Members of the old elite gravitated to the newcapital. The historianNiketas
Choniates was one of them.He picked up the threads of old acquaintances.
He commiserated with Archbishop Constantine Mesopotamites of Thessaloniki,
who had fallen into pirate hands but was now safe in Epiros.4
He hoped to persuade his brother Michael, the archbishop of Athens, to
come to Nicaea. Theodore Laskaris had a ship ready to whisk him away
from ‘windy Keos’ where he had found refuge. The archbishop refused the
invitation, preferring to remain within easy reach of his Athenian flock.5
At Nicaea Niketas Choniates found time to complete his great history, in
which he tried to explain why the disaster of 1204 should have overtaken
Constantinople. He also looked to the future. He compiled his Treasury
of orthodoxy, which was designed to counter heresy. The defence of orthodoxy
became central to the ideology of exile which he elaborated as court
orator for Theodore Laskaris. Exile was punishment for the sins of the past.
The parallel with the Israelites was much in Niketas’ mind. He compared
the waters of Nicaea’s Lake Askania to the waters of Babylon. In exile the
Byzantines, like the Israelites, would atone for their sins and would recover
divine favour. The New Jerusalem would be theirs again. Their immediate
task was to preserve the purity of orthodoxy in the face of the Latin
threat.6
The ideology of exile would at first be virulently anti-Latin in contrast to
the more restrained attitudes that prevailed before 1204. The impressions
created by the sack of Constantinople were reinforced by the intransigence
displayed by the Latin church in subsequent discussions between representatives
of the two churches. These discussions only underlined the contempt
felt by the Latins for the Greeks. The papal legate Pelagius provided further
confirmation of Latin arrogance towards the orthodox church. In 1214
he closed the orthodox churches in Constantinople and persecuted Greek
monks who refused to recognise papal primacy. As a counter-blast to his
activities, Constantine Stilbes, the metropolitan of Kyzikos, produced his
Against the Latins. This is one of the key documents of anti-Latin polemic.
It marked a decisive shift from reasoned debate to justified prejudice. Stilbes
had little to say about theological differences. Instead, he concentrated on
two issues: papal primacy and holy war. These were interlinked. They had
perverted Latin Christianity and had produced the tragedy of 1204. To take
papal primacy first, Stilbes charged that the Latins did not simply regard the
pope as the successor of St Peter. It was not even that they identified the two.
It was worse than this: they deified the pope and insisted that all Christians
submit to his authority. The perversion of papal authority was apparent
in the issuing of indulgences. Stilbes was the first Byzantine theologian to
draw attention to this Latin practice. What horrified him was not so much
that past sins were pardoned, but those that were still to be committed.
It was the same with oaths: the pope was capable of releasing Latins not
only from those that had already been sworn, but also from those yet to be
taken. Papal authority thus undermined the moral order that Christianity
was supposed to uphold. It was also used to promote warfare.7
The Byzantines had considered, but always rejected, the notion of holy
war. They followed Basil of Caesarea’s teaching that in all circumstances
the taking of human life was wrong. The notion of the crusade disturbed
the Byzantines. It was mostly clearly expressed in Anna Komnena’s story
about the fighting priest. She concluded, ‘thus the race is no less devoted to
religion than to war’.8 It was Stilbes who fused this disquiet into an outright
condemnation of the Latin church’s devotion to war. He accused the Latin
church of teaching that men dying in battle went to paradise. This might
not have been official doctrine, but beliefs of this kind circulated among
crusaders. Latin bishops were supposed to sprinkle naked youths with holy
water and in this way to turn them into invincible warriors. Stilbes seems
to be garbling the Latin church’s role in the making of a knight. Again he
was not so far off the mark.
The sack of Constantinople confirmed Stilbes’ portrayal of the Latin faith
as one perverted by papal primacy and its espousal of war as an instrument
of expansion. The crusaders had desecrated the churches of Constantinople
and had profaned St Sophia itself. Latin priests and bishops had played an
active role in the assault on the City. A bishop had been in the vanguard
holding aloft a cross. The Latin clergy had done nothing to prevent the
excesses of the crusaders; if anything, they encouraged them. They had
desecrated the holy images. Stilbes closed his tract with a demonstration
that because of its addiction to war, the Latin church had lapsed into heresy.
Stilbes fixed in the Byzantine mind an image of the Latins that would never
be erased. Some years later in 1231 when there was talk of a compromise
with the Latin authorities on the island of Cyprus, the orthodox clergy
and people of Constantinople sent a delegation to Nicaea. They protested
that this was to ignore their sufferings at the hands of the Latins: they
had been imprisoned; they had had their beards pulled out. Any deal with
the Latins would mean ‘a betrayal of the faith handed down from their
fathers’. The members of the delegation insisted that an obsession with
war had driven the Latins ‘raving mad’, priests and laity alike. They would
take any concession on the part of the Greeks as a sign of weakness and
surrender.9 The events of 1204 brought the Latins into sharper focus. It
was part of the way that the Byzantine identity was reconstructed in an
anti-Latin sense during the period of exile. The new patriarch Michael
Autoreianos even offered spiritual rewards to those Byzantines laying down
their lives in the fight against the Latins.10
Having laid the foundations of a Byzantine empire in exile Theodore I
Laskaris found himself under threat from an unexpected quarter. In 1211
his imperial claims were challenged by his father-in-law Alexios III Angelos,
who had the backing of the Seljuq Turks. Laskaris engaged the Seljuq
armies at the Pisidian border town of Antioch-on-the-Maeander. The battle
started to go against him, so he sought out the Seljuq sultan and killed him
in single combat. The Seljuq forces melted away and Alexios III was led off
to end his days in a Nicaean monastery. The manner of Laskaris’ triumph
did wonders for his prestige, but it was a pyrrhic victory. He had lost his
best troops – paradoxically, Latin mercenaries. The Latin emperorHenry of
Hainault invaded from the north and swept all before him. Laskaris had to
cede to the Latins the north-western corner of Asia Minor (see also below,
p. 763), placing a wedge between his territories in the north around Nicaea
and those in the south around Smyrna, and making communications difficult.
The death of David Komnenos in 1212 provided some compensation.
It allowed Theodore I Laskaris to annex Paphlagonia, effectively cutting
off the empire of Trebizond from the mainstream of Byzantine history. It
became instead a ‘Greek emirate’, and its history involves that of Anatolia
and the Black Sea rather than the late Byzantine empire’s.
World History
