Latin Empire of Constantinople

A renovatio

Drafted from Tricht, The Medieval Mediterranean 90 (2011)formation

The standard account of the Latin empire is that it was not really a state. A band of French and Flemish knights held a Greek city they could not administer, extracted what they could, achieved nothing, and were evicted after fifty-seven years by the people they had displaced. It appears in most histories as an interruption in somebody else's narrative.

Van Tricht's book argues against that reading, and this account follows him.

What they said they were doing

The title is the argument. The Latin emperors did not style themselves kings of Constantinople or princes of Romania. They used the Byzantine imperial style, took over the ceremonial, kept a substantial part of the Greek administration and much of the fiscal apparatus, issued documents in Greek as well as Latin, married into the Greek aristocracy, and described what had happened as a renovatio — a renewal of the empire, not a replacement of it.

Some of that is what any conqueror claims. What makes the case worth taking seriously is that the early emperors acted on it: Henry of Flanders, the strongest ruler the empire had, spent his ten years conciliating the Greek population, restoring Orthodox clergy where the Latin hierarchy had displaced them, and recruiting Greek nobles into his administration, against the wishes of the papal legate and of most of his own barons.

So the Latin emperors claimed to be the legitimate continuation of the empire they had just destroyed, and made the claim in Greek, to Greeks, using the Greeks' own formulas.

That the claim was made by the men who had sacked the city does not make it less of a claim. What it measures is whose legitimacy was worth having — and the answer, to a Flemish count sitting in Constantinople in 1204, was obvious enough that he did not consider an alternative.

The committee of twelve

The partition treaty provided that the emperor would be chosen by twelve electors, six Venetian and six from the crusading army, and that whichever party did not get the emperor would get the patriarchate. The twelve met in the palace and chose Baldwin of Flanders over Boniface of Montferrat, who had expected it. Venice took the patriarchate.

So the empire had a written constitutional procedure for choosing its head, set out in a treaty and actually executed. What followed in practice was a family: Baldwin, then his brother Henry, then Henry's brother-in-law Peter, then Peter's sons Robert and Baldwin II. The rule was election and the outcome was a dynasty, which is the usual relationship between the two.

It also puts the Latin empire in company it would not have expected. An elective element turns up almost everywhere in this part of the world: at Rome, at Byzantium, at Venice, at Genoa, in the Holy Roman Empire. The states that were straightforwardly hereditary — the Carolingians, the Nicaean emperors — are the exceptions.

That is not a claim about the Mediterranean being unusually republican. It is what happens downstream of an empire whose own emperors held their powers by a law voted in the senate. Everybody who inherited the argument inherited the vocabulary for it, including a Flemish count elected by a committee of twelve in a palace his army had just taken.

The partition

Drafted from Villehardouin, The Chronicle of Geoffry de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, Concerning the Conquest of Constantinople (1829)expansion

The Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in April 1204, and the fullest account of how is by a man who helped organise it. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, had been one of the six envoys who negotiated the shipping contract with Venice, was present throughout, and dictated his chronicle afterwards. He never once suggests the expedition should have gone to Egypt as agreed.

His description of the fleet going in is the passage everybody quotes, and it is worth quoting because he is describing something he thought beautiful.

The pilgrims embarked on the Thursday after mid-Lent, the horses were carried in the palanders, each division in its proper vessels, and the whole fleet drawn up in a line with the ships distinct from the galleys and the transports. It was a noble prospect, he writes, for the line of battle extended more than half a French league.

The first assault failed

On the Friday morning they came up to the city and attacked. In many places the crusaders leapt ashore and charged to the walls; elsewhere the scaling ladders on the ships were brought close enough that the men on them fought the defenders hand to hand with lances across the gap.

The assault went on in more than a hundred places until nearly noon, and then — for their sins, Villehardouin says — the pilgrims were repulsed, and those who had come off the galleys and transports were driven back to them by force. The losses that day were much greater on the crusader side than the Greek, and the Greeks were greatly elated.

They came back three days later and took the city.

What the treaty said

The important document is not the assault but the agreement made before it, because it is the constitution of everything that followed.

The crusaders and the Venetians had settled in advance how the empire would be divided if they took it. A quarter went to whoever was elected emperor. The remaining three quarters were split equally between the Venetians and the non-Venetian crusaders, and a committee of six from each side would choose the emperor from among the leaders.

They elected Baldwin of Flanders. And the electors' arithmetic had an obvious consequence which nobody at the time seems to have minded: the emperor of Constantinople was to hold one quarter of an empire in which his own barons held half and a foreign republic held the rest.

What the partition actually distributed

Provinces that had not been conquered.

The treaty assigned the whole of the Byzantine empire — Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, the islands, western Anatolia, the Black Sea coast — and the crusaders held a city and the ground their army was standing on. Everything else had to be taken from Greek lords who were still in it, and much of it never was.

That is why the Latin empire's expansion phase is also, on any reading, its whole history. It spent 1204 and 1205 riding out to occupy what the parchment said was theirs, and in April 1205 the field army was destroyed at Adrianople and the process stopped for good. What had been taken by then was kept for a while. What had not been taken by then was never going to be.

The brother

Drafted from Villehardouin, The Chronicle of Geoffry de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, Concerning the Conquest of Constantinople (1829)peak

The Latin empire had one competent ruler and he got the job because his brother was captured.

When the news of Adrianople reached Henry of Flanders, he was across the water in Anatolia holding Atramyttion, which was the one part of the partition treaty the crusaders had actually made good. He abandoned it and marched for Thrace.

Villehardouin, who was among the survivors Henry was coming to rescue, records what he brought with him and what he had to leave.

Twenty thousand people who could not stay

Henry had with him the Armenians who had joined him against the Greeks — twenty thousand of them, with all their wives and children, who dared not remain behind.

They were foot soldiers encumbered with waggons and families. Henry knew they would follow, so he left them and went on ahead with the cavalry to reach the survivors faster.

That is the peak of Latin power in Anatolia described in a subordinate clause: a Frankish prince with twenty thousand Armenian allies and their households, who had thrown in with him against the Greeks and now could not be left where they were — and whom he had to abandon on the road because speed mattered more.

Two parties, both taking up arms

The detail that stays with a reader is small.

At Kartopolis, Henry's force met another Latin column, a hundred good lances and five hundred mounted sergeants, coming from the other direction to relieve the same defeat.

Each party took the other for Greeks and drew their weapons. Then they came near enough to recognise each other, and did so with great satisfaction, and felt much safer in their quarters that night for being together.

That is the empire in the summer of 1205: two small groups of Frenchmen in hostile country, unable to identify each other at a distance, glad to have found somebody.

What he did with it

Henry was crowned in 1206 and reigned ten years, and by every account he was the best ruler the Latin empire had.

He beat the Bulgarians who had destroyed his brother. He came to terms with Theodore Laskaris in Anatolia and with the Greek lords in Europe, and — the thing that distinguishes him from everyone else in the enterprise — he governed his Greek subjects as subjects rather than as a defeated population, kept their clergy, and was remembered by Greek writers as a just man, which is not a thing Greek writers said about Latins.

Villehardouin's chronicle breaks off in 1207, which is why the fullest witness to the conquest is not a witness to what it became.

And the counter-example

The same passage records the other kind of man the expedition produced.

Five ships slipped their moorings and sailed away in silence — deserters going home while the army they had come with was being destroyed. Villehardouin names the worst of them, Peter de Fréville, and says he brought upon himself, from fear of death, a shame that stayed with him all his days.

It is the only judgement of that kind in the chronicle, and it is worth noticing what the marshal thought worth condemning: not the diversion of a crusade against a Christian empire, which he helped arrange and never apologises for, but leaving early.

Fourteen months after

Drafted from Villehardouin, The Chronicle of Geoffry de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, Concerning the Conquest of Constantinople (1829)contraction

Baldwin was crowned in Hagia Sophia in May 1204. In April 1205 he was captured alive on a field outside Adrianople by the king of Bulgaria, and the marshal of Champagne, who was standing in front of one of the city gates when the survivors came back, wrote down what he saw.

Villehardouin is not a neutral witness — he had argued for the diversion to Constantinople and spends his book defending the men who made it — and the account is still devastating, because his method is to list.

The Latins had gone out against a light cavalry army of Cumans and Bulgarians and been drawn off their ground. Those near the emperor, Villehardouin says, testified that no belted knight ever fought with greater courage. The fighting went on for some time, and then some of the Franks broke, and once that started the defeat was total. The emperor and Count Louis of Blois refused to turn their backs. Louis was killed on the field. Baldwin was taken alive.

Then the list, in the flat manner of a man writing out a casualty return: Peter, bishop of Bethlehem; Stephen du Perche; Reginald de Montmirail; the brother of the count of Nevers; Matthew de Walincourt; Robert de Ronsoy; John de Friaise; Walter de Neuilly; Ferry de Yerres and his brother John; Eustace de Heumont and his brother John; Baldwin de Neuville — and many others.

What Villehardouin does next is the only creditable thing in the chapter and he puts himself in it without comment. He was posted in front of one of the gates. When the fugitives appeared he rode out with everyone he could gather, sent orders to the officer holding the other gate to follow, collected the men running off the field around his own banner, and between noon and vespers got the rout stopped. Others, he adds, were so frightened that they would not stay with their comrades at all.

Baldwin was carried into Bulgaria and shut in a tower at Tarnovo. Villehardouin's translator preserves the Greek historian's verdict on him, which is worth keeping because it comes from the people he had conquered: thirty-two years old, modest and pious, free of the licence of his countrymen, able to take contradiction without losing his temper, and given to spending his spare time in prayer or in relieving the afflicted. Nobody ever learned exactly how he died.

The empire had existed for eleven months when it lost its emperor, its second greatest lord and the flower of its knighthood in one afternoon to a power nobody in the council at Venice had considered at all. It went on existing for another fifty-six years, and never again had a field army capable of taking the offensive in Thrace.

Fourteen months

Drafted from Tricht, The Medieval Mediterranean 90 (2011)contraction

Baldwin I was crowned in May 1204. In April 1205, outside Adrianople, the Bulgarian tsar Kalojan destroyed the Latin field army with Cuman horse archers who feigned flight and drew the knights into a pursuit. Baldwin was captured and died in a Bulgarian prison; the doge Enrico Dandolo, who had directed the whole enterprise, died three months later.

Fourteen months after the conquest the empire had lost its emperor, its army and the man who had made it, and it never rebuilt a force capable of offensive war.

What it actually held

Very little, and shrinking.

The partition treaty had assigned the Latin emperor a quarter of the Byzantine empire and his vassals the rest, but the treaty distributed provinces that had to be conquered first, and most never were. Bulgaria held Thrace's interior. Nicaea held western Anatolia within a decade. Epirus held the west. The Greek territories the crusaders did hold in Greece — the principality of Achaea, the duchy of Athens — were vassals in name and independent in practice, richer than the emperor and disinclined to help.

By the 1230s the Latin empire was Constantinople, its immediate suburbs, and a strip of coast. The emperor was the poorest ruler in his own hierarchy.

The lead off the roof

On paper the empire lived on the land tax it had inherited from Byzantium, and it had almost no land to apply it to. What it actually lived on has no ordinary name: the empire sold the city.

Baldwin II, its last emperor, spent most of his reign travelling in western Europe asking for money. He sold or pawned relics — the Crown of Thorns went to Venetian merchants as security for a loan and was redeemed by Louis IX of France, who built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house it, and a long list of others followed. He is reported to have had the lead stripped from the roofs of the imperial palaces and sold. At one point he pledged his own son Philip to Venetian creditors as security, and the boy was held in Venice for years until a Castilian merchant redeemed him.

There is no term for a state whose principal income is the sale of its predecessor's property, because states do not usually last long enough doing it to need one. A good deal of the treasury of medieval western Europe — the relics at the Sainte-Chapelle, the bronze horses at San Marco, reliquaries in a dozen cathedrals — is where it went.

1235, and the thing that kept it alive

In 1235 John Vatatzes of Nicaea and Ivan Asen II of Bulgaria besieged the city together, by land and by sea, and were driven off by a Venetian fleet and a small Frankish relief force.

That is the last time the empire defended itself successfully, and it demonstrates what had been true since 1205: the city could not be taken by anybody who did not control the sea, and Venice did. The Latin empire survived fifty-seven years because a commercial republic found it convenient, and Venice's own records are candid that the convenience was the three-eighths of the Byzantine empire the partition had given it.

The last chapter is what happened when the fleet was somewhere else.

An afternoon

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)end

In July 1261 a Nicaean commander named Alexios Strategopoulos was passing near Constantinople with a force of about eight hundred, on an errand that had nothing to do with it. Local farmers told him the garrison had gone off on a raid against a Nicaean island and that the Venetian fleet had gone with it. A group got in through a postern or over the wall — the accounts differ — opened a gate, and the city changed hands.

Baldwin II left his crown and sword behind in the palace and took ship. Michael VIII Palaiologos, who was three hundred kilometres away and did not hear for several days, entered in August and was crowned in Hagia Sophia.

Two conquests of the same city

There is a symmetry worth noticing. In 1204 Constantinople was taken by a fleet and an army, after a siege, a failed assault, a second assault and a three-day sack. In 1261 it was taken by eight hundred men who happened to be walking past and were told by farmers that the garrison was out.

The same wall, the same century, and the word for what happened is the same in both cases.

Fifty-seven years of what

The same day looks different from the other side. Recovering Constantinople cost the restorers the Anatolian base that had made the recovery possible, and the frontier they stopped watching is where the Ottomans came from.

The conclusion from this side is narrower and worth stating alongside it. A polity that had survived on somebody else's navy ended on an afternoon when the navy was elsewhere. Nothing about 1261 was a judgement on the Latin empire's government; it was a judgement on its position.

Whether the government was any good is the question Van Tricht reopened. What can be said is that it had a written constitutional procedure for choosing its head, an inherited fiscal system it could not apply, an army of enfeoffed knights destroyed in its first year, and a claim on the legitimacy of the empire it had overthrown, made in Greek.

What outlasted it

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)afterlife

The empire lasted fifty-seven years. Several of the things it created lasted very much longer, and one of them is still in a treasury in Paris.

In the Aegean

In the Aegean, rather a lot. The principality of Achaea lasted until 1432, the duchy of Athens until 1456 under Catalan and then Florentine rulers, and the Venetian islands until the seventeenth century — Latin states on Greek ground that outlasted the empire that spawned them by up to two hundred years.

In Constantinople, almost nothing. The Latin patriarchate collapsed with the empire and left no hierarchy behind: fifty-seven years of a rival church in Hagia Sophia produced no congregation that survived the day the Greeks came back. What was left was a city with a quarter of its former population, no treasury, and its bronze and its relics in Venice and Paris — the condition Byzantium spent its last two centuries in.

The titular emperors

The other survival is a claim, and it is a small comedy.

Baldwin II spent the rest of his life as emperor of Constantinople without Constantinople, and the title descended to his son and then out of the family altogether — sold, inherited and married into among the princely houses of Italy and France for the next century and a half. Its holders occasionally raised money on it. None of them ever went east.

That is the ordinary fate of a title separated from its territory, and it is worth setting beside what happened to the other imperial claim in the same city. When Constantinople fell for the second time, in 1453, the conqueror took the Roman title himself and meant it: Mehmed II called himself Kayser-i Rum and behaved accordingly. A Turkish sultan's claim on the Roman name outlived the Latin claim on it, and was taken more seriously in Europe.

The one that mattered

The lasting consequence was not in Greece or in Paris but in the relationship between the two halves of Christendom.

Before 1204 the schism between the Latin and Greek churches was a quarrel among theologians and patriarchs, conducted in letters, periodically patched up. After 1204 it was a memory of the sack of a Christian capital by a crusading army, the installation of a Latin patriarch in Hagia Sophia, and fifty-seven years of occupation.

Every subsequent attempt at reunion — and there were several, all driven by Byzantine emperors who needed western troops — foundered on a population that would not have it. The best-documented remark of the period, whether or not anybody actually said it, is that the turban of the Turk was preferable to the Latin mitre. In 1453 the western help that arrived was a few hundred Genoese.

The Latin empire was a fifty-seven-year state that held a city and a coastal strip and could not feed itself. What it did was make the reunion of the churches impossible, at the beginning of the two centuries in which Byzantium's survival depended on it.