and of sup Byzantine Empire had to deal. It is, in fact, in reading the history of so gigantic a failure, that we realise what the strength of that Empire had been which had been able to hold its own against the Turks. The Crusaders in their dealings with the same enemy had had a similar experience. The imperial troops had also won almost every battle, had inflicted crushing defeats upon the Turks, had reconquered the country again and again, but new hordes, ever pressing into Asia Minor from Central Asia, had enabled the enemy to fight successfully for Islam and to drain away the strength of the Empire by ever-renewed struggles. Two years after the departure of Richard, namely, in 1195, the truce which he had concluded was broken. Saladin died suddenly in 1195, and his empire was at once divided. One of his sons named Aziz took Egypt, the eldest named Afdal became possessed of Palestine and Damascus, and a third, Dahir, of Aleppo. Saladin's brother Malek-Adel seized Mesopotamia. When Aziz and Afdal quarrelled, MalekAdel took advantage of their differences to make himself sultan and became master of Egypt, where as we shall see he played an important part in the outrage of the fourth crusade. At the end of 1196, Henry the Sixth, the Swabian sucplementary expedition. cessor of Frederic, determined to undertake a crusade, and for this purpose sent an embassy to Constantinople to make exorbitant demands on the new Emperor Alexis. This crusade, which may be regarded as supplementary to the third, lasted but a few months and was a miserable failure. The Emperor of the New Rome dreaded the passage of the Crusaders through his territory, and for the first time in Byzantine history, says Nicetas, the Emperor determined to buy peace. Five thousand pounds of gold were promised to Henry as an annual contribution towards the crusade. The Emperor levied a 'German tax' on the people in order to raise this sum, and for this purpose assembled what we may describe as the three estates of the realm, the senate, the clergy, and the guilds which represented the artizans. The people, however, refused to pay the new tax, and the Emperor was reduced to the necessity of raising what he could from the treasures of the churches. In 1197, Henry died at Messina, much to the relief of the population of the Two Sicilies and of Constantinople, and before the money which had been collected was remitted. The failure of the third crusade and of the supplementary Increase of ill-feeling expedition increased the bitter feeling in the West towards towards the the Empire of the East. Again was the cry raised that the Empire heterodox Empire had betrayed Christendom. Instead of assisting the soldiers of the West, Alexis was accused of giving aid and support to the Saracens and the Turks. The failures which were due to the division of the Crusaders themselves, to the quarrels between Philip and Richard, and later on to those between Richard and Conrad, and to the opposition of the Turks and Saracens, were set down to the intrigues of the Byzantine emperors. Even the dreadful mortality among the Army of the Cross in Asia Minor and in Syria was charged to the same account. The Greeks had poisoned the wells, had infected the provisions, had diverted the water-courses. No crime was too monstrous to attribute to those who had for the most part been passive spectators of the sufferings of the Cross. Those who were not with us were against us,' says one of the chroniclers. It must not be forgotten that during the whole period of the crusades, and to the last, this sentiment of hostility was increased by the great importance which the popes attached to the schism of the Orthodox Church. The history of the century had been one long effort to endeavour to persuade or to frighten the rulers of Constantinople into acknowledging the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. As these failed many attempts were made, and especially during the last twenty years of the twelfth century, to detach from Constantinople the various churches which had hitherto acknowledged the authority of its patriarch. Considerable success had rewarded these efforts so far as the Armenians were concerned. Innocent the Third continued them with the energy which he threw into everything which he undertook. In 1199 he had induced a provincial council in Dalmatia to accept the Roman rite by promising aid against the King of Hungary. In the same added to by ecclesiastical dif ferences. year he had sent a legate to Constantinople and an agent to John of Bulgaria, to negotiate the establishment of a patriarchate, and to give that pretender the crown which the Emperor denied. Two years later he sent an embassy to Servia to detach the Servians from Constantinople. Like his predecessors, he too made many attempts at Constantinople to persuade its rulers to accept the authority of the Elder Rome. All these various attempts show how great was the importance attached to this question by the popes. The feeling of irritation at their non-success found expression among the Crusaders in bitter hatred for the schismatics. It would be easy to give illustrations of this bitterness. No acts done by Protestants against Roman Catholics, or vice versâ, exceed in barbarity the treatment of the Greek priests and their worship as described by Eustathius of Salonica, and these acts can only be attributed to religious hatred. Thus it came about that having in the third crusade begun by cordially hating the members of a heretical church, they ended by attributing their own blunders, failures, and crimes to the interference of those whom they thus hated. This feeling bore bitter fruit when almost immediately afterwards the fourth crusade was organised, and was undoubtedly one of the principal causes which, as we shall see, enabled its leaders to divert the expedition from its lawful and intended purpose into an attack upon a Christian city. In another manner the crusades contributed directly to the capture of Constantinople. They had shown to the West how greatly the power of the Byzantine Empire had been lessened. Constantinople was still a city which had never been captured, but the weakness of its emperors, the ease with which dynastic changes had been made, and the continual troubles which existed within the city, led the military leaders of the West to believe that she would be unable to resist a combined attack by land and sea. The crusades had thus not only largely contributed to the weakening of the Empire, but they had shown that weakness to the West in a way which directly invited invasion. 133 CHAPTER VI. WEAKENING OF THE EMPIRE BY ATTACKS FROM THE WEST. 1. From Normans of Sicily. AMONG the troubles of the last century and a half preceding the capture of Constantinople which came from the side of Europe, the most serious were those which were caused by the inhabitants of Italy. At the very time that our fathers were feeling the heavy hand of the Normans from France, the Byzantine Empire was being weakened by their kinsmen in Italy, and that at the moment when it had need of all its strength to resist the Asiatic hordes who were pouring into it. The population of the Two Sicilies was during the eleventh century still mainly Greek. The language, except among the Arab-speaking Mahometans, was not Italian but Greek. Several cities in Southern Italy still admitted the rule of the New Rome. The Normans had, however, conquered and settled many portions of Southern Italy, and in 1062 had won the island of Sicily from its Saracen conquerors. Robert Wiscard, and under him his son Bohemund, led the Normans into Epirus and Thessaly, and waged war upon the Emperor Alexis with considerable success until 1085, when, with the death of Robert, the Norman projects of conquest in the Byzantine empire came, for a time, to an end. The war had been costly to the Empire. Durazzo had been captured by the Sicilian Normans after a long siege, in which the enemy had been once severely defeated by the Greek commander. After its capture, owing to the jealousy of Alexis of his own general, Robert had pushed across to Larissa, and the Empire had been hard pressed to recapture that city. Alexis had been in such straits that he had obtained 7,000 light cavalry Progress of Normans in Sicily. from Suliman, Sultan of Nicæa, to assist him. In 1107, Bohemund again invaded the Empire. His army, as Finlay' remarks, resembled that with which William the Norman conquered England. It was composed of experienced military adventurers who joined Bohemund in the hope of plunder. The Adriatic was crossed nearly at its narrowest part, and siege was again laid to Dyrrachium, the modern Durazzo. Alexis concluded a treaty with Faliero, the Doge of Venice, by which the republic was to aid in the war against Bohemund. By the energy of Alexis and the assistance of the Waring guard, the enemy was worn out, and Bohemund had, in 1108, to sue for peace and to accept it on humiliating terms. In the treaty 2 the invader declares that he repents him of what he has done; that he wishes to become for the future the liegeman, the servant, and the subject of the Empire; that he will fight all enemies of the Emperor; that, in regard to cities which the Emperor may choose to give him, he will receive the oath of fidelity from no one, and will take it to no one but the Emperor. All these promises he swears to observe by the passion of Christ who is now passionless, by the cross which is invincible, by the gospels which have conquered the world, and by the crown of thorns, the nails, and the holy lance. In 1130, when Roger the Norman became king of the Two Sicilies, his investiture was made by a legate of the Pope. This was in itself a denial of the suzerainty of, and a formal and successful attempt to detach the kingdoms from, the New Rome, and was so regarded on both sides. The power and title of the Roman emperor was in the West held at this time by a German king. Roger made an alliance with Conrad against the Roman Emperor in the East. A desultory war followed, which was continued by William, the son of Roger, who conducted it with an energy and thoroughness which would have done credit to his namesake in England. William captured Corfu, sent his fleets into the Ægean, pillaged Corinth and several islands of the Archipelago. In 1156 a ' Finlay, ii. 145. Byzantine and Greek Empires. |