in the summer of 1192 Richard I. had been advised by his counsellors that Cairo and not Jerusalem was the true point of attack; while in 1200 there was the additional reason for preferring an attack on Egypt, that the truce in the Holy Land between Amalric II. and Malik-al-Adil had still three years to run. It is Egypt therefore—to which, it must be remembered, the centre of Mahommedan power had now been virtually shifted, and to which motives of trade impelled the Italian towns (since from it they could easily reach the Red Sea, and the commerce of the Indian Ocean)—it is Egypt which is henceforth the normal goal of the Crusades. This is one of the many facts which differentiate the Crusades of the 13th from those of the preceding century. But, with Syria in the hands of the Mahommedans, the attack on Egypt must necessarily be directed by sea; and thus the Crusade henceforth becomes—what the Third Crusade, here as elsewhere the turning-point in crusading history, had already in part been—a maritime enterprise. Accordingly, early in 1201, envoys from each of the three chiefs of the Fourth Crusade (among whom was Villehardouin, the historian of the Crusade) came to Venice to negotiate for a passage to Egypt. An agreement was made between the doge and the envoys, by which transport and active help were to be given by Venice in return for 85,000 marks and the cession of half of the conquests made by the crusaders. But the Fourth Crusade was not to be plain sailing to Egypt. It became involved in a maelstrom of conflicting political motives, by which it was swept to Constantinople. Here we must distinguish between cause and occasion. There were three great causes which made for an attack on Constantinople by the West. There was first of all the old crusading grudge against the Eastern empire, and its fatal policy of regarding the whole of the Levant as its lost provinces, to be restored as soon as conquered, or at any rate held in fee, by the Western crusaders—a policy which led the Eastern emperors either to give niggardly aid or to pursue obstructive tactics, and caused them to be blamed for the failure of the Crusades in 1101, and 1149, and in 1190. It is significant of the final result of these things that already in 1147 Roger of Sicily, engaged in war with Manuel, had proposed the sea-route for the Second Crusade, perhaps with some intention of diverting it against Constantinople; and in the winter of 1189–1190 Barbarossa, as we have seen, had actually thought and spoken of an attack on Constantinople. In the second place, there was the commercial grudge of Venice, which had only been given large privileges by the Eastern empire to desire still larger, and had, moreover, been annoyed not only by alterations or revocations of those privileges, such as the usurper Alexius III. had but recently attempted, but also by the temporary destruction of their colony in Constantinople in 1171. Lastly, and perhaps most of all, there is the old Norman blood-feud with Constantinople, as old as the old Norse seeking for Micklegarth, and keen and deadly ever since the Norman conquest of the Greek themes in South Italy (1041 onwards). The heirs of the Norman kings were the Hohenstaufen; and we have already seen Henry VI. planning a Crusade which would primarily have been directed against Constantinople. It is this Hohenstaufen policy which becomes the primary occasion of the diversion of the Fourth Crusade. Philip of Swabia, engaged in a struggle with the papacy, found Innocent III. planning a Guelph Crusade, which should be under the direction of the church; and to this Guelph project he opposed the Ghibelline plan of Henry VI., with such success that he transmuted the Fourth Crusade into a political expedition against Constantinople. To such a policy of transmutation he was urged by two things. On the one hand, the death of the count of Champagne (May 1201) had induced the crusaders to elect as their leader Boniface of Montferrat, the brother of Conrad; and Boniface was the cousin of Philip, and interested in Constantinople, where not only Conrad, but another brother as well, had served, and suffered for their service at the hands of their masters. On the other hand Alexius, the son of the dethroned Isaac Angelus, was related to Philip through his marriage with Irene; and Alexius had escaped to the German court to urge the restoration of his father. On Christmas day 1201, Philip, Alexius and Boniface all met at Hagenau[1] and formulated (one may suppose) a plan for the diversion of the Crusade. Events played into their hands. When the crusaders gathered at Venice in the autumn of 1202, it was found impossible to get together the 85,000 marks promised to Venice. The Venetians—already, perhaps, indoctrinated in the Hohenstaufen plan—indicated to the leaders a way of meeting the difficulty: they had only to lend their services to the republic for certain ends which it desired to compass, and the debt was settled. The conquest of Zara, a port on the Adriatic claimed by the Venetians from the king of Hungary, was the only object overtly mentioned; but the idea of the expedition to Constantinople was in the air, and the crusaders knew what was ultimately expected. It took time and effort to bring them round to the diversion: the pope—naturally enough—set his face sternly against the project, the more as the usurper, Alexius III., was in negotiation with him in order to win his support against the Hohenstaufen, and Innocent hoped to find, as Alexius promised, a support and a reinforcement for the Crusade in an alliance with the Greek empire. But they came round none the less, in spite of Innocent’s renewed prohibitions. In November 1202 Zara was taken; and at Zara the fatal decision was made. The young Alexius joined the army; and in spite of the opposition of stern crusaders like Simon de Montfort, who sailed away ultimately to Palestine, he succeeded by large promises in inducing the army to follow in his train to Constantinople. By the middle of July 1203 Constantinople was reached, the usurper was in flight, and Isaac Angelus was restored to his throne. But when the time came for Alexius to fulfil his promises, the difficulty which had arisen at Venice in the autumn of 1202 repeated itself. Alexius’s resources were insufficient, and he had to beg the crusaders to wait at Constantinople for a year in order that he might have time. They waited; but the closer contact of a prolonged stay only brought into fuller play the essential antipathy of the Greek and the Latin. Continual friction developed at last into the open fire of war; and in March 1204 the crusaders resolved to storm Constantinople, and to divide among themselves the Eastern empire. In April Constantinople was captured; in May Baldwin of Flanders became the first Latin emperor of Constantinople. Venice had her own reward; a Venetian, Thomas Morosini, became patriarch; and the doge of Venice added “a quarter and a half” of the Eastern empire—chiefly the coasts and the islands—to the sphere of his sway. If Venetian cupidity had not originally deflected the Crusade (and it was the view of contemporary writers that Venice had committed her first treason against Christianity by diverting the Crusade from Egypt in order to get commercial concessions from Malik-al-Adil,[2]) yet it had at any rate profited exceedingly from that deflection; and the Hohenstaufen and their protégé Alexius only reaped dust and ashes. For, however Ghibelline might be the original intention, the result was not commensurate with the subtlety of the design, and the power of the pope was rather increased than diminished by the event of the Crusade. The crusaders appealed to Innocent to ratify the subjugation of a schismatic people, and the union of the Eastern and Western Churches; and Innocent, dazzled by the magic of the fait accompli, not unwillingly acquiesced. He might soothe himself by reflecting that the basis for the Crusade, which he had hoped to find in Alexius III., was still more securely offered by Baldwin; he could not but feel with pride that he had become “as it were pope and apostolicus of a second world.” Yet the result of the Fourth Crusade was on the whole disastrous both for the papacy and for the crusading movement. The pope had been forced to
- ↑ As a matter of fact, there is some doubt whether Alexius arrived in Germany before the spring of 1202. But there seems to be little doubt of Philip’s complicity in the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople (cf. M. Luchaire, La Question d’Orient, pp. 84-86).
- ↑ It is true that in 1208 Venice received commercial concessions from the court of Cairo. But this ex post facto argument is the sole proof of this view; and it is quite insufficient to prove the accusation. Venice is not the primary agent in the deflection of the Fourth Crusade.
