Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].
| Pope Benedict IX | 1033–48 |
| Pope Leo IX | 1048–54 |
| Pope Nicholas II | 1058–61 |
XII
THE EARLY CRUSADES
The imperial standards of Constantinople were designed with a two-headed eagle typifying Constantine’s rule over the kingdoms of East and West. Towards the end of the eleventh century this emblem had become more symbolic of the Emperor’s anxious outlook upon hostile neighbours. With Asia Minor practically lost by the establishment of a Mahometan dynasty at Nicea within one hundred miles of the Christian capital, with the Bulgarians at the gates of Adrianople, and the Normans and the Popes in possession of his Greek patrimony in Italy, Alexius Commenus, when he ascended the throne of the Caesars, found himself master of an attenuated Empire, consisting mainly of strips of Grecian seaboard.
Yet in spite of her shorn territories Constantinople remained the greatest city in Europe, not merely in her magnificent site and architecture, nor even in her commerce, but in the hold she preserved over the imagination of men.
Athanaric the Goth had exclaimed that the ruler of Constantinople must be a god: eleventh-century Europe accepted him as mortal, but still crowned the lord of so great a city with a halo of awe. It was Constantinople that had won the Russians, the Bulgars, and the Slavs from heathenism to Christianity, not to the Catholicism of Western Europe but the Greek interpretation of the Christian faith called by its believers the ‘orthodox’. It was Constantinople whose gold coin, ‘the byzant’, was recognized as the medium of exchange between merchants of all nations. It was Constantinople again, her wealth, her palaces, her glory of pomp and government, that drew Russian, Norse, and Slav adventurers to serve as mercenaries in the Emperor’s army, just as auxiliaries had clamoured of old to join the Roman eagles. Amongst the ‘Varangar’ bodyguard, responsible for the safety of the Emperor’s person, were to be found at one time many followers of Harold the Saxon, who, escaping from a conquered England, gladly entered the service of a new master to whom the name ‘Norman’ was also anathema.
Alexius Commenus was in character like his Empire—a shrinkage from the dimensions of former days. There was nothing of the practical genius of a Constantine in his unscrupulous ability to mould small things to his advantage; nothing of the heroic Charlemagne in his eminently calculating courage. Yet his daughter, Anna Commena, who wrote a history of his reign, regarded him as a model of imperial virtues; and his court, that had ceased to distinguish pomp from greatness and elaborate ceremonial from glory, echoed this fiction. It was this mixture of pretension and weakness, of skill and cunning, of nerve and treachery, so typical of the later Eastern Emperors, that made the nations of Western Europe, while they admired Byzantium, yet use the word ‘Byzantine’ as a term of mingled contempt and dislike.
The Emperor, on his part, had no reason to love his Western neighbours. The Popes had robbed him of the Exarchate of Ravenna: they had set up a Headship of the Church in Rome deaf to the claims of Constantinople. When in the eighth century the Emperor Leo, the Isaurian,[12] earned the nickname of ‘Iconoclast’, or ‘Image-breaker’, by a campaign of destruction amongst devotional pictures and images that he denounced as idolatrous, Rome definitely refused to accept this ruling on behalf of Western Christendom.