The History of the Renaissance World (26 page)

20.1 Byzantium and Venice

At this, the whole scale fell over. An enraged mob of Venetian expats attacked and sacked the new Genoese quarter, tearing off roofs, knocking over walls, and leaving it uninhabitable. Manuel sent a sharp message to the Doge, Vitale Michiel, demanding that Venice both rebuild the quarter and pay damages to Genoa. The Doge refused, blaming the destruction on the citizens of Constantinople. Manuel had anticipated the refusal; he had already sent secret messages all across Byzantium, ordering his officials to arrest every Venetian citizen on Byzantine soil at one time. The date set was March 12, 1171.

On that morning, the emperor’s decree was carried out. Men, women, and children were taken into custody and imprisoned; all of their property—houses, shops, ships, land—was confiscated. In Constantinople, the Venetian captives very soon filled up the prisons, and monasteries were pressed into service.
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This gave Manuel over ten thousand hostages to hold against future Venetian aggression. But Doge Vitale Michiel, apoplectic with fury, declared war anyway. The Venetians spent four months building a special war fleet to retaliate, and then set sail for Byzantine territory. The first city they came to was Chalcis, the largest city on the Greek island of Euboea. They laid siege to the city; the Byzantine governor there, alarmed by the size of the fleet and unwilling to act as a sacrifice to the quarrel, offered to play mediator with Manuel if the Venetians would lift the siege.
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Mindful of all those hostages, the Doge—who was leading the fleet in person—agreed. He chose two of his men to accompany the Byzantine officials to Manuel’s court, and the Venetians removed themselves to the island of Chios, where they settled in and waited for the negotiations to proceed.

Even though he was feeding all of his Venetian prisoners at his own expense, Manuel decided to play the waiting game himself. When the ambassadors from Venice arrived, he explained that he couldn’t see them yet, but that
another
embassy would certainly receive his full attention. The ambassadors went back to Chios, then back to Constantinople again. All of the back-and-forthing took time; and although this could have backfired on Manuel, luck was on his side. The Venetian camp at Chios was struck with plague; one contemporary report says that more than a thousand people died in the first few days of sickness.

Manuel continued to stall, the Venetians continued to die, and finally Vitale Michiel surrendered to the inevitable. He loaded the survivors onto his ships and staggered home. According to Manuel’s private secretary John Cinnamus, the emperor sent a blistering letter after him. “Your nation,” it began, “has for a long time behaved with great stupidity”:

Once you were vagabonds sunk in abject poverty. Then you sidled into the Roman Empire. You have treated it with the utmost disdain. . . . Now, legitimately condemned and justly expelled from the empire, you have in your insolence declared war on it—you who were once a people not even worthy to be named, you who owe what prestige you have to the Romans; and . . . you have made yourself a general laughing-stock. For no one, not even the greatest powers on earth, makes war on the Romans with impunity.
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This certainly proved true for Vitale Michiel; when he arrived in Venice, his angry subjects assassinated him for his failure.

Manuel had triumphed in this round. Venice was humiliated, and Stefan Nemanja, the Grand Prince of Serbia, had lost his strongest ally. Manuel marched into Serbia, invaded the capital, and forced Nemanja to swear himself back into vassalhood. Hungary he left alone; he now controlled the coastal territories and had no need to push the issue further.

Manuel still did have a problem: all of those expensive-to-feed Venetian captives in his jails and monasteries. He solved the dilemma by ignoring it. Over the next few years, while he carried on tricky and unsuccessful negotiations with Venice, the Venetian captives seeped out of their prisons a few at a time and limped back home.

M
ANUEL DIED IN
1180, after thirty-seven years on the throne of Constantinople. He had increased the empire’s power, but ruined its alliances; Byzantium had very few friends left in the west.

His death was followed by five years of violent chaos that damaged the empire still further. His young wife Mary of Antioch had finally given him a son and heir, but Alexius II was still only eleven, and Mary was his regent.

Within the year, Mary had made herself vastly unpopular. As a westerner herself, she was inclined to grant too much favor to the Italian merchants in Constantinople and too little to the citizens of the empire itself. She took as her chief advisor another unpopular official, Manuel’s nephew Alexius; a slug, according to the chronicler Nicetas Choniates, “accustomed to spend the greater part of the day in bed, keeping the curtains drawn lest he should ever see the sunlight . . . also he took much pleasure in rubbing his decaying teeth.”
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Hearing of the unhappiness in Constantinople, Manuel’s cousin Andronicus Comnenus—exiled to Paphlagonia some years earlier for agitating against the throne—set sail for the city. He had always been a popular member of the royal family, and when the people of the city heard that he was on his way, they celebrated by rioting. The riot turned into a bloodbath. Pisans, Genoans, and any remaining Venetians in the city were lynched. By the time Andronicus arrived, hundreds had died.

He rode into the city as its savior. The remaining Italians were rounded up and sold as slaves to Turkish merchants; the incompetent Alexius was arrested and blinded; Andronicus confined both Mary and the young Alexius II to the palace.

Mary was found strangled, not long after, and Andronicus had himself crowned as Alexius’s co-ruler. The joint rule lasted for less than a year. Once Andronicus felt himself secure on the throne, he ordered the fourteen-year-old Alexius strangled as well.
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His violent rule was short, and ended as it had begun, with murder. Andronicus’s method of keeping power was to eliminate anyone who seemed to pose a danger to him. “He left the vines of Bursa weighed down,” one chronicler notes, “not with grapes, but with the corpses of those whom he had hanged; and he forbade any man to cut them down for burial, for he wished them to dry in the sun and then to sway and flutter . . . like the scarecrows that are hung in the orchards to frighten the birds.”
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After two years of this, his subjects had had enough.

In 1185, Andronicus sent an official to arrest and execute (on no good grounds) a distant royal cousin named Isaac Angelus. Angelus, a mild man by all accounts, turned on the hangman and killed him. Instantly, the people of Constantinople hailed him as a hero and shouted for him to be crowned as emperor.

Andronicus, outside the city at the time, rushed back to restore order. But the mob turned against him, and his own guards refused to fight their fellow countrymen. Isaac Angelus seems to have decided that the crowd’s feelings needed an outlet; he ordered Andronicus’s right hand cut off and his right eye gouged out and then turned Andronicus over to the crowd for punishment. “Carried away by unreasoning anger,” writes Nicetas Choniates, “. . . there was no evil which they did not inflict wickedly on Andronikos.”

He was slapped in the face, kicked on the buttocks, his beard was torn out, his teeth pulled out. . . . Some struck him on the head with clubs, others befouled his nostrils with cow-dung, and still others, using sponges, poured excretions from the bellies of oxen and men over his eyes. . . . Thus reviled and degraded, Andronikos was led into the theater in mock triumph sitting on the hump of a camel. When he dismounted, he was straightway suspended by his feet. . . . Even after he was suspended by his feet, the foolish masses neither kept their hands off the much-tormented Andronikos, nor did they spare his flesh, but removing his short tunic, they assaulted his genitals. A certain ungodly man dipped his long sword into his entrails by way of the pharynx; certain members of the Latin race raised their swords with both hands above his buttocks, and standing around him, they brought them down, making trial as to whose cut was deeper.
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After long agonizing hours, Andronicus finally died. The body was left hanging for several days before it was cut down and tossed into the gutters. The dynasty of the Comneni had come to an end. Byzantium—friendless, simmering with hatred, filled with fear—was in the hands of Isaac Angelus.

Chapter Twenty-One

Resentments

Between 1171 and 1186,
Henry II of England fights the Irish,
his own sons,
and the French

B
Y
1171, Henry II of England had recovered somewhat from his guilt over Becket’s murder; at least, enough to invade Ireland.

He had been given an open door by the Irish king Diarmait Mac Murchada, ruler of the eastern kingdom of Leinster. Leinster, as the thirteenth-century historian Gerald of Wales points out, was “separated only from England by the sea which flowed between,” making it a natural target for the English. But Henry’s path into it was indirect. A few years before, Mac Murchada had rashly visited the wife of the neighboring king of Meath, in her husband’s absence; she had “long entertained a passion” for Mac Murchada, Gerald assures us, “and allowed herself to be ravished, not against her will.” The king of Meath, returning home, was not pleased. He gathered his own men together and then called on the High King of Ireland to help him avenge his honor.
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The High King of Ireland was Rory O’Connor, king of Connacht. For centuries, one Irish king out of the handful that ruled the island had borne the title of High King. But, as contemporary historians point out, the designated High King was always ruler
co fresabra
: with opposition. The High King’s authority was constantly challenged by his peers, and Rory O’Connor was no exception; he had already been forced, more than once, to fight to defend his title; and now he decided to make a friend of the king of Meath. Together, the two drove Mac Murchada out of Leinster.

Mac Murchada, catching a favorable wind, went across the Irish Sea and appealed to the English throne for help. Henry II was himself in Western Francia, occupied in yet another struggle with Louis VII of France over control of his lands there; but he knew that anything that created chaos in Ireland was bound to be good for the English. He sent back a message giving all of his knights permission to help Mac Murchada recover his throne, and promising them “favour and licence” in exchange.
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The most prominent knight to take up the challenge was Richard de Clare, son of the Earl of Pembroke. Nicknamed “Strongbow” for his skill, de Clare had fought in his early twenties for King Stephen, against Henry’s mother Matilda; and when Henry finally claimed the crown, he had refused to allow Richard to inherit the title of earl. Now, de Clare saw the chance to gain a crown instead. He agreed to fight for Mac Murchada in exchange for the chance to inherit the throne of Leinster; Mac Murchada’s oldest daughter Aoife agreed to marry the Englishman, to seal the deal.

This arrangement worked out better for Richard than for his new father-in-law. By 1171, the English had helped Mac Murchada reoccupy his kingdom, but during the protracted struggle Mac Murchada’s own son was killed, and Mac Murchada himself took ill and died in the first week of May, not long after his sixty-first birthday.

Strongbow and Aoife could now claim to be king and queen of Leinster, but Henry II—finally returning from Western Francia—intervened. He did not want one of his knights establishing an independent monarchy right across the water, and so he assembled an army at the western port city of Gloucester, ready to sail to Ireland. Strongbow, still fighting off the combined forces of the king of Meath and the High King, hurried to Gloucester and assured the king of his loyalty. “He succeeded at last . . . in appeasing the royal displeasure,” says Gerald of Wales, “upon the terms that he should renew his oath of fealty to the king, and surrender to him Dublin . . . with the towns on the sea coast, and all the fortresses.” Richard would rule as king of Leinster, but only by Henry’s permission; and the English king would take direct control of the port cities.
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