SOURCE: An introduction to Chronicles of the Crusades, Penguin Books, 1963, pp. 7–25.

[In the following essay, Shaw surveys the content, form, and style of Villehardouin's Conquest of Constantinople. Shaw commends the “simplicity and lucidity” of the work.]

Few events in history have been more coloured by romantic imagination than that series of expeditions to the Holy Land known as the Crusades. The very name conjures up a vision of gallant knights inspired by pure religious zeal, leaving home and country to embark on a just and holy war against the enemies of the Christian faith. The two chronicles here presented, each composed by a man who took part in such an expedition, give a truer picture of an enterprise in which the darker as well as the brighter side of human nature is shown in the actions of those who took the cross. However, since these chronicles deal with only two of the Crusades, it is well perhaps in this introduction to place them in their context as giving part of a struggle between Christians and Moslems for possession of the Holy Land that lasted for nearly two hundred years.

Jerusalem, the Holy City, had been a centre of pilgrimage from very early times. Its capture in 638 by the Moslem Caliph Omar had left the Christians free to practise their religion. Conditions remained the same until 1076, when Jerusalem passed into the hands of the Seljukian Turks, who desecrated the holy places, and brutally treated the Christians in the city, throwing some into prison and massacring others. Pilgrims who managed to make their way to the Holy Land brought back pitiful tales of the plight of their co-religionists in the East.

The idea of a Holy War to avenge these wrongs occurred to Pope Gregory VII, and to his successor Victor III; but the peoples of Western Christendom, preoccupied with their own affairs at home, paid small attention to their pleas. However, little by little, to the north of the Alps, the preaching of Peter the Hermit did much to influence popular opinion in favour of a war against the infidel, and when, at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II, a Frenchman born, appealed to his countrymen to join an international expedition to recover Jerusalem, he met with an enthusiastic response. In 1096 two expeditions started for the East. One, led by Peter the Hermit, consisted of an undisciplined mob, which was almost completely wiped out by the Turks in October of that year. The other, made up of properly organized troops in command of barons from Northern France and Flanders, Provence, and Southern Italy, arrived at Constantinople in December. Here they joined forces with the Byzantine Emperor. Passing through Asia Minor, where they helped the Greeks to capture Nicaea and defeated the Turks at Dorylaeum, they finally entered Syria. The people of the northern province of Edessa, in revolt against their Armenian ruler, invited Baudouin de Bouillon to take his place in March 1098. In June of that year the Crusaders captured Antioch; in July 1099 they took Jerusalem after a siege of only six weeks. This victory, one regrets to say, was followed by a merciless slaughter of Turks and Jews within the city. As a result of this first Crusade three Christian states were established in Syria: the principalities of Edessa and Antioch, and the kingdom of Jerusalem. The whole of this conquered territory was commonly known as Outremer (the land oversea).

For many years the barons of Outremer, by maintaining an offensive and defensive war against the surrounding enemy, managed to keep hold of the land they had gained without calling in aid from the West. In 1144, however, when the Turks overran the province of Edessa, the Queen-regent of Jerusalem, fearing lest, with Antioch now exposed on its northern border, the Turks might capture this province also, sent an urgent appeal to Pope Eugenius III to initiate a new Crusade. The Pope referred the matter to King Louis VII of France, a man of noted piety, who took the cross in 1146 at the Assembly of Vézelay, where Saint Bernard's eloquence moved many Frenchmen to follow their king's example. Travelling to Germany, the saint persuaded the Emperor Conrad to join the expedition. In 1147 an army led by the rulers of France and Germany set off on the Second Crusade, determined to do great things. In the end, however, instead of advancing on Edessa, the Crusaders made an unsuccessful attempt to capture Damascus, and returned home without accomplishing anything.

Meanwhile, in the East the Turks were increasing in strength, and the Christians growing weaker. Pilgrims who came to the Holy Land were often shocked by the luxury and license of life in Outremer. Internal disputes among the barons of the land wasted energy that might have been used in defending it. The death of King Amalric of Jerusalem in 1174, leaving the kingdom without a worthy successor, was shortly followed by Saladin's rise to power as head of a united Moslem Empire. In 1187 the Christians suffered their greatest disaster when, after Saladin had routed and destroyed their army at the Horns of Hattin on 3 July, he occupied Tiberias, Jaffa, Ascalon, and Gaza, and finally entered Jerusalem. The Moslem's humane treatment of its Christian population was in marked contrast to the conduct of those Crusaders who had captured the city in 1099.

Once again Western Christendom was roused to action. In 1189 a third Crusade, led by three sovereigns, Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, Philip Augustus of France, and Richard I of England, prepared to go oversea. Barbarossa, who started first, was drowned in a little river, on his way through Asia Minor, on 10 June 1190. His army, disheartened, dwindled away, till only a very small contingent was left. Early the next year Philip and Richard sailed from Messina to go to the help of the titular King of Jerusalem who, with a pitifully small army, was besieging Saladin in Acre. Theirs was an uneasy partnership from the first. Different in temperament—Richard hot-tempered, rash, and impetuous; Philip, cold and shrewd—their relations were still further complicated by the fact that the English king, as Duke of Normandy, was Philip's none too obedient vassal, while the French king, for his part, was jealous of Richard's power.

Philip arrived before Acre on 20 April 1191. Richard, delayed by a storm at sea, got there seven weeks later. When Acre surrendered on 12 July, the two kings raised their banners on the walls. Leopold of Austria, now in command of the German forces, had also placed his there, only to have it torn down and flung into the ditch, an insult for which a cruel vengeance was exacted later. Richard's slaughter of his Turkish prisoners after Acre surrendered casts a darker shadow on his name.

In August 1191, the French king, tired of crusading, and anxious about the state of things in his kingdom, returned to France. Richard took command of the remaining troops and continued the campaign. But although he defeated Saladin at Arsuf in September 1191, and successfully relieved Jaffa in August of the following year, he came within reach of Jerusalem only to veil his eyes from the sight of the city he dared not attempt to deliver. The sole achievement of this Crusade was a five years' truce with Saladin, which gave the Christians possession of the main coastal towns as far south as Jaffa, and allowed pilgrims free right of entry into Jerusalem.

So we come to the Fourth Crusade, the story of which is told by Villehardouin in his Conquest of Constantinople, a work distinguished among other things by the fact that it is the first reliable record of these expeditions to be written in French. The earlier Crusades, it is true, had their historians, but these, among whom we may particularly note William, Archbishop of Tyre, gave their accounts in Latin. There were not wanting certain effusions in verse concerning the exploits of Crusaders oversea; but none of these has any historical value. Graindor de Douai, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, gives lively accounts in the Chanson d’Antioche and the Chanson de Jérusalem of the taking of these two cities in the First Crusade; but, on the other hand, he has little conception of the motive behind the expedition, and a very imperfect knowledge of the main events. Less reliable still are those imitations of the Old French epics, such as Godefroi de Bouillon or the Chevalier du Cygne, in which fantasy takes the place of fact. The Norman Jongleur produces, in his Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, a straightforward record of the Third Crusade, but from his position as a humble pilgrim in the ranks he has no more than an outside view of the events he chronicles. It remained for a leading actor in the Fourth Crusade to present the first trustworthy and fully-informed history of such an expedition, in his own native tongue and in prose.

The author of the Conquest of Constantinople was born some time between 1150 and 1154. His father, Vilain de Villehardouin, was a nobleman of Champagne with estates in the southern part of the province, not far from its chief town Troyes. Geoffroy was not the eldest of Vilain's sons, but thanks to his connexions by birth, and later by marriage, with many noble families in Champagne and the neighbouring provinces, and no doubt also to his power of commanding confidence and respect, he became in 1185 Marshal of Champagne. In those days, when fighting between neighbouring barons was no remote contingency, a marshal's duty was to see that everything was in order to resist or make an attack; if war broke out, he had to make all necessary arrangements for a campaign, and in his lord's absence take over command. In addition to this, he was his lord's deputy in everything that concerned the administration of the province. Villehardouin, so far as we know, had not been an active service before he went oversea, but there is evidence of the important part he had played as arbiter in disputes within the province and representative of his lord in negotiations with the king of France. In the course of his duties he became familiar with many of those noble personages whose names are cited in his chronicle, and gained, as marshal of a province, experience that prepared him for the tasks that lay before him in a wider field.

His work, while it follows a chronological order, is not a record of events set down from day to day, but rather a kind of official history of the Fourth Crusade, compiled a few years after the close of this abortive expedition, by one who could supplement his own memories of it by reference to existing documents—letters, treaties, army lists, and so on—to which, as Marshal of Romania, he had free access. A man of mature years and ripe experience, and in the confidence of those who had organized and taken a leading part in the various campaigns and other incidents he chronicles, Villehardouin speaks with authority. Even if—as with all histories written before time has set events in their full perspective—his interpretation is sometimes biased, he gives on the whole a very fair and honest account of an enterprise that began so well and ended so disastrously.

All the same, the accuracy and fairness of Villehardouin's presentation of his story have not escaped challenge from certain quarters. Some of his critics, for instance, assert that in laying the responsibility for the diversion of the crusade to Zara, and later to Constantinople, on the men who failed to report at Venice he takes no account of certain machinations going on behind the scenes; others allege that in so doing he deliberately arranges his story so as to free the leaders of the expedition from blame. Such criticism can be easily answered. No doubt the Venetians welcomed a situation that gave them a chance of increasing their influence in the Mediterranean; no doubt Philip of Swabia was eager to have his brother-in-law Alexius restored to power. While this may be so, it is difficult to imagine that French Crusaders would have consented to further the aims of Venice and Germany if, in their straitened circumstances, they had seen any other way of succeeding in their own enterprise. As for the idea that Villehardouin acted as an official apologist, this can quickly be discounted, in view of his honest account of actions on the part of these same leaders at a later date.

Villehardouin has also been accused of undue harshness in his judgement on the men who failed to join or deserted from the army. Certainly he is severe; but we must consider the circumstances. The barons had bound themselves in full council to abide by any agreement their envoys made in Venice, and, by feudal custom, all those who had pledged themselves to go on the expedition were equally bound. A man of honour himself, with a high conception of his military duties, Villehardouin found it unthinkable that any man worthy of the name of knight should break his promise, or fail to go where his leader should command. Why then, he wondered, had so many knights defaulted? In his indignation at the harm their defection had caused to the enterprise, it seemed to him that they must have thought it safer to go to Syria, where the Christians still held certain cities, than face the risks of campaigning in a country which was entirely in Moslem hands. None the less, with touching human inconsistency, in reporting the fate of those who went to Syria, it is not their want of courage but their lack of wisdom that Villehardouin blames. Speaking here in pity rather than in anger, he pays tribute to the memory of those good knights, regretting only that they made a bad choice, and paid the penalty for their sinful folly.

As for the allegation that Villehardouin, in his account of discord in the army and consequent desertions from it, makes no allowance for the religious scruples of those who protested against making war on Christians, it is difficult at this interval of time to determine how far such protestations were sincere, and how far they were put forward as a pretext for disbanding the army. In the case of the Abbot of Vaux there is some reason for suspicion; for this cleric, who was so active in stirring up dissension in the Crusaders' army, and who finally left it on the plea of religious scruples, showed no such squeamishness when in 1209 he played a leading part in the ‘crusade’ against the Albigenses, who were no less Christian than the Greeks.

All things considered, it is hardly to be wondered at that Villehardouin, convinced as he was that the only hope of delivering Jerusalem lay in keeping the army together, had little patience with those who wished to disband it and little sympathy with those who pleaded religious scruples. Had not the Pope himself, at first appalled by the attack on the Christian city of Zara, granted absolution to the Crusaders on the grounds that they had acted under constraint, and urged them to keep the army together? Moreover, at the very time that the Abbot of Vaux was making trouble, his Holiness, relying on the promise Alexius had given to bring the Greek Church under the authority of Rome, had finally, after some hesitation, let the Crusaders know that he would not oppose the expedition to Constantinople, provided it was managed in such a way as to bring about a reunion between the Roman and the Orthodox Church.

That hope was never to be fulfilled, nor did this army ever reach the Holy City. From the time that the Franks presented their ultimatum to the Emperor Alexius IV in February 1204 all thoughts of a Crusade were lost sight of in a series of contests between Franks and Greeks and the many troubles that followed the establishment of the Latin Empire of Romania by force of arms. In this latter part of the chronicle Villehardouin's bias must be taken into consideration. Recounting events from the French point of view, he interprets them, so far as he can, to the prejudice of the Greeks. What to them was the gallant attempt of a conquered nation to regain its lost independence was in his eyes a proof that they were by nature disloyal and treacherous. Apart from this bias, his chronicle gives a fair account of the long and tragic struggle between Christians of the East and West and one from which we can draw our own conclusions.

From the facts Villehardouin puts before us it is evident that, from their first assumption of power, the conquerors made the fatal mistake of underestimating the opposition they might have to meet. Confident, after the sudden collapse of resistance in Constantinople, that subduing the rest of the empire would be easy, and apparently unconscious of the bitter hatred aroused in a cultured race by insolent barbarians who had pillaged and wrecked their lovely city—one of the finest centres of civilization in the world—the Franks made no attempt to conciliate the Greeks.

At first it seemed as if their confidence was justified. Apart from a few isolated cities, still holding out against the conquerors, the whole of the land on the northern side of the straits submitted to foreign rule. The barons, however, as Villehardouin himself admits, instead of governing the lands allotted to them justly, thought only of what profit they could gain for themselves. This last provocation was too much for the Greeks. Rising in revolt, they drove the Franks out of Adrianople and Demotika, and took possession of these two important cities. In their eagerness to oust the conqueror by any possible means they entered into alliance with the powerful King of Wallachia and Bulgaria. In the end Johanitza proved even more unwelcome than the Franks. But if the Greeks had cause to regret his coming, so had their conquerors, as Johanitza's troops overran the empire, capturing and destroying the fine cities of Romania, till only two beside Constantinople remained in Frankish hands.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the straits, in Asia Minor, Theodore Lascaris, husband of Alexius III's daughter Anna, was doing his best to prevent the Franks from obtaining possession of th lands allotted to them, and finally, as Villehardouin tells us, succeeded in accomplishing his aim. Acknowledged from the first by Greeks in Asia Minor and those who rallied to his side from across the water as their legitimate ruler, he was crowned emperor in 1206. The Empire of Nicaea was to remain the headquarters of the Greek monarchy until, with the fall of the Latin Empire in 1261, a descendant of the Emperor Theodore returned to rule in Constantinople.

Villehardouin's chronicle ends somewhat abruptly with the death of the Marquis de Montferrat in 1207. The fact that Henri de Valenciennes, in his Histoire de l’Empereur Henri, continues the story of Romania from the very point at which Villehardouin's account breaks off suggests that the sudden ending of the Conquest of Constantinople was due to the author's death. The date of this is uncertain. There is evidence that Villehardouin was still alive in 1212, and still in Romania, where he probably remained for the rest of his life. Documents relating to donations in memory of himself and his wife afford proof that he died some time before June 1218. At all events, he lived long enough to see the Emperor Henri, wiser and more farsighted than his ill-fated brother, conciliating the Greeks by giving them a fair share of honours and offices, and establishing peace within that part of the empire still remaining to him.

The Conquest of Constantinople is one of our main sources of information on the course of the Fourth Crusade,¹ but it is also a fitting memorial of one whose constant practice of the knightly virtues of loyalty and courage gives him a place among the noblest characters of his day. A man of firm religious principles, Villehardouin's duty to God, as he sees it, is to serve Him as faithfully and devotedly as a good vassal serves his lord; and above and beyond all this to recognize that all events, whether as indications of God's pleasure or displeasure, are ordered by His will. Loyalty to God, moreover, entails complete integrity of conduct: all breaches of faith, all underhand dealings and acts of treachery, all covetousness and self-seeking, are not only contrary to the knightly code but violations of divine law. If the God Villehardouin serves is the ‘God of Battles’, if he accepts without question the legate's sanction of war against Greek Christians as just and holy, though we may regret the little place that love and mercy have in his religion, we cannot doubt the sincerity of his faith.

Equally loyal in his service of those to whom his earthly allegiance is due, Villehardouin interprets his duty as something more than blind obedience. A man of strong character and sound judgement, he does not fear to show his disapproval of the Emperor Baudouin's quarrel with the Marquis de Montferrat, but boldly intervenes to heal the breach. In this, as in other instances throughout the chronicle, his concern is to work for ‘the common good of all’.

Courage, that other essential quality in a knight is, as he conceives it, a disciplined activity. It does not consist in shutting one's eyes to danger—there are many allusions in his work to the risks to which he and fellow-crusaders were exposed. Nor is it to be confused with rashness, which, as in the case of the disastrous fight at Adrianople, leads men to hazard not only their own lives but the enterprise to which they are committed. It is, in fact, an ability to make a cool and balanced appraisal of danger without giving way to fear. Such a courage is Villehardouin's; yet it comes to him so naturally that he takes it as nothing to boast about, relating each adventure that concerns himself as one in which his gallant companions have their full share.

A man of clear and balanced judgement, austere and reticent by nature, Villehardouin is distinguished for the simplicity and lucidity of his work. No obtrusion of his own personality, no flights of imagination, no long and picturesque descriptions such as his contemporary Robert de Clari² delights in, come in to break the clear line of a story that compels our interest by its masterly presentation of the facts. Statesmanlike in his approach to the vicissitudes of an expedition that began as a Crusade and ended as a war against Christians, he shows, by his skilful choice and treatment of his material, the political import of each turn of events as it leads on to further action, and that with no more comment than will set it in relief. He was a soldier as well as a statesman, and that sense of order and discipline ingrained in men of his profession is plainly apparent in his straightforward account of dissensions within the army, as also of the many engagements in the long contest between Franks and Greeks.

Yet for all the general sobriety of his exposition of the uneven course of the Fourth Crusade, his work is by no means lacking in animation. Whenever, for instance, his story moves from conferences and similar matters of routine to recollections of the army on campaign, the contrast between his lively, dramatic portrayal of its fortunes and his quieter presentation of other incidents in his work gives light and shade to a chronicle that never varies in its simplicity, but changes its tone and tempo as the occasion demands. Viewing this chronicle as a whole, and remembering that Villehardouin, as a pioneer among French historians, had no other guide save his own native genius, we can only marvel at the skill of this soldier-statesman, who marshals and deploys his facts as a good commander does his forces to bring this story of high hopes defeated so vividly before our eyes. …

Notes

1. Nicetas Choniates, a Greek historian whose own palace was burnt and plundered in the sack of Constantinople, gives a full account of the period up to 1206 from the Greek point of view. His interpretation of events has been taken into consideration in assessing Villehardouin's western bias.

2. Author of another eye-witness account of the Fourth Crusade, with the same title as Villehardouin's. His descriptions of what he saw for himself are not wanting in colour, but in his report of the expedition he relies too much on hearsay evidence—often incorrect—for his work to have any historical value.