By the time he returned victorious from his campaign, the emperor clearly didn’t have much longer to live. Forced to sit up in order to breathe, and swollen with disease, he lingered on until August 1118, finally dying in his bed with his family by his side.* He had been a brilliant emperor and deserved to be buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles alongside the greatest of them, but instead he chose to be interred in the quiet little chapel he built along the seawalls.† The thirty-seven years he spent on the throne had given the empire a comforting stability just when it needed it the most, and had laid the foundation for a return to prosperity and strength. The full-scale collapse had been halted, and the emperor had even managed to recover the rich coastal lands along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. With a little more cooperation and goodwill between his people and the crusaders, Alexius almost certainly could have recovered the interior of Asia Minor as well. With the heartland of Anatolia restored to the empire, the damage done by Manzikert would have been effectively undone, and a much stronger Byzantium would have existed to deny the Turks a foothold in Europe. The following centuries would see plenty of capable and ambitious men on the imperial throne; if they had been given access to the resources of Asia Minor, they could perhaps have prevented the five hundred years of enslavement that awaited half of Europe. But the poisonous relations between Byzantium and the crusaders were not Alexius’s fault, and he can hardly be blamed for their deterioration. The Crusade could very well have overwhelmed the fragile imperial recovery, but he had handled it deftly and had accomplished more than any had dared to hope. Not all of his successors would have his skill—or be so lucky.
Long after the last crusaders left Constantinople, the impact of their passing reverberated in the imperial capital. Though the first experience left a bitter taste in the mouths of both sides, the rather pampered court was nevertheless impressed by the superb physical prowess of their brutish guests. In many cases, these swaggering men were their first intimate glimpses of the faraway West, and though the crusaders were uneducated and rough, there was a savage magnificence in the way these men of iron held themselves.
When the Second Crusade, led by the crowned heads of Germany and France, made its way through the capital during the reign of Alexius’s grandson Manuel, something in the pageantry of the age of chivalry caught the rich Byzantine imagination. It became fashionable for wealthy ladies to sport western-style dress, and the emperor Manuel even held jousting tournaments, horrifying his watching court by entering the lists himself.*
The fad for all things western, however, carried with it the tinge of superiority that all older civilizations feel toward younger, threatening ones. The wealthy might amuse themselves by aping these exotic strangers and their barbaric customs, but they felt little real warmth or understanding for their western colleagues. No matter how proficient these knights were at war, at heart most Byzantines considered them to be nothing more than jumped-up barbarians, incapable of true parity with the spiritual and temporal glory of Constantinople. The Roman Empire might have lost a good deal of its material luster, but it remained a shining beacon of learning and civilization in a darkened world, and no so-called king or prince from the barbaric West could ever really cross that divide.
Such lofty claims of glory seemed to be true enough under the Comnenian emperors, as the empire’s recovery continued. Alexius’s son John the Beautiful humbled the aggressive king of Hungary and forced the Danishmend Turks to become his vassals. When the stubbornly independent princes of Armenia continued to defy him, the emperor marched into Armenia and carted them off to Byzantine prisons for safekeeping. This display of imperial power brought the squabbling crusader kingdoms into line, and the prince of Antioch even presented himself before the emperor and pledged his humble allegiance. A hunting accident cut short John the Beautiful’s promising reign, but his even more brilliant son Manuel took up where his father had left off. The arrogant prince of Antioch, mistaking the new emperor’s youth for weakness, demanded that several fortresses be immediately turned over to him, only to have Manuel appear like lightning before the city, terrifying the populace. The other crusader kingdoms got the message and hurried to declare that the emperor was their overlord. When Manuel rode into Antioch in 1159 to personally assume control of it, the leading dignitaries of the crusader world—including the king of Jerusalem—marched obediently behind him. Three years later, the Seljuk Turks accepted vassal status in exchange for Manuel’s promise to leave them alone; in the West, Serbia and Bosnia were annexed by the crown. Byzantium seemed to have recovered from Manzikert and reclaimed its prestige.
There were, however, ominous clouds on the horizon. The empire’s reputation in the West had not been particularly high since the First Crusade, but it worsened significantly with the unmitigated failure of the second. Though the debacle was hardly the fault of Byzantium, French and especially Norman crusaders returned home with alarming tales of Byzantine duplicity and shocking imperial treaties with the Muslim enemy.* The fact that the crusaders had repeatedly ignored Manuel’s advice to avoid the Turks by traveling along the safer coastal routes was conveniently overlooked; the treaty with the sultan was damning enough. Clearly, the heretical Greeks cared nothing for the Christian cause in the East and were secretly trying to undermine the crusaders’ success.
Even more dangerous than Byzantium’s blackened reputation in the West, however, were the deteriorating relations with Venice. The Italian city-state had built up quite a commercial empire largely at Byzantine expense, and its increasingly arrogant attitude was unacceptable to the rank-and-file native merchants whose trade was being strangled. One could hardly walk the streets of the capital without running into an insufferable Venetian, and there were many who wished the emperor would send them all back to their lagoon. Surely an empire as glorious and mighty as Byzantium didn’t need to have its merchants crowded out by foreigners and its wealth diverted to some far-off city. John the Beautiful had tried to curb Venetian influence by refusing to renew their trading rights, but he had only succeeded in starting a war in which the hopelessly decrepit Byzantine navy couldn’t even participate. After a few months of having his coasts burned and trade disrupted, John swallowed his pride and gave in to Venetian demands, having accomplished nothing more than increasing the bitterness on both sides. His son Manuel as usual had better luck. In 1171, the emperor, in an act equal parts foolishness and bravery, simply arrested every Venetian in the empire and seized their merchandise, ignoring the outraged protests. The Venetian ambassador Enrico Dandolo was indignantly recalled (though not before losing the use of an eye), and the powerful navy took his place. Once again, the two nations were at war, but this time the Byzantines didn’t even have a navy, since John had disgustedly cut funding to it several years before. Incredibly, however, Manuel’s luck held. The plague broke out among the Venetian ships and the war effort collapsed. The poor doge returned to Venice—bringing the plague with him—and was brutally killed by an angry mob.
The Venetian stranglehold on the empire’s sea commerce was broken, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. For the moment, the republic was content to lick its wounds and nurse its bruised ego, but memories were long on the Venetian lagoon. Thirty-two years would pass, but Venice—and Enrico Dandolo—would have their revenge.