Latin Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Latin Empire began with a coronation inside the Hagia Sophia on the 16th of May 1204. Baldwin IX of Flanders, a Crusader from western Europe, sat where Eastern Roman emperors had sat for centuries, wearing the regalia of a civilization his armies had just plundered. What made that moment so strange was not the conquest itself but the contradiction it created. Five polities now claimed, simultaneously, to be the Roman Empire: the Latin Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and three Byzantine successor states in Epirus, Nicaea, and Trebizond. Only one of those five would survive. How the Latin Empire rose from a diverted Crusade, why it never truly governed what it claimed, and how a force of 800 soldiers ended it on a single summer night in 1261 are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Crusade Diverted

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  The Fourth Crusade had been called to retake Jerusalem from Muslim control. That objective was never reached. Instead, a sequence of economic and political pressures pushed the Crusader army toward Constantinople, the wealthiest city in the Christian world. The original plan was limited in scope: restore Isaac II Angelos, who had been deposed by his nephew Alexios III Angelos, to the Byzantine throne. Isaac's son Alexios IV promised the Crusaders financial and military support if they helped him. That payment would fund the onward march to Jerusalem. When the Crusaders arrived at Constantinople, however, the situation turned volatile. Isaac and Alexios IV did briefly reign together, but the promised funds never materialized in full. In April 1204 the Crusaders stormed and plundered the city, seizing what they had been promised and far more. The Partitio terrarum imperii Romaniae, signed on the 1st of October 1204, formalized the division of Byzantine territory. Three eighths of the empire, including Crete and other islands, went to the Republic of Venice. The remaining territory was claimed by the new Latin Empire, parceled into vassal crusader states including the Kingdom of Thessalonica, the Principality of Achaea, the Duchy of Athens, and the Duchy of the Archipelago. Crusade leader Boniface I of Montferrat had been among the architects of this plan, but it was a Venetian-backed Fleming who took the throne.

• 3. The Problem of a Name

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  "Latin Empire" was never what the empire called itself. Historians in the 16th century coined the term to distinguish this Crusader state from both the classical Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, all of which used the word "Roman" for themselves. The label "Latin" reflected the religious and linguistic identity of the conquerors: they were Roman Catholic, and they used Latin in liturgy and scholarship, as opposed to the Greek-speaking Orthodox population they now ruled. The Byzantines had their own names for what had happened. They called it the Frankokratia, meaning rule of the Franks, or the Latinokratia, meaning rule of the Latins. The Crusaders' founding documents called their new state the imperium Constantinopolitanum, the Constantinopolitan Empire, a phrase common in western sources including papal correspondence, suggesting the Crusader leaders saw themselves as taking over an existing empire rather than founding a new one. Yet claiming the Roman name directly was difficult. Western Europe already recognized the Germanic Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate successor to Rome. A contemporaneous German chronicle, the Deeds of the Bishops of Halberstadt, called Baldwin I not emperor of the Romans but imperator Grecorum, emperor of the Greeks, the same title it had earlier given Alexios I Komnenos. Baldwin himself navigated this carefully. His full title replicated almost exactly the one used by Alexios IV, and on his seals he abbreviated Romanorum as Rom., leaving it ambiguous whether he meant the Romans or Romania, the land of the Romans. His successor Henry used imperium Romanum in at least one letter. A Venetian statesman, Marino Sanuto the Elder, used yet another formulation: Sebastō Latíno Basilía ton Rhōmaíōn, the August Latin Empire of the Romans.

• 4. War on Every Border

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  Baldwin I was captured at the Battle of Adrianople on the 14th of April 1205, less than a year after his coronation. The Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan had answered a call for help from Byzantine lords in Thrace who refused Latin rule. Kaloyan's troops and their Cuman allies crushed the Latin heavy cavalry and imprisoned Baldwin in the Bulgarian capital Tarnovo, where he died later that year. Kaloyan himself was murdered in 1207 during a siege of Thessalonica. Baldwin's brother Henry of Flanders then reclaimed most of the lost Thracian territories, concluding peace in 1210 through his marriage to Maria of Bulgaria, a daughter of Kaloyan. In Asia Minor, early Latin campaigns captured much of Bithynia by 1205, defeating the forces of Theodore I Laskaris at Poemanenum and Prusa. A truce was reached in 1207, and the Treaty of Nymphaeum in 1214 confirmed Latin control of most of Bithynia and Mysia. The southern European front opened almost simultaneously when Michael I Komnenos Doukas of the Despotate of Epirus threatened Latin vassals in Thessalonica and Athens. Michael eventually submitted to Henry and even offered his daughter to Henry's brother Eustace in the summer of 1209, but turned hostile again by 1210. Henry died on the 11th of June 1216, supervising repairs to the walls of Thessalonica. His death left the Latin Empire without its most capable ruler at the moment when both Nicaea and Epirus were gathering strength.

• 5. An Empire Hollowed Out

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  By 1228, when Baldwin II took over a much-diminished state at majority, the Latin Empire was essentially insolvent. The Latins had dismantled the Greek economic administration immediately after the conquest, trusting neither the professional Greek bureaucracy nor the commerce it had managed. The disruption was severe. Production and trade collapsed. For a few years the empire's main exports from Thrace were wheat and furs; the rest of the economic basis rested on Constantinople's position astride major trade routes. Within a generation that advantage was fading. By the 1230s Constantinople, with its drastically reduced population, faced shortages of basic foodstuffs. The most reliable revenue stream, in a grim measure of how far the empire had fallen, was selling looted relics to churches in Western Europe. Baldwin II himself sold the relic of the Crown of Thorns while traveling in France in search of funds. He also stripped the lead roofs from the Great Palace and sold them. When that was not enough, he handed over his only son, Philip, to Venetian merchants as a guarantee for a loan. Baldwin traveled repeatedly to Western Europe seeking military aid from Pope Honorius III and the King of France Philip II, but largely without success. In 1235, the last Latin possessions in Asia Minor fell to Nicaea. That same year, Nicaea and Bulgaria launched a joint campaign and laid an unsuccessful siege to Constantinople. The podestà of Constantinople, who held the title of Governor of One-Fourth and One-Half of the Empire of Romania, remained practically independent of the emperor throughout this period, reflecting Venice's parallel authority over the remnant state.

• 6. Eight Hundred Soldiers

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  The Latin Empire ended not with a pitched battle but with an unlocked gate. In July 1261, the Nicaean general Alexios Strategopoulos was sent with roughly 800 soldiers, most of them Cumans, to watch the Bulgarian frontier and observe the Latin defenses of Constantinople. His force was an advance scout, not an assault army. When the troops reached Selymbria, about 30 miles west of Constantinople, local farmers known as thelematarioi told them that the entire Latin garrison and the Venetian fleet had left the city to raid the Nicaean island of Daphnousia. Strategopoulos hesitated. If the Latin army returned quickly, his small force could be destroyed. He would also be exceeding his orders. He decided he could not let the opportunity pass. On the night of the 24th and the 25th of July 1261, his men concealed themselves near the Gate of the Spring. A detachment guided by the thelematarioi found a secret passage into the city, attacked the guards from inside, and opened the gate. The Latins were caught completely unaware. As word spread, Baldwin II and the Latin inhabitants ran to the harbors of the Golden Horn hoping to reach ships. Strategopoulos simultaneously ordered the Venetian buildings and warehouses along the coast set on fire to block their escape. The returning Venetian fleet arrived in time to evacuate many Latins to what remained of Latin Greece. Baldwin II went into exile. The heirs of Baldwin II continued to use the title Emperor of Constantinople for roughly another century, exercising actual authority only when ruling as princes of Achaea between 1333 and 1383. James of Baux, the last Latin emperor to govern any imperial territory through Achaea, died on the 7th of July 1383.

• 7. Art and the Byzantine Shadow

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  Known artworks produced within the Latin Empire are almost non-existent. André Grabar suggests three possible explanations: destruction, the disruption caused by subordinating the Greek clergy who had sustained artistic production, and the difficulty of distinguishing Latin-made art from imitative works produced elsewhere. What the Crusader occupation did produce, indirectly, was a shift in Italian painting. Crusader rule over Constantinople brought western artists and patrons into sustained contact with Byzantine visual culture. That encounter contributed significantly to the Italo-Byzantine style. The Italian painting Virgin and Child by Berlinghiero, made around 1230, was modeled directly on a Byzantine icon type called the Hodegetria. The original Hodegetria icon, which had been kept in the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople, is believed to have been destroyed when Ottoman Turks sacked the city in 1453, roughly two centuries after the Latin Empire itself had ceased to exist.