Byzantine Culture

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Alexios I Komnenos and the First Crusade

The emperor who asked the west for mercenaries and received an army of armed pilgrims. Alexios I, the oaths at Constantinople, Antioch, and the beginning of Byzantine–Latin distrust.

In March 1095 envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos appeared at a church council at Piacenza and asked Pope Urban II for military help against the Turks in Anatolia. What Alexios wanted was recruits — bodies of western heavy cavalry, hired and paid, serving under Byzantine command, of the kind the empire had been employing for fifty years. What arrived eighteen months later was something nobody had planned for: tens of thousands of armed pilgrims under their own lords, with their own objectives, moving through his territory and expecting to be fed.

The First Crusade recovered Nicaea, broke Turkish power in western Anatolia, and made possible the Komnenian restoration. It also produced a mutual grievance between Byzantines and Latins that never healed and that led, at a distance of a century, to the Fourth Crusade.

The Position in 1095

Alexios had seized the throne in 1081, at a point when the empire was in the worst condition of its history to that date. The defeat at Manzikert in 1071 had not itself lost Anatolia; the civil wars of the following decade had, by inviting Turkish contingents into Byzantine factional fighting and then failing to remove them. By the 1080s a Seljuk sultanate was established at Nicaea, seventy miles from Constantinople.

Alexios had also fought off a Norman invasion of the Balkans under Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, destroyed a Pecheneg army at Levounion in 1091, and stabilised the coinage after a disastrous debasement. His domestic settlement — government by an extended family of relatives holding new high-sounding titles — is described in the Komnenian dynasty.

What he lacked was manpower. The thematic soldiery was gone; the army he had was built from household troops, aristocratic retinues, the Varangian Guard and hired foreigners. Requesting western recruits was routine Byzantine practice, and there were precedents going back decades.

What Urban II Did With the Request

At Clermont in November 1095 Urban preached something considerably larger than a recruitment drive: an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem, with remission of penance for participants. The help of the eastern Christians featured in the appeal, but Jerusalem — which was not Byzantine, had not been Byzantine for four and a half centuries, and was not mentioned in Alexios’s request — became the objective.

Whether Urban intended to help Constantinople or to assert Roman leadership over a reunified Christendom after the schism of 1054 has been argued both ways. Probably both motives were present, along with a desire to export the endemic violence of the French nobility.

The Crusaders Arrive

The first to reach Byzantine territory, in summer 1096, was the disorganised popular movement under Peter the Hermit. It had already massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland and pillaged its way across Hungary and the Balkans. Alexios fed it, advised it to wait for the princes, and — when it refused — ferried it across the Bosphorus, where it was destroyed by the Turks at Civetot in October.

The princes came in separate contingents through the winter of 1096–1097: Hugh of Vermandois, Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy. Alexios’s daughter Anna Komnene, who was thirteen at the time and wrote the Alexiad some fifty years later, gives the fullest Byzantine account, and her portraits are the most memorable in Byzantine literature. On Bohemond — the Norman who had invaded the empire a decade earlier and was now arriving as an ally — she is unforgettable:

There was a certain charm about him, but it was dimmed by the alarm his person as a whole inspired… even his laugh sounded like a threat to others.

Alexios’s policy was to move each contingent across the straits quickly, keep them separated, supply them well, and extract an oath. The oath required the crusaders to restore to the empire any territory that had been Byzantine before the Turkish conquest and to hold other conquests as imperial fiefs. Most leaders swore it, some reluctantly; Raymond of Toulouse gave a modified undertaking; Godfrey held out for months before agreeing.

Nicaea and Anatolia

The joint operation against Nicaea in May–June 1097 worked exactly as intended. The crusaders invested the city by land; Byzantine ships were hauled overland to the lake behind it to close the last supply route; and the garrison, seeing the position was hopeless, surrendered to the emperor’s representative rather than to the crusaders.

From the Byzantine point of view this was a textbook result: the city recovered intact, the population unharmed, the treaty terms fulfilled. From the crusaders’ point of view they had done the fighting and been denied the sack. The resentment is recorded in the Latin accounts immediately.

The combined armies then crossed Anatolia, defeated the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan at Dorylaion in July, and opened the road. Byzantine forces under Ioannes Doukas reoccupied the western coastal regions and the Aegean islands over the following two years — the most valuable outcome of the whole enterprise for the empire, and the base from which the Komnenian recovery was made.

The Breach at Antioch

The rupture came at Antioch. The crusaders besieged the city from October 1097, took it by treachery in June 1098, and were immediately besieged themselves by a relieving Muslim army under Kerbogha. Alexios was marching to join them when he met the deserting Stephen of Blois, who reported that the crusade was already destroyed. Alexios turned back, judging the risk of losing his field army in the interior unacceptable.

The crusaders broke out and defeated Kerbogha anyway. They then declared that the emperor had abandoned them and that the oath was void. Bohemond kept Antioch — a city that had been Byzantine until 1084 and was explicitly covered by the agreement — and made it a Norman principality.

Each side had a case. Alexios had acted on the best information available and had no obligation to destroy his army in a rescue attempt that appeared futile. The crusaders had been told help was coming and it had not come. What neither side could do afterwards was trust the other.

Consequences

For Byzantium: western Anatolia recovered, the Aegean coast secured, the empire functional again for another century. Antioch lost, and with it the claim to Syria.

For the crusaders: Jerusalem taken in July 1099 and four Latin states established in the Levant.

For relations between them: a permanent narrative on each side. Latin chroniclers from Antioch onwards describe the Greeks as treacherous and effeminate; Byzantine writers describe the Latins as greedy, violent and faithless. Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, written in the 1140s, is already fully formed in this view.

Bohemond made the breach explicit in 1107 by invading the empire from Italy, in a campaign he preached as a holy war against schismatic Greeks. He was defeated and forced to accept the Treaty of Devol in 1108, acknowledging himself Alexios’s vassal for Antioch. He never returned east to honour it, and Antioch stayed out of imperial hands.

A Note on the Sources

The Alexiad is a major work of history written by a woman in the twelfth century, unique in the medieval world, and also a defence of her father written by a daughter who had been excluded from power. The Latin narratives — the anonymous Gesta Francorum, Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres — are eyewitness accounts written to justify their own leaders. Reading the events of 1097–1098 requires holding all of them at arm’s length simultaneously, and the exercise is a useful introduction to what happens when two literatures describe the same war.

The Oath and What It Meant

The oath Alexios extracted at Constantinople is the hinge of the whole quarrel, and the two sides understood it differently — probably from the start.

For Alexios it was a variant of a familiar instrument. Byzantine practice routinely bound foreign commanders by oath and incorporated them into the imperial hierarchy through titles, gifts and stipends, as Byzantine diplomacy describes. The content was specific: territory that had been Byzantine before the Turkish conquest was to be restored to the empire; other conquests were to be held from the emperor.

For the crusading leaders it was a condition imposed under pressure by a man whose supplies they needed, in a ceremony most of them did not fully understand. Anna Komnene describes a Frankish knight sitting on the imperial throne during one of these audiences and having to be removed — an anecdote that captures the mutual incomprehension exactly.

The Latin accounts differ on what was sworn and by whom. Raymond of Toulouse gave a modified undertaking not to harm the emperor’s life or lands, and no more. Tancred avoided the ceremony entirely and later slipped across the Bosphorus in disguise to escape it.

Alexios for his part committed to supply the army, provide guides and a Byzantine contingent, and join the campaign in person if he could. Whether he was obliged to march to Antioch in 1098 is precisely what the two sides disagreed about afterwards.

The Anatolian Recovery

The most valuable outcome for Byzantium is the least discussed, because it happened behind the crusade rather than at its head.

While the main army marched east, Byzantine forces under John Doukas moved down the Aegean coast recovering cities that had been lost for a generation: Smyrna, Ephesus, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, and the islands of Chios, Rhodes and Samos. Further south, the coastal strip of Pamphylia and Cilicia was retaken in stages.

The recovered territory was not incidental. It contained the empire’s most productive remaining agricultural land, its Aegean harbours, and the population that supplied the twelfth-century army. The Komnenian restoration described in the Komnenian dynasty rests on this recovery, and the recovery rests on the Turks in western Anatolia being fully occupied by an army of Frankish heavy cavalry passing through.

Alexios got what he had asked for at Piacenza — with consequences he had not asked for at all.

Reading Anna Komnene

The Alexiad is the principal Byzantine source and needs handling with some care.

Anna was thirteen in 1097 and wrote in the 1140s, some fifty years later, after her exclusion from the succession and her retirement to a convent. She is writing a defence of her father against a tradition that had begun to blame him for the Latin quarrel, and she has a clear literary programme: the book is modelled on classical historiography, uses Homeric vocabulary deliberately, and is unusually candid about being a work of grief.

She is also very good. The portraits of Bohemond, Robert Guiscard and the crusading leaders are the sharpest character sketches in Byzantine literature; the technical descriptions of siege engines and the crossbow are precise; and she quotes documents, including the treaty of Devol, at length.

What she is not is neutral, and the Latin eyewitness accounts — the Gesta Francorum, Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres — are equally partisan in the other direction. The events of 1097–1098 are a case where reading one side alone produces a confident and wrong picture.

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