The Greeks after Alexander the Great required to be paid, fiery champions who paid themselves; instead of helpers for the emperor, warriors greedy for their own profit and despisers of treaties - it was with horror that men looked on the migration of Western barbarians, who plundered the Greek islands and coasts. The "more upright" (áλovoтepot) formed the minority among them, while the "poorer," who wished to rob, were in the majority. The personal charm which radiated from Alexius and reflects itself most vividly in the accounts of the Crusader princes, as, for example, in the letter of Count Stephen of Blois, helped to lessen the difficulties; even Godfrey de Bouillon, who at first was extremely hostile to the emperor, could not escape this influence and took the oath of fealty. The mass of the people had openly made Alexius, the "worthless," the "treacherous," responsible for all losses and disasters, and repeated disdainful epigrams, such as Alexius uttered about the struggle of the Turks and Franks, "as important as if two dogs were biting each other." The Norman Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, had at first submitted to the emperor a plan for making himself an independent sovereign, but in the end he took the oath of fealty. After the conquest of Antioch he wished to keep this most important town in his own hands. He could only do this if he appealed for help to the authority of the papacy against the heretics of Byzantium. Urban II, however, in the councils of Bari and Rome, advocated the reconciliation of the churches. His successor Paschal II (1099-1118) first attempted by his papal legate to support Bohemund, who himself came to Europe in order to make capital out of the current prejudice against the Greeks and to divert the dangerous attacks of the Byzantine emperor on Antioch by a crusade of Europe against Byzantium. But he could not raise the mighty storm which, in his own words, was necessary in order to uproot the lofty oak, although he preached from the pulpit in Chartres that the crusaders against Byzantium would obtain the richest towns, and often forced the conviction on minds irritated against the emperor that a successful crusade could only begin with the war against Byzantium. Owing to the energy of the Comneni a full century was still to elapse before these ideas were matured. In the peace of 1107-1108, which followed on a severe defeat near Durazzo, Bohemund was forced to renew the oath of fealty for his sadly diminished principality of Antioch, which was to become again Greek,- ecclesiastically so at once, and politically after Bohemund's death (1111). On the other hand the promise of the subjection of the Crusaders by Alexius had less importance. The severe defeat of the papacy in 1111 (Vol. VI) induced Alexius then to offer the papacy protection and union in return for the imperial Roman crown, which offer Paschal II declared possible under the proviso that Alexius subjected himself (the members to the head) and abandoned his obduracy. 1 (b) The Extent and Population of the Empire. In 1100 the East Roman Empire embraced the Balkan Peninsula, including Bulgaria, as far as the Danube. Servia, Bosnia, and Croatia had been lost. The southern Crimea was subject to Byzantium; the southern coast of the Black Sea, with Trebizond, was only taken from Gregory, prince of Georgia, in 1107, and he was enfeoffed with it in 1108. The islands of the Egean Sea, Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus were Byzantine. This sovereignty was, it must be acknowledged, only nominal in many places. A rebellion caused by the pressure of taxation still surged in Crete and Cyprus; in Rhodes the pirates were the virtual rulers. The charter of the monastery of Christodulus on Patmos, dating from April, 1088, shows how that island was a wilderness, overgrown with thorns and treeless, without any buildings except a miserable chapel inside an ancient temple. Even this deserted rock was incessantly harassed by attacks of Turks and Christian pirates, who had driven St. Christodule from Mount Leros in the vicinity of Halicarnassus to Cos, and finally to Patmos. The old naval provinces of Asia Minor, from which the fleet was recruited, had fallen into the hands of the Turks as far as the Sea of Marmora. The Turk Tzachas, formerly in the Greek service, had with the title of emperor ruled from Smyrna not merely over the surrounding country, but also over Chios, Samos, and the greater part of Lesbos, which only became once more Byzantine after 1092. Under such conditions we must consider it merely a faint echo of the times of greatness (cf. the map "Western Asia at the Time of the Caliphs on p. 332 of Vol. III), if the phrase "the fleet is the glory of Romania" is still heard. The population was a motley mixture. Traders flocked together from every quarter of the world, not merely into the capital, but to the October fair at Thessalonica and to Halmyrus. The great traveller, the Jew Benjamin of Tudela († 1173), testifies to this state of things at Byzantium under Manuel: "merchants from Bagdad, Mesopotamia, Media, Persia, Egypt, Palestine, Russia, Hungary, the country of the Pecheneges, Italy, and Spain." The Greek population had then revived, and lived in crowded villages and towns. Arcadia, Lacedæmon, Astypalaia, Achrida, Joannina, Castoria, Larissa, Platamuna, Cytros, Dyrrhachium, Chimara, Buthroton, Corcyra, are mentioned as Greek towns by the Arab Edrisi, who wrote at the commission of Roger II. On the western slopes of Parnon, between the modern towns of Lenidi (vaòs Toû 'Ayiov Aewvidov, deed of 1292) and Hagios Andreas lived the Tsakons, descendants of the old Laconians (eg 'Axwvías?); it was here that the population with its ancient names had retained the greatest purity. Slavonic immigrations had almost submerged the old Greek race. Jewish colonists, Albanians, and Wallachians pushed their way into the Greek peninsula. A province of Thessaly was called Great Wallachia, and we find Wallachians in the army. The cities of western Italy began slowly to plant their colonies in the crevices of this tottering empire. The disintegrating force of this luxuriant foreign growth must not be underestimated when we consider the progress of Byzantine decay. It is not the profit-making powers of trade that we must consider, but that of the colonial system, which ventured to work in the sinking Byzantine Empire with its own surplus of capital and surplus of hands. The system of forced labour, which employed the former Byzantine serfs as if they were full slaves, created for the Italian communities those riches which we should never comprehend as a result of the Levant trade alone. (c) Dreams of Empire down to the Death of Andronicus (1185).—John II Comnenus (1118-1143), also called John the Handsome, averted by his moderation the ambitious efforts of his sister Anna (cf. p. 92) to place on the throne her husband Nicephorus Bryennius the younger; he also fought with success against the Pecheneges (1122), Servians (1123), and Hungarians, and in Asia against the Seljuks (1126-1137) and Armenians (1137). The treaty of 1108 was The Greeks after Alexander the Great renewed, in 1137, with Bohemund I, successor of Raimund of Poitou,1 on the terms that Antioch should be surrendered to the Greek throne, but that a territory on Turkish soil, Haleb and the petty towns on the upper Orontes (still, however, to be conquered), should be ceded to Raimund as a hereditary fief. The action of the emperor against Antioch was sharply censured by Pope Innocent II in the bull of 1138; the Latins were ordered to withdraw from his company and his service. The Byzantine clergy then felt the widening of the gulf which separated them from the papacy. "The Pope is Emperor and no Pope," said a Greek who was staying at Monte Cassino; and the Archbishop of Thessalonica bluntly rejected the claim of Rome "to send her orders thus from on high," since the Greeks, "to whom the knowledge of science, the learning of their masters, and the brilliant intellects of Hellenism were useless," thus became slaves. Gentle and wise, never enforcing a death penalty, thrifty, since he curtailed the luxury of the court and left behind him a well-filled treasury, John enhanced the glory of the empire and extended its frontiers. Only Italy was definitely given up; Naples, the last possessio of Byzantium on Italian soil, became Norman in 1138. The attempt to withdraw from the iron grip of Venice proved a failure, since the latter proceeded to ravage the islands. The ideas of West European chivalry united with Byzantine culture and statesmanship in the person of the fourth son of the emperor John, Manuel I Comnenus (1143-1180). We cannot indeed appeal to the testimony of the ever laudatory hack-poet Theodoros Prodromos, who wrote witty and pleasing verse on everything which could bring money to his purse; but we have better authorities in the historians Cinnamus (a soldier skilful in his profession) and Nicetas Acominatus, who continued the work of Anna Comnena. The rash daring with which the emperor, escorted by two faithful followers, made his way through a dense Turkish army, charged alone with the standard against the Hungarian ranks, and after the crossing of the Save did not actually burn his boats but sent them back; his return with four Turks bound to his saddle-bow; his acceptance of a challenge to single combats in honour of his wife; and the skill with which, in the lists at Antioch, he hurled two Latin knights out of their saddles, all this brought him nearer to the Western chivalry. He seemed to be an Occidental among the Greeks. And in admirable harmony with the whole picture is his German wife, Bertha of Sulzbach, sister-in-law of Conrad III, who, in defiance of the stately etiquette of the Byzantine senate and court, gave expression to her joyful admiration of her heroic husband. Even the superstitious liking for astrology, which the emperor defended in a treatise of his own composition, forms a natural pendant to this. Natives of the West received high posts in the army and the government. The great Western shield and the long lances were now introduced into Byzantium. 1 Robert Guiscard of Apulia, † 1085 Bohemund of Antioch (after 1098), † March 7, 1111, Bohemund II, *1108, † Febr. 1130 Elise, d. of Baldwin II of Jerusalem, † c. 1136 Constantia 1136 = Raimund I of Poitou, son of William of Aquitaine, † June 29, 1149 Bohemund III, † 1201 The way seemed paved for a reconciliation between East and West, and at this price the Roman and Greek Churches, according to Manuel's view, might be united under a Roman primate. Pope Alexander III lent a willing ear to these proposals, so long as he found himself in conflict with Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1161). Then the cardinal-presbyter William of Pavia spoke quite in the Byzantine spirit of the oppression which the tyranny of the barbarians had brought on the Church since the name of emperor had been arrogated by them. In this sense the sanguine spirit of Manuel was understood, when he wished in the year 1175 to win the co-operation of the West by a new crusade. But the Greek clergy were quite opposed to the union, and the parallel of the wandering sheep was indignantly repudiated by the Greek Church with the remark that it had not added anything to the creed (cf. p. 80). The clouds in the West lowered threateningly. Barbarossa at the end of 1177 wrote to the emperor Manuel that not merely the Roman imperium, but also the Greek Empire, must be at his beck and nod and administered under his suzerainty. In the theory of the two swords there was no room for a Greek empire; Frederick even offered his services as an arbiter in Greek ecclesiastical disputes. Thus in the West, twenty-seven years before the annihilation of the Greek Empire, political doctrines were started which simply denied the existence of the Greek imperial crown. It was of little importance, then, in view of the failure to win over the Curia and to conduct successfully the diplomatic war against the Western empire, that Manuel had his own party in Rome, Venice, Dalmatia, and Hungary, or that he hoped to gain the crusading States by great undertakings on their behalf, and the good-will of the Latins generally by trade concessions, or the education of Ragusan nobles at the cost of the State. The calamitous defeat near the sources of the Mæander, at Myriocephalon, 1176, which Manuel sustained at the hands of Izz ed-dîn Kilij-Arslan (1156-1193; Vol. III, p. 372), was, it is true, quickly retrieved by two great victories, but the intense energy of Manuel was broken. The ascendancy of Barbarossa and his own defeat show that his life-work as a statesman and a soldier had not been successful. Under Alexius II (1180-1183), a minor for whom his mother Maria of Antioch governed, the smouldering hatred of the Greeks for the Latins burst into flame. The unscrupulous exactions of labour-service and money imposed by the Occidentals were terribly revenged on May 2, 1182. Andronicus (I) Comnenus, the Alcibiades of the Middle Byzantine Empire, stirred up this rebellion and, as a liberator, occupied the highest place in the empire in 1183, first as co-regent, and after the murder of Alexius (1184) as sole ruler. A favourite with women, of infatuating personal charm, an orator whose flood of eloquence no hearer could resist, an admirable general, a distinguished administrator of the empire, whose great landowners and feudal nobility he remorselessly attacked, he was the most exemplary ruler, and the most unscrupulous of men in his private life. Once more the administration was to be altered, bureaucracy terminated, and the refractory grandees crushed with iron strength and condemned for high treason. But when the avenging massacre of the Latins at Thessalonica (August 24, 1185) and the restriction of the games exasperated the people, Isaac Angelus, who had been spared during the proscription, was chosen emperor on September 12, 1185, after turbulent meetings of the electors. Thus ended the era of peace in which "every man sat quietly under the shade of his own vine and fig-tree," in which The Greeks after Alexander the Great canals and aqueducts had been planned, taxes lessened, and the population of the empire amazingly augmented. The scenes after the fall of Andronicus, when the mob robbed and pillaged in the palace, the arsenal, and the church, as if in an enemy's country, throw a lurid light on the condition of the capital. M. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE EMPIRE UNDER THE HOUSE OF ANGELUS (1185-1204) THE reigns of Isaac II Angelus (1185-1195) and his brother Alexius III (1195-1203) mark the complete decline of the empire. The mob and the capital play the chief rôle. The weakness of the government, which could no longer ward off plundering inroads, was apparent to all its subjects. The collection of taxes on the marriage of Isaac II weighed especially heavily on the Bulgarians and Wallachians. Peter and John Asên, two brothers of the old stock of the Bulgarian czars, who had grown up among the Wallachians and were familiar with their language and beloved by the people, took advantage of political discontent and religious enthusiasm to stir up revolt; Peter became Czar of the Bulgarians and Greeks (1185). The new empire was supported by the Servian prince Nemanja. The alliance with Frederick I Barbarossa did not indeed lead, as had been hoped, to a recognition of the imperial style, and the Servian king Stephen II Nemanja was defeated by Isaac in 1194, while John was murdered in 1196 and his brother Peter in 1197; but nevertheless Calojan (1197-1207) was able to rule over a realm which extended from Belgrade to the lower Maritza and Agathopolis, from the mouths of the Danube to the Strymon and the upper Vardar. The imperial army of Isaac, whose commander Alexius Branas proclaimed himself emperor, was defeated by Conrad of Montferrat, with a force composed of Franks, Varangians, Turkish and Georgian merchants. The non-Greeks already decided the destinies of Byzantium. The army, which already was mostly nonGreek, was strengthened by colonists and Hungarian mercenaries abroad. The defeat of Adrianople, as well as the crusade of the emperor Barbarossa, showed the complete feebleness of the generals and the army. Of the former dominions of the empire Macedonia and Thrace were in the possession of the Bulgarians. Corfu,1 Cephallenia, Zacynthus were held by Margaritone of Brindisi, who was first an admiral of Tancred's, then a private on his own account. A tribute of fifty and later of fifteen hundredweights of gold was asked by the Emperor Henry VI for the territory from Dyrrhachium to Thessalonica. The fabric of the empire was cracking in every joint. Archons rose up in particular towns and districts and exercised a completely independent sovereignty. Where imperial officials, "privileged pirates," still governed or appeared, they only extorted taxes for Byzantium, for themselves, and for a retinue of rapacious underlings, so that—as in the period of the taille under Louis XIV - the inhabitants preferred to leave the fields uncultivated and fled. Archbishop Michael Acominatus of Athens, a native of Asia Minor, unfolds a thrilling picture of that age of misery. He gallantly defended the Acropolis against the Archon Leo Sgurus of Nauplia and pointed out the privileges of his residence, which no one now respected. Although Athens still retained a reflection 1 From κορυφός instead of κορυφή = rocks ; Corifus in Liutprand as early as 968. VOL. V-7 |