Crusader Disasters in the Balkans

Already the leaders of the crusade, who only three years before had set sail so proudly from Venice, were dead or on the point of death.

Continuing Crusader Empire Rules Constantinople ,
our selection from Constantinople by William J. Brodribb and by Sir Walter Besant published in 1879. The selection is presented in six installments for 5 minute daily reading. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Latin Empire Of The East – Its Foundation And Fall (A.D. 1204-1261).

Time: 1204-1261
Place: Constantinople

The position was one of extreme peril. Baldwin sent messengers to his brother, ordering him to return in all haste, and then made such hasty preparations as were possible, and sallied forth to the siege of Adrianople. Had he waited for Henry’s return, all might have gone well with him, but he would not wait. It was the rule of the crusaders never to refuse battle, whatever the odds, a rule to which their greatest victories as well as their greatest disasters were chiefly due. What Godfrey did before Ascalon, Baldwin was ready to do before Adrianople. He had with him no more than a hundred and forty knights, with three trains of archers and men-at-arms — say two thousand men in all. The gallant Villehardouin, Marshal of Romania, who was destined to survive this day and write its story, led the vanguard.

The main body, with whom was Baldwin, was commanded by the Count of Blois; the rear was brought up by old Dandolo. The slender ranks of the little army were continually being recruited by the accession of the fugitive remains of the garrisons. On the way to Adrianople they met the light cavalry of the Cumans. Orders were given not to pursue these light horsemen, who fought after the manner of the Parthians. In a solid phalanx the western knights were able to face any odds, but scattered and dispersed they would fall beneath the weight of numbers.

The order insisted on by Dandolo, who knew this kind of enemy, was broken by no others than the Emperor himself and the Count of Blois. The Cumans, as usual, fled at the first charge of the heavily armed knights, who spurred after them, regardless of the order, and led by the Emperor. When they had ridden a mile or so, when their horses were breathed, then the Cumans closed in upon the little band of knights, and the unequal contest began of a hundred and forty against fourteen thousand. Some few struggled out of the mêlée and found their way back to the rest of the army. Most fell upon the field. Among these was the Count of Blois. A few were taken prisoners, among whom was the Emperor. No one ever knew his fate. The wildest stories were told of this unfortunate Prince. His hands and feet, it was said, were cut off, and he was exposed, mutilated, to the wild animals; he was beheaded; he enacted the part of Joseph — Potiphar’s wife being King John’s queen. Nothing was too wild to be believed about him. Twenty years later a hermit of the Netherlands thought it would be possible to pass himself off as the real Baldwin, who had escaped from captivity and was thus expiating his early sins.

He obtained the fate from justice and the sympathy from the vulgar which have commonly been the lot of pretenders. Whatever the real end of this Emperor, King John wrote a year later to the Pope, calmly informing him that his intercession for Baldwin was no longer of any use, because he was no longer living. Then it was, and not till then, that his brother, Henry of Flanders, consented to assume the title of Emperor. Already the leaders of the crusade, who only three years before had set sail so proudly from Venice, were dead or on the point of death: Baldwin murdered in captivity; the Count of Blois killed on the field of battle; Dandolo dead, at the age, say some writers, of a hundred, in the year 1205; the Marquis of Montferrat about to be slain in an obscure skirmish with the barbarous Bulgarians.

Henry stood alone, save for the faithful Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, who, though his narrative ceases at this point, is believed to have remained with the new Emperor. His reign lasted for ten years only. It was a reign of successful, brave, and prudent administration in things military, civil, and ecclesiastical Its success was greatly assisted by the fact that very early in his reign the Greeks discovered the mistake they had made in changing the rule of the Latins for the rule of the Bulgarians.

The first were hard masters, with rough, rude ways, and little sympathy with the culture of the Byzantines; but the latter proposed, as soon as the Latins were driven south, to exterminate the population of Thrace, or at least to transplant the Greeks beyond the Balkans. They called upon the Emperor to forgive them and to help them. Henry, with a little army of eight hundred knights, with archers and men-at-arms, perhaps five thousand in all, made no scruple of going out to attack this disorderly mob of forty thousand Bulgarians. As no mention is made of the Cumans, it is presumable that these had gone home again with their booty. At the siege of Thessalonica King John was murdered — slain by no less a person than St. Demetrius himself, said the Greeks — and a peace was concluded between his successor and Henry.

The last years of this exemplary monarch’s life were spent in wise administration. He checked the zeal of the Pope’s legate, and would not countenance persecution about the double procession and other controverted dogmas. He checked the pretensions of the clergy, by placing his throne on the same level with that of the Patriarch, whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a college of priests. When he died, childless, the next heir to the empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, a member of that princely house which still survives in the line of the English earls of Devon.

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