The following document, which reflects a twelfth-century Byzantine view of Western Europe and its crusaders, comes from the pen of Anna Comnena (1083-after 1148), daughter of Emperor Alexius I. Anna, who had received an extensive education in classical Greek literature and thought, undertook to write the history of her father's eventful reign following the death of her husband in 1137. The fact that she entitled the work the Alexiad, in imitation of Homer's epic poem the Iliad, clearly indicates the view she held of her father's place in history. Anna's protestations of historical objectivity notwithstanding, this is partisan history, but its very partisanship allows us to see the world through Byzantine eyes.

In the first selection Anna comments on the Investiture Controversy, a struggle that provided the domestic background to the First Crusade. Although it was much more than just an instance of papal muscle-flexing, on one important level Urban's call for the First Crusade was an assertion of papal moral supremacy over Emperor Henry IV, with whom the pope was locked in ideological battle. The second selection deals with the arrival on Byzantine soil in 1096 of the lead elements of the First Crusade.

Meanwhile, an event occurred which is worth relating, as it, too, contributed to this man's [Emperor Alexius] reputation and good fortune.... Now it happened that the pope of Rome [Pope Gregory VII] had a difference with Henry, king of Germany. [Henry IV. As king of Germany, Henry was also emperor-elect of the Western Roman Empire] .... The pope is a very high dignitary, and is protected by troops of various nationalities. The dispute between the king and the pope was this: the latter accused Henry of not bestowing livings [a living, also known as a prebend, was the income a cleric received to support him in his clerical office and duties] as free gifts, but selling them for money, [the papacy claimed that lay rulers, such as Henry, were guilty of the sin of simony - the selling of sacred clerical offices and other holy items], and occasionally entrusting archbishoprics to unworthy recipients, [according to the papal reformers, this was another abuse of the system known as lay investiture, and some radical reformers, such as Gregory VII, called upon pious lay people to throw out unworthy clerics who had been invested in their offices by lay rulers]. and he also brought further charges of a similar nature against him. The king of Germany on his side indicted the pope of usurpation, as he had seized the apostilic chair without his consent. [by tradition, the pope-elect applied for imperial approval of his election]. Moreover, he had the effrontery to utter reckless threats against the pope, saying that if he did not resign his self-elected office, he should be expelled from it....

When these words reached the pope's ears, he vented his rage upon Henry's ambassadors; first he tortured them inhumanly, then clipped their hair with scissors, and sheared their beards with a razor, and finally committed a most indecent outrage upon them, which transcended even the insolence of barbarians, and so sent them away. My womanly and princely dignity forbids my naming the outrage inflicted on them, for it was not only unworthy a high priest, but of anyone who bears the name of a Christian. I abhor this barbarian's idea, and more still the deed, and I should have defiled both my pen and my paper had I described it explicitly. [Anna seems to imply that Gregory had the envoys castrated. There is no credible evidence of his having abused Henry's legates in this manner.] But as a display of barbaric insolence, and a proof that time in its flow produces men with shameless morals, ripe for any wickedness, this alone will suffice, if I say, that I could not bear to disclose or relate even the tiniest word about what he did. And this was the work of a high priest. Oh, justice! The deed of the supreme high priest! nay, of one who claimed to be the president of the whole world, as indeed the Latins assert and believe, but this, too, is a bit of their boasting. For when the imperial seat was transferred from Rome hither to our native Queen of Cities, and the senate, and the whole adminstration, there was also transferred the arch-hieratical primacy. [Chief patriarch of the universal Church].

And the emperors from the very beginning have given the supreme right to the episcopacy [another term for bishopric. A bishop was the chief priest of a city or large town and its surrounding lands. An archbishop was the bishop of a major city and exercised authority over a number of subordinate, or suffragan, bishops. A patriarch was the bishop of such an exceptionally important city that he claimed authority over vast areas and large numbers of subordinate archbishops and bishops. The question was, Who was the chief patriarch of the Church - the bishop of Rome or the bishop of Constantinople?] of Constantinople, and the Council of Chalcedon emphatically raised the bishop of Constantinople to the highest position, and placed all the dioceses of the inhabited world under his jurisdiction. [wrong - the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon of 451 stipulated in canon 28 that the bishop of Constantinople enjoyed a primacy of honor second only to that of the bishop of Rome because Constantinople was the New Rome.] There can be no doubt that the insult done to the ambassadors was aimed at the king who sent them; not only because he scourged them, but also because he was the first to invent this new kind of outrage. For by his actions, the pope suggested, I think, that the power of the king was despicable, and by this horrible outrage on his ambassadors that he, a demi-god, as it were, was treating with a demi-ass! The pope consequently, by wreaking his insolence on the ambassadors, and sending them back to the king in the state I have mentioned, provoked a very great war.
 




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Before he [emperor Alexius] had enjoyed even a short rest, he heard a report of the approach of innumerable Frankish [Frank was a term used in the eastern Mediterranean to refer to any Westerner] armies. Now he dreaded their arrival for he knew their irresistible manner of attack, their unstable and mobile character and all the peculiar natural and concomitant characteristics which the Frank retains throughout; and he also knew that they were always agape for money, and seemed to disregard their truces readily for any reason that cropped up. For he had always heard this reported of them, and found it very true. However, he did not lose heart, but prepared himself in every way so that, when the occasion called, he would be ready for battle. And indeed the actual facts were far greater and more terrible than rumor made them. For the whole of the West and all the barbarian tribes which dwell between the further side of the Adriatic and the pillars of Heracles, [The Strait of Gibraltar] had all migrated in a body and were marching into Asia through the intervening Europe, and were making the journey with all their household.... And they were all so zealous and eager that every highroad was full of them. And those Frankish soldiers were accompanied by an unarmed host more numerous than the sand or the stars, carrying palms and crosses on their shoulders; women and children, too, came away from their countries. [This, the first wave of the crusade, was the so-called (and misnamed) Peasants' Crusade of 1096]. And the sight of them was like many rivers streaming from all sides, and they were advancing towards us through Dacia [Hungary and Romania] generally with all their hosts....

The incidents of the barbarians' approach followed in the order I have described, and persons of intelligence could feel that they were witnessing a strange occurrence. The arrival of these multitudes did not take place at the same time nor by the same road (for how indeed could such masses starting from different places have crossed the straits of Lombardy all together?). Some first, some next, others after them and thus successively all accomplished the transit, and then marched through the continent. Each army was preceded, as we said, by an unspeakable number of locusts; and all who saw this more than once recognized them as forerunners of the Frankish armies.
 




2. Gunther of Paris, A Constantinopolitan History

Following the Muslim recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 and the failure of the Third Crusade to retake the holy city, the West was eager to strike back at Islam. In the early thirteenth century a force made up largely of French warriors and Venetian sailors planned to strike at Islam by capturing Alexandria in Egypt, thereby relieving pressure on the embattled Latin settlements in the Holy Land. That particular assault never took place. Rather, circumstances led the army and fleet of the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) to Constantinople, where the crusaders became embroiled in a dynastic power struggle between rival imperial claimants. Eventually the crusaders attacked Constantinople on April 12, 1204, and captured it the following day. After three days of brutal looting, the crusaders settled down and established the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261).

The Byzantines regained their capital city in 1261, but their empire was by then largely a shadow of its former self. Just as significant, the events of 1204 caused the final and, until today, irreconcilable rupture between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity.

One of the participants in the April 1204 looting of Constantinople was Martin, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Paris, which was located in the Vosges mountains of German-speaking Alsace. Upon his return to Paris in 1205, Martin commissioned on of the monastery's brothers, Gunther, to compose an account of the abbot's adventures on the crusade. Gunther (ca. 1150? - after 1210?), already an accomplished scholar and poet, took this opportunity to construct the Hystoria Constantinopolitana ( A Constantinopolitan History), a masterpiece of artfully intermingled prose and poetry, written to reveal the ways of God to humanity.

In the following two selections Gunther uses prose and poetry to pass judgment on Constantinople, to explain the reasons, both human and divine, behind the crusaders' decision to travel to that city in 1203, and to justify the assault of April 1204. The first selection appears at midpoint in Gunther's history; here, at the pivotal moment in his story, the author stops to reflect on the meaning of what is about to unfold. The second selection serves as a poetic explanation of why and how the crusaders attacked the Christian city of Constantinople.
 

Now the series of events which had led our people to this constraining crisis [the crisis that forced the crusaders to attack Constantinople in April 1204) can be condensed as follows. When the royal youth Alexius [Prince Alexius Angelos sought help in the West to restore his deposed father, Isaac II. Isaac had been deposed, blinded, and imprisoned by his brother, the current emperor, Alexius III. When the crusade army restored Isaac to the throne in 1203, the crusaders insisted that Prince Alexius be made co-emperor. Alexius IV was killed in an anti-crusader palace coup, and his death precipitated the eventual April attack on the city] came to the encampment accompanied by messengers and a letter from King Philip [Philip of Swabia, king of Germany (r. 1197-1208), was Prince Alexius's brother-in-law and supported the young man's overtures to the crusade army for help], who was imploring our people so urgently on his behalf; next, because it seemed to them right (if they could effect it) to restore the kingdom's legitimate heir to his throne, from which he had been cruelly deposed; then also because of the youth's entreaties and his promises that, if he were restored, he would be able, both then and afterward, to offer significant assistance to all pilgrims. [a pilgrim is someone who undertakes a religious journey (pilgrimage) to a sacred place. Usually this is done for penitential reasons. Crusaders were considered to be pilgrims of a special sort - armed pilgrims who were atoning for their sins by journeying to and liberating Jerusalem - and the enjoyed all of the special privileges the Church accorded pilgrims.]

Moreover, it helped that they knew that this very city was rebellious and offensive to the Holy Roman Church [from the Western perspective, the Greek Church had broken away from obedience to papal authority. From the Byzantine perspective, the pope claimed powers that rightly belonged to the entire Church, which was guided by the Orthodox emperor and the community of all right-believing bishops], and they did not think its conquest by our people would displease very much either the supreme pontiff [Pope Innocent III. Pope Innocent had forbidden the diversion to Constantinople because he feared the crusade army would be destroyed in the process, and he also did not want to see the blood of Greek Christians shed. However, the crusader leaders knew he was no admirer of Byzantium. Even while he was telling representatives from the crusade army that the army must not go to Constantinople, the pope expressed the sentiment that he wished the city could be captured without bloodshed by some Catholic (Western Christian) people] or even God. Also, the Venetians, whose fleet they were using, were particularly urging it, partly in hope of the promised money (for which that race is extremely greedy) and partly because their city, supported by a large navy, was, in fact, arrogating to itself sovereign mastery over that entire sea. Through the union of all these factors and, perhaps, of others, it happened that all unanimously found in favor of the young man and promised him their aid.

Yet there was also, we believe, another far older and more powerful reason than all of these, namely, the decision of Divine Goodness, which so arranged, through this pattern of events, that this people, proud because of its wealth, should be humbled by their very pride and recalled to the peace and concord of the Holy Catholic Church. It certainly seemed proper that this people, which otherwise could not be corrected, should be punished by the death of a few [Gunther maintains, wrongly, that only a handful of Greeks died in the battles of April 1204] and the loss of those temporal goods with which it had puffed itself up; that a pilgrim people should grow rich on spoils from the rich and the entire land pass into our power; and that the Western Church, illuminated by the inviolable relics of which these people had shown themselves unworthy, should rejoice forever. [among the objects seized in the sack of the city, the holy relics of the saints and especially of Jesus (such as his Shroud, or burial cloth) were highly prized. Abbot Martin piously looted a church and brought home a treasure trove of relics, which Gunther ironically referred to as "the spoils of sacred sacrilege."]

It is in any case, significant that the oft-mentioned city, which had always been faithless to pilgrims, [from the Western perspective, Constantinople had worked actively to ruin the Second and Third Crusades. In fact, the Byzantines had little sympathy for the crusades or the crusaders.] following (by God's will) a change of citizenry, will remain faithful and supportive and render us aid in fighting the barbarians and in capturing and holding the Holy Land - an aid that is more significant because of its closer proximity. Anyway, all of these matters would be unsettled had that people been conquered by persons of another faith, heathen or heretic, or (what would have been most disastrous) had it been forced to convert to their error. Therefore, I believe these considerations, surely hidden from us, yet manifest to Him who foresees all, were of utmost importance to God. It was because of them that those monumental and miraculous events, of which we shall speak, were conducted to their outcome along a fixed but secret path.
 




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Break in! Now, honored soldier of Christ, Break in~
Break into the city which Christ has given to the conqueror.
Imagine for yourself Christ, seated on a gentle ass, [according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph seated on a donkey. Christians commemorate this event on Palm Sunday, the Sunday preceding Easter.]
The King of Peace, radiant in countenance, leading the way.
You fight Christ's battles. You execute Christ's vengeance,
By Christ's judgment. His will precedes your onslaught.
Break in! Rout menaces; crush cowards; press on more bravely;
Shout in thundering voice; brandish iron, but spare the blood.
Instill terror, yet remember they are brothers
Whom you overwhelm, who by their guilt have merited it for sometime.
Christ wished to enrich you with the wrongdoers' spoils,
Lest some other conquering people despoil them.
Behold, homes lie open, filled with enemy riches,
And an ancient hoard will have new masters.
Yet you, meanwhile, curbing heart and hand,
Postpone and disdain the pillage of goods until the right moment!
Throw yourself on the timorous; press firmly upon the conquered;
Do not allow the fatigued to recover and regain strength.
Immediately upon the enemy's expulsion from the entire city,
There will be time for looting; it will be proper to despoil the conquered.