Episode 288 - Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 288.

Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat.

Last time, we saw the Latins agree to conquer the Roman Empire and run it from Constantinople.

The Emperor Baldwin marched off to war with Bulgaria to to defend his new lands, only to be captured in battle just outside Adrianople.

One of the major reasons for the Latin defeat was the absence of so many of the men who'd captured New Rome.

As I mentioned, many were on their way north but arrived too late, yet thousands more were nowhere near Adrianople on that fateful day.

They were off conquering Greece under the auspices of Boniface, the Marquis of Montferrat.

The city has fallen.

The city has fallen.

When the Latins realized that the city was theirs, no one was more excited than Boniface.

The Marquis had seen both his brothers murdered on their quests to become great lords, and now he had succeeded, and what a triumph it was.

The Queen of Cities had fallen to his army, and he would doubtless become the new Roman Emperor.

He raced his horse through the burnt-out husk of central Constantinople and made his way to the great palace.

Taking a moment to glance up at the Achia Sophia, as he passed, Boniface arrived at the Chalk Gate.

Once he was flanked by his men, he announced his intentions to the terrified Byzantines inside.

If they stood aside and allowed his men to occupy the palace, he would make sure that they were not harmed.

The gates opened, and Boniface made his way through the halls which every Roman emperor since Constantine had called their home.

Many in the palace had known both of the Marquis's brothers, and had hailed each as Caesar.

So Boniface didn't seem the worst choice to be the new Vasilefs.

Men would ingratiate themselves with their new ruler by reminiscing about the times they'd shared with his siblings, and many Romans in that quarter of the city began to refer to him by the imperial title, keen to be seen as early adopters in this new, scary world.

Amongst Boniface's grateful guests was a woman of particular interest,

Marguerite of Hungary, the widow of Isaac Angelos.

Isaac had married her as part of his efforts to secure peace with Hungary, but had been overthrown nine years later by his brother, Alexius Angelos Komnenos.

Margaret had been forced to live under house arrest and was as surprised as anyone when she was suddenly re enthroned by the Crusaders in twelve oh three.

Nothing good followed for her family as Isaac passed away just as his son by another woman, Alexius Angelos, was murdered by Molsuflos.

Back into her gilded cage she went until now.

Boniface eyed the thirty year old empress and liked what he saw.

Here was a way to massively bolster his claim to the throne.

She was the rightful Byzantine Empress empress in the eyes of many, and so Boniface was simply stepping into the shoes vacated by the Angeloi and providing continuity.

He could even rule in the name of her Roman children.

Yes, she had had two sons with Isaac Angelos, named poignantly John and Manuel.

The two princes were no more than ten years old.

If the Roman people had doubts about their new Latin overlord, he could actually present these children as their true rulers.

The marriage would also help secure Hungarian support for the new regime.

Genius move, Boniface, the Marquis said to himself.

He quickly married her, and then

didn't become emperor.

To his immense frustration, the Crusaders stuck to their plans to elect a new Vasilevs and chose Baldwin.

Fuming, Boniface demanded that he be compensated for this massive loss.

But as I mentioned last week, Baldwin did things by the book.

He respected the decision of the committee who divided up the Byzantine realm according to their considered opinion.

As Baldwin marched off to Thessaloniki to secure the city, Boniface decided to take what he wanted.

He suborned the troops occupying one of the Thracian towns that Baldwin had just left, and inside he presented Margaret and her children to the local Roman population, who responded enthusiastically.

Cheered by this, Boniface gathered his forces, which included most of the knights who'd come from Italy and Germany, and marched them north to Adrianople.

As you know, Adrianople was the largest city in Thrace.

By seizing it, Boniface would have a tremendous bargaining chip.

But taking the city proved far harder than he'd anticipated.

The siege engines the Marquis could muster did not threaten the walls, and the Roman inhabitants resisted stoutly.

According to the crusader Robert of Clary, Boniface now presented Margaret and her children to an embassy from the city.

Boniface urged the ambassadors to admit that they recognized the empress, which they did, and they acknowledged that the boys were indeed the sons of Isaac Angelos.

Bah said Boniface, why have you not recognised this boy as your lord, then?

to which the ambassador wisely responded, Take him to Constantinople to be crowned, and once he's in possession of the city, we will bow down before him.

Boniface's blushes were spared when another embassy, this time from New Rome, called him to come back and make peace with Baldwin.

When the Doge and other crusade leaders heard what was happening, they reacted quickly.

They knew they couldn't survive a civil war, and begged the Marquis to stand down.

The Emperor Baldwin returned from Thessalonica and duly offered that city to Boniface.

The Marquis's tantrum had worked.

The Latins agreed to create a new kingdom of Thessalonica for Boniface to rule.

This would cover most of Greece and the approaches to the city in each direction.

This was how the Latins had divided up the Holy Land.

As you know, there was a county of Edessa, a principality of Antioch, and a county of Tripoli.

Each functioned as its own realm, but the ruler of each ultimately owed allegiance to the king of Jerusalem.

So even as Boniface became king of Thessaloniki, he still owed fealty to the emperor Baldwin.

His ego soothed, Boniface rushed off to take possession of his new prize.

As you may recall, Boniface wasn't the only man rushing west that summer.

The former emperor, Alexius Angelos Komninos, had already travelled in this direction after blinding Mautsuflos.

Angelos Komninos was struggling to find Roman troops willing to fight the Latins.

Most towns only had small garrisons, and in the wake of the sack of Constantinople, few were willing to stand in the face of a Latin cavalry charge.

So the Vasilevs made his way south into Greece, where he knew someone who could be relied upon to put up a fight.

Leo Skuros was one of the many figures who decided to rebel against Constantinople's authority in the confusing years which led up to the arrival of the Fourth Crusade.

Skuros was from Naplion, just south of Argos in the Peloponnese.

Most likely his family were local office holders, and with the relentless disruption going on further north, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He seized control of his hometown, then Argos, then Corinth.

He would take control of the local tax revenues, pay the soldiers himself, and cease to send the expected funds to Constantinople.

When the Latins arrived on the Bosphorus, Skouros took the opportunity to expand his domain.

He marched north, capturing many towns in Attica, though failing to take Athens itself.

He made it all the way to Larissa in central Greece, which had long been the main Byzantine administrative centre in the region.

And it was there that he received Alexius Angelos Comninos and his family in the summer of twelve oh four.

Skouros had of course rebelled, technically, against Angelos Komninos, so it was a strange alliance in many ways but if Skouros could hold Greece against the Latins, then perhaps a counterattack could be launched in the future.

Skouros married the daughter of the Vasilefs, Eudokia, and it's possible that the Emperor bestowed upon Skouros the title of Despot, the same title he'd issued to the men who'd married his other daughters.

Unfortunately, this alliance did not stand the test of time.

Boniface's hardened knights would prove to be too strong for Scorus's levies.

The Marquis made his way first to Thessaloniki, where the locals welcomed their new master.

He installed Margaret and her sons in a palatial residence and organized a new administration, but he then quickly left to seize further territory.

Sizing up the forces coming towards him, Scoros wisely abandoned Larissa and made for Thermopylae.

The famous pass was a natural choke point at which to make a stand, but his attempted ambush failed and the Latins drove off Scorus's men.

Leo was disappointed by the performance of his forces, but he could see that standing and fighting the Latins face to face was a mistake.

He retreated to the Isthmus of Corinth and held it against Baldwin's first attack.

But the Marquis was on a mission and determined to capture the country while his followers were still enthusiastic for conquest.

A second attempt broke through in early 1205, and Skoros was forced to distribute his forces between his three main strongholds, Corinth, Argos, and Naplion.

Perhaps if he could exhaust the Latins in a series of sieges, then he could break their power.

This wasn't a bad strategy.

The Latins didn't have enough men to surround any of these cities.

They had to occupy strongholds near by and make life difficult for those behind the walls.

Eventually each city succumbed to the pressure and made an accommodation with the invaders.

As Professor Caldelis says in his new book, Roman culture did not encourage ordinary citizens to fight to the death.

They were used to preserving their lives and waiting for imperial forces to come to the rescue.

But in this case, no one was coming.

Corinth would hold out for five years, testament to Scoros's organization and the formidable defences of the Acro Corinth, the citadel high above the city.

By the time it fell, Scoros was dead.

A later legend remembered him as riding his horse off the top of the cliff, denying the Latins the chance to take him alive.

Meanwhile, Alexius Angelos Comninos fell into Boniface's hands.

Always keeping his pieces on the chessboard, the Marquis decided not to execute the former emperor or have him taken to Constantinople to be humiliated.

Instead, he shipped him off to Montferrat to live in comfortable exile.

For now.

As Antony Caldellus notes, this made him the first Roman emperor to visit Italy since Heraclius's grandson Constans II some five hundred years earlier.

All seemed to be going swimmingly for Boniface, and so he was shocked when a a few months later he got word that Baldwin had been captured by the Bulgarians.

The Marquis would never have made it to the battlefield, even if he'd wanted to, and he was too ensconced in Greece now to make a play to become the new emperor, so he stuck to the task in front of him.

As I said, it took five years to subdue Corinth, so Boniface had plenty to do, building forts around the city and harassing the local population.

He also authorized his subordinates to fan out and conquer the rest of Greece.

Greece was a prosperous and peaceful place in twelve hundred AD.

There hadn't been major trouble since Basil II had eliminated the Bulgarian Empire two centuries earlier.

The landscape was filled with lush fields and productive cities.

The surplus that these created was then carted to the coast to be sold to the Italian merchants who dominated the trade routes.

As the Latins went from town to town, they found the locals receptive to surrender on friendly terms.

You can take over the government if we can keep our land.

Of course, it wasn't all smiles, but there was little resistance once it became clear that Skouros was trapped in Corinth.

Otho de la Roche became the grand lord of Athens after capturing Attica and its surrounding territories, while Guillaume of Champlete and Geoffrey of Vilhardouan took 600 soldiers south and conquered the Peloponnese.

This created a principality of Achaea, which would administer the region.

The lords of Athens and Achaea were therefore vassals of the king of Thessaloniki, and between the three territories most of Greece was now safely under Latin control.

As in Western Europe, each lord would then reward his own men with lands and titles.

These would prove to be enduring conquests.

The further south you went, the safer these new Latin lords were from Roman or Bulgarian assault.

Speaking of which, in the wake of Baldwin's death, the Bulgarians were able to rampage across Thrace and briefly contemplate taking Thessaloniki.

As Boniface was helping to besiege Naption, he received alarming news.

A group of Bulgarians living in Thessalonica had stirred a revolt against the Latins.

Chaos reigned, and the Tsar's army were on their way towards the city.

Margaret, holed up in the city with her children, begged the Marquis to come running, which he did.

Boniface and his men rushed into Thessaloniki and ousted the rebels.

Order was restored, and the Bulgarians decided against a siege, now that the king was back in his city.

Boniface was now fully aware of what a danger the Bulgarians presented.

They trampled across his lands that summer and dragged their captives back north.

Boniface kept in touch with the authorities in Constantinople about the alarming collapse of Thrace.

The Latin Empire could not be allowed to disintegrate, or his new conquests would be intensely vulnerable, and yet he couldn't do much to help them, because if he took his men east to fight the Bulgarians, the Greeks would rebel and overthrow his subordinates.

When it became clear that the Emperor Baldwin was gone, Boniface sent for his daughter in Italy.

When she arrived, Boniface offered her hand in marriage to the new Vasilefs, Baldwin's brother, Henry.

Henry and Agnes were married in February 1207 in the Ahea Sophia.

This alliance made it clear that Boniface was committed to the Latin project, and he needed to be, because that summer the Bulgarians rampaged through Thrace again.

Fear was growing that the Slavs were going to sweep the Latins into the sea and become the new masters of the Balkans.

In the autumn, Boniface travelled to Kypsella to pledge fealty to the new emperor.

This was the same imperial mustering grounds where Isaac Angelos had been captured and blinded.

Henry must have been concerned about Boniface, after all the Marquis had tried to humiliate his brother with that stunt at Adrianople.

But the two men needed each other desperately at this point, and so were mutually relieved when the ceremony went off without a hitch, and they parted on good terms.

Unfortunately for the Latins, they still didn't know the lands they had conquered well enough.

A party of Bulgarians, possibly led by Vlak cavalry, were lurking in the area.

When they got word that the king of Thessalonica was making his way slowly back towards his realm, they decided to pounce.

The Bulgarians attacked the rear of the Marquis's train, and when he heard what was happening he spurred his horse into action, even though he was not wearing armour.

It was typical Latin bravery, but also a foolhardy move.

His cavalry charge drove the enemy back, but arrows flew at his person, and one struck a fatal blow below his shoulder.

With blood pouring from the wound, the Marquis fell back and his men began to panic.

Boniface fainted and had to be helped to the ground.

The Bulgarians swarmed around him, and a large number of Latins fled to save themselves.

Those who stood with the Marquis were cut down, and Boniface's head was removed and taken back to the Tsar.

It was a gruesome end for a man who dreamt dreams of glory.

Yet just like Baldwin, he took on a fight with too few men, and his personal bravery cost him his throne and his life.

When the Bulgarian Tsar Kaluyan saw Boniface's decapitated head, he immediately ordered an attack on Thessaloniki.

His army had been ravaging the countryside all summer, but there was no way he could turn down this opportunity.

If the Bulgarians could could capture the Roman second city, then perhaps they could make themselves masters of the entire region.

Once that was done, the noose would slowly tighten around the Latin Empire.

Could Callion

actually drive the Westerners out and make himself Roman Emperor?

We'll find out together next time.

I've not seen any scholars talk about the curse of Constantinople, but Boniface's death just three years years after taking the city marks the end of the entire leadership team of the Fourth Crusade.

Count Louis of Blois had fallen at Adrianople, as we discussed last week, and the Emperor Baldwin followed some time later in captivity, while their colleague Hugh of St.

Paul died of a sickness back at New Rome.

At the end of May 1205, the Doge, Enrico Dandelo, joined them.

He passed from natural causes and was buried in the Ahia Sophia, the only Christian to receive such an honour.

None of them lived to see the fruits of their conquest, and all but Dandolo died in pretty miserable fashion.

Did the ghost of Constantine or Justinian put a curse on them?

Did their theft of relics upset the divine power that had aided them in taking the city?

Perhaps some petty-minded Byzantinist might suggest that this was karmic retribution for their crimes, but I haven't heard that anywhere yet.

Nevertheless, they are all gone now, and the entire Latin project is hanging by a thread.

For anyone wondering what happened to the sons of Isaac Angelos, John and Manuel,

Manuel seems to have died while still a young man, while John fled to Hungary with his mother in the twelve twenties.

He would live till he was sixty and serve for at least twenty years as the governor of the area between Sirmium and Belgrade, the very borderland which had caused so many wars between Byzantium and Hungary during the Komnenian era.

A very fitting appointment for a man whose birth was literally designed to bring peace to this very region.

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