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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.
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