The Byzantine Empire in the Templar period

The Crusades began in the year 1095 after a Christian empire in the east warned that it was in danger of being annihilated by a determined Muslim enemy, the Seljuks. This was the Byzantine Empire centred on the enormously wealthy city of Constantinople. For the next three centuries, it would have a turbulent history, dealing with both the western crusaders and eastern Saracens, until finally crushed by Ottoman Turks in 1453. That history would feature the Knights Templar very prominently.

What was the Byzantine Empire?

Nobody in the “Byzantine Empire” ever used that term. They regarded themselves as the unbroken continuation of the Roman Empire and called themselves “Roman,” “Romaioi,” or “Romans”. Their empire had emerged out of the eastern half of the Roman Empire when the western half was invaded by Goths, Vandals, Huns, and others in the fifth century CE.

This empire spoke Greek, which had always been the lingua franca in the east since the invasions of Alexander the Great. It was Christian but didn’t acknowledge Rome’s claim to overall religious supremacy. From the earliest centuries of the Christian church, there had been five patriarchs, of which Rome was just one. The others were in Byzantine territory: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. And whereas the pope increasingly reserved the right to boss western monarchs around, it was the reverse in the east – the patriarchs were subservient to the emperor.

The two halves of Christianity were moving in very different directions. Relations between eastern Greek Christians and western Latin Christians got so bad that in 1054 – in an event called the Great Schism – the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.

In the 6th century CE, the Byzantine Empire reached its peak in terms of territory, under the Emperor Justinian. It ruled all of Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Asia Minor, the eastern Mediterranean (modern Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon), Egypt, north Africa, and southern Spain. There were dreams of recreating the Roman Empire. But it all fell apart with the emergence of Islam, crashing out of the Arab world.

The new Islamic caliphate – establishing its first capital in Damascus – took north Africa, Egypt, and most of the Levant. Meanwhile in Italy, new forces like the Lombards, and later the Normans, ate into Byzantine holdings. Long wars were also fought against the Bulgars. Things at times looked desperate for the empire.

Yet despite all this, the empire not only endured, but experienced a renaissance under the Macedonian dynasty, from 867CE to 1056CE. It regained control over the Adriatic Sea, Southern Italy, and the territory of Bulgaria, and conquered Crete, Cyprus, and most of Syria.

The Byzantine Empire in crisis

This winning streak came to a bloody end with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, a central Asian steppe people who had converted to Islam. Their armies crashed through the Islamic caliphate and into Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which was the bread basket, tax base, and source of military recruits for the empire.

In 1071, the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes rode out of the extremely well defended city of Constantinople, ringed by impregnable walls, to see off these Seljuks. The result was his disastrous defeat at Manzikert. Romanus was captured and forced to grovel at the feet of the Seljuk leader, Alp Arslan. Following this humiliation, the Komnenos dynasty took power from 1081 to 1185. These wily emperors renewed the empire’s military strength, rebuilt its finances, and used skilled diplomacy – often seen as underhand cunning – to push back their enemies.

This was the empire in 1080, when the Seljuks almost entirely overran Asia Minor, which had previously been wholly Byzantine.

This was how things looked decades later as the Komnenos dynasty got a grip on the situation.

Then the Byzantines made a huge gamble, fraught with risk. Emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent a letter to Pope Urban II in 1095, requesting assistance in pushing back the Seljuk Turks who had conquered so much of his empire and held the holy city of Jerusalem. At a church council in Clermont that year, the pope read out what may have been a sexed-up version of the letter.

It included descriptions of eastern Christians being tortured and a promise from Alexios that those coming to help from the west would be given untold riches, including holy relics. Many historians doubt that Alexios made such a generous and rash promise.

FIND OUT MORE: The pope calls for a crusade against Islam

Dawn of the Knights Templar

Urban unleashed a new kind of war – a holy war – which we call The Crusades. Christians were to “take the cross” and travel a huge distance to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims. This reflected the papacy’s desire to increase its political and religious power. Jerusalem was seized in the First Crusade and new Christian states established along the eastern Mediterranean. The Byzantines hoped these crusader-run realms would automatically pledge allegiance to Constantinople, but the Roman Catholic invaders had other ideas.

In 1118, the Knights Templar were established – along with other Catholic military orders, like the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. The Byzantine Empire would have loved the Templars to be allies but from the outset, there was a lack of trust in the relationship between the western crusaders and Constantinople. This deteriorated even further over time with the Byzantines sometimes preferring to deal with the Saracens than the crusaders, leading to charges of treachery.

The tensions boiled over in the year 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, when a crusader army – led by the Doge of Venice and including knights Templar – breached the thick walls of Constantinople and sacked the city. This attack by a Christian army against a Christian city was a total derailment of the crusading ideal. The doge was motivated solely by cynical political considerations and the prospect of financial gain.

After the sack of Constantinople, Byzantine refugees and factions formed new states, including the Empire of Nicaea, the Empire of Trebizond, and the Despotate of Epirus, attempting to restore Byzantine rule. But they remained shut out of what had been their capital.

Some have tried to argue that the Knights Templar and Hospitaller weren’t involved in the attack on Constantinople, as they were fully absorbed in holding crusader territory in the Holy Land. This is very likely a comforting fiction. The Templars and Venice developed a close relationship at this time. Indeed, between 1256 and 1270, there was a conflict between Venice and its Italian commercial rival Genoa (the War of Saint Sabas) in which the Templars sided with Venice while the Hospitallers fought with the Genoese.

For 57 years, from 1204 to 1261, the Byzantines were forced out of their own capital city, which was taken over by a series of “Latin” emperors – and one empress, Yolanda, between 1217 and 1219. In 1261, the Byzantines managed to regain their capital under Michael VIII Palaiologos, establishing the Palaiologan dynasty. But the city he ruled had been massively damaged and asset stripped by the crusaders – leaving it a shell of its former glorious self.

The Palaiologans faced continuous pressure from neighbouring states, particularly the Ottomans, Bulgarians, and Serbs. The role played by the Byzantine Empire in subsequent crusades was much diminished – and the empire, though exerting a huge cultural influence beyond its borders, went into a slow, terminal decline. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. The city would be renamed Istanbul, capital of a Muslim empire.

If you would like to know more about the Knights Templar, then get your hands on a copy of my book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery. Published by Pen & Sword and available on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and WHSmith. Don’t miss out on your copy!