| #### 5, INNOCENT III AND THE LATIN EAST |

| #### #### But before the story of Innocent III's general council is told, some account must be given of the way in which he dealt with the problem of the Latin East. #### From the very moment of his election Innocent planned to restore the crusade. It was to be, once more, a papally directed thing; and the ideals that inspired it were to be protected against the selfishness of the magnates. Appeals to the princes of Europe, and requests for information to the bishops in the East and to the heads of the military orders, began to issue steadily from Rome. Legates were commissioned to restore peace between the warring kings; the papal diplomacy set itself to conciliate and win over the schismatic church of Armenia; and to resolve the new, most pressing problem of all -- the relations of the West with the empire of the East: Constantinople's malevolent neutrality must be turned. Here was a complicated problem indeed. The reigning emperor, Alexis III, had been welcomed as an ally by Innocent's predecessor who, for all that the Greek was a schismatic, had dreamed of setting him up to counterbalance the danger to religion from the Catholic Henry VI. The strange allies had in common a hatred of the Hohenstaufen, for the Greek emperor's dethroned predecessor -- Isaac Angelus -- was father-inlaw to Philip of Swabia. #### Innocent III proposed to himself, at first, to bring the hundred and forty years' schism to an end, and thus to make Alexis III the chief of the new crusade. There would thus be an end to the old quarrels between the Latins who had won the battles and the Greek emperor claiming the Latin conquests as his own long lost territory. While, then, the pope was pressing forward with the usual preparations for a crusade, he was also negotiating with Alexis the calling of a general council that would restore the East to the unity of the Catholic faith. What the pope did not, as yet, realise was that the empire of the East was breaking up. It lacked a fleet; its army was wretchedly provided, the soldiers' pay in arrears; in all the provinces still nominally subject to Constantinople there were movements making for political autonomy which the government was powerless to arrest; and the empire v as not only menaced by the Turks, but by the Bulgarians and the Venetians too. Even if the pope succeeded in his plan to end the schism, the Byzantine empire, as a crusading force, was an arm that would break the first time it was used. #### By the March of 1201 the vast preparations were so far advanced that the leaders of the crusade opened negotiations with Venice for the transport of men and stores. The terms agreed upon were that the republic should receive eighty-five thousand marks, and a half of whatever conquests were made. The pope's scheme, for an alliance with Constantinople, was ignored. The crusade, this time, was to make directly for the centre of the Mohammedan world, Cairo; and the armies were to be ready to sail on June 24, #### This agreement Innocent ratified, with a solemn prohibition against attacking Christian States. The pope knew -- none better -- how, since the failure of the crusade of 1189-1192 and the quarrel of Barbarossa with Constantinople, the new idea had gained force that the Greeks were as much the enemies of the crusade as the Turks. Henry VI had actually planned to destroy the Greek Empire as the first step towards Catholicising the East; and now the crusaders had chosen as their leader a near relative of the dead emperor, Boniface of Montferrat, who had scores of his own to pay off in Constantinople. The dethroned emperor, Isaac Angelus, was an old ally; and the new line, so Boniface held, had been responsible for the death of his brother Conrad, a famous leader of the crusading armies in 1192. There was every chance that this Hohenstaufen- inspired leadership would take the crusade into the Hohenstaufen channel. #### At this moment, March, 1201, there arrived in Italy Alexis Angelus, the son of the dethroned emperor. He did his best to enlist the sympathy of the pope and, more effectively, he came to an arrangement with his brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia - - at the moment under the papal ban, but the brains of the crusade. It is highly probable that it was at this interview (December 25, 1201) that the decision was taken to use the crusade to restore the dethroned Isaac Angelus. Within a few months Boniface actually proposed this for Innocent's sanction, but the pope held by his pledge. #### The crusaders at last began to gather at Venice. Here again, the diplomacy of Philip and Alexis was busy; and, although no attempt was made to force a decision, the idea of capturing Constantinople as a first step towards the lasting triumph became familiar to all. The army was smaller than had been hoped. Even pledging all their resources, the Crusaders had not been able to raise more than four-sevenths of the sum promised to Venice. It was now suggested that they assist the Venetians to reconquer Zara now, and so wipe out their debt. There was a lively opposition to the proposal. The papal prohibition to attack Christian States, disobedience to which entailed excommunication, stood in the way; but in the end the plan was accepted and in November, 1202, Zara was captured from the Hungarians and restored to Venice. #### At Zara, too, the Hohenstaufen scheme was adopted. The leaders of the crusade, fresh from suing out an absolution for the crime of Zara, now came to a definite understanding with Alexis as representative of the deposed Isaac Angelus. They would assist him to recover his throne, and in return he promised to restore the church of Constantinople, with its dependencies, to the Roman obedience, to pay a huge money indemnity to the crusading army, to join in the crusade himself and to maintain an army in the Holy Land. Once more there were violent dissensions in the crusading army, but, as at Venice, the majority accepted the pact. Chief among those who refused and who, at this stage, abandoned the crusade was Simon de Montfort. #### On May 24, 1203, the armada set sail from Corfu. A month later it was in sight of Constantinople, and on June 24 it anchored off Chalcedon. Innocent, still true to his policy had, long before this, expressly forbidden the expedition. #### From Chalcedon the leaders summoned Alexis III to yield. He refused, and on July 7 the siege began. Ten days later there was a general assault. Alexis III fled, the partisans of Isaac brought him out of prison and acclaimed him as emperor, and the gates were opened to the Latins. On August I Isaac's son Alexis, brother-in-law to the excommunicated Philip of Swabia, at the moment waging war on the pope and his protege Otto in Germany, was crowned as joint emperor with his father. It only remained for him to carry out the promises made at Zara. #### To this, whatever his good faith, there were difficulties that were insurmountable. To begin with Alexis Angelus was not, as yet, master of more than the capital. Then the sum promised as an indemnity was far beyond what his treasury held. The Crusaders decided to winter at Constantinople. As the imperial subsidies delayed, they took to looting; and presently something like a state of war developed between the Crusaders and the populace of the capital. In February, 1204, the discontent in the city brought about a revolution. The recently restored Isaac, and his son, were murdered and the successful leader of the movement was proclaimed as Alexis V. He reigned for a matter of weeks only. The Crusaders decided to make themselves masters of the capital and to set up an empire of their own. They arranged how the immense booty of the city's wealth was to be shared; they arranged the procedure for the election of their emperor; they arranged, finally, how the territories should be divided: to the new emperor a quarter; to Venice three-eighths; and the remaining three-eighths, in fief, to the different leaders. #### All this carefully arranged, they attacked on April 9. They were, however, repulsed. Three days later they attacked again. After a furious day of fighting they were masters of part of the town and, since Alexis V fled in the night, the morning of the thirteenth found them undisputed masters of the city. Three churches were appointed as depots for the loot, and then followed one of the great sacks of history. Never since Constantine placed there his capital, nine hundred years before, had Byzantium yielded to an invader. Now, all the accumulated treasures of a thousand years were to be had for the taking. Nothing was spared, the churches and convents were plundered as systematically as the palaces of the emperor and his nobility. Finally the emperor was elected -- Baldwin of Flanders -- and, on May 16, 1204, he was crowned in St. Sophia with Latin rites. #### It remained to be seen what the pope would do. The new emperor sent an elaborate letter full of explanation of the many advantages that would accrue to religion from the conquest, and, when this failed to reach the pope, he despatched an embassy to make it all clear. Innocent, however, faced with the fait accompli, and with all the different Greek claimants to the empire dead, Angeli and Comneni alike, had no difficulty in accommodating his practical mind to the new situation. That situation was indeed the result of disobedience to his orders. The Ghibellines had triumphed. It remained for him to bring back to his authority as many as he could of the Crusaders and to safeguard the interests of religion in the new world united so forcibly to the West. #### It was not long before the pope had measured the strength and reality of the reunion. The Latin empire in the East suffered in its very foundations from all the deadly insufficiency which had ruined the enterprise in Syria. Like the King of Jerusalem the emperor was little more than a primus inter pares. Then, too, between the new state and Syria lay Asia Minor and the two new states, of Nicaea and Trebizond, in which the Byzantines proceeded, with no hindrance from the Latins, to organise themselves. The Latins had, of course, inherited all the anxieties of the Byzantine emperors of the last three centuries, and their emperor was scarcely crowned before a Bulgarian invasion called him into the field. The Latin empire, far from providing a new basis for the crusade and new armies, was an additional liability lo the already overtaxed religious enthusiasm of the West, and it threatened to eat up resources that might otherwise have helped to change the situation in Syria. #### Innocent III soon understood: the Holy Land remained as a major problem; and so long as he lived the pope planned and strove for its recovery. But in those plans the new Latin empire had no great place. It was, once more, the direct assault of the West on Islam that Innocent had in mind. To the execution of his policy there were even more than the usual distractions. There was the long war in Germany, the struggle with John in England, the crusades against the Moors of Spain and the heretics of Languedoc. But by 1215 the way was clear. One of the tasks of the General Council would be to organise, under the new Western emperor, a crusade whose successes should rival the glory of the first. ####  |