822 years ago, on August 1st of 1203, crusaders looked on as an elderly blind man and his irresponsible son were crowned Roman Emperors in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Despite the splendor of the coronation rites, it must have dawned on at least some of the crusaders that they were not supposed to be here at all. These very men had taken vows three years ago to deliver Jerusalem, which had been lost to the Muslims under Saladin in 1187. Since that time, they had gotten themselves in debt to the Venetians whom they had hired to ferry them overseas, as a result of which they had agreed to help the latter conquer the Christian city of Zara on the Adriatic coast.
But Christian cities were not appropriate targets for crusaders and the pope had only agreed to reconcile with the army after he had received firm assurances that the crusaders would suffer no more deviations from their goal. But then the chaos-factor arrived on the scene: a renegade Byzantine prince named Alexios, who appealed to the crusaders to assist him in taking the imperial throne, of which he and his elderly father had been deprived by his iniquitous uncle, in exchange for which he promised them everything: 200,000 marks of silver, thousands of reinforcements to help the crusaders take Jerusalem, and the submission of the Byzantine Empire itself to the papacy. Under the prince’s spell, the crusaders broke their word to the pope and set sail for the greatest city of Christendom. Now, on this August day, the crusaders gazed on the fruits of their labor. But it would profit them nothing: before the year was out, the new regime and its Western “saviors” were at loggerheads and the latter were contemplating the drastic geopolitical move–their own violent seizure of Constantinople, which happened on April 12th of 1204, and the imposition of their own regime–that would resound through history ever after as the defining act in the medieval tragedy of schism. Behind it all were fatal flaws in the Western military intelligence, both as regards their own mission–vitiated from the get-go by a lack of specificity as to objectives and logistical miscalculation–and as regards Byzantine political and social realities. The Fourth Crusade presents us with a singular spectacle of Western foreign intervention and regime-change gone awry and the most flagrant case of “mission creep” in western military history.
Innocent III (1198-1216), one of the most active pontiffs in medieval history, became pope in 1198 and dedicated himself to the causes of recovering the Holy Land for Christendom and drawing back the “wayward” Church of Constantinople into Roman obedience. The former goal required an army, which he duly set about gathering after his enthronement, but the historical irony (or tragedy) was that this army would become inextricably bound up with his pursuit of the second goal. Although some modern commentators have smelled a rat and seen the pontiff as planning the diversion to Constantinople from the beginning, the evidence does not support that view. Another factor that modern critics often fail to grasp is the problem presented by medieval armies to distant leaders–how to direct them, restrain them, or keep them from dissolving–problems for which Innocent, for all his intelligence, had no solutions at hand.
From the beginning, the Western army lacked consensus about its goal. They knew they were crusaders, and taking the cross meant liberation of the Holy Land, but since the Third Crusade (1189-1192) one influential strand of military opinion in Christendom had inclined toward the view that the conquest of Muslim Egypt was a necessary preliminary to taking Jerusalem. This elite view was not necessarily shared by the rank-and-file, ever inspired by dreams of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, who began to desert and find their own passages to Syria once they became aware of the discrepancy. These desertions fed into a major logistical miscalculation: when the date set by treaty with Venice for departure from her harbor rolled around in summer of 1202, only about half of the projected crusader army had materialized. Since there was no central treasury for the army and payment was collected from the troops on site, this meant that the crusaders fell woefully short of the money owed to the Venetians for the grand fleet they had provided. These circumstances inclined the crusader princes to accept the Venetians’ first diversion of the army to Zara, as an alternative preferable to the dissolution of the entire army (though this decision prompted further defections). Finally, the identity of the crusader as a soldier enrolled in the cause of Christ–a potentially limitless mission–rendered the army susceptible to the theory that they were somehow duty-bound to assist the foreign prince Alexios to “his” throne and opened the door for the expansion of the scope of the crusaders’ mission before the walls of Constantinople. Western military intelligence blundered both in defining a limited goal commanding general consensus and in prudentially establishing the means suitable to that goal and possible for the army.
The other crusader blunder, no less fatal, had to do with Western ignorance of Byzantine politics and society. Had the crusaders understood that there was no such thing as hereditary right to the throne or primogeniture in Byzantium, they could have dismissed Alexios along with his appeals to justice and his assurances that his people longed to have him back. In the Roman Empire, power continued to depend (as it always had) upon divine right and the will of the people, which in practical terms meant success in taking and holding power. The Empire was not a personal patrimony passed from father to son as in the hereditary monarchies of the West. In this instance, Alexios had clearly manipulated the crusaders by appealing to their culturally-specific ideas of justice and political legitimacy. (In other words, Alexios understood the Westerners better than they understood the Byzantines). But Alexios was not the “natural lord” of Byzantium and when the crusaders pressed these claims upon the Byzantines lining the walls of Constantinople, they were met with incredulity and derision. From their perspective, the citizens of Constantinople did not need any saving–certainly not at the hands of foreign soldiers whom they regarded as barbarians. This points us to the bigger chasm in Western understanding. Although the Venetians and their Doge had familiarity with the Empire, the majority of the crusaders failed to appreciate the racial awareness of these people, who identified themselves as Romans (not merely in wishful aspiration, but in the concrete facts of blood, tongue, and creed) and would never accept as legitimate a regime that was either sustained or directly managed by alien “Franks.” After 1204, this insensitivity of Byzantine civilization only continued, as manifested in papal intransigence over ecclesiastical policy and the forced grafting of French feudal custom on Roman soil.
To be sure, it is easy for the historian, equipped with hindsight, to make such judgments. After all, if we imagine ourselves as intelligent crusaders among the dispirited thousands grieving for the lost vision of Jerusalem on the Adriatic coast in the winter of 1202, we too might have leaped at Alexios’ offer as a stroke of kind Providence. Given his promises of money and men, what better way, we might reason, to ensure final victory in the Holy Land, while winning, in addition, the return to the papal fold of the “schismatic Greeks”?
But such was not to be. Even if the crusaders had failed to measure their financial means to their expenses from the beginning–but one aspect of general failure of Western military planning–we should not let the fallacy of “sunk costs” distract us from the pure wisdom of common sense troubling the minds of so many crusaders who chose to abandon the army and seek passage by other means, or go home. This common sense dictates that clear objectives must be identified, and stuck to, and the means taken for those objectives must be those which are most direct. And, by extension, this imperative for clarity utterly forbids wading into the uncertain waters of a foreign nation’s internal politics for the sake of some imagined tangible benefit, let alone in the service of some vague notion of justice. The West might yet learn something from the Fourth Crusade.
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