Chapter XXXII: 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.