Episode 299 - Baldwin II with John Giebfried

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 299

Baldwin II with John Kiepfried

Last time Constantinople was captured by the forces of Nicaea.

Alexius Stratiopoulos led his men through the streets of the city, and the sitting emperor Baldwin II fled for his life.

As he sailed away from his capital, Baldwin was deeply saddened by these events.

You see, Baldwin was not a French knight who'd grown up in the fields of Flanders or Champagne.

He hadn't come to the Bosphorus looking to get rich or seeing Byzantium as just a stopover on the way to Jerusalem.

No, he was born and bred in Constantinople.

His childhood memories were of the great palace, of La Cernae, of the Hippodrome and the Messi.

He was a Latin man, yes, but he was also a Constantinople

through and through.

We've spent so much time recently with the Nicans and the Epirates that we haven't actually checked in with the Latin perspective since the Emperor Henry died back in 1216.

It was soon afterwards that the Latins suffered a double defeat, their forces in Europe and Asia being routed in the same season.

Those twin disasters left the Latins unable to venture out of Thrace, and soon the Niceneans and Bulgarians were besieging the Theodosian walls.

Today we take a look at the perspective of Baldwin II, the longest reigning and last of the Latin emperors of Constantinople.

He is a tragic figure in many ways, trapped between two worlds, not fully a part of either.

He is emblematic of the mixed allegiances and confused identities which the Latin occupation introduced into the Byzantine world.

Baldwin was crowned emperor at a young age, but never really exercised much power.

He controlled little more than Constantinople for much of his reign and was constantly begging others to lend him help since he didn't have the resources to act on his own.

There's only one man who can give us a proper biography of Baldwin, and that's Dr.

John Giebried, who was our guest in episodes 292

and 293.

John teaches history and digital humanities at the University of Vienna, but as he explains in the interview, he spent many years researching the reign of the Latin Empire's last ruler.

John Giebried, welcome back to the podcast.

Great to be back with you, Robin.

It's very very exciting to talk to you today because this is your specialist subject and it's something that only you can do justice to, I think, in

this

only I wasted.

Yeah, only I wasted five years of my life.

Actually, probably more, considering there's a lot of my master's thesis in it as well.

So, this was the better part of a decade of my life reading a lot of documents that otherwise no one would ever touch.

Fantastic.

Well, this is why you're here.

This is your moment.

And time to do some justice to Baldwin II.

So

he is a unique and special figure in this particular story,

but

he hasn't received the attention maybe that deserves, as we've just talked about.

So can you tell the listeners what is his historical reputation?

So if you have ever picked up a general history of the Crusades or of Byzantium, where the reign of Baldwin II is mentioned, there basically the only thing he's discussed about is

in terms of the poverty of Constantinople in his time and the immense amount of debts that he spent his life dealing with.

If they said four things about him, I can guarantee these are the four things.

As someone who's read basically every account of his reign, these are the four things they mention, and they don't mention anything else.

One, he goes traveling around Western Europe looking for aid.

Two, he sells the crown of thorns and other relics to St.

Louis of France, which then end up in Saint-Chapelle, which is actually not true, as we will get into later.

Second, he strips the lead off the roofs of the Grey Palace to pay for his debts.

This is like the sign of how poor are you?

You're ripping lead off of roofs to pay your debts.

And finally, most infamously, he has to mortgage his own son, Philip, as collateral for a debt.

He then defaults on the debt, and his son essentially gets repossessed by the Venetians, dragged off to Venice, and is only freed when the king of Castile in Spain pays for his ransom.

Those are the four things things that are mentioned in every account, and it gives you this picture of him.

And basically, from Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all the way to present, that's what you are going to read about Baldwin, and that's all you're going to hear.

But this is really a character.

And as I said, my PhD was trying to give a more nuanced picture of Baldwin, especially in terms of his self-presentation.

How did he portray himself?

How did he look to the outside world?

How is it that Baldwin would want to be remembered?

As a reminder, Baldwin II is the son of Peter of Courtney and Yolanda of Flanders.

Yolanda was the sister of Baldwin and Henry, the first two Latin emperors, so she was an obvious candidate to aid in the succession after Henry's death.

Her husband Peter was a French knight and the two had 10 children, which was ideal for diplomatic marriages.

As we discussed in episode two hundred and ninety four, though, Peter never made it to Constantinople.

After being crowned in Rome, he landed at Dyrrhachium and tried to march overland, but he was captured or betrayed by Theodorus Dukas, the ruler of Epirus.

Peter died in captivity, while Yolanda made it safely to New Rome, where she gave birth to Baldwin in the purple room of the great palace, making him a Porphyrogenitos.

Yes, he is the first porphyrogenitos emperor since Alexius II, and he wants to remind people so much of it that he writes it on his seal in Greek so that everyone will remember that: yes, you are the son of the still barely living emperor of Constantinople, and you are born in the palace in the purple room, going all the way back to a tradition from almost 500 years ago at this point.

Now, historians often claim that the Latin rulers of Constantinople didn't keep up the Byzantine traditions or they completely forgot about it.

But the Latin court was careful enough to make sure the empress gave birth in the right room in the right part of the palace so that you have the extra legitimacy of being a porphre genetos.

And Baldwin cared enough about the title personally that he would put it on his seal and remind people the rest of his life that, yes, I am as legitimate as a Byzantine emperor could be.

And do you think he's as legitimate as a Byzantine emperor could be?

So, this is a controversial position, but if I was writing a Byzantine history textbook and I had to make a chronology of rulers, I would write that there is a Flemish dynasty that ruled Constantinople from 1204 to 1261.

None of these people who say the legitimate emperors are the people in Nicaea, and maybe we'll put an asterisk around it, but the list after Alexius V goes to Theodore Lascaris, and we go all the way through Michael Palaeologus, and they're the real emperors.

And I just don't think that, I think that's sort of looking too far in the future and retrospectively taking care of this.

So if you look through Byzantine history, what makes someone a legitimate emperor?

It's possession of Constantinople.

It's not Greek language, it's not ethnicity.

You have Syrian dynasties, you have Armenian dynasties.

If Greek language is the rule, basically Constantine and Justinian have to be cut from your list as legitimate Byzantine emperors.

And in all cases, when there have been different claimants to who is the emperor, who is not the emperor, the rule that is always used is, you know, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Possession of Constantinople makes you the Roman emperor in this period.

The only time that doesn't count is when the Latin emperors are in control and you have this, like, yeah, the guys in Nicaea, they're the real emperors.

When, you know, for half the time, they're not even the most powerful Greek lords claiming to have like imperial title.

But let's say I think that if you look at who are the legitimate Byzantine emperors, if you're writing a timeline, I think you have to include a Flemish dynasty.

Well,

I'm going to leave that there and let the listeners debate

what they think of that controversial opinion.

I'm interested to see what they say.

I don't want to derail the conversation too much.

I want to stick to Baldwin's story, but I like it.

So, Baldwin, he grows up, he's born in Constantinople.

What do we know about his childhood?

So he grows up in Constantinople.

He is the only local born Latin emperor of Constantinople.

We notice he learns to speak, read, and write both French and Greek.

He probably learns Latin too, because we have a lot of Latin documents issued by him as well.

His childhood is not great.

Basically, he progressively becomes much more of an orphan.

He never meets his father.

His mother dies before he's three.

He's raised by his sister.

This is, so after his mom dies at age three, his sister, who was the wife of the emperor of Nicaea, Gieros Karis, also dies.

So she comes over and she is regent for Baldwin for a while while they're waiting for one of the three older brothers to show up.

The first older brother says no.

The second older brother says yes, but he doesn't exactly have a great time with it.

This is Robert of Courtenay.

He gets driven from the throne in a very colorful incident involving his wife that the lords didn't want him to be married to, having the nose cut off her in bed while his mother-in-law is being thrown out a window.

And at this point, he runs away and dies coming back.

So, brother number three is too young and too far away.

So, Baldwin is the only logical heir, and he's not even a teenager yet.

So, the Crusader barons have to make a choice.

They need a regent.

And one guy who shows up and says, i'll take the job is the bulgarian czar john ii asen who is if we're grading on who is winning the race to constantinople and to be the most powerful player in the game he's winning at this point in the story and he says i'll be regent i'll come to constantinople baldwin can marry my daughter i'll be regent and protector and i promise he can have the throne at the end of all this.

But fearing that the Bulgarians are just going to absorb Constantinople and Baldwin is going to basically be a Bulgarian puppet in name only.

The Crusader barons decline the offer and hand it over to John of Brienne.

So, John is technically the king of Jerusalem, which the Crusaders don't hold anymore.

Well, technically, he's not king of Jerusalem anymore.

He gets fired from that job, but that's a part of the story that would take so long that even I'm not going to go into it here.

So, yes, John is the ex-king of Jerusalem.

And the barons of the Latin Empire say, Hey, you are an expert crusade regent.

How would you like the job of being emperor for life?

And your daughter from his third marriage will then marry Baldwin II.

So, Maria Brienne marries Baldwin II, and they will inherit the kingdom.

John gets to be emperor for life, but he's in his 70s at this point.

So, they're not too worried about that as a problem.

And John's three sons from said third marriage will all get lands in Greece or in Asia Minor, assuming John can actually conquer those lands.

So your daughter gets to be empress after you die.

Your son gets lands, but only if they can conquer the lands.

And although John brings an army with him, the choice of John really inflames everyone around them.

So John Assen of Bulgaria is not a fan of this since he's just lost his Regency Prize.

He allies himself with John III, Dukas Fathatsis in Nicaea, and they attack John of Brienne in Constantinople in an event that one historian has called the War of the Three Johns.

Great name for a war.

And listeners will remember, this is the siege of Constantinople by Nicene and Bulgarian forces.

And it's John of Brienne who is manning the walls.

Yep.

And he...

now into his 70s, decides to massively outnumber, just lead one of those great Latin cavalry charges against huge superior odds.

And he manages to fight off the siege.

And it's his one moment of basically of glory where French chroniclers back are calling him the new Hector for his ability to fight back against the Greeks.

But it really is

the one good thing on his record as Latin Emperor.

Otherwise, his reign is very much a disappointment.

John sort of holds on, but he doesn't have any forces to go on the offensive.

And instead, he sends the now teenage Baldwin off to the West.

In fact, his three sons actually go with Baldwin to the West, where he manages to get the new king of France to marry them all off to very eligible ladies because he's not getting them any lands in Constantinople anymore.

Meanwhile, John falls into greater and greater debts.

And he does two of the things that Baldwin is criticized for.

One, which happens slightly later because I just said the kids off with Baldwin, is that he manages to mortgage one of his sons as debt collateral for a loan, but he's able to transfer that over by giving the Venetians something that they want more, which is the crown of thorns, which he uses as relic collateral.

So every account that is ever written about the sale of the crown of thorns always says it's Baldwin who sells the crown of thorns.

But it's not actually Baldwin.

It's actually John of Brienne, followed by the nobles of Constantinople.

And as we'll talk about in a little bit, Baldwin actually saves the situation rather than it being just a complete disaster where they lose the crown of thorns for nothing.

John, later in his reign, basically gets deeply involved with the Franciscans.

Maybe it's the life of complete and total poverty that has something to do with it, but the Franciscans are an up-and-coming order in this.

He takes over and redecorates in these beautiful frescoes a church in Constantinople.

And on his deathbed, John of Brienne puts off the robes of an emperor, becomes a Franciscan monk.

And when he dies, his body is sent to be buried in Assisi.

That is how much of a Franciscan he really becomes.

I like the idea that he's

a bit of a punchline.

I'm the king of Jerusalem who pawned the crown of thorns.

That's my claim to fame.

You don't want that on your CV.

Okay, so John's done his part.

He's been in Constantinople without many options and racking up debts, trying to

maintain his position.

And Baldwin has gone west.

He's gone back to Europe to ask for help.

So what's he been up to?

So he's mainly doing three things.

He is claiming his inheritance because now at this point, he has outlived all three of his elder brothers.

And meanwhile, his older sisters have been squatting on his territory, not expecting him to ever come back.

And he needs the land and needs the money.

So he goes back to France, where he manages to claim by right as the oldest male heir, Namur, which is basically the southern third of modern-day Belgium, as well as Courtenay, which is a county a little bit to the south of Paris, kind of next to Orléans.

And he gets that land for himself and all of the revenues.

He actually needs to use an army loaned to him by his cousin, the daughter of Baldwin I, who was at this point Countess of Flanders, to detach his sister and send her back to Luxembourg because she had been ruling no more.

So that's step one, get back the lands that are supposed to be his.

The second thing is recruiting a crusade army.

So Pope Gregory IX had originally called a crusade to Jerusalem.

He's very good friends with John of Brienne.

And when everything was falling apart in Constantinople, Gregory IX said, never mind, we're not going to Jerusalem.

I want all the knights of Europe to go defend Constantinople instead.

And yeah, all the people had signed up for Jerusalem.

You're now going to Constantinople.

Or at least you're going to not go and give your money to people who are going to Constantinople instead.

And this was very unpopular with people who said, yeah, I'm going to Jerusalem.

Be told, no, you're going to Constantinople instead.

And so a whole bunch of lords basically say, nope, we're not listening to you, Pope.

We're going to Jerusalem anyways.

We're taking our money and our men, and we are not getting involved in the Latin Empire whatsoever.

They go off in what's known as the Barons Crusade.

It doesn't get a number.

It's one of the largest crusading ventures ever, but it doesn't get a number because crusade numbering systems are a complete and total disaster that don't mean anything

and are a relic of 19th century historiography.

But that is a very much a side point.

So Baldwin, meanwhile, has to go around and recruit and get money any way he can.

One story I like that shows just how young and naive Baldwin is is after going to France, he says, hey, I'll just go to England.

So he gets on a boat and shows up in Dover completely unannounced, doesn't tell the king of England that he's coming.

And when a foreign monarch with soldiers shows up in a country uninvited, he is basically told to wait that this is not what rulers of foreign countries should do.

You should one, ask permission and be wait to be invited in by the ruler.

So here you have this teenage emperor in waiting and the king of England is like, okay, fine.

He is technically my cousin because, you know, European monarchs, they're all cousins.

He can come.

We'll give him a couple hundred pounds and

we'll send him back along his way.

And that is the story of how he accidentally breaks the rules trying to go to England.

But he's more successful in other ways.

He puts together a fairly large crusader army.

If we believe the Greek sources, it's something like 20,000 knights.

It's probably not that big, but that's what the only numbers we have say.

Annoyingly, on the list of horrible things that drive historians crazy, I found buried deep within the financial registers of Louis IX, King of France, a reference to basically, we pay this, we pay this, we pay this.

There are things like, oh, and we paid this knight some money to go serve serve with Baldwin.

And then he says, we sent a messenger to go measure the size of the number of soldiers that are in Baldwin's army and bring back the report to us.

We have the receipt where we paid the guy.

We don't have the report of exactly the number of knights and who showed up in the army because that didn't survive.

Amazing.

It's the problems of a medieval historian.

So many records that you want just don't survive.

And there are tantalizing clues that that record did exist.

And there's an exact list to number all the people who went and it doesn't survive.

So he gets together this army and he's getting ready to march back.

And it's at this point he hears of the problems with the relics and the crown of thorns that John of Brienne and then the barons of Constantinople had mortgaged the crown of thorns.

And oh, by the way, you have less than a year or else the Venetian merchants who we owe the money to are going to show up and they're going to take the crown of thorns back to Venice and it's going to be in St.

Mark's.

And yeah, we have some other relics that we're currently on loan as well.

So Baldwin tries to salvage the situation by mentioning to his cousin, the King of France, Louis IX, that, hey, would you like the crown of Thorns?

I am going to give it as a gift to you, as long as you show up or send people to show up in Constantinople with the money to pay back the loan, and then you could just bring it back here.

And knowing they have only months left, the King of England deputizes some Dominican friars and sends them basically racing to Constantinople Constantinople to get there before the Venetians who are supposed to come and

take it.

And they basically make the deadline by barely a week.

But they show up with the money, pay the debt in full with the letter from Baldwin saying, nope, I am giving this to my cousin, the King of France.

And they bring the relic back to France where it's greeted with applause and there are giant celebrations everywhere.

And Saint Louis, to celebrate, builds the beautiful Saint-Chapelle in the center of Paris, basically right across the way.

It's from Notre Dame.

And it is the most beautiful French Gothic stained glass that exists anywhere in the world, is probably in Saint-Chapelle.

And it is built to have first the Crown of Thorns and then all the other passion relics of Constantinople.

Basically, what a thousand years of Byzantine emperors have been saving up, John of Brienne and the nobles have been pawning off.

And Baldwin basically manages to shift them all to France, which probably saves them from destruction from the Ottomans.

but they end up, with the exception of the Crown of Thorns and a piece of that being destroyed by the French Revolution.

So

gives them another 400 years of life and how it does.

And as a thank you gift, Baldwin manages to get 10,000 livres as a gift.

So he actually turns a profit on what is a lose-lose situation for him.

and gets something out of these relics that were mortgaged out of there.

So at that point, he's ready to head off and go on his crusade.

Yeah.

And so

this is the last chance, really,

we might say, for the Latin Empire, right?

Because that war of the three Johns showed that they were kind of hemmed into the capital.

Unless a relief army comes from the west, they're never going to get out of there unless they ally themselves with someone.

you know if they were going to join the bulgarians somehow but that would be a kind of different way to keep going so Baldwin has got an army.

He's got the Western army they're looking for.

How does that crusade go?

So he marches over land, goes through Germany and through Hungary, shows up right next to Bulgaria, who then says, oh, hey, we'll be back on your side for a little bit.

They take back some crucial real estate in Thrace, and they are probably getting ready to expand more the following year.

The next year, Nicaea again tries for a siege of Constantinople.

Baldwin and his forces are able to beat back that siege, and everything is looking like, okay, Baldwin has his army.

He has won over one ally.

He's defeated another one.

And now is sort of expansion time.

But then, as history always does, some new player comes into the story and completely disrupts everything.

And perhaps no one in medieval history does this as well as the Mongols.

And that's exactly who are coming into the story right now.

Absolutely.

So the listeners will be familiar with the Mongols and who they are, but

how did their appearance in Europe and the Middle East affect Baldwin?

Well, I mean, they reshape the map of the Aegean.

And basically, the Mongols give Nicaea the assist it needs to eventually come out as the winner.

So there are two Mongol invasions happening almost simultaneously, one in Asia Minor, one in Europe, and both of it basically cripples every other player left on the board, with the exception of Nicaea.

So in Asia Minor, the Mongols come in, they defeat a combined army of the Seljuk Turks, Trebizond, and the Armenian Kingdom at the Battle of Koseda.

All three then become Mongol vassals and they're out of the game.

For the rest of the period, Nicaea has no real threat from the east, so they can focus on going west and dealing with everything there.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Mongols famously subjugate all the Russian principalities.

They devastate Poland.

They conquer Hungary.

And then on their way back, leaving Hungary, they swing through the Balkans and cripple Bulgaria, and they fight a series of battles against Baldwin II and the Latins.

And this is one of the hallmarks, something that Baldwin can say that no other European ruler can say in these invasions, which is he actually defeated a Mongol army in battle.

However, we then promptly lost the fall of battle.

So what we know from this chronicle is in that second battle, he is defeated.

And from the other sort of historical pieces I was able to put together, he then goes missing.

You have this year, year and a half period where no one knows where Baldwin II is.

And this causes his brother-in-law, the Prince of Manicea.

Remember that Peter and Yolanda married their daughters off to all of the rulers, including the Prince of the Morea, Jeffrey II Vilhardman.

And then he's like, yep, I'm coming to Constantinople and I will be regent for my, at this point, like one-year-old nephew.

Baldwin has a son at this point.

I'm in control here.

And they send notices to the west that Baldwin is lost and probably dead and now I'm in control here.

And then afterwards, Baldwin shows up and he's like, yep, I'm alive.

Sorry.

And retakes the throne, but he comes back without an army.

So with his crusader army gone, that he and the Bulgarians are basically wiped off the map.

And it's at this point Nicaea starts driving west.

They will take Thessalonica and northern Greece, surround Constantinople.

And at this point, the geopolitical shift means the inevitability of Nicaea comes along.

And it would take basically a gigantic, miraculous moment, some event on the scale of a Mongol invasion to deal a decisive enough blow to Nicaea to end the inevitability that they're going to be the ones to come out and top.

Do you have a theory on what happened to Baldwin in that year?

I don't.

Basically, he is.

There is a French historian who thinks he's captured and is a prisoner, and he had to make submission, but I can demonstrate that he didn't make submission to the Mongols from later documents when he's sending ambassadors to the Mongols and doing these things.

It's possible he was a Mongol prisoner.

It is possible he is just running around Thrace.

It's possible he's he's like injured somewhere recovering from wounds.

He might be hanging out with Bulgarians for a little bit.

I don't know.

There is a, there is this like magic one-year gap.

And it's like, if I had five questions to like ask Baldwin if he came back, this would be in like my top three of what is going on in this period.

And yeah, it's one of the big mysteries that we have about his reign in all the mysteries we have.

And there's a lot.

It's really interesting because often if someone goes off to battle and doesn't come back, that's it.

They don't come back, and you get the fake person might come back, but uh, he actually came back, so

yeah.

So, uh, you just said he he needs another,

he needs a Hail Mary to change the situation here.

He needs a Mongol invasion of Nicaea or something like it to change the situation.

What does he try to do?

So, again, this is now me reducing 200 pages of a dissertation into as small as I can,

because

I could go on for 200 pages, but we would lose 99% of all your listeners as I go through all the footnotes on all of this.

So, let's just say he takes basically five big swings over the next two decades in order to try to reverse the situation he's in.

And they all come remarkably close to succeeding.

And then something else happens that isn't his fault, and it all also part for him.

So, the first big swing he takes is with the seventh crusade so baldwin's cousin louis the ninth later saint louis he is getting together his own crusade this is going to be the biggest crusade since the third crusade the biggest single nation crusading effort that is put into the field in the history of the crusades and baldwin comes up with a plan to try to help he sends his wife maria brienne to go to meet up with the army while they're preparing in Cyprus.

The plan, as it had been for for the fifth crusade, is we're going to land, attack Egypt, and then either trade Egypt for Jerusalem or crush them in Egypt and

march on to Jerusalem from there.

And

while they're waiting in Cyprus, Maria Brienne shows up and she has all these lovely contract notes where she sort of puts on her best damsel in distress hat and she goes around and says, hey, you're all my cousins, you're all my friends.

Actually, her brother is one of the leaders of the crusade at this point.

That

once you're done liberating Jerusalem, do you think you could come to the aid of me, poor distressed cousin of yours, and come to Constantinople, only stay for a year, we'll deal with these Greeks, and you, successful crusaders, will have not only saved Jerusalem, you will have saved Constantinople as well.

And then you will be the most awesome crusaders of all time.

And she manages to recruit some of the best, most powerful crusaders in the crusade army to join her cause.

And they said, yeah, yeah, once we're done retaking Jerusalem, we'll totally be back.

Now, if you know anything about the history of the crusades, they're not getting Jerusalem back.

In fact, this crusade is not even getting out of Egypt.

They march south into Egypt.

The king of France's brother leads a suicidal cavalry charge with the Templars and manages to get themselves defeated.

Louis IX is taken prisoner and he's only released after basically a king's ransom and all of France is like has to pay in two years of like the entire income of the king of France to get the king of France out of

captivity from the Mamluks.

And when they get to Jerusalem as pilgrims, not as conquerors, and they hang out in the Crusader states, they're reminded, hey, weren't we supposed to go to Constantinople on our way home?

And the King of France says, no, you don't have to.

And Maria Brienne's brother also says, yeah, I absolve you of your oath to my sister.

And they all go back and forget about the promises that they made.

So that's strike one.

Strike two is a Spanish solution.

So Baldwin goes to attend the first council of Lyon.

This is one of those big Western ecumenical councils.

It makes him the first emperor of Constantinople to preside over a major church council since the iconoclastic controversy.

So he actually shows up and he is the emperor sitting at the right hand.

It's not the Holy Roman Emperor because the Holy Roman Emperor is, how do I say, fighting a war against the Pope at this point.

So they're not exactly friends.

But Baldwin comes, shows up at the council, asks for help, and he makes friends there with the Order of Santiago in Spain.

So they are a military order, just like the Templars and the Hospitallers.

Baldwin goes to Spain, makes a deal with the King of Spain

and with the Knights of Santiago.

He is able to do this because of dynastic ties.

So, Baldwin's wife, Maria Brienne, is the daughter of the King of Castile's sister.

So, they are sort of very much family and friends.

And the arrangements are also helped by the fact that there is peace going on between the Spanish kingdoms and the Muslim type of kingdoms in the south.

So, you have these knights of Santiago with no reconquistaing to do and a family member and help.

So they sign all the arrangements.

They put together a big army of knights who are going to set up like a commandery in Constantinople.

And we're just waiting for the Pope to send money.

But remember that part where the Pope is fighting with the Holy Roman Emperor?

He then doesn't have the money that he promised Baldwin to pay for this to come in.

And so Baldwin is like, hey, can I have the money?

Can I have the money?

And meanwhile, down in southern Spain, the people of Seville rise up and kill the Lord who had made peace with castile and the the northern spanish kingdoms which then means there now is war in spain uh and this army not getting the money that was supposed to instead of marching to constantinople marches south into seville they capture seville and basically with the conquest of seville it basically seals spanish victory in the reconquista even if the last muslims aren't driven out until 1492 after the fall of seville it's basically game over and that army could have been in constantinople instead but but instead it, you know, goes down in Spanish history rather than in Crusader history.

For the other stories, I'll be briefer.

So at swing number three, he makes an alliance with the ruler of Sicily, Manfred, who's the illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor.

And they put together a joint Greek Crusader Sicilian army to fight against Nicaea.

This is the Battle of Pelagonia, and it's going pretty well until one of the Greek commanders who is fighting in this joint

Sicilian Greek army defects mid-battle.

Nicaea is able to come out on top.

Four is sort of Baldwin and the Mongols.

So despite having lost a battle to the Mongols and fought against them, Baldwin realizes that they would be a very valuable ally to have.

And he sends one of his cousins all the way to Karakoram to the Mongol court there.

This Baldwin of Hano is the first secular ambassador from Europe ever to reach the Mongol court.

There have been some Franciscans and Dominicans who have made it out there, but the first secular ambassador from Western Europe to make it to there comes from Constantinople.

And we don't know what comes out of it, but basically after this period, the Venetians start building commercial ties with the Mongols, especially around modern Crimea.

And there's a lot of intertrade between Constantinople and China.

And although military stuff doesn't come out of this, it is incredibly important for later European history.

And finally, in the last years, when the fate of the Latin Empire is looking bleak, when their arch rivals Genoa have made a treaty with Nicaea, I don't want to ruin too much of the end of the story for everyone here, but basically Baldwin doubles down with the Venetians.

And it is one of the sort of the first attempts by the Latins to and the Venetians to try to break out that goes disastrously bad that they decide to attack the island of Daphnusia at the north end of the Bosphorus.

And with the fleet and garrison away, a passing Nicene army, which was not going to Constantinople, was going to Bulgaria, sees, oh, Constantinople is left undefended, and that's the end of the Latin Empire.

But the details of that story, I will leave to you to tell your dear podcast listeners.

And

do you want to talk about what happens to Baldwin himself after that?

The basics of it are: he goes back to the West and continues to hit up every source of aid that he possibly can.

He tries to broker peace between Manfred, this bastard ruling the kingdom of Sicily, with the Pope.

That fails.

The Pope then replaces Manfred as ruler of Sicily with Charles of Anjou, who is St.

Louis' younger brother, so a prince of France.

And Baldwin is like, okay, I'll work with you, and brings over relatives, and they're all preparing for Charles of Anjou to to invade Constantinople.

And again, I do not want to ruin later seasons of your podcast, but it's while waiting for this invasion to go through that Baldwin dies in his mid-60s in a little town in Apulia called Barletta, where he is buried.

Interestingly, his wife isn't buried next to him.

I've always had a suspicion that Baldwin and Maria Brienne didn't get along particularly well.

The fact that they spent most of their reigns apart from each other, that they only had one kid, and that after she died, after him, she chose not to be buried next to her husband in the cathedral in Barletta, but instead had herself buried in a CC next to her dad, I think says a lot about perhaps the relationship.

And if you go and mortgage our son as part of your debts, it's probably not good for the future of your marriage.

It's quite a sad end for Baldwin.

As I mentioned in the introduction, he isn't like the other crusaders who can just sail home.

Constantinople was his home.

This is where he'd grown up.

It's what he knew.

It was his place in the world, and he believed he was the rightful lord of the city, appointed by God.

My final questions to John were about Baldwin's identity and how we should remember him.

So

I think what we should say is that he really inherited an impossible situation and he persevered.

He is the longest ruling,

longest reigning ruler of Constantinople since Manuel Komenos, almost a century before.

So he lived, he reigned longer than the almost dozen people who came before him on the throne.

And despite it seeming like, oh yeah, he's just going to lose it.

In the 1240s, he survives.

basically 20 years where no one thinks he has a chance.

And he sort of just keeps pulling rabbits out of his hat to stay alive just long enough.

But the magic is never fully with him enough to transform everything along the way.

But I think we very much do not give Baldwin the credit as a ruler of Constantinople, that he is as close to a Byzantine-Latin hybrid as you can be.

There's a great line by a German medieval historian named Percior Straum in the 19th century who said, Show me your insignia and I'll tell you who you want to be.

Not who you are, but who you want to be.

And if you look at the seals of Baldwin II, on one side, you have a Flemish knight that looks exactly like his uncle Seals.

And it's a guy riding to horseback in traditional armor with his imperial title written in Latin, looking just like a sort of Western crusader ruler would be.

But flip it over, and you have Baldwin wearing a laurels, this traditional royal garb, wearing a Greek crown, holding a scepter.

The seal is almost identical to the same thing that Manuel or Alexius II would have had.

And it gives him his title in Greek.

It says that he is Porphyrogenitus.

He very much lays claim to I am emperor of Constantinople in the tradition dating back through all my Byzantine ideas.

There are two sides of the seal, two sides of Baldwin.

And we always see the Latin half, the guy who's going off to Western Europe asking for aid, very much this.

He's an outsider, foreigner, crusader.

But his own identity to himself really is as a son of Constantinople.

He is where he was born, it's where he grew up.

You can't be sure, but like Greek is probably his first language as much as French is.

And we have notes from when he goes to France and meets the Queen of France.

She belittles his French.

She says, Are you really one of us?

And the French look at him as he's not really one of us.

The Greeks look at him and say, he's also not one of us.

But he very much tries to still be that.

If you look at his administration, the high-ranking like official positions go to Latin lords.

Actually, in some cases, half Latin, half Greek, but every imperial officer that we know about is Greek.

Baldwin issues documents in Greek.

He signs his documents, even in the West, in Greek.

And there's a wonderful sort of side-by-side comparison you can do.

So his older sister is the Empress of Nicaea.

She grew up in the West, came to Nicaea, had to learn Greek.

And if you look at when she signs documents, it is this scribbly, like very hesitant, shaky Greek that looks like it's written by a five-year-old.

If you look at Baldwin's signature, it's basically identical to any other Greek emperor signing it.

He is 100% fluent.

He's been doing this his whole life.

He knows what he is doing and what he is saying.

And he is a son of Constantinople.

And I think what he does is very much part of that tradition that after 1261, he could have comfortably retired and have the Count of Namur and the Lord of Courtenay and lived a life in the French court.

But that's not what he wants to do.

He sells everything.

He mortgages his land.

He makes alliances.

He leaves home and family and spends the remaining sort of decade and a half of his life traveling everywhere around Europe, trying to get together the army to go back.

uh and reclaim his home that every permutation of alliances that he can possibly make he wants to make because he is of Constantinople.

He is Baldwin II of Constantinople, not of Flanders, not of Namur.

He is Baldwin of Constantinople.

And that is how he refers to himself.

And that's how I think we should remember himself of.

He is as close to a Byzantine emperor as someone who is sort of a crusader can ever really be.

And I think we shouldn't forget that.

Yeah, very good.

And

the extent of his efforts and the extent of the difficulty he was in are sort of captured in

an interesting story

you flagged up about his debts.

Yeah.

So

I have so many favorite stories when it comes to Baldwin II, but there's one I couldn't leave the podcast without telling.

So during my research, I came across a wonderful document, document, which is in the English royal patent rolls, which has nothing to do with patents in the modern sense.

Letters patent are public letters of the English monarch.

And in it, dated to the 28th of January, 1330, there is a message from the King of France to the King of England about a tiny coastal town called Bervlit in today's Netherlands.

In it, King Philip V of France tries to intercede with his 17-year-old cousin, the newly on the throne Edward III of England.

This is five years before the two of them are going to start the Hundred Years' War with each other, so a slight period before everything goes apart, where Philip manages to convince Edward to reconfirm the medieval equivalent of a cease and desist letter that was initially issued by Edward III's great-grandfather, Henry III.

So King Henry had promised that no creditor could seize property of the burgesses or merchants of the town of Birwlit for any debts except their own.

He did it on behalf of the then exiled Latin Emperor Baldwin II.

So this is Baldwin telling the King of England, hey,

the merchants of this tiny little village, which is a minor property that I got in the crazy inheritance mechanisms of dynastic succession, this little town belongs to me.

But whenever any of the merchants show up in England, they're being harassed by creditors who are coming after me.

So please say that the merchants don't have to deal with my debts.

So the fact that the king of England had to write a letter saying, nope, cease and desist, you cannot go after these poor merchants from this tiny little Dutch town, that it shows how bad the debts were.

That the town of Birbelet had to do this says one thing, but the fact is the cease and desist letter was issued not only by Henry III, but by his son, Edward I, by his grandson, Edward II, and now in the 1330s, by his great-grandson, Edward III, that this town in what's now the Netherlands keeps going back to the King of England and saying, please, remember, they can't go after our debts.

So 1330 is

almost 70 years after the fall of the Latin Empire.

It's 57 years after Baldwin died.

It's 23 years since Baldwin's imperial line comes to an end with the death of his granddaughter.

Yet the residents of Bervlit still feel it's necessary to get the two most powerful rulers of all of Europe, the King of England and the King of France, to have to deal with the debt repercussions of a very much long-dead Baldwin II.

That's sort of how long and lasting the shadow of the debts of Baldwin II really goes.

So this is the stuff that he was dealing with and the problems that he faced.

And that story just just encapsulates it better than anything else I found.

Absolutely.

John, thank you so much for joining us today and for

giving us a much fuller and more sympathetic portrait of Baldwin II.

And of course, for all you shared in our previous conversation about the Latin Empire of Constantinople.

Well, I'm glad I can be equal time for the bad guys,

as probably most of the podcast listeners and certainly all of Byzantine historians can be.

And I am really grateful for your podcast being here and for getting to tell all these stories that would otherwise be lost in boring academic stuff that only professors of medieval history would ever read.

So thank you so much.

And I look forward to keep listening to the podcast as the story continues to unfold.

Thank you.

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