In short, Alexios knew how to pull the emotional triggers of western Christians. He also played on the rapidly growing obsession with relics, where any object relating to Christ’s life, however banal and improbable – including his milk teeth and bread he had once chewed on as a baby – had spiritual significance.39 The emperor actively stimulated this demand in the years before the First Crusade. An otherwise unremarkable account of the life of Bishop Pibo of Toul reveals that the bishop had brought a part of the Holy Cross back to Germany with him on his return from pilgrimage in 1086. The bishop had not found this by chance: it had been given to him personally by the emperor. Little wonder that Alexios was described by Pibo as ‘the most glorious emperor of the Greeks, who loved him most dearly’.40
Other beneficiaries of Alexios’ relic diplomacy included Henry IV of Germany, who was sent religious treasures to win his support against the Normans in the early 1080s. He was given ‘a gold pectoral cross set with pearls and a reliquary inlaid with gold containing fragments of various saints, identified in each case by a small label’.41 According to two German authors, other items included vases and jugs that were very likely to have come from the collections expropriated by Alexios from the churches of Byzantium not long before.42
When Peter the Venerable writes that the emperor enriched a great many chapels and churches north of the Alps, he can only refer to the relics and holy objects Alexios dispatched to far-distant regions. Although Peter, abbot of the great monastery of Cluny, does not specify which gifts he himself received from Alexios, or when he received them, his emphatic approval suggests that Alexios had been sending items of genuine significance: truly he was ‘great in name and deed’.43
It is not surprising that the letter from Alexios to Robert of Flanders drew attention to Constantinople’s collection of relics, which included the most holy and significant objects relating to Christ’s life, such as the pillar to which Jesus was bound before being submitted to the scourge, as well as the lash itself; the scarlet robe in which Christ was arrayed; the crown of thorns; garments from the Crucifixion, as well as most of the Holy Cross and the nails that had fastened him to it; linen cloths from the tomb; the twelve baskets with remainders of the five loaves and two fish which had fed the 5,000; and relics and bones belonging to any number of the Apostles, martyrs and prophets.44 Guibert of Nogent, who had read the letter and provided a summary of its contents, noted the claim that the head of John the Baptist, including his hair and his beard, were in Constantinople – something that surprised him since he had been under the impression that John’s head was preserved in the church treasury at Angers. ‘Now we are certain’, he wrote wryly, ‘that two John the Baptists did not exist, nor did one man have two heads, for that would be impious.’45 He promised he would investigate the matter further.
Alexios was particularly creative in his use of various sections of the Holy Cross as his appeals for help gathered pace in the mid-1090s. The Cross was the relic most closely associated with Constantinople after being brought to the capital during the reign of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century. The flurry of altars and churches blessed by Pope Urban II in central France in 1095–6 suggests that Alexios may have given the pontiff pieces of the Cross as powerful tools to help galvanise support for the military expedition.46
Influential western visitors to Constantinople were judiciously shown the relics held in the capital. A monk from Kent who visited in the early 1090s fortuitously met a friend from home serving in Alexios’ bodyguard and was allowed into the emperor’s private chapel. Access was normally strictly controlled. The fact that the monk was allowed in and then given relics belonging to St Andrew, which he took back to Rochester cathedral, suggests that the emperor was monitoring diplomatic channels to win the goodwill of westerners.47
Alexios’ shrewd ability to decipher what mattered to westerners extended to the language he used when communicating with leading figures in Europe. Contact with Henry IV in the early 1080s, for example, was couched in terms of Christian solidarity and religious obligation. Henry and Alexios had to co-operate against the Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, wrote the Byzantine emperor, ‘so that the wickedness of this enemy both of God and of Christians will be punished – murderer and criminal ... You and I can be friends as Christians, brought more closely together as kinsmen; thus deriving strength from one another, we shall be formidable to our enemies and with God’s help invincible.’48
His communication with the great Benedictine monastery of Montecassino in Italy was no less carefully judged. Thanking the abbot for a letter expressing warm regards and wishing for great favours from Almighty God, Alexios replied that ‘through His compassion and His grace He has honoured and exalted my empire. However, not only because I have nothing of good in me, but because I sin above all men, I pray daily that His compassion and patience be sent to sustain my weakness. But you, filled with goodness and virtue, judge me, sinner that I am, a good man.’49 Alexios was keen to show his humility and underscore his personal piety and devotion: it was calculated to impress a monk at the head of an order based on strict rules of obedience and self-restraint.
It seems clear, therefore, that Alexios knew how to appeal to wester ners. In this he was undoubtedly drawing on his experiences with men such as Peter Aliphas, the Norman who took imperial service in the 1080s, and Goibert, a monk from Marmoutier who became a close confidant of the emperor and his inner circle shortly before the First Crusade. The emperor deliberately used the lure of Jerusalem to draw military support to Byzantium, and to cast the empire’s troubles and its political interests in terms of Christian obligation.
In his appeal, Alexios could be encouraged by the success of his earlier pleas for help. The letters he sent out after Nikomedia fell to Abu’l-Kasim in the early 1090s, for example, had yielded immediate results, with western knights joining him to drive back the Turks ‘with God’s assistance’.50 But as the situation deteriorated in Byzantium, the emperor required more formidable assistance. Alexios therefore carefully targeted his appeals to those who had responded enthusiastically in the past. Most promising was Robert of Flanders. Alexios knew Count Robert personally from meeting him at the end of 1089 and had benefited from the 500 knights that Robert had dispatched to Constantinople soon after. It was no surprise, then, that Flanders was heavily canvassed by the emperor in the 1090s even after Count Robert’s death in 1093. When Pope Urban II wrote to ‘all the faithful’ of this region in 1095, he noted that they needed no introduction to the problems in the east: ‘Your brotherhood, we believe, has long since learned from many sources that a barbaric fury has disastrously attacked and laid waste the churches of God and the regions of the Orient.’51 The Pope was right – people in Flanders who were particularly well informed about the situation in the east included Count Robert’s heir, Robert II of Flanders, and his wife, Clementia, who in a charter issued in 1097 noted with sadness that the Persians had occupied the church of Jerusalem and had destroyed the Christian religion in every direction.52
The emperor sought to capitalise on his relations with Count Robert I to recruit other nobles.53 Deliberately widening his appeals for help, his letter to Flanders was addressed not only to the count, but ‘to all the princes of the realm and all lovers of the Christian faith, laypeople and clerics alike’.54 As Guibert of Nogent astutely noted, the emperor ‘did not approach him because he thought that Robert was extremely wealthy and capable of raising a large force ... but because he realised that if a man of such power went on such a journey, he would attract many of our people, who would support him if only for the sake of a new experience’.55