I was now the First Man in the State – but that is a very different thing from being Emperor. It would take me another twenty-one months of plotting and maneuvering – well, yes, and murdering, too – before I could say that the imperial power rested with me and me alone.

Once the protosebastos’s regime fell, it was clear that there would soon be a reckoning with the Latins in the City. This was a problem that had been growing and festering for almost exactly a century. The origins of our baleful entanglement with the Latins can be traced back to May 1082, when my grandfather Alexius Comnenus, desperate for naval support against Robert Guiscard, the Norman Duke of Apulia, agreed to grant the merchants of Venice privileges to trade duty-free throughout the Empire and a commercial colony along the Golden Horn in Constantinople in return for their alliance.

The Venetians held up their end of the bargain, it must be said, defeating a Norman fleet in the Adriatic and later recovering Dyrrachium for the Empire, but their help came at a heavy cost. Incredibly, under the charter Alexius extended to the Venetians, their merchants were actually treated more favorably than our own! They paid no duties or fees of any kind to enter our harbors and load or unload their ships, and our customs officers were not even empowered to inspect their cargoes. You will immediately grasp the unfortunate results these privileges produced. There was soon no reason that anyone would hire a Byzantine merchant to transport a cargo when there was a Venetian one available who could undertake the job for less. Under these circumstances, as the decades passed, the Venetians gathered more and more of the Empire’s trade into their hands; our merchant marine withered away in the face of this foreign competition that operated with such unfair advantages; and the wholesale loss of customs duties as Venetian merchants came to dominate the Empire’s internal and external maritime trade further reduced the State revenues when we were already in desperate financial straits owing to the loss of two-thirds of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks.

Within a few years after Alexius’s death in 1118, his son and my uncle, John II Comnenus, decided that some action had to be taken. For by that time, Alexius’s ill-considered charter of privileges for the Venetians was having not merely baleful commercial and financial consequences, but social ones as well. As the Venetians grew in wealth at our expense and watched our native trade wither away in the face of the privileges we had foolishly extended to them, their arrogance, haughtiness and pride became intolerable. They erected lavish mansions in their quarter of the Golden Horn and moved about the city like colonial masters who had taken possession of some hapless and dysfunctional state. Their disregard extended not merely to the urban proletariat whom they swept aside as they made their way in sedan chairs and on horseback through the streets, or to the tradespeople and servants with whom they dealt for goods or services, but to the highest-ranking nobility and civil officials of the Empire. Added to all these sources of friction was their espousal of an alien religion and their contempt for the practices and ceremonies of our changeless, time-honored faith, so egalitarian and communitarian in the comfort it offers to rich and poor alike, as beautiful and full of mystery as the heaven to which we all aspire.

My uncle John, the most straightforward and uncomplicated of men, squarely confronted these evils and took action to correct them in the most direct manner possible by terminating the Venetians’ commercial treaty. Rather than accept the overdue and inevitable end of a set of special privileges that had long outlived their original justification, however, the Venetians sent their fleet to sweep through our islands in the Ionian Sea and the Aegean, raiding and pillaging. By that time, our own fleet had atrophied to a point where it could no longer even think of taking the Venetians on, so John was forced to back down and restore every last privilege provided by Alexius I’s charter of 1082. All John could do was to begin trying to balance the favors granted to the Venetians with some more restricted privileges afforded to their rivals, the Pisans and the Genoese. But while these measures eroded the Venetians’ predominant position somewhat, they did nothing to restore the health of our own commerce, navy, or finances.

My cousin Manuel expanded upon his father’s policy. He had little use for the Venetians. They had broken their alliance with us and taken the side of William I, King of Sicily and Southern Italy, when Manuel launched his expedition across the Adriatic to reconquer our old possessions in Apulia in 1155. So Manuel made an alliance with the Genoese, who of course demanded their own commercial quarter along the Golden Horn by way of recompense. But it was all for nothing. Manuel’s campaign in Apulia recalled the Sicilian expedition of the ancient Athenians – dazzling initial successes, followed by ultimate disaster when the Normans successfully raised the siege of Brindisi. In the end, the one lasting consequence of Manuel’s expedition to recover our lost lands in the Italian boot-heel was the establishment of another wealthy and arrogant colony of Italian merchants along our capital’s waterfront.

And in addition to all the other woes they brought us, the Italians were not even able to leave their wars behind when they were living as guests in a foreign city. In 1170, the Venetians, envious of the growing wealth and prestige of their Genoese rivals, launched a military attack upon the neighboring Genoese cantonment and virtually destroyed it! When Manuel very properly demanded that they compensate the Genoese for their losses, the Venetians haughtily replied that they would do nothing of the kind.

This was too much even for Manuel, lover of westerners that he was. The Venetians’ effrontery had to be humbled, or our Empire would have been viewed with utter contempt from Baghdad to Britannia. He laid his plans with care and great secrecy, and then unleashed a huge dragnet from one end of the Empire to the other on the morning of March 12, 1171. Every single Venetian his officers could lay their hands on was taken into custody, to the number of nearly 20,000 – 6,000 merchants and another 14,000 sailors, servants, tradespeople, and family members. Ten thousand of them were taken in Constantinople alone: there were so many they more than filled all the prisons, and Manuel had to confine the balance of them in monasteries – which for your average luxury-loving Venetian merchant, is probably almost as bad as a prison anyway! Their possessions and accumulated wealth were expropriated as well.

This led to war, of course. The Venetians dispatched their fleet against our island possessions, following the same playbook they had used a half-century earlier against the Emperor John II. They also stirred up Stefan Nemanja, the prince of the Serbs, to rebel against us. But this time, happily, matters did not go the Westerners’ way. Our fortress of Euripos on the straits of the island of Euboea successfully defied their siege; our fleet under Andronicus Contostephanus drove their warships back beyond Cape Malea at the southern tip of the Peloponnese; and our army compelled the Serbian prince to submit to our authority once again.

But that, rather surprisingly, was it. The Venetians are commercial men. Wars are expensive, and there were other ports all over the Mediterranean – particularly in the Islamic countries – where they could ply their trade. In the end, they decided it made more sense to ransom their citizens than to pursue an unsuccessful war. It seemed like Manuel had finally managed to rid the Empire of the Venetians, those leeches who had sucked away our commercial lifeblood for fully ninety years, more easily than anyone imagined.

Yet, somewhat surprisingly, it turned out that ridding ourselves of the Venetians did not suffice to solve our problems with westerners in general. Commerce abhors a vacuum, and it proved to be the Genoese and Pisans, not our own citizens, who had the capital, ships, and experience to step into the Venetians’ shoes. A decade after Manuel expelled the Venetians, the size of the Latin Quarter along the Golden Horn was no smaller: the Genoese and Pisans had simply occupied the real estate the Venetians left behind. Most of the ships filling that scimitar of water along the north side of the City, golden in the late afternoon light, were once again of Italian origin, manned by Italian crews. And the arrogance of haughtiness of the Pisan and Genoese merchants proved as intolerable as that of their Venetian predecessors.

The hostility towards the westerners was then further intensified during the barely 18 months that the protosebastos ruled the State. As he lost support and his position weakened, he found it necessary to fill more and more of the major (and most lucrative) offices of state with westerners, because their loyalty at least could be bought. In the end, when he and I squared off across the Bosphorus after my arrival on the heights of Chalcedon, over half of the sailors manning the warships that barred my way were westerners.

I knew the City hungered for a final reckoning with the westerners, and I saw no reason to stand in the way of that occurring. With the fall of the protosebastos, the days of these renegades swaggering around our capital like they were lords, rather than paid hirelings of our society and (in many cases) outcasts from their own, had come to an end. I knew they would be resentful, and that made them potentially dangerous. Should opposition to me coalesce around some nexus – as it inevitably would, as I moved to consolidate my own position and necessarily had to squeeze some others out of theirs – these Latins could become formidable allies for my enemies. So they must go.

It was also necessary for me to acknowledge the explosive resentment towards the Latins that seethed throughout the City. For they had not only come to control our trade but dominated the City’s financial system as well, lending money at such rates as pleased them and enforcing their contracts with the ruthless indifference and callousness of men who seek only to make a killing in as short a time as possible so that they can retire in comfort to their distant homes, weighed down with the silver coins they have pillaged from hard-working but unfortunate foreigners.

And it wasn’t only the laborers and small businessmen who wanted the Latins to be gone. The Grand Duke Andronicus Contostephanus was equally eager to discuss with me the removal of those Genoese and Pisans who had until recently been his arrogant and often insubordinate underlings. As his example demonstrated, the City’s aristocrats had their own memories of insults and humiliation at the hands of the westerners – and also, I suspected, their own debts and loan obligations that they were equally eager to see erased.

You must remember, too, that in the eyes of the practically all of the City’s populace, these Latins were people of a heretic faith – one that should have been despised by the Almighty, but whose adherents, owing to His mysterious purposes, now seemed to possess greater temporal power and prosperity than did our own State, which had remained faithful to the true doctrines and rituals of his Church. Our people deeply resented the periodic efforts by the Bishop of Rome, whom it pleases to call himself "Pope," to impose his authority and the wrong-headed practices of the western Church upon us. To see these heretics building churches in which they practiced their rites in our holy city, dedicated to the Virgin Mother of our Savior and dependent throughout its history on her special protection, was both an intolerable affront and, in the eyes of the lower classes in particular, risked alienating the special providence on which we had so often relied.

In short, there was no point in my making an effort to tamp down or defuse the burning hatred and resentment of the Latins. That long-simmering pressure must now find release, and opposing it would only have meant my destruction as well.

So when the leaders of the lower classes in the City crossed to Chalcedon after the fall of the protosebastos to sound out my attitude, I told them that I thought it was their patriotic duty to undertake a final solution of the Latin problem. I added that I would even allow my Paphlagonian mercenaries to cross the straits and support them when they moved in to settle their accounts. (This move had the further advantage from my perspective of affording my most loyal retainers an unparalleled opportunity to greatly enrich themselves by plunder and spoil.) As for Contostephanus, I authorized his ships to take whatever action he judged necessary or appropriate against the remaining Latin warships that were moored in the Golden Horn.

As the day designated for the operation approached, some of the Latins began to get nervous. Warned by friends or business partners, they moved their families and goods onto the ships in the Golden Horn, particularly the 44 warships that had made up the Latin contingent of the fleet. But there were others who were too arrogant to take heed, or whose haughtiness meant that there was no one they found credible to give them a warning. There were others whose wealth and possessions were all tied up in the properties they owned within our City, or who preferred to hope that the rumors were exaggerated, or who chose to believe that the storm would pass now that the fall of the protosebastos’s regime had removed one of the major sources of popular resentment. And after a full century of Latin occupation, too, there were many who were elderly and had no real homes abroad to which they could contemplate returning.

The action that followed was an extraordinary expression of the hatred and resentment of the Empire’s citizens against these foreign parasites who had for so long lorded it over them. On the designated morning, hate-filled mobs suddenly surged into the Latin Quarter from several directions. They were accompanied by priests, brandishing silver crosses and brightly colored holy banners above the heads of the crowd, while companies of monks from the City’s monasteries cheered on the bloodthirsty throngs, assured them of Heaven’s favor for their acts, and in some cases even helped to hunt down and point out those Latins who had found some temporary place of safety.

There was no resistance worthy of mention. The mob cut down every westerner they met. They ransacked houses, not only to empty them of all potential loot but also to ensure that no one who had hidden themselves away in a secret place of refuge escaped their fury. Then they put them to the torch. They did the same when they found houses securely barred against them, and were completely indifferent even when they heard the desperate screams of women and children who were trapped inside.

The Latin clergy – of whom there were many in the city, both monks and priests – could not of course expect to be spared. But they were not always killed immediately; many of them were instead subjected to the cruelest of tortures before they surrendered their lives. A elderly cardinal, one John by name, whom the Pope had sent as an envoy to the protosebastos’s regime, was first mocked and tormented, like Jesus by his Roman guards, then killed and beheaded. Then the mob tied his severed head to the tail of a scrofulous, mangy dog and chased it through the streets, pelting it with stones and laughing as it ran.

Some of the most terrible scenes took place at the great Hospital of St. John, where monks of that religious order tended the sick. The monks all died of course, sometimes after terrible tortures and abuse, while their patients were slain in their beds or in whatever place they tried to find safety.

The mobs turned with special fury upon the Latin churches and religious houses. Not only were they ransacked of all items of value, but even the tombs were smashed, and the dead bodies inside desecrated and dismembered.

As the mobs moved through the streets, those Latins who lived in districts closer to the waterfront fled their homes with the bare minimum of their possessions and ran for the harbor as their only possible means of escape. They swarmed aboard the ships still berthed at the wharves, and terrible scenes took place as latecomers found the gangplanks pulled up, the lines cast off, and the ships beginning to stand away. For to be left behind meant either a terrible death or the prospect of being sold into slavery.

The Latin warships formed up at the head and sides of the milling, desperate collection of ships. Many of their crews showed great gallantry and courage, returning to the wharves to snatch away desperate families of refugees or tossing ropes to those who plunged into the water and swam out from shore. Then, with great, billowing clouds of gray and black smoke rising above the orange and yellow fires that were consuming what had been until a few hours earlier one of the wealthiest commercial districts in the world, their lead warships steered out past the towers where the great chains are kept that seal the entrance to the Golden Horn in times of danger and made for the open sea beyond.

The Grand Duke Contostephanus’s galleys moved to intercept them, but there are few sea fighters in the world who can match the Italians. Moreover, our Greek sailors were not inspired with the same desperation, grief and rage that animated the Latin sailors and soldiers. Our seamen mostly wanted to see the Latins gone, and they had little inclination to endanger their own lives when it appeared that the Latins now wanted nothing more than to flee back to their own lands once and for all.

By this point, my aides and I had ridden to the top of that famous mount crowned by stunted pine trees behind Chrysopolis that is the highest point of land on the western side of the Bosphorus. [1] Here we had a panoramic view of the Sea of Marmara and the Princes’ Islands to our left; the City with its domed churches and the Great Palace to our front; and the twisting waterway of the Bosphorus to our right. From this distance, some four miles away, the battling warships outside the entrance to the Golden Horn looked as tiny as children’s toys. But in between the dark patches of drifting smoke we could still see streams of fire arcing across the water from the flame-throwers aboard the opposing ships. Occasionally we would see a ship drifting helplessly, flames running up its rigging and consuming its sails, while ant-like figures leapt into the sea. At times, when the wind blew from the west, we could hear screams and shouts and catch the smell of charred wood and roasted flesh. Of the course of the battle, however, we could divine little until at length we observed a closely packed phalanx of heavily laden vessels emerge from the smoke and cruise past the sea walls and towers lining the foot of Palace Hill, making their way with every ounce of speed they could muster towards the Sea of Marmara. These were clearly the Latins, while behind them Contostephanus’s galleys seemed to hang back. I heard afterwards that many of their crews demanded that their captains allow them to land so they could join in the pillaging of the Latin Quarter before it was first picked clean and then wholly consumed by fire.

Whatever the reason for their hesitation, it proved costly to us. We soon realized that the Latin ships, with the war galleys circling the diverse mass of merchantmen like mastiffs protecting a herd of sheep, were not making their way directly to the entrance of the Dardanelles, but instead had turned aside towards that lovely small archipelago off the Bithynian coastline known as the Papadonisia, the Isles of the Monks, which are scattered across the sea like jewels cast upon a carpet. [2] Too late, we understood their purpose. The four principal islands are dotted with monasteries and convents, wealthy and pacific, where the Latins could both stock up on the provisions necessary for their unexpected and lengthy voyage back to their homelands and slake some of the furious desire for revenge kindled by the horrific scenes they had witnessed earlier that day.

The poor monks and nuns never stood a chance. They had little warning of the savage attack that fell upon them and would have had little ability to defend themselves even if they had. Over the remainder of the day, the scenes of murder and torture that had played out inside the Latin Quarter that morning were re-enacted on Prinkipo, Prote, and the other two islands, but this time with Orthodox monks and nuns as the victims. Soon, plumes of smoke rose like pillars from above the deep green of the pines, and we could only imagine the desecration being wreaked upon those wealthy sanctuaries from the bustle and stress of the City just across the water.

My colleagues and I were filled with helpless anguish, which was further intensified by the (to us) inexplicable failure of our own ships to sail to the aid of the islands’ inhabitants. Instead, our war galleys remained mostly hove to within the Golden Horn itself, although a few ventured out curiously along the sea walls, as if they were utterly mystified by what the Latins’ purpose could possibly be. For the remainder of that day and throughout the next morning, our ships took no action. The Latins had all the time they needed to complete the first down payment on their revenge, after which they packed their booty and provisions aboard their ships, unfurled their sails and unshipped their oars, and cruised away to wreak similar havoc wherever they happened to touch upon the coast of the Sea of Marmara, the Hellespont, and the Aegean.

The Latins' vengeance was terrible. The lovely and quiet shores of the Sea of Marmara were dotted with small islets and promontories that were perfectly situated for a life of religious retreat and contemplation, and there were several dozen such foundations along the Latins’ route of escape. Moreover, these establishments were not only wealthy in their own right, enriched by generations of bequests, but also served as places of safe-keeping for much of the accumulated wealth of the City’s merchants and great families. Upon these rich treasuries the Latins now descended like the barbarian hordes of old – Gauls, Goths, Galatians. The loss of gold and silver was immense, although the destruction and desecration of venerated religious objects was, if anything, even more difficult for many of our people to bear.

As word spread of the initial series of attacks, the monks were able to flee inland and to save at least some portion of their treasures. Many of the townspeople along the coast had to do the same, and their homes were subject to the same fury that the City mob had wreaked upon the Latins’ own residences.

When the news reached the other Latin colonies scattered around the Aegean, they packed up their possessions, boarded their ships, and joined the large convoy of their fellows that had now emerged from the Hellespont. By this point, our garrisons were on the alert, and cities like Thessalonica greeted the Latins armed and ready, causing them to stand off and look for smaller and more vulnerable prey. In fairness, I must note that some of the Latins even objected to returning evil for evil. These separated from the main fleet and made their way to the ports of Syria, where they re-established themselves.

Of course, these outrages only served to further feed the anger of the City mob that had carried out the original assault upon the Latin Quarter. Some 4,000 prisoners had been taken during the attack, who in the normal course of events would have been made available for ransom to their families and fellow-citizens back home. But now, there was no willingness to return any of the Latins to their homes. Even though the price offered might be cheaper, the prisoners were instead almost all sold into slavery in the lands of the Seljuk Sultanate to our east.

And so the Latins were at last driven from the City – well, not quite all of them, of course, for a substantial proportion of the Imperial Guard are western mercenaries. But these men are subject to our command structure and live in military quarters, not in a segregated community, and their presence strengthens the State, rather than weakening it.

It had been my hope that by allowing the mob to unleash itself upon the Latins before I crossed to the City and officially entered it, I could present what had occurred to the western powers as an explosion of long-simmering popular outrage that erupted during the interregnum before I was fully able to assert my authority within the City itself. In short, I wanted a measure of deniability. And perhaps the western states accorded me that to some degree, because there was no official military response from Pisa or Genoa to the massacre of their fellow citizens. Or perhaps it was simply that they had learned a lesson from the Venetians’ experience a decade earlier. Rather than mounting large and costly military expeditions that were subject to the inevitable caprices and uncertainties of war, the Italians simply let their citizens’ still-burning desire for vengeance find its own expression. Over the next several years, the waters, islands, and coasts of the Aegean began to swarm with ruthless and cunning Italian pirates who were equally animated by a desire for vengeance as well as riches. The river mouths of Lycia became the nests and refuges of these predators, so there was no season when we were free from their marauding. Those islands that were too lightly populated to provide for their own defense were soon largely abandoned. And, as you can imagine, the cost of policing and patrolling our waters against this plague was substantial.

Thus, in the end, each side paid a terrible price for the painful necessity of cutting out once and for all the alien growth that had fastened itself onto our capital and our commerce, and that was draining away the revenues of the State and the prosperity of our people. I of course concede that the final removal of the Latins was messily handled, but it could not have been otherwise. When two alien peoples have lived beside each other for a full century, in interdependence but also in hatred, resentment, and mutual misunderstanding, the process of finally forcing a clean break and the complete removal of one cannot help but be painful and bloody. And so it was. But I now believe it will be possible to restructure our relations with the Latins on a more sound basis, one that recognizes the necessity and inevitability of dealing with them, while at the same time keeping them at an appropriate distance and under reasonable controls. Never again must they be allowed to fasten like leeches upon our society and State in the manner they have for the past century.

[Editor's Note: Andronicus’s confidence that he had witnessed the "final solution" of the Latin problem proved misplaced. It was true that he managed to conclude a new commercial treaty with the Venetians on more favorable terms in 1185, and his successor Isaac Angelus was able to successfully resolve matters with the Genoese and Pisans for a relatively moderate cost in 1192, resulting in new commercial agreements and their re-establishment in a revived Latin Quarter along the Golden Horn. But the lingering memory of the savage Byzantine attack of a decade earlier continued to poison western attitudes towards Byzantium, helping to make possible both the western assault on Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade just a little over twenty years later and the savage sack of the city that concluded it. – A.J.]

Notes:

[1] This is the hill known to the Turks as the Buyuk (or Great) Camlica, on the eastern edge of Uskudar, which today is marked by a giant television antenna and a weather station at its summit.

[2] These are known today as the Princes’ Islands.

Sources:

Emily A. Babcock, trans., A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea by William, Archbishop of Tyre (1943), at 464-67

Charles M. Brand, Byzantium Confronts the West, 1180-1204 (1968), at 41-43, 208-11, 325-26

John Freely, Blue Guide: Istanbul (1983 ed.), at 345, 350-57

Harry Magoulias, ed., O City of Byzantium, Annals of Nicetas Choniates (1984), at 140-41

A.A. Vasilev, The History of the Byzantine Empire (1952), at 433, 436

Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997), at 652