Episode 292 - Venice and the Rest of the Empire with John Giebfried

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hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 292

Venice and the rest of the empire with John Giebfried

Over the last few episodes we've viewed the aftermath of the sack from a variety of vantage points

and yet we haven't actually touched every corner of the Roman world.

With the Byzantine government extinguished, the Empire had been divided up between around 13 different states, so we need to survey the wreckage to give ourselves a full picture.

We'll get some help with this from Dr.

John Giebfried from the University of Vienna, who's been invaluable in putting together these next few episodes.

I'm going to introduce John in more detail next week, but he teaches history and digital humanities in Vienna and his academic work focuses on the Crusades, the Crusader States and European interactions with the Mongols.

We recorded an entire episode about Latin Constantinople and the Venetians, but I've decided to split that in two.

Next week we'll talk about New Rome.

Today he will be telling us more about the biggest vulture in the aviary, the Venetians.

The

The first place to mention is Atalia, the city on the southern coast of Anatolia, roughly halfway along its length.

This has long been the key port which connected the Aegean to Cilicia and Cyprus beyond.

With Constantinople in chaos, the city was isolated and the Seljuks seized it in 1207.

The Christians inside launched a counter-attack, though, with help from the Latins of Cyprus, but by the next decade Italia was safely in Turkish hands.

This eliminated Roman pretensions to the southern coast of Anatolia, meaning that the Armenian rulers of Cilicia were now operating entirely on their own.

The northern coast of Anatolia did not go the same way.

Trebizond, the great trading port in the north east corner of the peninsula, became the home of a Byzantine successor state which outlived all of its rivals.

Trebizond, as you may recall, is shielded from the plateau by the Pontic Alps, giving it as good a chance as Nicaea to survive Turkic attacks.

The city had repeatedly shrugged off Constantinople's control during the Komnenian era and would now go it alone.

The men who seized control of the region were the grandsons of of none other than filthy old Andronicus Comninos.

The Emperor Manuel's disreputable cousin had several children, as you may recall.

His eldest legitimate boy was named Manuel.

Manuel had two sons, Alexius and David, who fled to Georgia at some point during the reigns of the Angaloi.

They would have been relatively young when Andronicus and their father were killed, so they may have stayed at Constantinople for a while before fleeing when the political winds turned even further against them.

They seem to have had a family connection to the ruler of Georgia, Queen Tamar.

It was she who sponsored the young men, both in their early twenties, to march on Trebizond.

They seized the city around the same time that Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade.

When this shocking news reached Alexius, it seemed as good a time as any to have himself declared Vasilefs.

Alexius and David took the troops they now commanded and rapidly established their control over the coast of northern Anatolia.

This included both the territory immediately surrounding Trebizond and pushing west into Paphlagonia.

This was the homeland of the Komninoi and the place Andronicus had lived just before he became emperor, so there was plenty of support for the brothers from the local people.

But dreams of riding this momentum all the way to Constantinople, if that was ever a realistic goal, were quickly snuffed out.

Alexius had to defend Trebizond itself from Seljuk attack, while David was repeatedly defeated by Theodore Lascaris when he attempted to capture Nicene territory.

In 1214, the Seljuks seized the port of Sinope, roughly halfway along the peninsula, meaning that Trebizond's holdings in Paphlagonia were now physically separated from those further east, and they ceased to be any threat to Nicaea.

Alexius himself was captured during the conflict and forced to pay a tribute to Iconium.

From that time onwards Trebizond and Constantinople largely went their separate ways politically.

Trebizond would become a Roman state in a largely Caucasian and Turkish world.

Its relatively small population would survive and thrive through judicious diplomacy and its advantageous position as a trading centre.

The majority of its people would continue to see themselves as Romans, and their leaders would style themselves as Megas Komninos,

great or grand komninoi, implying that their descent from Andronicus made them superior to all other Romans claiming similar titles.

There's a lot of interest from listeners of this podcast in the story of Trebizond, but their history isn't especially relevant to our narrative any more, so let's catch up with them at a later date.

The other outposts of the Roman world were largely seized by the Venetians.

The men of Venice were given portions of the empire in the partition carried out at Constantinople in the days after the sack.

But they largely ignored these decisions and traded the places they wanted for the places they didn't.

We saw this in our last episode, where the Italians were happy to let Michael Ducas run the interior of Epirus as long as they could have Corfu and Arraychium.

It was exactly this, islands and port cities, which the Venetians had their eyes on.

Understandably, the great mercantile republic was really only interested in places which would further its trading goals, and the collapse of Roman power allowed them to annex all the key stopping points on their journeys east.

A new Venetian Empire was created, the route to Syria and Egypt now firmly in Italian hands.

This would allow them to dominate trade with the East, to gather its wares and export them back to Western Europe.

In the immediate aftermath of the sack, the Venetians were more worried about Genoese piracy, which had plagued the Aegean for many years, so their earliest acquisitions were aimed at pacifying this region.

The Venetian fleet was used to capture most of the islands of the Aegean, the exceptions being those which lay too close to Anatolia to be safely held.

They established a major base on Euboea, the large island off the coast of Attica, and would later develop the Greek port towns of Methoni and Coroni,

neither of which had been major trading centres before 1204, but now served as ideal stopping points on the route between Constantinople and Venice.

The Italians didn't need to colonize everything.

A number of Aegean islands around Naxos were taken by the Crusaders instead, and were officially loyal to the Emperor of Constantinople rather than Venice.

They are conventionally known as the Duchy of the Archipelago, but their survival depended on their Italian allies and their ports were open to the Venetians.

Over in the Adriatic, Cephalonia, Zacynthos, Corfu, and Durachium were all seized.

The latter two were then lost to the Epirates, but battle for control of them will continue.

The island the Venetians wanted above all others was Crete, which would prove the hardest to take.

Crete's large size and strategic position made it a key target for all the Italian trading states.

The Genoese seized it during the Fourth Crusade, and the Venetians now attempted to dislodge them.

It took three tries and thirteen years to finally push their rivals out, but they did it.

The Venetians then began to establish themselves firmly in the capital, Candia.

But by excluding the local Romans from power, they set off wave after wave of rebellion against their rule.

These violent conflicts would last for decades and require fresh waves of Venetian settlers in order to maintain control.

The one major island which the Venetians didn't take was Rhodes.

It was held by an independent Roman governor for several years before the Genoese attempted to capture it.

Subsequently, it was taken by forces from Nicaea.

There was obviously significant territory in the Balkans which had now been seized by the Bulgarians and Serbians, but much of this had already been taken before the Fourth Crusade arrived, and some of it was still being disputed by the rival powers we've covered in the last few episodes.

I've put up a couple of maps on the website and social media which attempt to make sense of this chaos.

Back at Constantinople, the Venetians were now junior partners in government.

To take up the story, we turn to John Giebfried.

We begin by talking about the perspective of Enrico Dandelo, who negotiated the deal that would see the Venetians take control of the patriarchal church and three-eighths of the empire.

This created tension with the government of the Venetian Republic itself, who were keen not to allow the newly empowered colony at Constantinople to forge an independent path.

You have Enrico Dandelo that basically basically he negotiates that three-eighths of the former Byzantine Empire are going to fall directly under Venetian rule.

That includes Crete, the Aegean Islands, the Peloponnese, basically all the Adriatic coast, some chunks of Thrace going up to Adrianople.

He negotiates this deal where the emperor is going to become a frank.

A Venetian was never going to become emperor anyways, and the Venetians had no interest in becoming the emperors.

They're going to at least get the patriarchate as their consolation prize, that a Venetian will be the new patriarch of Constantinople.

He also continues active military support, sending troops into the field.

There are Venetian knights fighting in the Battle of Adrianople, along with the traditional Venetian naval role that goes along with it.

And he is very much on the camp of, yes, we are definitely taking our rightful place, and we are going to get this big chunk of the Byzantine Empire, and we are going to keep it for ourselves.

But then he dies.

He's dead.

He's buried in Constantinople.

The Venetians elect one of their own, a man named Marino Zeno, and Zeno really wants to carry on that mission.

He appears to be a local who was in the sort of Venetian colony in Constantinople beforehand, and he is in charge, and he sort of is the one negotiating that coronation oath with Henry that he is playing an active role, asserting himself as if he is like the the leader of the Venetians in the empire.

Now,

just because he is asserting rule in Constantinople, there is still Venice.

And we forget that as soon as Enrico Dandelo dies and the news gets back to them, the Venetians and the Venetian Republic goes and elects their own doge.

And it's important to notice that it's the people who stayed behind who get to pick the next person.

And the people who stayed behind were probably the people not very enthusiastic about this sort of overseas colonial empire.

And the man they pick is a guy named Pietro Ziani.

And Ziani's policy is basically to consolidate what he can, but he has realized that Enrico Dandelo has bid off a bit more than Venice can chew.

That three-eighths of the former Roman Empire cannot be ruled by one tiny city, even with its large sort of merchant fleet.

And so he scales back Venetian ambition and he says, we're going to directly rule Crete.

We are going to directly rule Corfu.

We're going to keep Dirachium.

We're going to sort of sell, hand off our claim on the Peloponnese to Geoffrey of Ilhardwin, not the historian, his nephew.

We all will also let a guy named Marco Senudo, he'll take over all the Aegean islands.

He will not be, it'll be his personal fief.

He will be Venetian, but it will not be sort of the Venetian state ruling it, like they're directly ruling Crete and Corfu.

He also wants to make sure that he has control over the local community in Constantinople.

He does not want the empire to be run from Constantinople, and he doesn't want Constantinople taking its own independent positions from sort of the motherland back in Venice.

There are later legends passed around that Ziani considered moving the capital of Venice to Constantinople.

That's just later historical fiction.

Really, what he wants to do instead is assert control over that colony.

And what he does is he recalls after a couple of years, the Podesta and puts in his own man as the new head of the colony, sort of the Venetian community in Constantinople.

And basically, every two or three years, whoever the doge is, is going to send someone new to Constantinople with new sort of controls from above and really wants to have like direct executive authority over the community in Constantinople.

And so

this Podesta has a kind of independent authority, but

is always ultimately reporting back home and is not forging a completely independent path.

Yeah.

And I think the first guy in the job, Zeno, wants to do it that way.

And Ziani, the Doge in Venice, wants to have more control because he is not as ambitious.

He sees what resources Venice has left and knows that they can't push things so much.

So the Venetians at Constantinople were now represented by a new leader, the Podesta or Podesta, who would manage their affairs, negotiate with the Latin emperors, and administer some of their new colonies.

Not all.

He would be responsible for those places close to Constantinople, while Venice itself would administer the new ports along the Adriatic, the Greek coast, and Crete.

The Venetian colony at Constantinople would expand significantly after the sack,

but there was a dispute over authority.

The Podestar was a secular figure, while the new patriarch of the Byzantine Church was also a Venetian.

So who would have authority over whom?

The secular or the religious leader?

And would Venetian churches now be under the jurisdiction of the Agia Sophia or remain loyal to their home church?

John takes up the story.

So, the Venetian quarter along the Golden Horn basically doubles in size and extends sort of further into the city.

Now, the area they're taking has been badly damaged by fire, and so there's a lot of reclamation work.

The center of Venetian control in Constantinople becomes the Pantocrator Monastery, and they will fortify it.

And this is sort of the civil authority, which is distinct and often very much at odds with the patriarch of Constantinople further down the peninsula, who is his own independent authority.

And part of this has to do with Venetian politics: that the Venetian church back in Venice claims sovereignty over all Venetian churches everywhere that there are Venetians.

And so

even during the period of Byzantine rule, the Venetian community in Constantinople and the wider Byzantine world didn't answer to the patriarch in Constantinople because

there was a Greek patriarch, so they answered to their home church back in Venice.

And once there was a new Latin patriarch, the Latin patriarch said, hey, now that we're Latins, you answer to me.

And they say, no, our church says the rules are

we answer to the authorities back in Venice.

And that the patriarch of Grotto, which is the fancy, complicated title that

the head of the Catholic Church in Venice had during this period, the Patriarch of Grotto is the superior of all the Venetian churches within the Byzantine Empire.

And because they didn't want to have to answer to the patriarch in Constantinople, this is what they continued to assert throughout this period, which led to a weird situation where you had the Venetians not answering to the Venetian patriarch, but the Franks having to answer to the Venetian patriarch.

It also doesn't help that the person who was picked to be Venetian patriarch is probably

the single worst figure on the Latin side for the entire like 1204 to 1206 period.

His name is Thomas Morassini, and he is just a walking disaster for everyone and everything that goes along in the period.

That so they couldn't just pick the head of the church in Venice to become the new patriarch because he was very much out of favor and had a whole bunch of corruption allegations pending against him.

So they wanted to pick someone who the pope would be okay with.

And what they did is they picked one of the Venetians directly serving as an underling to the pope in Rome.

And this Thomas Morssini, he wasn't an archbishop, He wasn't a bishop.

He wasn't even a priest.

He wasn't even a deacon.

He was a sub-deacon.

He hadn't even received like full ordination as a deacon.

The only reason he got the job is because he was already directly working for the pope.

And maybe, you know, the pope would say yes to that more than picking a more experienced Venetian.

The problem is he was quarrelsome and greedy and would never listen to anyone.

He is going to fight without end against the Latin Emperor Henry and basically says, no, no French clerics ever, even in French churches, we're all going to be Venetians.

And there's a whole debate on that.

He is holding debates with the Greeks and trying to make a compromise with the Greeks.

And he's like, no, you all have to pray for me as patriarch.

I'm going to insist you do it in Latin too, not in Greek.

And we are going to stomp over all your rights and make no compromise at all, ever.

And does not want,

like, the Emperor Henry desperately, desperately is trying to make this work, is trying to get the Greeks on his side.

And every time he gets close to it, Morissini is there, like, no, everyone, listen to me, do it my way, give me all the money, all the power, all the authority.

Everybody has to listen to me.

And that is true even in his dealings with other Venetians.

And the most famous case of this, and one of my two or three favorite stories from the whole history of the Latin period, has to do with an icon of the Virgin Mary known as the Hodigatria.

This is a very ancient icon that is, according to tradition, painted by Saint Luke himself that has been used to defend the city dating back 800 years by this point.

And you have this icon, which is in imperial protection.

It appears that Emperor Henry promises it to the Venetians in exchange for his coronation.

Now, who does he mean by the Venetians?

Does he mean the Venetian Patriarchate or does he mean the Venetian podesta?

Our problem is we know about this incident because the Venetian patriarch writes a letter to the pope.

So we have it from his side.

We don't have it from the other side.

So we have to sort of piece it out.

So the patriarch Morosini, he says, yep, the icon is mine.

I am taking it to the Hagia Sophia.

The podesta Zeno says, no, it's mine.

I want it back.

And in, again, this is the telling of Morosini.

He says, you can have it if you can find it.

He doesn't expect it because it is inside the Hagia Sophia, inside the sacristy, under triple locks.

The gates of the cathedral are locked and barred, and he has like guards both inside and outside.

But Zeno is like, nope, I'm getting it.

It's mine.

And so when he can't break through the doors, he literally sends Venetians down the chimneys of the Hagia Sophia to sneak into the building, to open up one of the doors so that the Podista sort of armed group can break in.

Morosini is there at the time, basically saying, you're all excommunicated.

We're putting you under interdict.

He literally goes through sort of the medieval process of excommunication where he is like burning candles and lighting them out and yelling while they are breaking into this, but they don't know where in the church it is.

And it's only when one of the Greeks who is there and who hates Mauricini, like everyone hates Mauricini, tells them where it's hiding that they get it out.

They take it back to the Pantecrator monastery, which is where the Podesta is set up, and it remains in the Pantocrator, nicely under Venetian guard until the Greeks return in 1261.

Morassini writes all these letters to the Pope, but by this point, the Pope is really tired of Morosini and says, All right, your excommunications can stand, but I'm not doing anything about it.

Like,

there's not much I can do over this dispute.

As far as we know, well, we know it remains there, so he loses out.

But it gives you a sense that the Venetians were not united, that you have a patriarchal government that expects to be as rich as the patriarch of Constantinople has always been, but not having the resources in order to do it.

And you have a whole bunch of civil officials not wanting the patriarch to be their boss and to be in the way.

You have this general sort of inter-Venetian struggle that is worst under Morosini, who's going to be around for the first decade of Latin rule, but continues.

Eventually, it kind of dies down when the Venetian clerics stop appointing Venetian patriarchs, but the Pope starts appointing people, but the Pope always appoints Venetians anyways, but Venetians who are less likely to cause trouble.

But there is this very much fractured, divided Venetian community, which is in itself cut off from the main Venetian community, which is already pushing them aside.

So

you really have fractured fractured foundations all around.

The Patriarchate was meant to be a prize because it was a rich institution, but much of its wealth had now ebbed away.

Many of the lands it owned were now occupied by other people.

We saw Theodore Lascaris, for example, reassigning these lands to aristocrats he wanted to favor.

Even the workshops and rental properties which the Ahia Sophia owned in the capital had lost some of their value with the destruction of so much of the city.

Many Latins, like the patriarch Thomas Morassini, came to Byzantium expecting to get rich and were disappointed.

Not only did he fail to work well with the secular authorities, but he utterly failed as a spiritual leader.

The Latins were not pleased to have Venetian clergy forced upon them.

The local Venetians, as we just heard, weren't interested in changing loyalty to this new figure, and of course course the Byzantines were so frustrated by Morissini that most acknowledged the patriarch established at Nicaea as their true archbishop.

The failure of the patriarchate to provide any spiritual unity or leadership is not one of the main reasons that the Latin Empire failed, but it didn't help.

The Podesta and the Venetian colony in the city were not especially helpful to Latin rule either.

They were vital for its defence, but by maintaining their separateness, they could not lend the Latin emperors the kind of support which they needed.

Had they been his subjects, then he might have been able to utilise their manpower to hang on to more of Thrace and Anatolia.

But by withdrawing from such matters after Dandelo's death, the Venetians essentially stood by and watched the Latin position crumble in the face of the Eperate Bulgarian and Nicene advance.

It's also worth saying that although the new Venetian Empire would prove very profitable in the long run, in the short term it was not.

The reason the Venetians invested so heavily in Constantinople was that the Byzantine elite were their best customers.

Every Easter when the Emperor handed out the wheelbarrows full of cash to his senators, they would go down to the market and stock up on goods.

The Venetians brought wares from east and west to the Bosphorus, where rich members of the Comninian court would snap them up.

Now there was no wealthy court to sell to.

The Latin emperors were always short of money and were not as interested in ostentatious display.

Profits plummeted and it took decades before the Venetians of New Rome returned to the level of prosperity they had enjoyed under Manuel Komninos.

So the Roman world has been divvied up and the main players established.

We're nearly ready to end our vantage point gimmick and move forward with the narrative.

But there is one place left that we haven't really talked about in detail: Constantinople itself.

Next time, we'll take a look around what's left of New Rome with Dr.

Giebfried as our guide.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.