptly ended tolerance in 1028 and did not restore it, the long-term consequences for the frontiers under Seljuk pressure were dire. We have already encountered the burning of the Bogomil Basil in the Hippodrome around the time of the First Crusade (see p. 456), and in the same era there occurred trials for heresy in Constantinople involving leading scholars of literature and theology, Michael Psellos and his student John the Italian (Italos). Psellos in the end escaped serious consequences, but Italos was not so fortunate; after repeated hearings of the case against him, from 1082 he was silenced and ended his days obscurely in a monastery.

There were political dimensions to the trials of Italos, since he was associated with the faction opposed to the Komnenos family's usurpation of the throne, and the collapse of Byzantine power in southern Italy rendered suspect his Italian background and links to the Normans in Sicily: the Emperor Alexios's daughter Anna Komnena, passionate partisan for her father and gifted historian of his reign, wrote scornfully of Italos's inept use of Greek. But there were more long-term issues at stake. Psellos and Italos were keenly interested in using Classical texts, particularly Plato, to illuminate Christianity. That aroused the same sort of fears which had dogged the Patriarch Photios in his enthusiasm for pre-Christian literature and philosophy (see p. 457). This same mood had surfaced in the anti-intellectualism of Symeon the New Theologian. How far could philosophy be of use to Christians?

The confrontation persisted. It claimed a fresh victim in a pupil of Italos, the theologian Eustratios, Metropolitan Bishop of Nicaea, who wrote commentaries on works of Aristotle. Eustratios had taken care to disassociate himself from the views of Italos, and the Emperor Alexios had specifically commissioned him because of his scholarship to prepare arguments against the Miaphysite theology of Armenian subjects of the empire. Yet the very fact that Eustratios used Classical dialectic in the manner of Aristotle to construct his case aroused hostility from his fellow clergy and, after a trial in 1117, the Emperor had him suspended from office. Interest in Plato and Aristotle did not die away in Constantinople, and the Komnenian age was notable for the diversity and variety of its literature - but as far as mainstream theology was concerned, a great contrast developed with the Latin West. On the eve of Western Europe's rediscovery of Aristotelian dialectic in scholasticism's creative exploitation of Classical learning (see pp. 398-9), the Byzantine authorities were turning away from the same intellectual resources. That mood intensified in some quarters of the Church to cause further disruption in the fourteenth century.
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The recurrent Byzantine pattern of centralized recovery followed by disintegration began another cycle with the death in 1180 of the great-nephew of Alexios, Manuel I Komnenos, after nearly four decades on the throne. Over the next half-century, the sequence of attempted seizures of power, rebellions and conspiracies came at a rate of around two a year.
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The chaos provided an obvious opportunity for the Balkan and central European provinces of the empire to rebel and break away. Once more Bulgaria became an independent kingdom, Serbia also established itself as a monarchy under the long-lived Grand Zupan (Prince) Stefan Nemanja (reigned 1166-96), while the King of Hungary overran the westernmost territories of the empire. Even so, most of the various self-promoted rulers in the Balkans continued to look to Constantinople for cultural models to dignify their regimes, giving out titles and offices which reflected the pattern of the Byzantine Court. When an independent Bulgarian patriarchate was established in the early thirteenth century in T'rnovo, then the capital of the Bulgarian kingdom, the city began being called the 'Third Rome' after Old and New Rome. It was a title which much later in the sixteenth century was to be revived for a Church in a new Orthodox world whose centre lay far to the north.
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By that time, the Second Rome had fallen to the Ottoman Sultan. The roots of its fall lay in the disaster of the Fourth Crusade.

THE FOURTH CRUSADE AND ITS AFTERMATH (1204-1300)

Behind the course of the Fourth Crusade lay the ambitions of Venice for expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetians had been particularly energetic in securing trading privileges from the Byzantines. Eighty years before, they had provided a foretaste of future miseries in a crusading campaign of 1122-4 which centred on the capture of Muslim-held Tyre, but which also encompassed a great deal of raiding, mayhem and robbery in Byzantine territories around the Aegean, designed to force the Emperor into extending the concessions which they had already won. From Tyre they bore back in triumph to Venice a piece of marble on which Christ had once sat, and from Byzantine Chios the bones of St Isidore; their expedition ended with duly solemn praise of God in the
Te Deum
.
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Now, in 1201, there were plans for a new crusade: a consortium of Western European crusaders struck an ambitious deal with Venice to build them a fleet and transport them to attack Cairo. It was a reasonable proposition if they wanted to knock out Islam's chief power and proceed to Jerusalem, and if there were no military operations in Palestine itself, the agreement would respect a truce of 1198 with the Ayyubid ruler in Damascus. However, those involved disastrously miscalculated: they could not hold fellow crusaders to the agreement for the fleet, and not enough people turned up to fill the horrifically expensive array of ships.

The Venetians were not going to lose their investment. They forced the crusaders uncomfortably camping out on the Lido to fulfil their bargain in a way that would suit Venetian interests. This involved an expedition not against Muslim Cairo, but against the great Christian power of Byzantium. The crusaders had already in their company a (not very impressive) young claimant to the Byzantine imperial throne, Alexios Angelos, and so the new scheme had a ghastly plausibility.
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Pope Innocent III, originally an enthusiastic supporter of the enterprise, felt increasingly helpless at the march of events, partly thanks to the independent actions of his agent with the crusader armies, Cardinal Peter Capuano. Innocent watched horrified as in 1202 the crusaders wrecked the Adriatic city of Zara, which was actually under the overlordship of a fellow crusader, the King of Hungary, but which had made the mistake of annoying the Venetians. Much worse followed: attacks on Constantinople in 1203 and 1204, horrible deaths in quick succession for a series of Byzantine emperors, including the little-regarded Alexios, the trashing of the Christian world's wealthiest and most cultured city - in short, countless incentives for centuries of Orthodox fury against Catholics.

With no very convincing Byzantine candidate for the throne left alive in the devastated city, the way lay open for an audacious new plan: the installation of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, a Latin Westerner, as Byzantine emperor, the distribution of large expanses of Byzantine territories to crusader lords, and the formal union of the Church of Constantinople with the Church of Rome. Any notion of the armies moving east to win back the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem its capital city was quietly forgotten. Innocent was now caught between his pleasure at the fulfilment of the ancient ambition of Rome to secure Church reunion on his own terms and profound misgivings about how this had been achieved. He had initially rejoiced that the capture of the city was an obvious prelude to the end of the world and the coming of Christ in glory, and even quoted at length from the apocalyptic writings of Joachim of Fiore to express his excitement, but he quickly changed his tune. 'By that from which we appeared to have profited up to now we are impoverished; and by that from which we believed we were above all else made the greater, we are reduced', he now lamented to Peter Capuano.
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He was less than pleased that alongside the newly minted Latin Emperor Baldwin, the Venetians had elected fifteen canons as a Cathedral Chapter for Hagia Sophia without any reference to himself; the canons had in turn elected a Venetian as Patriarch of Constantinople.
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Even so, Innocent was not inclined to advocate the return of the city to heretical Greeks. His attitude to them was made plain in the fourth decree of his tame council called to the Lateran in 1215, 'On the pride of Greeks towards Latins': hardly the most apologetic of phrases after the mayhem visited on the city.
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Drab practicalities began to occupy the Pope, notably the problem of looted relics - not so much the question of the ethics of looting them, as to how to authenticate them once they had arrived in Western Europe. Decree 62 of Innocent's Lateran Council forbade sales and ordered (completely ineffectively) that all newly appearing relics should be authenticated by the Vatican.
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This flood of relics westwards affected all Europe. Far away from Byzantium on the north Norfolk coast, the priory of Bromholm found an end to its financial headaches when it installed the slightly ironically named 'Good Rood of Bromholm', a fragment of the True Cross filched from the emperor's private chapel in Constantinople, and a welcome stream of revenue from pilgrims followed.
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This was small beer compared with the coup of the enthusiastic crusader King Louis IX of France, who (ignoring the orders of the fourth Lateran Council) bought from the Venetian pawnbroker of the hard-up Latin Emperor of Byzantium the actual Crown of Thorns worn by Christ at the Crucifixion. This was a major acquisition to equal the sacred relics accumulated by Louis's Merovingian predecessors, confirming that his Capetian dynasty had inherited all their anciently earned divine favour and sanctification - and what could be more appropriate for a saintly king (canonized as early as 1297) than possession of a crown more holy than his own? As display cabinet for the crown, Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle in the royal palace complex at the centre of Paris. The fury of the French Revolution spared enough that we can still marvel at its thrillingly soaring (though now empty) space and its exuberance in sculpture and glass.
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Once the Latins had been expelled from Constantinople in 1261, duplicates of many of these purloined relics began to appear back in their original homes in the city and the Byzantines declared the restorations to be a series of miracles.
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