Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
Peter Capuano, released the crusaders from their vow and absolved them of their sins. In return, he demanded an additional year of service and little more. Innocent could not extract further promises in exchange for lifting the penalty of excommunication, nor could he demand further military action in lieu of a campaign against Muslim Jerusalem. Innocent needed a new approach.
This chapter argues that Innocent employed accusations of sacrilege and other sinful behavior during the postconquest looting as a source of new leverage and as a means of explaining the sudden loss of divine favor. Such accusations cited wide misconduct but named the violation of holy ground and the seizing of relics as the worst of the crusaders’ many crimes. These complaints were made most explicitly in the summer of 1205, just as crusaders and their relics began arriving back in the West.
Within a year of the creation of the Latin Empire, papal writings consistently raised the issue of sinful misconduct after the conquest in order to push recalcitrant Christians to support papal positions or desires. Thus, the pope moved the contest over the meaning of 1204 to a religious battlefield. Even when not discussing the looting, he made moral or spiritual judgments on crusader conduct, thus keeping the conversation on the papal battleground of religious matters. Over time, other critics of the crusade echoed the papal approach in its moral condemnation of the crusaders and focus on illicit looting. The persistent criticism from Rome and other sites cemented the crusaders’ conduct and moral decision-making during the pillaging of Constantinople as the locus of the conflict over memory and meaning of the Fourth Crusade.
Innocent and the Crusaders
The contest over the memory of the Fourth Crusade emerged out of a specific set of political, ecclesiastical, and economic postconquest issues with which the papacy and the leaders of the crusading army wrestled. As with so many other phases of the crusade, the terms of oaths sworn by the soldiers dictated the nature of the difficulties to follow.1 Key terms of the March Pact at once incurred Innocent’s wrath and mandated reconciliation between the crusaders and the papacy, a precarious situation indeed. The central passages—on election and division of secular spoils—caused no controversy with Rome. It was, rather, the lesser provisions that governed the disposal of the wealth of the church and the patriarchate of Constantinople that reignited tensions otherwise potentially eased by the victory. The lay leaders had disposed of church lands, other kinds of church property, and even the highest ecclesiastical office in Constantinople. Innocent could not let this stand. Meanwhile, in order to ensure that the co-signers of the pact would all meet the commitments to which they had agreed, the document mandated papal ratification. The crusade leadership, assuming that Innocent would eventually absolve them of their sins, actually wanted the coercive threat of papal excommunication in order to guarantee the crusaders’ adherence to the document. Without papal ratification, the pact could have been annulled, thus potentially rendering Baldwin’s ascension to the throne illegitimate and raising the chance for further internecine conflict.
Innocent’s responses to the crusade are found chiefly in the register of his correspondence covering the most important years of the crusade’s aftermath, 1204 to 1206.2 The Gesta Innocentii, a second key source for papal engagement in the contested memory of 1204, offers the perspective of the larger papal organization. Its author, an anonymous member of the curia writing between 1204 and 1209, benefitted from his hindsight of the events of the Fourth Crusade, the sack of Constantinople, and the failures of the early Latin Empire. One of the chief purposes of the Gesta was to exculpate Innocent from any blame that might have accrued to him as the sponsor of the initial crusade.3
The interactions between the army and Rome during the close of the crusade shaped the papal response in the years that followed. Over the course of the campaign itself, before the sack, the tone of papal letters builds from mild reprimand to outright fury and condemnation. Questions of morality, ecclesiastical privilege, and divine approval—topics on which Innocent could claim ultimate authority—appear within these sources from the very beginning. As plans began to go awry, the pope deployed his limited tools of coercion and persuasion in order to get the crusade back on course to Egypt without antagonizing allies or potential allies, particularly the king of Hungary and Emperor Alexius III. He reminded the crusaders of their oath and threatened excommunication; in fact, each time the crusade diverted, an edict of excommunication against the army went into effect, though the crusade leadership suppressed this news. Innocent tried to divide the crusaders from their defiant leaders, or to split the French from the Venetians, with intermittent success. Many soldiers did abandon the enterprise (mostly because of internal dissent rather than papal machinations), but enough of them remained to provide a credible military force. Further undermining any sway Innocent might have had, clerics on the crusade preached to the rank and file that the diversion to Constantinople was part of the holy mission.4
Despite the crusaders’ defiance of the papacy, this crusade was not particularly irreligious. The soldiers had taken sacred oaths on which they staked their very souls. Nor did the diversion to Constantinople mean that the soldiers intended to abandon their quest to free Jerusalem. To the contrary, Constantinople initially represented a means to the ends of financing and supplying for the campaign against the Muslims. Even in February and March 1204, the crusaders still planned to leave Constantinople and campaign in Egypt. But the successful conquest changed everything. The clause mandating papal approval of the March Pact demonstrates that the crusaders knew the papacy would have to be part of the new empire’s future for it to survive. Moreover, the crusaders were operating under lingering burdens of excommunication. They now controlled a large region that would need to be assimilated into the Latin rite if the conquered people were to accept their Latin rulers. Most importantly, Jerusalem was nowhere in sight. The only military expedition the army would yet undertake was to pacify its new holdings and beat back both Greek and Bulgarian claimants to the throne. And only the pope or his representative could absolve the oath of a crusader.
Innocent knew that the crusaders cared about obedience to Rome, if not to the degree he might have wished. Throughout the Constantinople affair, Innocent and his legate remained optimistic that the force could be turned back toward Egypt and returned to the papal fold. To effect this desired turnabout, Innocent offered both spiritual inducements and threats. His main concern about the diversion to Constantinople had been that it might interfere with reconciliation talks or efforts to recover the Holy Land. Even after the death of Alexius IV, the idea that Constantinople could be conquered by the small Latin army, be ruled by a Latin emperor, and seemingly serve as a new beachhead for future crusades had not seemed likely to any of the parties involved.5 However, presented with the reality of the new emperor Baldwin, in the first few months after the fall, Innocent stated his belief in the providential nature of the conquest and was ready to deal with the conquerors.6
In the initial aftermath of the conquest, therefore, it was a foregone conclusion among all parties that some form of agreement between the papacy and the crusaders could be reached. The shift away from diversion and toward looting, particularly sacrilegious looting, took place in an atmosphere of mutual distrust yet mandatory engagement. Each side had much to gain by dealing with the other, but Innocent had the moral upper hand. The crusaders knew that they had strayed and required papal forgiveness to lift the edict of excommunication. On the other hand, the crusaders were in Constantinople, held the city, and had already apportioned the wealth of the East among themselves. With the moral high ground balanced against fait accompli, negotiations concerning reconciliation and the ecclesiastical future of the Latin Empire began; so too began the contest over memory.
The First Postconquest Communications: Cautious Optimism
After news of the conquest reached Rome, the pope turned his efforts in the East to four new issues. First, he wanted to recover all of the church property that had been looted or secularized—this included both objects, such as relics, and the lands of the Greek church in the city. Second, he desired complete papal control over the patriarchate of Constantinople. Third, he wanted the newly conquered lands to serve as a base of operations for further crusading activity. Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, he wanted to convert the Greek people to a true Roman Catholicism. The Franks and Venetians, meanwhile, were dealing with two issues of their own. They needed, first, papal ratification of the March Pact to stabilize the new empire while, second,