In What Way Did the Christian Crusades Contribute to the Decline of the Byzantine Empire?

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Byzantium and the Crusades

• 

Book:

Byzantium and the Crusades
Jonathan Harris
London, Hambledon and London Books, 2003, ISBN: 1852852984; 277pp.; Price: £19.95

Reviewer:

Professor David Jacoby
Hebrew Academy of Jerusalem.

Citation:

Professor David Jacoby, review of Byzantium and the Crusades, (review no. 371)
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/371
Appointment accessed: 7 April, 2022

On 13 April 1204 the western or Latin armies participating in the 4th Crusade conquered Constantinople, the upper-case letter of Byzantium. The approaching 800th ceremony of that event has generated renewed interest in the groundwork, context and affect of that crusade, expressed in several new studies and in conferences. The initial goal of the Quaternary Cause was the re-establishment of Christian rule over Jerusalem, lost to Sultan Saladin of Egypt in 1187. Instead, it ended with the capture of the capital of a Christian state that had withstood all previous sieges and assaults.

The divergence of the crusade has been the subject of an ongoing and intense debate for the last 150 years or so. The same arguments have been used fourth dimension and again, however in the absenteeism of new prove, no disarming new explanations take been offered. Speculation has centred on a conspiracy theory and a search for those guilty of having masterminded the deviation. In a broader context, the Fourth Crusade has been viewed as a clash between two civilizations, Byzantium and the Latin Due west, and has raised more key questions regarding their respective nature and the relations between them. It has been argued that the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 was the culmination of mounting cultural estrangement, intolerance and hostility between Orthodox and Catholic Christians, partly fuelled by differences in theology, liturgical practices and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Others have viewed that conquest as the outcome of a random and unpredictable concatenation of events.

Jonathan Harris rejects these explanations and provides his own reconstruction of the developments leading to the conquest of 1204. His book deals with the relations betwixt Byzantium and the West in the menses extending from the death of Emperor Basil Ii in 1025 to the reign of Andronicus II (1282-1328). It focuses on the connections of these relations with the get-go iv crusades launched by the Latin W before 1204, and briefly considers Byzantium's recovery in the following eighty years.

Harris argues that a primal to the agreement of the interaction betwixt Byzantium and the Latin West lies in the nature of the Byzantine imperial ideology. The Byzantines considered Constantinople both the political centre of the Christian world and a holy urban center, a new Rome and 2nd Jerusalem. This standing was illustrated by the urban center's strength, size and wealth, royal and ecclesiastical buildings, too every bit relics (Chapter 1). The emperor's continuing in the family of rulers, every bit leader of the Oikoumene or world lodge was the second bones element of the Byzantine ideology. The principles upon which the emperors based their dealings with foreign powers and the crusaders were expressed by a small and influential group of ceremonious servants with classical education, who served equally their directorate on domestic and foreign policy and as their ambassadors. Despite the classical band of their treaties, letters, manuals, panegyrics and writings of history, they had a good knowledge of gimmicky realities. The traditional brandish of wealth, magnificence and pomp to impress foreigners, generous grants of imperial honorific titles and subventions in coins and silks, cunning diplomacy to dissever opposing forces and military forcefulness were all used in order to preserve the security of the empire and the emperor'south standing (Affiliate two).

Harris recounts the often-told story of the relations of Byzantium with the Westward from the mid-eleventh century to 1204, with an emphasis on specific developments and a thematic treatment of certain issues (Chapters 3-nine). He considers the rise of Leo IX to the papacy in 1049 equally a major turning signal in Byzantine-western relations. Byzantium misunderstood the inverse nature of the papacy, which in the post-obit menstruum laid increasing stress on the doctrine of papal supremacy and its claim to universal leadership within Christendom. Information technology was unavoidable, therefore, that the traditional Byzantine policies would lead to a clash between the 2. The Pecheneg invasion of Byzantium, which began in 1046-47, the Byzantine defeat by the Seljuks at the battle of Mantzikert in 1171, and internal political instability after 1025 opened the way for the occupation of Asia Minor by Turkish warlords and the Norman invasion of the empire in 1081. The defence of the empire was ensured in the eleventh century by traditional methods, yet the hiring of western mercenaries was a new development that led to Byzantine requests for big-calibration armed forces aid from the West in the 1090s. The worsening security state of affairs of Byzantium thus generated the latter's interaction with the crusading movement (Chapter iii).

The Byzantine fears for the safety of Constantinople in 1096-97 did not prevent Alexios I from taking advantage of the passing western armies of the First Cause to regain lost territory in Asia Minor. The emperor's insistence on the safety of Constantinople as his first priority offers the background to his refusal to participate in the crusade, his tense relations with the crusading leaders, and stiff animosity and propaganda against Byzantium in the W. The status of Antioch, over which he failed to restore Byzantine rule, was to affect Byzantine policies towards the crusading motion and the crusader states of the Levant in the following decades (Affiliate 4). According to Harris, Alexios I and John II were solely concerned with the recognition of their supremacy with no intention of conquering Antioch, while the Latins were 'obsessed' with the concrete possession of territories (Chapter 5). In his dealings with the leaders of the Second Cause in 1147-49, Manuel I used tactics similar to those of Alexios I, even so was more successful than John 2 with respect to Antioch. Past more subtle means than his predecessors, he managed between 1158 and 1171 to impose his tutelage on the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the 2 other crusader states, in need of support against the Muslims of Syria and Egypt (Chapter 6). After the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople perpetrated in 1182, Andronicus I was defendant by westerners of bunco with Saladin of Egypt against them (Chapter 7). The negotiations of Isaac II with the sultan following the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, aimed at ensuring the safety of the empire against a Latin attack, were perceived in the Due west as outright Byzantine treachery (Chapter 8).

According to Harris (Affiliate 9), this perception and Byzantium's failure to make what the Latins considered to be the rightful financial contribution to the recovery of Jerusalem were the two factors leading directly to the Latin conquest of Constantinople. These same arguments were used by western writers to justify the first conquest of Byzantine territory, namely that of Republic of cyprus by King Richard I of England in 1191.(pp. 141-42) In 1195 the western emperor Henry VI exerted strong pressure on Byzantium to provide financial assistance for a cause, a precedent followed by Innocent Iii in 1199. In 1202 the pope issued a thinly-veiled threat to Alexios III that strength could be used against Byzantium if information technology did not comply. Although he neither advocated nor condoned an attack on the empire, his pronouncements allowed the participants in the Fourth Crusade to believe that it was justified.(pp. 149-152)

Later on the fall of Constantinople, the three Greek successor states of Trebizond, Epirus and Nicaea competed for the imperial inheritance. The latter gained the upper hand past its successful territorial expansion and diplomatic moves, which led to its recovery of the purple city in 1261. The ground had been prepared by the military machine weakness of the Latin empire from within the city, and by the alienation of the Greek population resulting from the enforced submission of the Greek Church to the papacy (Chapter 10). Harris stresses that the Fourth Crusade was a major factor in the ultimate disappearance of the Byzantine empire in 1453, but which was however perpetuated in the Orthodox churches and in the cultural sphere (Chapter 11).

A few remarks virtually Harris' bibliography. It includes translations of sources to stimulate the reading of those unable to approach texts in their original language, even so this does non justify the omission of the latter. The following are new editions of sources, replacing those used by Harris: Michael Choniates, Michaelis Choniatae Epistulae, ed. Foteini Kolovou, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, XLI (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2001); for imperial charters delivered to Venice, I trattati con Bisanzio, 992-1198, eds. M. Pozza and Thou. Ravegnani, Pacta veneta 4 (Venice: il Cardo, 1993); for those delivered to Genoa, see I Libri Iurium della Repubblica di Genova, I/i, ed. A. Rovere, Fonti per la storia della Liguria, Two/ Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, Fonti XIII (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1992), pp. 262-64, no. 181, and the following volumes in the same series, published by other editors; Marino Sanudo Torsello, Istoria di Romania, ed. E. Papadopoulou, Plant for Byzantine Research Sources 4 (Athens: National Hellenic Inquiry Foundation, 2000). Harris has besides disregarded several recent studies, some of which are cited below. In the list of secondary works, instead of 'Meyer', read 'Mayer'.

Maps illustrate events and historical processes and further their understanding. Unfortunately, all 5 maps (pp. 3, 7, 77, 97, 167) in this book are seriously flawed. Numerous cities are misplaced, beginning with ports such every bit Constantinople that appear inland. Corinth, Gallipoli and Abydos are far removed from the isthmus, the peninsula and the access to the Dardanelles, respectively, where they should have been sited. Various stretches of political boundaries are unclear or inaccurate in the regional maps 1, 3 and five. Map three, 'The Latin states in Syria and Palestine', lacks a engagement, indispensable in view of the territorial changes that occurred in twelfth-century Levant. Map v, 'The Latin empire and the successor states, c. 1215', contains anachronistic features; Mongol dominion in Anatolia began but in 1242, that of the Mamluks in Syria in 1250, and Euboea was not Venetian until 1390. Finally, in map ii of Constantinople, the street pattern is partly incorrect; the church of the Forty Martyrs is grossly misplaced, the Genoese quarter is missing and, since there was no separate Amalfitan quarter, it should not have been mentioned.

Harris' book still makes pleasant reading. His narrative is fluent and enlivened by the frequent citation of contemporary sources or their paraphrase. It is all the more than important, therefore, to be aware that it contains factual mistakes and questionable interpretations, but some of which are mentioned here for lack of infinite.

In 992 Venice obtained only a reduction of the tax paid past ships passing through the Dardanelles. Therefore, contrary to Harris, the Byzantine alliance with Venice in 1082, directed against the Normans, did non expand existing trading concessions. Nor did these concessions cripple the empire's revenue from the export-import trading tax, or enable the Venetians to monopolise trade betwixt Constantinople and the Due west (pp. 39-xl, 113-114). These sweeping generalisations have already been assuredly discarded.(1)

Far more important in our context is the link between the policies of Alexios I and the passage of the crusader armies through Byzantium. The letter of Alexios I to Count Robert of Flanders, asking for troops and albeit the weakness of the Empire, has been decisively shown non just to exist spurious in form, just besides unlikely to have ever been sent. Information technology is also highly doubtful that a Byzantine request for troops was submitted in 1095 at the Church Council of Piacenza (pp. 37, 47-50, 54), as there was no need for them at that fourth dimension. The western sources reporting these events were all written several years afterward and coloured by the light of subsequent developments. They clearly reflect western, rather than Byzantine views.(2) It is questionable, therefore, whether the armies of the First Crusade came to Constantinople in response to a Byzantine appeal. In whatsoever consequence, at that fourth dimension the state route through Byzantium was the simply possible ane for a large crusading trek, in the absence of adequate maritime transportation.

Harris' account of the negotiations of Isaac Ii with Saladin (p. 131) requires several corrections. The emperor agreed in 1188 to the sultan's request to build a new mosque (and not just use an existing one) in Constantinople. Its construction is mentioned past Pope Innocent III in a letter of 1210 to the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, Tommaso Morosini.(iii) Isaac II presumably intended to further thereby the transfer of Latin ecclesiastical institutions in the territories recently conquered by Saladin and especially in Jerusalem to the jurisdiction of the Greek Church. Nonetheless he made an explicit request to that event only in the bound of 1192, which Saladin turned downwardly.(4) Moreover, no Orthodox Patriarch replaced the Latin 1 in Jerusalem until 1206/1207.(v) In short, there was no de facto renewal of Byzantine protectorship over the Holy Sites, as claimed by the author.

Various developments following the Fourth Crusade are inaccurately described. A Venetian was elected Patriarch of Constantinople, yet the church of Hagia Sophia was not included in the enlarged Venetian quarter in the city.(6) The exodus of many Greeks did not go out the metropolis 'largely to the poor, the aged and the infirm' (p. 164), equally loftier-ranking civil servants contributed Byzantine elements to the imperial formalism of the Latin court and ensured the continuity of the Byzantine administrative and fiscal systems under Latin rule.(vii) Big sections of the Empire were divided between the Latin emperor, his major vassals and Venice, yet the Roman Church was non the beneficiary of territories as claimed on folio 164. Venice neither occupied Dyrrachion nor the isle of Euboea, in which but a section of the city of Negroponte came under Venetian rule in 1211.(8)

More importantly, there are serious flaws in Harris' basic argument, which hinges entirely on ideology, diplomacy and politics, without due consideration for other factors in Byzantine-western relations and long-term developments within the empire itself. His ain account fails to provide evidence that the conflicting universal claims of the Byzantine emperors and the popes had any direct impact on the course of events leading to the conquest of 1204. While the first two crusades were conducted through Byzantium, the tertiary 1 signalled a decisive shift towards straight maritime transportation from western Europe, although Frederick I Barbarossa still took the country route. The maritime option was also called for the Fourth Cause. There was no reason, therefore, to cross Byzantium to obtain financial or other aid. Harris has misread the alphabetic character addressed by Innocent 3 to Alexios III in 1202.(p. 150) Information technology did non allude to the danger ultimately facing Byzantium from the Latins if information technology failed to offer assistance to the cause, simply the danger from the Muslims. One time we put bated this crucial link in Harris' argumentation, the moral justification the Pope supposedly provided for an set on on Byzantium is too removed. Moreover, in June 1203 the Pope explicitly prohibited the utilize of the crusade as a pretext for acquisition Byzantium. On the other paw, it is not surprising that the messages addressed past the crusaders to the pope, or the arguments they invoked to persuade the crusader armies to assault a Christian state such every bit Byzantium were couched in idealistic terms, in order to provide the required moral justification for action. They assume a total and unflinching dedication of the western leaders to the crusading ideal, whose pronouncements cannot always be taken at face value.

Harris' linear approach leaves no room for flexibility in attitudes resulting from changing circumstances in the course of the crusade, nor for private or collective interests or ambitions. It is hard to believe that Boniface of Montferrat and especially Venice had none. Harris' failure to admit them goes far to explain why, in his account, Venice appears to exist no more than a silent partner in the deviation of the Fourth Crusade, instead of the major factor it was. In sum, the volume fails to deliver on the writer'southward promise. It does not offer a new and disarming estimation of the developments leading to the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.

Notes

1. See for example D. Jacoby, 'Italian privileges and trade in Byzantium before the Quaternary Crusade: a reconsideration', Anuario de estudios medievales, 24 (1994), 349-69, repr. in idem, Trade, Bolt and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), no. Ii.Back to (1)
2. Run across P. Schreiner, 'Der Brief des Alexios I. Komnenos an den Grafen Robert von Flandern and das Problem gefälschter byzantinischer Kaiserschreiben in den westlichen Quellen', in G. De Gregorio and O. Kresten, eds, Documenti medievali, greci e latini. Studi comparativi (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1998), pp. 124-40.Dorsum to (ii)
3. Patrologia Latina, CCXVI, col. 354.Back to (3)
4. See D. Jacoby, 'Diplomacy, Trade, Aircraft and Espionage between Byzantium and Egypt in the Twelfth Century', in C. Scholz and 1000. Makris, eds, Polupleuros Nous. Miscellanea für Peter Schreiner zu seinem 60. Geburtstag, Byzantinisch Archiv, 19 (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Sauer, 2000), pp. 94-99.Back to (4)
5. Meet J. Pahlitzsch, Graeci et Suriani im Palästina der Kreuzfahrerzeit (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2001), pp. 253-28.Back to (5)
6. Run into D. Jacoby, 'The Venetian Quarter of Constantinople from 1082 to 1261: Topographical Considerations', in C. Sode and S. Takács, eds, Novum Millennium. Studies on Byzantine History and Culture Dedicated to Paul Speck (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 160-67.Back to (6)
7. On the latter, see D. Jacoby, 'The Venetian presence in the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261): the challenge of bullwork and the Byzantine inheritance', Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, 43 (1993), 141-201, repr. in idem, Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), no. VI.Dorsum to (7)
8. Encounter D. Jacoby, 'La consolidation de la domination de Venise dans la ville de Negrepont (1205-1390): un aspect de sa politique coloniale', in Ch. A. Maltezou and P. Schreiner, eds, Bisanzio, Venezia e il mondo franco-greco (XIII-Xv secolo) (Venice: Istituto ellenico di studi bizantini e postbizantini, 2002), pp. 155-60.Dorsum to (viii)

Author's Response

Jonathan Harris

Posted: Wed, eleven/11/2009 - 12:05

It is extremely flattering that a scholar of the continuing of Professor David Jacoby has taken the trouble to review my volume. Jacoby'south work is well known to anyone who has worked on the middle and later periods of Byzantine history (1025-1453), the Latin empire of Constantinople and Frankish Greece. His close studies of documentary material, published and unpublished, have borne fruit in a serial of seminal articles in the several languages in which he writes with ease. Past investigating the original documentation and so thoroughly and past refusing to accept anything on trust, Jacoby has been able to overturn numerous shibboleths and clichés, and his writings provide a constant claiming and inspiration to others working in the field.

Yet the detailed piece of work that Jacoby produces is non the simply way of writing history. For those of united states who take the needs of undergraduates, MA students and a wider, non-academic reading public in mind, the type of detail that Professor Jacoby goes into is not possible. In order to give some overview of events and a basic agreement of the menstruation, some degree of generalisation and loss of precision is unavoidable. It is this difference which, I believe, lies behind some of the criticisms of particular which Jacoby has made of my book.

For example, Jacoby criticises my bibliography because it does non contain some of the latest editions of gimmicky sources. As I made clear in the acknowledgements, however, the versions and translations cited were those which were likely to be about accessible to full general readers and students, who would not take the chance to use specialised academic libraries. The same applies to the maps, which Jacoby says are 'seriously flawed'. These were inserted just to give a general idea of the geography of the region. That of Constantinople illustrates the important signal: the city's easily defended position. The question of whether the church of the Twoscore Martyrs is in the wrong place is hardly relevant, especially as its position is largely a matter of speculation anyhow. The map of the Latin states of Syria and Palestine is attacked by Jacoby considering it does not bear witness the territorial changes which took place in the twelfth century. Its task in the book, however, is just to evidence where those states were in a broad eastern Mediterranean context.

I do not wish to deny that I accept made mistakes. I therefore am grateful to Professor Jacoby for pointing out that I misspelt the surname of the eminent medievalist, Hans Eberhard Mayer. A guilty plea must also exist recorded as regards my statement that Venice occupied Dyrrachion in the years later on 1204: the city in fact ended up being taken over by the Despot of Epiros. No doubt in that location are enough of others of a typographical nature, which Jacoby has not listed because of shortage of infinite.

On the other mitt, many of my supposed errors are in fact Jacoby's misreading of the relatively limited bespeak that I am trying to brand. He attacks my handling of the treaty betwixt Venice and Byzantium in 1082 because information technology supposedly repeats the well-worn argument that the treaty crippled the empire's economic system and enabled the Venetians to monopolise trade between Constantinople and the West. This view, says Jacoby, has been 'convincingly discarded' (in an commodity of his own). All the same that was non my statement or the point of discussing the treaty. On pp. 39-40 I alluded to the treaty just to show that information technology was a typical case of Byzantine diplomatic practice: finding an ally who could assail your enemy from behind, in this case the Normans of Southern Italy. I say that the emperor Alexios could be blamed for over-generous concessions hither, as indeed he has been,(1) just I was not offer analysis of the treaty and its upshot on Byzantine commerce per se. On pp. 114-xv I discuss the treaty in the context of John Two's conflict with Venice in 1119-26 as essential background to the run up to the Fourth Cause. Once again I was non offering a view on the treaty's long-term commercial implications but merely pointing out that the Byzantines conspicuously were non happy with it, or they would not have refused to renew it.

Jacoby claims that I am in mistake to suggest that the Showtime Crusade might have been unwittingly prompted past Alexios I's requests for mercenary troops from the W, on the grounds that all evidence for such requests is western European and therefore unreliable. This is non the example. Byzantine sources do mention attempts to recruit western mercenaries in the 1090s. Anna Comnena tells united states that Alexios I recruited a contingent of Flemish knights later meeting the count of Flanders in 1091 and that during his Petcheneg entrada he was expecting to be joined by a contingent of troops from Rome.(2) Jacoby as well asserts that the request at Piacenza was unlikely because at that place was no need for mercenary troops at the fourth dimension, but there is abundant show that the Byzantines were recruiting western mercenaries throughout the eleventh century and not simply at item moments of crisis.(3) I therefore experience completely justified in taking the Latin sources almost the Council of Piacenza seriously, while being alert to their obvious bias.

My account of the negotiations between Isaac Ii Angelos and Saladin in 1185-92 is criticised, partly because the mosque in Constantinople was a new one and not an existing one and partly considering there is no evidence that Isaac requested the protectorship of the Holy Places from Saladin before 1192. As for whether the mosque was new or old, the affair is perchance not of the first importance, nor is information technology an effect that I am even trying to accost. The point here is that the type of dealings that the Byzantines had with Saladin betwixt 1185 and 1192 were not anything new, fifty-fifty if the particular mosque existence discussed was. Equally for the protectorship of the Holy Places, it is not unreasonable to assume that Isaac had been requesting this all along, since so many other Byzantine treaties with Muslim powers had fabricated that demand in return for concessions over the mosque in Constantinople. Besides, one source does mention that Greek clergy were given favoured status in Jerusalem after Saladin's conquest of the city in 1187.(4) In whatsoever case, my aim in discussing the negotiations was not to demonstrate how much or how little Isaac extracted from Saladin, just to show that they did non concern any military alliance or programme to partition the kingdom of Jerusalem every bit is ofttimes suggested.

The chapter on the backwash of 1204 attracts some of the severest censure. I am held to be in fault because I state that the exodus of many prominent Greeks from Constantinople left the place largely to the poor, old and ill, because Jacoby has discovered examples of people who did not fall into those categories, but who even so remained behind. The remark is one made by several contemporaries and eyewitnesses and and then it should not exist dismissed lightly,(v) but it does non, of class, mean literally that everyone went. My bespeak was only that many did go out and that these provided the courtiers at the rival courts of Arta, Nicaea and Trebizond.

My mention of the Roman church equally a beneficiary of the territorial division of the Byzantine empire is held to exist inaccurate. I was referring to the ecclesiastical property that was assigned to the Latin church in Greece to support it financially, though my use of the phrase 'Roman church' here might have been a little misleading. Finally while it is true that the Venetians just occupied a pocket-size part of the island of Euboea in the years immediately after 1204, to go into particular about the procedure by which they came to dominate the whole island would accept been tedious and inappropriate hither.

In brusque, I have to reject most of Jacoby's corrections. The alternative would be to qualify each statement with carefully-worded get-out clauses designed to assuage the possible wrath of all the specialists in every one of the many fields on which the book touches. That would exist regrettable, given that the clarity and fluency of the prose is, in Jacoby's stance, the book'southward only positive quality.

Jacoby concludes his review by denouncing my overall argument as neither new nor convincing. In a nutshell, my thesis is this: in its dealing with the reformed papacy, passing crusades and the Latin states of Syria between 1050 and 1204, the rulers of the Byzantine empire relied on trusted techniques and ideology. This meant putting the defence of Constantinople to a higher place all else and securing recognition of the position of the Byzantine emperor as the emperor of the Romans, the supreme overlord of the Christian world. Successful though information technology had been in the past, this approach was dangerous in a period when the pope was claiming that he was the head of Christendom and that the defence force of Jerusalem was the duty of all pious rulers. The failure of the Byzantines to accede to either of these points led to their existence blamed for the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 and to the justification of aggression against them to extort supplies for crusading expeditions.

I volition not dwell on Jacoby's claim that my argument is not new, although I would be interested to know where it has been advanced before. The grounds on which Jacoby says my thesis is unconvincing, on the other hand, are incomparably weak and rather unfair. He claims that the main prop of my argument is the letter written past Pope Innocent III to the Byzantine emperor Alexios Iii in November 1202. There Innocent warns the emperor that he ought to deport more like his supposed pro-western predecessor Manuel I, 'and so that y'all might be able to extinguish or feed the burn down in distant regions lest it be able in some mensurate to reach all the way to your territories'. I read this equally a thinly-veiled threat that Innocent might not be able to preclude aggression from the w if Alexios failed to co-operate with the try to recover Jerusalem, a reading endorsed past the translator of the letter.(6) Jacoby regards this equally a misreading and asserts that Innocent was referring to the Muslim powers who might march on Constantinople if non checked in Syria.

Jacoby'south reading of the letter is perfectly plausible and he may well be correct. What is unreasonable is his insistence that my entire thesis thereby falls. In fact, fifty-fifty if Jacoby's reading is right, the 1202 letter is but a tiny office of the bear witness I use to back up my argument. Typical of the wide range of material I use are the chronicles which describe the conquest of Cyprus by Richard I of England in 1191. They justify this assailment confronting Christians by bringing out all the old slurs confronting the Byzantines, their disobedience to Rome and their supposed brotherhood with Saladin, while extolling the cloth advantages that the campaign brought for the crusaders and the Latin position in the Holy Land.

Jacoby's parting shot is to merits that such justifications should exist ignored because they were but a cover for territorial ambitions on the part of crusade leaders who may not have had the slightest interest in the recovery of Jerusalem. In his stance, there is no link between ideology and action here, simply opportunistic state grabbing. Whether Richard I, Boniface of Montferrat and others were 18-carat in their attachment to the crusade of recovering Jerusalem is something that no one can always know, but it makes, in any case, no difference to my argument. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out in quite another context, to assert that an individual'southward professed principles must either be seen as the causal conditions of his deportment or else discounted altogether is rather simplistic. Those principles were the production of a shared political ideology with which all actions and policies accept to exist presented equally compatible.(seven) Aggression confronting Christian Byzantines, whether washed to advance the cause of recovering Jerusalem or simply to catch land and booty for its own sake, still had to exist justified in terms of crusade ideology and of the anti-Greek propaganda that had developed in response to Byzantine policies towards passing crusades and the Latin states of Syria. My thesis that Byzantine policies alienated the west and unwittingly provided a justification for aggression is therefore quite unaffected by Jacoby's objection here.

It is with some reluctance that I take to disagree fundamentally with so distinguished a scholar equally Professor Jacoby. To do otherwise, however, would exist to invite the situation envisaged by the learned Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaeologus (1391-1425), where 'there would not be ane person among the present generation … who would dare open his oral fissure'.(viii)

Notes
1. Run into for example: George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, transl. J. G. Hussey, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 359.
2. Anna Comnena, Alexiade, ed. B. Leib, iii vols (Paris: 1937-45), ii. 105, 139; English translation by E. R. A. Sewter, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 229, 256.
three. Jonathan Shepard, 'The uses of the Franks in eleventh- century Byzantium', in Anglo-Norman Studies, 15: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), pp. 275-305.
4. Bar Hebraeus, Chronography, transl. Ernest A. Wallis-Budge, 2 vols (London: Oxford Academy Press, 1932), i, p. 327.
5. Niketas Choniates, Historia, ed. J. A. Van Dieten, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, xi, ii vols (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1975), i. 589-94; Geoffroy de Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), p. 99; Gunther of Pairis, The Capture of Constantinople, transl. A. J. Andrea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 107; Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, transl. E. H. McNeal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 100.
6. Dice Register Innocenz III, ed. O. Hageneder et al, vii vols (Graz and Cologne, 1964-99), v, pp. 239-43; English translation, Alfred J. Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the 4th Crusade (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 35-39, on p. 38.
seven. Quentin Skinner, 'The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole', in N. McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Order in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 93-128, on p. 128.
8. Manuel Ii Palaeologus, Letters, transl. George T. Dennis, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 8 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1977), no. 52, p. 148.

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