WI Alexius I got what he wanted....

By the time the Crusaders got to Constantinople nobody expected them to stay and help the Empire win back Anatolia. The oath of fealty was an attempt to salvage something from the Crusaders intention to go to the Holy Land, to make them sattelites rather than Byzantine Themes or adversaries.
 
By the time the Crusaders got to Constantinople nobody expected them to stay and help the Empire win back Anatolia. The oath of fealty was an attempt to salvage something from the Crusaders intention to go to the Holy Land, to make them sattelites rather than Byzantine Themes or adversaries.


Alexius got scared by the size of the army but he imposed this oath of fealty thinking that the Nobles would have obeyed him since he outranked them... (He was still the Roman Emperor of course)
When things got out of control he negotiated the surrender of Nicaea rather than let Crusaders and his army capture it... He was planning to do the same in Antioch but his army was delayed and Bohemound was given the pretext he wanted to set the Crusaders free from their vows... Greed overcame Crusaders and cerainly they wouldnt left the riches of Antioch to the Emperor...
 
Well, actually Alexius apparently was marching an army out to "help" the Crusaders take Antioch. However, deserters from the Crusaders' army told him that all was lost, and he turned his army around, never reaching Antioch. Thus, the Latin Crusaders argued, it was not they, but Alexius, who had broken the oath sworn in Constantinople. He was, as their liege lord, obligated to help them, and since he didn't arrive to help them at Antioch, he had broken the oath.

To achieve what you want Riain, have Alexius continue his march, and the Byzantine army break the Second Siege of Antioch, when the Crusaders are trapped inside the city. With Alexius having just saved their bacon the ruler of Antioch, at least, would have been a vassal of Constantinople. With the aid Alexius has provided at Antioch, the oaths of fealty that the Crusaders swore would still be in effect, since Alexius has kept his up his end of the contractual obligation. Thus the rest of the states the Crusaders establish would have the same obligations to Constantinople as Antioch. The history of the fall of the rest of the Holy Land may look much different. With Antioch having fallen, Alexius probably would want to go after Aleppo next, with its key strategic and economic position.

This may seem like it doesn't really matter, but it does. If the Crusader states right off the bat are vassals of the Empire, then you will end up having a closer relationship between the Empire and the Latin Outremer much sooner. In OTL it was a pretty acrimonious relationship, and the Latin Outremer only recognized its shared interests with the Byzantine Empire after the Second Crusade (1148). One of the things that is noted in both Zirgid and Nur al-Din's campaigns against the Latins is that they didn't want to get the Byzantines involved in the Latin-Muslim wars in the Holy Land. In this TL the Byzantines would be much more involved in the wars, because the constant border skirmishes would be between the Emperor's vassals and the Muslims, not between those crazy barbarian Latins and the Muslims (OTL). The Latins being in the Empire actually will probably end up securing Syria much sooner. The Empire would want both Aleppo and Damascus in the fold, and if those cities fall in the first half of the 12th century, then the Latins would be secure enough to use extensively in the campaigns against the Turks in the interior of Anatolia. The Rum Sultanate would be surrounded on three sides, with the Byzantines to the north and west, and the Latins to the south.

Furthermore, with the Latins as Imperial vassals, Riain, you'll be able to get what you want, an army of Latin knights fighting for the Empire.
 
I think that by the time the Crusaders got to Constantinople the 'damage' was already done. The Empire's call for mercenaries had already been bastardised into a Crusade, and the armies had sworn to the pope that they would free Jerusalem, not fght for the Emperor. How much of the oath of fealty was "Yeah, yeah, yeah, fealty, whatever, just let us enter the city and cross the straits will ya."?
 
I agree with Corvinus... But there is one thing that troubles me... For how long they will tolerate each other? There have been only 40 years since the schism and the mutual excommunications... Latins would soon started to rebel against Byzantines and Byzantines would try to supress Latins and drive them out of Holy Lands replacing them with Byzantine troops...
 
Last edited:
I think that by the time the Crusaders got to Constantinople the 'damage' was already done. The Empire's call for mercenaries had already been bastardised into a Crusade, and the armies had sworn to the pope that they would free Jerusalem, not fght for the Emperor. How much of the oath of fealty was "Yeah, yeah, yeah, fealty, whatever, just let us enter the city and cross the straits will ya."?

Under what conditions the oath was made is totally immaterial. The fact that in the TL I offered Alexius keeps up his end of the bargain, means that the Latin nobles are obligated to do the same. The fact that a Byzantine Army with the Emperor at its head is taking part in their military operations helps to maintain that sense of loyalty.

I'm going to go ahead and take issue with your thoughts about what exactly Alexius wanted. IMO what Alexius was looking for was some respite from the body blows that the Empire was suffering. The Turks were breathing down the Empire's neck and the Byzantines were in perhaps the worse strategic situation that they EVER had been in, in their entire history, period. The Crusades gave them breathing room, allowed them to survive the body blow of Manzikert. And they did all this without threatening the territorial integrity of the Empire, or becoming involved in the Empire's internal politics. So would you please explain why the mercenaries would have been any better than what he got?

I agree with Corvinus... But there is one thing that troubles me... For how long they will tolerate each other? There have been only 40 years since the schism and the mutual excommunications... Latins would soon started to rebel against Byzantines and Byzantines would try to supress Latins and drive them out of Holy Lands replacing them with Byzantine troops...

I don't think the Latins would rebel against the Byzantines. If you look at what happened to the Latin Outremer OTL they moved away from the Latin West's mainstream culture very quickly. The "orientalization" of the Latin East shocked visitors from the West by the first Frankish generation that was born in the East. With a greater relationship between the Byzantines and the Eastern Franks I would expect more inter-marriage. If Byzantine military power is used to secure Syria, then the Latins would be freed up to be used as heavy cavalry in the Byzantine campaigns for Anatolia. I agree that they could end up having fights with the Byzantines, but as a frontier people I think the Latins would recognize that the Byzantines might be heretics, but the Muslims wanted to kill them.
 
Western mercenaries for a limited engagement would be feasible for the Byzantines, but I doubt that a major expedition that could expel the Turks from Asia minor could occur. The main problem is religion. Since the schism of 1054, the papacy regarded the Greeks as heretics or even worse. They probably even felt that the Turkish invasion was divine retribution for the break with Rome. I don't think that Alexius was desperate enough to become a Roman Catholic just for the sake of Asia Minor. Latin mercenaries were notoriously enreliable anyway. Look what happened to Andronicus and the Catalan company. That was a disaster. Without the crusader states, I see a stronger Fatimid caliphate until the Mongol invasions.

Nah, the religious raw wasn't that significant at that time.
 
I don't deny that as it turned out the Crusaders helped the Empire to regain considerable territory while the power of Islam was focused elsewhere. We had a good discussion a week or so ago about the 3rd Crusade and it's possibilities to indirectly enhance the Empire. But in 1204 the same Crusading movement turned on the Empire and struck the blow which doomed it, so Venice could make a buck that week. The fact remains that Alexius called for mercenaries to fight the Turks in Anatolia, he didn't call for a religious war in the Holy Land so he could pick up the scraps and get a few vassals. The fault for the difference lies with Urban and Bernard, change their behaviour and you change history.
 
Actually Alexius asked for mercenaries to the Pope but Urban II was aiming elsewhere... Alexius thought that with the oath of fealty he would have secured their loyalty.... (Alexius expected that the Crusading Nobles would have respected the fact that he was the Roman Emperor)
When he saw that the Crusaders were going out of his control he enforced Byzantine diplomacy in order to "control" the Crusader's conquests as it happened with Nicaea...
 
I don't think that you can just say that the Crusader-movement was the work of one pope and one very skilled preacher. The outpouring of manpower for this adventure to the East points to demographic pressures that the Church took it upon itself to respond to. What I'm saying is that if you butterfly Manzikert away, and Alexius doesn't need Latin military aid, then you're still going to have to send this excess population of warrior-nobility somewhere.

So lets go with a different pope and no skilled preacher. Alexius' flee falls on deaf ear, or he gets a few knights, whatever, the upshot is no Crusades being preached in the early 1090's. What happens to all those landless, freebooting knights who OTL went East? Well one of two things, either they stay home, in which case you've raised the ante from regular level of violence to a truly horrifying level of violence, what with the low-prices for mercenaries and the willingness of knights to cut each other throats for land. But I don't think the knights would stick around. I think we'd see a bigger focus on Iberia and the Baltic. Both are relatively close, offer the chance for land, and killing the infidel, and both are already happening prior to the Crusades. So what is the effect of all this extra manpower on the Iberian and Baltic frontiers starting in the late 1090's?
 
We've already acknowledged the demographic pressures, the younger sons who would never gain their own lands. But does that need a Crusade to solve, or would recuriting mercenaries to serve the Emperor directly suffice? Urban could have just supported Alexius' idea, and facilitated a recruitment drive to rid Europe of similar numbers of mounted warriors without all of the relgious, holy land overlay which caused SO much trouble.
 
Urban II was aiming elsewhere... He didnt wanted to help Alexius... but to return the "schismatic" Greeks to the Apostolic See of Rome... But both Pope and Alexius were deceived when Crusaders started working for themselves... they wouldnt have left the riches of the East to Alexius and certainly not the Pope...
 
If you start off first asking "Why did the Crusades happen?" then you can see why the idea of turning the landless knights of Europe into Alexius' mercenaries doesn't make sense. The Crusades happened because you had a military society that had defeated all existential threats. The Norse, Muslims and Magyars had all been neutralized. Therefore, a new external enemy had to found, or Europe would tear itself to pieces in internal conflicts. The knights of Europe were going to do violence, the question, as Urban saw it, was whether they were going to do violence to other Latin-rite Christians or to the infidel. The Greeks' defeat at Manzikert, and Alexius' call for help, gave Urban II a pretext for getting rid of the excess knights and sending them on a mission to free the holy land from the infidels and in the process free Europe from the knights.

The advantage of sending them on a Crusade is that they don't require money. Their reward is two-fold: They are going to get land that they conquer from the infidel, and they are going to get spiritual rewards in the next life (absolved of all sins, etc.). Neither one of these rewards requires the spending of money by anyone in Europe. Plus the knights didn't want to be paid, they wanted land. The whole point of the Crusades was to make the landLESS knights landED knights.

So if Alexius' was planning on buying up large numbers of mercenaries, then these men are going to need to be settled somewhere. And that somewhere is probably going to be on the Anatolian frontier. Here we run into another problem. Even in Europe, where vassals faced liege lords of the same church and many times the same culture, there were disagreements about obligations that ended up turning into war. In Anatolia you're going to have Latin knights defending the Byzantine frontier, probably defending places that were rather important to the Byzantine frontier, like fortresses and cities, since this is where you would station troops. These Latin knights are, like all nobility, a grasping, greedy bunch, who want to increase their own power. They know that as far as military tech goes they are pretty much on the top of the heap. And in the sometimes choatic environment of Byzantine politics, they would probably be willing to go for the gold. Byzantine politics, because there is not the same emphasis on heiredity as there was in Europe, a Latin could aspire to the Kingship. And since the Latins would be an important part of the Byzantine military, given how knights are used, they would know just how much power they had. Basically, bringing Latins in large numbers into the Empire (as Rianin is proposing) is not a very good idea. Latins could be used as a more far away frontier people (far away, like in Syria/Palestine) but as an Anatolia frontier people, I can't see good things happening.
 
I struggle to believe that the OTL Crusades were the BEST Alexius and the Empire could have hoped for when asking Urban about mercenaries. I think Alexius had his own ideas in mind when he broached the subject and Urban turned them into something different, with Bernards 'help'.
Perhaps Alexius could have spoken with someone else, perhaps the HRE or some other important king. They wouldn't have called for a Crusade but would still be interested in moving their demographic issues onto someone else.
 
Even then (calling HR Emperor or any other than the Pope) NO King/Duke/Count gone to help the Byzantine Emperor would want to share what they conquered...
HRE would have helped and asked for recognition of their Imperial Title... If not for lands... (Byzantines refused to recognise HRE as Emperors of the West...)
 
Last edited:
The reason that Alexius went to the Pope rather than directly to the European monarchs is because the Pope and the Latin Church were the most solid and reliable part of Europe political structure. Most of Europe's Kings were hardly more powerful than their vassals (in some cases far weaker, ie France vs. the Angevins) and all of them were focused on very local issues, like not getting killed, expanding their domains, etc. The Church offered the ability to speak to all of Europe, which is what Alexius wanted to do.

I don't think you can convert the whole population of Europe's landless knights into Byzantine mercenaries because the Byzantine state couldn't pay them, and bringing large numbers of foreign mercenaries into your Empire and settling them worked so well for the Western Empire (Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Vandals, Alans, noticing a pattern?), why shouldn't the Eastern one do it too? Plus, all the knights aren't going to want to just go fight for some other king. I think that the idea of the Crusade appealed to a lot of these fighters not just on the greed/glory/land level, but also on a religious level, after all this period was one in which the Church was at perhaps the apogee of its power. I don't think that fighting the Turks in Anatolia held the same religious appeal that freeing Jerusalem, or fighting to keep Jerusalem free, did. In fact even in Iberia and on the Baltic the Crusaders were at least fighting to expand the TRUE faith. In Anatolia their fighting the infidel for a heretic Emperor. The urge to make the Emperor a Latin-Rite Emperor would be strong.
 
Top