Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

Armed bands went roving through the city in an orgy of destruction. Nothing was sacred in the frenzied search for riches. Tombs were smashed open, reliquaries had their contents flung aside, and priceless manuscripts were hacked apart to extract the jeweled coverings. Churches were desecrated, women defiled, and palaces pulled down. Neither the living nor the dead were spared. The lid of Justinian’s magnificent sarcophagus was cracked open, and though the sight of his preserved corpse gave the vandals a momentary pause, it couldn’t stop them from hurling it aside to get at the golden vestments and silver ornaments.

For three days, the fire and the looting continued unabated, and what escaped the clutches of one was inevitably claimed by the other. When silence finally settled on the shocked and shattered city, even the crusaders were taken aback by the amount of plunder. No city, one of them wrote, had produced such loot since the creation of the world.

Of all the crusaders, only the Venetians thought to preserve—not destroy—the priceless artifacts that had fallen into their power. They knew beauty when they saw it, and while the rest of the army hacked apart classical statues, melted down the precious metals, and divided the spoils, the Venetians sent back the works of art to adorn their city on the lagoon. *

For Dandolo, it had been a remarkable triumph. Venetian commercial power was guaranteed for the foreseeable future, and her main rivals of Pisa and Genoa were completely excluded. The old doge had effortlessly hijacked the armed might of Europe and used it to his advantage, disregarding threats of excommunication along the way and ensuring Venetian greatness for decades to come. But in doing so he had perpetrated one of the great tragedies of human history. Byzantium, the mighty Christian bulwark that had sheltered western Europe from the rising tide of Islam for so many centuries, had been shattered beyond repair—wrecked by men who claimed that they were serving God. Blinded by their avarice and manipulated by the doge, the crusading leaders broke the great Christian power of the East, condemning the crippled remnants—and much of eastern Europe—to five centuries of a living death under the heel of the Turks.

After the events of the Fourth Crusade, the already deep divide between East and West stretched into a yawning chasm that was truly irreconcilable. The crusading spirit, which had started out as a desire to help Christian brothers in the East, was revealed as a horrendous mockery. In the name of God, they had come with hardened hearts and cruel swords to kill and maim, to plunder and destroy—and in the work of a moment they had broken the altars and smashed the icons that generations of the faithful had venerated. Once the riches drifted away and the palaces subsided in ruins, the West eventually lost interest and turned away, but the East never forgot. Watching the crusaders walk their charred and blackened streets, the Byzantines knew that these men with the cross sewn brightly over their armor could no longer be considered Christians at all. Let the powers of Islam come, they thought. Better to be ruled by an infidel than these heretics who made a mockery of Christ.

*By the time he came to the throne he had already seduced no fewer than two of his nieces. *Like King Arthur in Britain, a legend soon grew up that Barbarossa wasn’t dead but merely asleep in the brooding mountains of Germany. He will arise—so the story goes—when ravens cease to fly, and restore Germany to her ancient greatness. *Murtzuphlus means “downcast” or “depressed.” Alexius’s real name was Ducas, but since he had unusually bushy eyebrows that gave him a permanently despondent look, he was universally known by the nickname Murtzuphlus. *Where a large part of it still remains. One Venetian in particular climbed on the Carceres—the monumental gate to the Hippodrome—and removed four life-size bronze horses. Once shipped to Venice, they were brought to Saint Mark’s, where they can still be seen today.

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T HE E MPIRE IN E XILE

When Pope Innocent III was informed of the sacking of Constantinople, he understood at once the damage that had been done. Furiously excommunicating everyone who had taken part, he wondered aloud how the dream of church unity could ever now occur. How could the Greeks, he wrote to his legates, ever forgive their Catholic brothers, whose swords still dripped with Christian blood, and who had betrayed and violated their holiest shrines? *Eastern Christians, he concluded with good reason, now detested Latins more than dogs.

The new masters of Constantinople, meanwhile, seemed determined to increase the native resentment. In a hastily cleaned Hagia Sophia, where a few days before a prostitute had been mockingly perched on the patriarchal throne, a Latin emperor was crowned, and the feudal arrangements of the West were forced on the corpse of the Byzantine Empire. The various nobles were rewarded with large estates, and a patchwork of semi-independent kingdoms replaced the single authority of the emperor. A crusader knight seized Macedonia, calling himself the king of Thessaloniki, and another set himself up as the lord of Athens. *Not even in its most advanced decay had the Byzantine state been as powerless as the Latin one that took its place.

Remarkably enough, given the deplorable state of the capital, the vast majority of Byzantines in the countryside were reasonably well off. As the central authority of the emperors had weakened in the years before the Fourth Crusade, the towns and villages of Byzantium had flourished. Merchants of the West, the East, and the Islamic world converged in fairs held throughout the empire, where they displayed exotic wares from as far away as Russia, India, China, and Africa. The urban population boomed, and since the corrupt and paralyzed imperial government was unable to collect taxes, the wealth stayed in private hands. Emperors could no longer afford their lavish building programs as the treasury dried up, but private citizens could, and the cities became showpieces for personal fortunes. A new spirit of humanism was in the air, along with an intellectual curiosity. Byzantine art, which had been stylized for centuries, became suddenly more lifelike; writers began to depart from the cluttered, archaic styles of antiquity; and individual patrons of the arts sponsored vibrant local styles in the frescoes and mosaics of their villas. The spirit of Byzantium was flowering even as imperial fortunes declined, and not even the terrible trauma of the Fourth Crusade could dampen it for long.

Despite the resilience of its culture and economy, the empire’s power seemed irretrievably lost. Alexius Murtzuphlus had tried to organize a counteroffensive with his fellow emperor-in-exile Alexius III, but his idiotic colleague had betrayed him, and the crusaders had flung Murtzuphlus to his death from the top of the Theodosian column. In remote Trebizond on the shores of the Black Sea, the grandsons of Andronicus the Terrible declared themselves the rightful emperors; while at Epirus, the great-grandson of Alexius Comnenus claimed the same thing. The most powerful and important fragment of the empire, however, was centered at Nicaea, where the patriarch crowned Alexius III’s son-in-law Theodore Lascaris as emperor.

As refugees and wealth poured into the Nicene haven of the Orthodox faith and Byzantine culture, the crusader’s Latin Empire of Constantinople grew progressively weaker. Within a year, a Bulgarian army had effectively broken its power, destroying its army, capturing the impotent emperor, and allowing Theodore Lascaris to reconquer most of northwestern Asia Minor. Instead of confronting the obvious danger of Nicaea, however, successive Latin emperors concentrated on extracting wealth from the citizens of Constantinople, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of palace life.