Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

From the beginning of his invasion, Bohemond tried to repeat his father’s success. After landing in Epirus with an army thirty-four thousand strong, he immediately marched up the Dalmatian coast and besieged the mighty city of Durazzo. But Byzantium was no longer the fractured weakling it had been twenty-five years before, when Robert Guiscard had brought his Normans crashing into the empire. A quarter of a century under a single ruler had given the empire the great benefit of stability, uniting the various noble families under a single command. A measure of prosperity had returned, and with it a deeper loyalty to the government in Constantinople. With morale suitably high, Durazzo easily resisted the attack, and a Byzantine fleet cut off Bohemond from his supplies. Alexius leisurely made his way from Constantinople with an army, obliging the Norman to defend against attacks from his rear as well as from the city. By the end of the year, Bohemond’s men were starving and, as usual in an army camp, suffering from malaria as well. The exhausted and humiliated crusader was brought before the emperor, where he humbly agreed to an unconditional surrender. After returning to Italy in shame, Bohemond died three years later without ever daring to show his face in the East again.

Alexius had refurbished the tarnished imperial reputation and been more successful than any could have hoped at the start of his reign, but he was now nearing sixty and rapidly aging. Suffering from an acute form of gout, he was more concerned with consolidating what he had recovered than with new battles against the Turks. Trying to bring relief to his subjects, he eased the tax burden on the poor, building them a vast free hospital and homeless shelter in the capital to provide for all their needs. Concerned by the growing power of Venice within the empire, he offered the same commercial treaties to Pisa, hoping that the two maritime republics would balance each other out. In 1116, there was time for one final campaign against the Turks; he completely routed the sultan’s troops, ending the regular attacks on the Byzantine coast. By the terms of the resulting treaty, the Greek population of the Anatolian interior immigrated to Byzantine territory, escaping enslavement but ensuring the Islamification of Asia Minor.

By the time he returned victorious from his campaign, the emperor clearly didn’t have much longer to live. Forced to sit up in order to breathe, and swollen with disease, he lingered on until August 1118, finally dying in his bed with his family by his side.^* He had been a brilliant emperor and deserved to be buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles alongside the greatest of them, but instead he chose to be interred in the quiet little chapel he built along the seawalls.† The thirty-seven years he spent on the throne had given the empire a comforting stability just when it needed it the most, and had laid the foundation for a return to prosperity and strength. The full-scale collapse had been halted, and the emperor had even managed to recover the rich coastal lands along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. With a little more cooperation and goodwill between his people and the crusaders, Alexius almost certainly could have recovered the interior of Asia Minor as well. With the heartland of Anatolia restored to the empire, the damage done by Manzikert would have been effectively undone, and a much stronger Byzantium would have existed to deny the Turks a foothold in Europe. The following centuries would see plenty of capable and ambitious men on the imperial throne; if they had been given access to the resources of Asia Minor, they could perhaps have prevented the five hundred years of enslavement that awaited half of Europe. But the poisonous relations between Byzantium and the crusaders were not Alexius’s fault, and he can hardly be blamed for their deterioration. The Crusade could very well have overwhelmed the fragile imperial recovery, but he had handled it deftly and had accomplished more than any had dared to hope. Not all of his successors would have his skill—or be so lucky.

Long after the last crusaders left Constantinople, the impact of their passing reverberated in the imperial capital. Though the first experience left a bitter taste in the mouths of both sides, the rather pampered court was nevertheless impressed by the superb physical prowess of their brutish guests. In many cases, these swaggering men were their first intimate glimpses of the faraway West, and though the crusaders were uneducated and rough, there was a savage magnificence in the way these men of iron held themselves.