Читать книгу Sacred Plunder - David M. Perry - Страница 14

2

____________________________

Pope Innocent III and Sacrilege, 1204–1215

When news reached Pope Innocent III that Constantinople had been conquered, he rejoiced at this clear sign of God’s miraculous power. He publicly hailed the victory and predicted the speedy reunification of the Greek and Latin churches, which would then lead to the liberation of Jerusalem by the forces of a united Christendom and perhaps mark the beginning of the Apocalypse.

But the Greeks failed to convert in large numbers. Enemies of the new state pressed in from all sides, and the need to defend the empire sapped resources from other crusading activity. Jerusalem remained in Islamic hands. Worse, critical voices from the West questioned crusader conduct and papal complicity in that conduct. At the same time, the pontiff began negotiating with the secular leadership of the crusade over church property in Constantinople. The Orthodox churches of Constantinople had owned huge swaths of the most desirable property in the great city, and the secular powers in the new empire, Frank and Venetian alike, felt empowered to appropriate it. But for Innocent, all church property belonged to the “seamless garment of Christ,” and he demanded its immediate return.

By then, however, Innocent had lost his leverage. The crusaders had defied him in their diversion to Constantinople and had been excommunicated for their trouble. They had also vowed, on pain of damnation, to fight for the Holy Land; until released from their vow, damnation threatened. These were cudgels that Innocent could have wielded to influence the postconquest environment. But, after the conquest, Innocent’s papal legate, Cardinal Peter Capuano, released the crusaders from their vow and absolved them of their sins. In return, he demanded an additional year of service and little more. Innocent could not extract further promises in exchange for lifting the penalty of excommunication, nor could he demand further military action in lieu of a campaign against Muslim Jerusalem. Innocent needed a new approach.

This chapter argues that Innocent employed accusations of sacrilege and other sinful behavior during the postconquest looting as a source of new leverage and as a means of explaining the sudden loss of divine favor. Such accusations cited wide misconduct but named the violation of holy ground and the seizing of relics as the worst of the crusaders’ many crimes. These complaints were made most explicitly in the summer of 1205, just as crusaders and their relics began arriving back in the West.

Within a year of the creation of the Latin Empire, papal writings consistently raised the issue of sinful misconduct after the conquest in order to push recalcitrant Christians to support papal positions or desires. Thus, the pope moved the contest over the meaning of 1204 to a religious battlefield. Even when not discussing the looting, he made moral or spiritual judgments on crusader conduct, thus keeping the conversation on the papal battleground of religious matters. Over time, other critics of the crusade echoed the papal approach in its moral condemnation of the crusaders and focus on illicit looting. The persistent criticism from Rome and other sites cemented the crusaders’ conduct and moral decision-making during the pillaging of Constantinople as the locus of the conflict over memory and meaning of the Fourth Crusade.

Innocent and the Crusaders

The contest over the memory of the Fourth Crusade emerged out of a specific set of political, ecclesiastical, and economic postconquest issues with which the papacy and the leaders of the crusading army wrestled. As with so many other phases of the crusade, the terms of oaths sworn by the soldiers dictated the nature of the difficulties to follow.¹ Key terms of the March Pact at once incurred Innocent’s wrath and mandated reconciliation between the crusaders and the papacy, a precarious situation indeed. The central passages—on election and division of secular spoils—caused no controversy with Rome. It was, rather, the lesser provisions that governed the disposal of the wealth of the church and the patriarchate of Constantinople that reignited tensions otherwise potentially eased by the victory. The lay leaders had disposed of church lands, other kinds of church property, and even the highest ecclesiastical office in Constantinople. Innocent could not let this stand. Meanwhile, in order to ensure that the co-signers of the pact would all meet the commitments to which they had agreed, the document mandated papal ratification. The crusade leadership, assuming that Innocent would eventually absolve them of their sins, actually wanted the coercive threat of papal excommunication in order to guarantee the crusaders’ adherence to the document. Without papal ratification, the pact could have been annulled, thus potentially rendering Baldwin’s ascension to the throne illegitimate and raising the chance for further internecine conflict.

Innocent’s responses to the crusade are found chiefly in the register of his correspondence covering the most important years of the crusade’s aftermath, 1204 to 1206.² The Gesta Innocentii, a second key source for papal engagement in the contested memory of 1204, offers the perspective of the larger papal organization. Its author, an anonymous member of the curia writing between 1204 and 1209, benefitted from his hindsight of the events of the Fourth Crusade, the sack of Constantinople, and the failures of the early Latin Empire. One of the chief purposes of the Gesta was to exculpate Innocent from any blame that might have accrued to him as the sponsor of the initial crusade.³

The interactions between the army and Rome during the close of the crusade shaped the papal response in the years that followed. Over the course of the campaign itself, before the sack, the tone of papal letters builds from mild reprimand to outright fury and condemnation. Questions of morality, ecclesiastical privilege, and divine approval—topics on which Innocent could claim ultimate authority—appear within these sources from the very beginning. As plans began to go awry, the pope deployed his limited tools of coercion and persuasion in order to get the crusade back on course to Egypt without antagonizing allies or potential allies, particularly the king of Hungary and Emperor Alexius III. He reminded the crusaders of their oath and threatened excommunication; in fact, each time the crusade diverted, an edict of excommunication against the army went into effect, though the crusade leadership suppressed this news. Innocent tried to divide the crusaders from their defiant leaders, or to split the French from the Venetians, with intermittent success. Many soldiers did abandon the enterprise (mostly because of internal dissent rather than papal machinations), but enough of them remained to provide a credible military force. Further undermining any sway Innocent might have had, clerics on the crusade preached to the rank and file that the diversion to Constantinople was part of the holy mission.⁴

Despite the crusaders’ defiance of the papacy, this crusade was not particularly irreligious. The soldiers had taken sacred oaths on which they staked their very souls. Nor did the diversion to Constantinople mean that the soldiers intended to abandon their quest to free Jerusalem. To the contrary, Constantinople initially represented a means to the ends of financing and supplying for the campaign against the Muslims. Even in February and March 1204, the crusaders still planned to leave Constantinople and campaign in Egypt. But the successful conquest changed everything. The clause mandating papal approval of the March Pact demonstrates that the crusaders knew the papacy would have to be part of the new empire’s future for it to survive. Moreover, the crusaders were operating under lingering burdens of excommunication. They now controlled a large region that would need to be assimilated into the Latin rite if the conquered people were to accept their Latin rulers. Most importantly, Jerusalem was nowhere in sight. The only military expedition the army would yet undertake was to pacify its new holdings and beat back both Greek and Bulgarian claimants to the throne. And only the pope or his representative could absolve the oath of a crusader.

Innocent knew that the crusaders cared about obedience to Rome, if not to the degree he might have wished. Throughout the Constantinople affair, Innocent and his legate remained optimistic that the force could be turned back toward Egypt and returned to the papal fold. To effect this desired turnabout, Innocent offered both spiritual inducements and threats. His main concern about the diversion to Constantinople had been that it might interfere with reconciliation talks or efforts to recover the Holy Land. Even after the death of Alexius IV, the idea that Constantinople could be conquered by the small Latin army, be ruled by a Latin emperor, and seemingly serve as a new beachhead for future crusades had not seemed likely to any of the parties involved.⁵ However, presented with the reality of the new emperor Baldwin, in the first few months after the fall, Innocent stated his belief in the providential nature of the conquest and was ready to deal with the conquerors.⁶

In the initial aftermath of the conquest, therefore, it was a foregone conclusion among all parties that some form of agreement between the papacy and the crusaders could be reached. The shift away from diversion and toward looting, particularly sacrilegious looting, took place in an atmosphere of mutual distrust yet mandatory engagement. Each side had much to gain by dealing with the other, but Innocent had the moral upper hand. The crusaders knew that they had strayed and required papal forgiveness to lift the edict of excommunication. On the other hand, the crusaders were in Constantinople, held the city, and had already apportioned the wealth of the East among themselves. With the moral high ground balanced against fait accompli, negotiations concerning reconciliation and the ecclesiastical future of the Latin Empire began; so too began the contest over memory.

The First Postconquest Communications: Cautious Optimism

After news of the conquest reached Rome, the pope turned his efforts in the East to four new issues. First, he wanted to recover all of the church property that had been looted or secularized—this included both objects, such as relics, and the lands of the Greek church in the city. Second, he desired complete papal control over the patriarchate of Constantinople. Third, he wanted the newly conquered lands to serve as a base of operations for further crusading activity. Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, he wanted to convert the Greek people to a true Roman Catholicism. The Franks and Venetians, meanwhile, were dealing with two issues of their own. They needed, first, papal ratification of the March Pact to stabilize the new empire while, second, maintaining their respective new possessions in Constantinople—including the churches and church property they had claimed as their own. These matters directly pertained to questions of church and papal prerogative. Where agendas came into conflict, the debate often unfolded along moral or spiritual lines. The specifics of the contest over memory and interpretation emerged from that debate.

A short letter from Innocent to Baldwin from November 1204 reveals the pope’s approach to the surprising conquest. Baldwin had sent his first letter to Innocent in May, but Genoese privateers captured the courier and delayed the letter’s arrival.⁷ Innocent began his letter by praising the miraculous nature of the conquest. This was not mere window dressing. The providential nature of the conquest was invoked by all involved across diverse genres (sermons, chronicles, diplomatic letters, poems, and so forth). But Innocent used his statement about God having miraculously effected the victory in order to assert his prerogatives over the new empire. He wrote, “[God] has deigned to work magnificent miracles with you for the praise and glory of His Name, for the honor and profit of the Apostolic See, and for the benefit and exaltation of the Christian people.”⁸ He placed Baldwin and his “land and people under the primary protection of St. Peter and under our special protection, resolutely ordering all archbishops, bishops, and all other church prelates, also kings, dukes, counts, and other princes, and all peoples that they support and defend your [Baldwin’s] lands and people, and they neither personally molest them nor have them molested by others.”⁹ Innocent promised to order his prelates to excommunicate and place under interdict any who might “molest” the new lands, and he instructed all of his clerics to assist the new emperor. He also extended the papal crusade indulgence, offering a remission of sins to those “lay crusaders” who helped defend the new Latin Empire. Innocent pledged to send Baldwin additional assistance, because he recognized that by helping Latin-ruled Constantinople, “the Holy Land might be more easily liberated from pagan hands.”¹⁰

Then Innocent issued a warning. In his view, the Byzantine Empire fell because God wished to punish the Greeks for defying Rome. He reasoned, “After the kingdom of the Greeks turned away from the obedience to the Apostolic See, it continuously descended from evil to worse evil until, by the just judgment of God, it was transferred from the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the obedient, from the schismatics to followers of the Latin rite, so that it might rise through the virtue of obedience to goodness because through the sin of disobedience it fell into evil.”¹¹ Therefore, Innocent continued, Baldwin had best remain “in obedience” to Rome lest the same fate befall his empire. Innocent informed Baldwin that to obey Rome he would have to “diligently and faithfully make sure that ecclesiastical goods, both fixed and moveable, are protected until they might be properly organized in accordance with our authoritative decision, so that those things that are Caesar’s might be rendered to Caesar, and those things that are God’s might be rendered to God without confusion.”¹² Placed at the close of the first formal communication between pontiff and new emperor and closely approximating biblical phrasing, this reference has considerable rhetorical weight.¹³ Innocent linked the survival of the empire to obedience to Rome and questioned the fate of church property. He probably suspected that some “confusion” had already taken place.

Innocent’s letter epitomizes his approach to the postconquest situation. First, he affirmed the miraculous nature of the victory. Second, he demanded specific actions from crusaders who wanted to avoid divine retribution for their sins. He coupled his historical analysis and providential interpretations with specific warnings. Carrot and stick—Innocent offered his support while demanding obedience. The fate of the vast wealth of the Greek church particularly concerned him.

Although chaos had initially reigned in the days after the Latin soldiers took Constantinople, “confusion” was not the biggest obstacle to satisfying the pope—and the chaotic looting of church property might well be labeled “confusion.” Rather, it was the more systematic appropriation of church wealth and position that demanded papal action. Two tenets of the March Pact addressed church matters. Following passages that detailed how six Venetians and six Franks would elect an emperor, the next section mandated that whichever party—the Franks or the Venetians—lost the election, that party would receive authority over Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate. Moreover, as noted above, the pact stated that “sufficient quantities of the possessions of the churches ought to be provided to the clerics and the churches so that they might live and be sustained in an honorable fashion. The remaining possessions of the churches, indeed, should be divided and distributed in accordance with the aforesaid agreement.”¹⁴ To secure this agreement, the parties asked that the pope “bind by the chain of excommunication” anyone who broke the pact.¹⁵ Innocent had no quarrel with much of this treaty, including the method of choosing an emperor, the clauses that refused access to the empire to anyone at war with Venice, the creation of a council to determine who received which fiefs, and even the means of dividing the secular loot. No pontiff, however, could have accepted the provisions for church property and the patriarchate, let alone given them official papal sanction.

The patriarch of Constantinople was arguably the second most powerful prelate in Christendom, following only the pope himself. Thomas Madden argues that the Venetians had always planned on losing the imperial election and taking control of Hagia Sophia, since Doge Enrico Dandolo had neither the authority to claim the city for the Venetian republic nor the desire to start his own imperial dynasty. Moreover, along with the title of patriarch came the control of the cathedral itself and all of its vast properties, leadership of the local church, and, most important, the ability to keep the newly Latin patriarchate from eroding the privileges of the Venetian-dominated patriarchate of Grado, the patriarchal seat located on an island not far from Venice.¹⁶ Under no circumstances would Innocent allow secular figures to determine the fate of the patriarchate, but his relationship with the Venetians and their leader had been especially fraught, and perhaps this contributed to the ensuing tensions over the issue.¹⁷ These tensions would linger well into the second decade of the Latin patriarchate’s existence.

The distribution of church property was an even more contentious problem.¹⁸ The pope’s urgent concern stemmed from the crusaders’ decision to give themselves the right to redistribute the vast wealth of the Greek church.¹⁹ The crusaders had agreed to reserve the churches—the actual buildings—for various clerics on the crusade, but such was the limit of their generosity. The churches of Constantinople controlled vast quantities of land and property throughout the medieval city. This city had served as the “new Jerusalem” for generations of Greek emperors and garnered wealth from the donations of pilgrims and the bequests of the devout.²⁰ The crusade leadership decided that it would give its priests only as much of the goods and property of the churches as the priests would need to sustain themselves appropriately. All other plunder taken from the churches was fair game for the secular crusaders. Furthermore, these secular leaders decided how much a given church needed to support itself.

Innocent was likely aware of at least the basic tenets of the March Pact by the time he wrote that first letter to Baldwin in November 1204. The pact itself was not enregistered in Rome until January 1205, and Alfred Andrea speculates that Baldwin delayed sending it to Innocent because he knew that it would “provoke papal ire.”²¹ A long letter from Baldwin to Rome from May 1204 (as opposed to the short missive that was delayed, as mentioned above) details the course of the conquest but does not mention the fate of the churches. Baldwin describes the battles, the multiple elections to determine the emperor in the last weeks before the sack, and his own election, and offers many hopeful words for the future, but he obfuscates the details of the pact, already enacted. He pretends, for example, that the appointment of electors occurred nearly of its own accord, rather than having been scrupulously planned out in detail weeks before the final assault.²²

One might posit that Baldwin suspected that the provisions concerning the churches would cause problems. He may have wanted more time to assess and divide church property before receiving a specific papal edict forbidding any such action. Throughout the crusade, the army’s leaders used fait accompli to counter papal objections, and they seem to have continued in this mode. This would explain Baldwin’s delay in informing the pope of what, precisely, was going on in Constantinople. The word “confusion” in Innocent’s first letter to the new emperor indicates that any attempts at suppression failed. The pope suspected that there would be problems, even if he did not yet know the details.

The March Pact, technically, was an agreement between the Venetians and the Franks. Thus, both Dandolo and Baldwin (as the leader of the Franks, once he took the throne) needed to send a copy to Rome and ask Innocent to ratify their agreement. The copy of the pact and their two letters requesting papal approbation arrived in January 1205.²³ With these in hand, Innocent could respond more directly. The two letters betray a certain discomfort. Baldwin asked for papal ratification of the “articles of agreement,” then stressed the “good and faithful association” between himself and the Venetians, specifically Dandolo. He noted that, in order to show their devotion to Rome, the parties agreed to ask for papal approval even before they stormed the city. Innocent should ratify the agreement, Baldwin concluded, for the sake of the stability of the new empire, the “relief of the Holy Land, and . . . the preservation of church unity.”²⁴ These three goals could not be achieved, he averred, without the Venetians’ help. Baldwin feared that Innocent would still be so angry at the Venetians that he would reject the agreement and throw the entire mechanism for apportioning the new empire into chaos. A papal rejection might also erode Baldwin’s legitimacy as emperor. In this letter, therefore, Baldwin emphasized the core goodness, faithfulness, and, above all, utility of the Venetians.²⁵

Dandolo had an even tougher task in seeking papal approval. He had to retell the entire history of the crusade in such a way as to make his actions seem acceptable. His letter to Innocent constitutes the first known Venetian attempt at shaping the memory of the crusade—a text earlier than either the Venetian translatio texts discussed in part II or the Ravenna mosaics considered by Madden.²⁶ Whether Dandolo actually expected to change Innocent’s mind is unknowable, but he did not necessarily have to persuade the pope of anything. The goal was to provide a willing pontiff a face-saving means out of the impasse between the two sides. He may have hoped that the pope would seek to make peace in order to play an active role in the new empire. Dandolo’s case relies partially on claiming that he did no wrong and had never intentionally defied papal will. More importantly, Dandolo suggested that the clear evidence of divine approval and even direct intervention in the campaign meant that the pope must forgive him. God, after all, could outrank the pope in religious matters.

This letter from Dandolo provides us with the earliest evidence of an internal counternarrative of the crusade that would resist the condemnatory voices from Rome and elsewhere. Dandolo employs the types of arguments later made by the translatio texts of the Fourth Crusade. He stresses the presence of a divine hand guiding events, explaining how, “with (as we believe) divine inspiration rather than human planning overtaking events,” Alexius Angelos met with the crusading army and asked for help. As a result of this “divine inspiration,” the crusaders and the Greek prince signed the Treaty of Zara, agreeing to attempt to place Alexius on the Byzantine throne.²⁷ Dandolo was arguing that regardless of what had transpired in the past between the Venetians and the papacy, events had so clearly shown the signs of divine intervention that exoneration should be a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, he did offer an exculpatory account of events. For example, he claimed that the Venetians had attacked Zara only because it was unjustly (iniuste) engaged in rebellion against Venice. He had heard that Hungary (to whom the citizens of Zara had pledged their city) was under the protection of Rome, but Dandolo did not believe this could be true.²⁸ He had “patiently endured” the edict of excommunication, but it had since been lifted by the papal legate Peter Capuano, so there was no need to ask for further official forgiveness on the matter of Zara anyway. Furthermore, the conquest of Constantinople was undertaken simply to correct a wrong (against Alexius and Isaac Angelos), and violence broke out after the Greeks proved to be treacherous liars (mendaces et fallaces).²⁹ In the diversions to Zara and Constantinople, claims Dandolo, the Venetians and crusaders only sought to fight injustice. And, of course, the city of Constantinople “had to be conquered for the honor of God and the Holy Roman Church and the relief of Christendom.”³⁰ Dandolo concluded that Innocent should grant his petitions because all of the Venetians’ actions had been only for the benefit of God and Rome.

Dandolo may have believed parts of his letter. He did not plan for the crusaders to become irrevocably indebted to Venice before they even departed from the city. He did not plan to divert the crusade to Constantinople. He probably did intend to use the newly constructed crusading fleet to pacify potential rivals in the Adriatic before sailing to Cairo, as this was in line with Venetian crusading tradition. Instead, he went so far as to use the crusading army to conquer the city of Zara.³¹ He did support both diversions as a means for the crusaders to pay off their debts to Venice; one central thesis of Madden’s work emphasizes the lack of his legal authority as doge to forgive those debts without such a solution.³² The recasting of Alexius and Isaac Angelos as perjurers only occurred after the Angeloi had been overthrown, since they had started as allies. Venetian secular accounts of the Fourth Crusade would come to include an invented papal directive to assault Constantinople, but Dandolo’s core argument did not rely on rewriting history or trying to alter papal perceptions.³³ Instead, the concept of God’s will superveniente, which Andrea translates as “overtaking events,” reveals Dandolo’s hermeneutic.³⁴ Events happened. Dandolo could justify his decisions, but such justifications were unnecessary, he claimed. With God’s will “overtaking” those events, the matter was moot. Dandolo did not admit to wrongdoing. He did not ask for forgiveness (Capuano had already absolved him, after all). He asked only for a favorable hearing of his petition. Later, the translatio texts of the Fourth Crusade would follow Dandolo’s approach to addressing morally questionable deeds: deny, blame the Greeks, admit sin when necessary, and invoke divine will. If God had worked a miracle to give Constantinople to the crusaders, should not the pope now treat Dandolo, one of God’s instruments in the affair, generously?

And the victory did seem to be a miracle. Before 1204, Constantinople had never fallen to an outside army. It is true that the Latins were greatly helped by internal dissension, but the city fell chiefly because French and Venetian soldiers made it over the walls. Only after this assault did the Greek army take flight.³⁵ For the crusaders, the success of the whole venture (and the promise it seemed to indicate for future crusades) proved that the deviation was part of God’s providential plan. Medieval authors often argued that God’s plan unfolds through otherwise disagreeable events, a theme to which authors of the hagiographies of 1204 frequently returned.³⁶ Dandolo turned Innocent’s conceptual framework back on the pontiff. Innocent had never denied the presence of God in the conquest of Constantinople; instead, he set himself up as the arbiter of the meaning of God’s presence. Dandolo offered an alternative interpretation.

In responding to the March Pact, the papacy tried to remain firm on certain points while otherwise staying positive and optimistic. The pope found much in which to rejoice when considering the new empire, despite any “confusion” about what should be “rendered” to the Church. Innocent’s writings suggest that he believed, in an apocalyptic sense, that the shocking conquest of Constantinople signified salvation for the Holy Land.³⁷ His letter to the clergy of the crusade in November 1204, produced at the same time that he wrote his first official letter to Emperor Baldwin, contains a wondrous and complex invocation of both the Old and New Testament, including the book of Revelation. This letter argues that once the Greeks enter the Roman Church, “all Israel shall be saved.”³⁸ The invocation of Revelation and the direct link between the conquest of Constantinople and the coming Judgment places the letter firmly in the category of apocalyptic writing. Innocent wrote that God, through the crusaders, had brought the reunification of Christendom to “divine completion.” That reunification was a prerequisite for the salvation of the Holy Land, itself a prerequisite for the end of days. For all this to come to pass, however, Innocent concluded that the new kingdom must be stable and that the Greeks must truly be converted. Only the Apostolic See of Rome could make sure this happened.³⁹ Thus, Innocent’s letter, like Dandolo’s, contains an early attempt at control over the interpretation of the meaning of the conquest.