The History of the Renaissance World (32 page)

The Crusaders now realized that they were never going to get paid; and they were too broke to make it to either Jerusalem or Egypt. Constantinople was still a rich city, even after Alexius’s depredations. Alexius V Ducas was a murderer and usurper. Their duty was clear. They needed to seize Constantinople and bring justice to the palace. The clergymen who had accompanied the expedition assured them that bringing Constantinople back under the authority of the Church of Rome, after its long estrangement, was a valid crusading goal and would be rewarded with remission of sins.

Alexius V Ducas and the Byzantine army fought back. The struggle between Crusaders and the imperial army began on April 8, 1204; within four days, the troops of Constantinople were in full flight. Late on the night of April 12, Alexius V Ducas himself escaped through the Golden Gate.

On the morning of April 13, Constantinople lay under Crusader control, and the Crusaders began to strip the city clean. “Gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk,” writes Villehardouin, “mantles of squirrel fur, ermine and miniver, and every choicest thing to be found on this earth. . . .”

So much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world. Everyone took quarters where he pleased, and there was no lack of fine dwellings in that city. So the troops of the Crusaders and the Venetians were duly housed. They all rejoiced and gave thanks to our Lord . . . that those who had been poor now lived in wealth and luxury.
¹⁰

Ibn al-Athir writes that, during the three-day sack of the city, the Crusaders killed priests, bishops, and monks, and destroyed churches. The altars were stripped, icons smashed apart, jewels pried out of sacred vessels, relics stolen. The eyewitness Nicholas Mesarites tells us that, in their greed, the Crusaders stripped women to see “whether a feminine ornament or gold was fastened to the body or hidden in them.” And there was worse to come.

They slaughtered the newborn, killed matrons, stripped elder women and outraged old ladies. They tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. . . . [M]any were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs, the wretched slew the innocent.
¹¹

By the second day of the sack, many of the Crusaders were thoroughly drunk from looting Constantinople’s luxurious wine cellars. They were, says Nicetas Choniates, braying like salacious asses at the very sight of women, and a sickness of rape swept through the city. No one was spared: virgins, married women, the old, even nuns were violated in the streets. Men who tried to stop the assaults were run through, decapitated, or left to die in the streets with their limbs hacked off. Nicetas himself managed to get his pregnant wife out of the city by smearing her face with mud and shielding her with his own body.
¹²

Finally, when the looting and murder had run its course, Crusaders elected one of their own, the Count of Flanders, to be the new emperor: Emperor Baldwin I. Constantinople had been transformed into the capital of yet another Crusader kingdom: the Latin Empire.

And that was the end of the Crusade. Not a single Crusader made it to Egypt, let alone Jerusalem.

Innocent III, appalled at the bloody ending to his treasured cause, sent a fierce reproof from Rome: “They who are supposed to serve Christ rather than themselves,” he wrote, “. . . have bathed those swords in the blood of Christians.”
¹³

25.1 The Conquest of Constantinople

But self-service had been a part of the crusading impulse since Bohemund’s refusal to give up Antioch. The rot that had set in after the First Crusade had eaten through to the surface; when a crusade offered power, the chance to grasp a kingdom would always trump the cause of Christ.

Part Two

INVASIONS,
HERESIES, AND
UPRISINGS

Chapter Twenty-Six

Westward

Around 1200,
a Mayan empire grows in Central America,
and the Inca slaughter the villagers of the Cuzco valley

A
CROSS THE
A
TLANTIC
, two new stories were unfolding.

On the Central American land bridge, the city of Chichen Itza, ruled by Toltec invaders, was itself facing invasion.
*
Its king carried out bloody rituals of human sacrifice, pouring out the sacred earth-restoring liquid in an attempt to keep his kingdom safe. But the sacrifices failed him. Sometime around the turn of the century, the Mayan king Hunac Ceel launched an attack against Chichen Itza’s imposing walls. To carry out his assault on his huge neighbor, he had hired seven generals and their troops from the fragmented lands farther to the southeast.

With the help of these mercenaries, he captured Chichen Itza; the city fell, a slightly later chronicle tells us, “because of the treachery of Hunac Ceel,” which suggests that the conquest may have come about through trickery and betrayal, rather than simply through force of arms. However it began, the invasion ended with Chichen Itza sacked and burned, its sacred reliefs shattered and defaced, the places of offerings laid waste; the people fled outwards and took refuge in other cities.
¹

This was only the beginning of a larger campaign. Over the next decade, Hunac Ceel conquered a good part of the Yucatán peninsula and made his home city, Mayapan, the center of a small but vigorous Maya empire. Mayapan was smaller than Chichen Itza, but carefully laid out as a military fortress: it was easy to defend, hard to besiege.
²

Hunac Ceel’s descendants ruled over the northern Yucatán peninsula for the next two centuries. The empire survived in part because of the strong central control wielded from Mayapan itself; the conquered aristocrats were required to live in the capital city, under the eye of the kings, while their estates farther away were administered by stewards on their behalf. It was a strict and unforgiving regime, but effective; and the empire flourished. “The natives lived together in towns in a very civilized fashion,” wrote the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who saw the empire of Mayapan in its final years. “In the middle of the town were their temples with beautiful plazas, and all around the temples stood the houses of the lords and priests. . . . They had their improved lands planted with wine trees, and they sowed cotton, pepper, and maize, and they lived thus close together for fear of their enemies.” The well-guarded borders held; force of arms had finally brought a long period of peace and prosperity to at least one part of the fragmented landscape.
³

26.1 Central America

B
Y THE TWELFTH CENTURY
, myths and rituals had begun to illuminate the Mesoamerican world. But South America remained largely voiceless. The ruins left behind suggest that large empires were much more common here than in the equally silent lands of North America; for centuries, these empires rose, flourished, and fell without leaving words behind them.

They left us puzzles instead.

26.2 South America

The Andes Mountains march along the western coast of the entire continent: a range over four thousand miles long (the longest in the world), three hundred miles wide, its highest peak soaring up to nearly twenty-three thousand feet.
*
South of the equator, the mountains create a rain shadow: a stretch of desert blocked by the peaks from moisture-bearing winds. The winds, hitting the mountains first, drop all of their water; by the time they flow over the summits and down to the desert, they are entirely dry. The Atacama Desert, on the South American coast, gets less than an inch of precipitation per year.
⁴
On its driest sands, rain falls perhaps once every forty or fifty years.

But in scattered places across the desert, underground rivers rise abruptly to the surface. Around the oases created by this subterranean water, the Nazca people lived.

They left pottery and ruins behind them: no chronicles, no legends, no lists of kings. Instead, they created enormous patterns on the dry ground by sweeping stones and debris away from the desert floor to reveal the lighter sands beneath. The lines of lighter ground form enormous spirals, grids, and figures of animals: a spider, a bird in flight, a fish, a monkey. The pictures are enormous: a hummingbird 305 feet long, a parrot whose head is nearly 70 feet across, a 150-foot spider. The outsider, standing in the desert, would see only a random path stretching to the horizon. The Nazca initiate saw instead the tip of a bird’s wing, the end of a lizard’s tail, the hand of a dancing man. Only from very high up can we see what the Nazca line drawers held in their minds.
⁵