The 1204 crusader conquest and sack of Constantinople, and the subsequent establishment of the Latin Empire, marked a significant moment in the history of the crusades. Modern scholars have debated various aspects of the campaign, known to posterity as the Fourth Crusade, theorising the motivations behind the chosen route and the decisions which led to some of the most notorious instances of the deployment of crusading forces against Christians. Most recently, medievalists have begun to conduct close critical readings of the texts produced in the wake of 1204 to identify how Latin Christians set about justifying the Fourth Crusade. It is here, in the study of both Latin and, significantly, Greek Christian source materials that George Demacopoulos'Colonizing Christianity makes its intervention.
As Demacopoulos states, Colonizing Christianity is not a history of the Fourth Crusade. Rather, he opens by describing the book as a "thought experiment" (1), the purpose of which is to ascertain what is to be gained from applying the approaches and methods of postcolonial theory to the sources, particularly in exploring ideas of Christian difference which emerged in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. Consequently, the book focuses on Greek and Latin religious polemic and teases out rhetorical mechanisms of authorisation and justification, as well as evidence of responses and meaning-making. The book examines and is structured around the work of six different Latin and Greek Christian authors who were writing within a century of 1204. Demacopoulos explains that he chose these sources in order that he might examine a range of different genres of medieval Christian writing, while simultaneously having a care to select materials that are readily available in English translation for the benefit of readers who are not specialists in the crusades or Byzantine history.
In the introduction, Demacopolous provides a brief overview of the historical events of the Fourth Crusade and the methodologies used in the book, along with a short consideration of the application of postcolonial critique in a crusading context. In this regard, scholars of the crusades and medieval history more broadly may well be disappointed by Demacopolous' level of engagement with the historiography of crusading as colonialism. While the appropriateness of viewing crusading as imperialism is succinctly refuted, a more reflective discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of applying postcolonial theory to an early-thirteenth-century context would have established a stronger theoretical foundation for the subsequent textual analyses. Rather, Demacopolous provides the disclaimer that the book seeks "to avoid an overly technical or overly theoretical use of postcolonial analysis" (6), concluding that the Fourth Crusade will be approached as a type of colonial or protocolonial encounter in order to better illuminate the discourses of religious difference embedded in the sources. In setting out the key aspects of postcolonial critique employed in the book, Demacopolous' primary recourse is to the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, and Robert Young, and especially to theories of colonial discourses of hybridity, ambivalence, sexuality, and exoticism. By viewing his sources through these analytical lenses, Demacopolous makes the overarching argument that it was in the wake of 1204, and not the Great Schism of 1054, that the sacramental boundaries between Latin and Greek Christianity underwent their most significant reconfiguration, and that this was a result of the political, economic, and cultural upheaval of the colonial encounter, not theological developments. In making this latter point, Demacopolous hopes to demonstrate the potential for finding theological common ground between Orthodox and Catholic Christians today.
In chapter1, Demacopoulos offers a welcome examination of the Old French prose narrative of Robert of Clari, a text which has often been largely overshadowed in the scholarship by another prose account by Geoffrey of Villehardouin. Robert, presented by Demacopoulos as a rank-and-file participant unafraid of criticising the actions of the crusade leadership, is thought to have dictated his La Conquête de Constantinople after his return to France in 1205. [1] In this chapter, Demacopoulos details the rhetorical mechanisms Robert uses to establish the moral superiority of the Latins over the Greeks, including the framing of Latin versus Greek masculinities, claims to authentic 'Romanness', and the use of tropes such as Greek treachery and sexual deviance. Demacopoulos identifies the role of ideas of virtue and wickedness, and of manliness and femininity in the presentation of Latin moral superiority, though more developed recourse to the sizeable historiography on masculinities and Latin representations of Greeks in a crusading context would have strengthened this. Indeed, several motifs identified by Demacopoulos in this chapter as mechanisms for conveying Latin moral superiority have precedents in earlier crusade narratives which are not acknowledged (e.g. the expulsion of women from the crusader camp before battle). Demacopoulos identifies Robert's discussion of Greek and Latin sexuality as an aspect of the colonial condition, and highlights the use of exoticizing representations of Constantinopolitan architecture and artefacts in the text (though his argument overreaches during the discussion of Robert's supposedly erotic discussion of a statue of Athena, wherein Demacopoulos refers to his discussion of its nakedness despite the source mentioning only its beauty).
Demacopoulos turns to Gunther of Pairis' Hystoria Constantinopolitana in chapter 2. Gunther, a Cistercian monk, wrote an account of the Fourth Crusade designed to record and justify his abbot, Martin of Pairis', acquisition of numerous Constantinopolitan relics in the wake of the crusader conquest of the city. The work had been completed, barring a final chapter appended later, by the end of 1205. Demacopoulos identifies several "colonial or protocolonial discursive features" (36) in Gunther's work, whereby the monk aimed to justify and defend Martin's actions. First, Demacopoulos demonstrates how Gunther draws on ideas of hegemonic superiority when he frames the crusader conquest of Constantinople as a moral good enacted by the crusaders for the good of the Greek inhabitants of the city themselves. Demacopoulos then identifies how Gunther's portrayal of certain Greek characters are reminiscent of the motif of the 'noble savage,' before demonstrating how Gunther uses this motif to justify Martin's actions. Perhaps less convincing, however, is his argument that Gunther uses homoerotic fantasy and innuendo indicative of sexual violation in his description of Martin's relic thefts; a reading that the source struggles to provide adequate evidence for.
In chapter 3, the book's focus shifts from narrative prose accounts to thirteenth-century papal correspondence to examine how the papacy perceived and orchestrated crusading as a "protocolonial enterprise" (49). In this chapter, Demacopoulos traces changing papal attitudes towards both the crusader conquest of Constantinople and Orthodox Christians in this period. He argues that the papal position shifts from that revealed in Innocent III's pre-1204 correspondence, in which Greek Christians are portrayed as merely obstinate in the face of papal authority, but nonetheless Christian, to being described as theologically deviant 'enemies of God' in the letters of Honorius III. Demacopoulos argues that the Fourth Crusade played a critical role in the escalation of this rhetoric and the trajectory, albeit an uneven one, of the Latin de-Christianisation of the Greeks. In addition, Demacopoulos identifies several inconsistencies in Innocent III's discussions of Greek Christians, and analyses these with recourse to Bhabha's theory of colonial ambivalence. Hence Demacopoulos concludes that the dissonances of Innocent's letters can be better understood in the context of the "unstable epistemic horizon" (70) that the crusader conquest of Constantinople heralded for Innocent. This chapter's argument would have been stronger had it been situated alongside a fuller consideration of the historical context, especially regarding Byzantine involvement in the affairs of the Latin East in the late twelfth century.
Chapter 4 examines two thirteenth-century canonical rulings--Ponemata 22 and 54--by Demetrios Chomatianos, archbishop of Ohrid. In these rulings, Demetrios, who acted as a judicial authority for Greek Christians in both the Greek successor states and within the Latin Empire of Constantinople, considers issues pertaining to "Greek/Latin sacramental comingling" (73). Demacopoulos uses these sources to begin his exploration of the complex and factional responses of the Greeks to their colonizers, for which he presents a counter-example in chapter 5. Demetrios argues in Ponemata 54 that the Greek monks of Mt. Athos who refuse to commemorate the pope must sever communion with those who continue to do so. As Demacopoulos notes, this source raises fascinating questions about notions of sacramental contamination and dilution. Similarly, in Ponemata 22, Demetrios rules that marriages between Greeks and Latin-sympathising Greeks are not only inadmissible, but invalid. Demacopoulos concludes that these rulings are best understood in the context of the colonial encounter, as an inversion of the fear of hybridity whereby it is the colonized Greeks who experience anxieties about comingling (namely sacramentally) with the colonizing Latins.
Demacopoulos presents a counterexample in chapter 5 by considering the Greek response as reflected in a narrative written by George Akropolites in the 1270s and, significantly, after Michael VIII Palaiologos had captured Constantinople in 1261, restoring Greek power there. Having sketched George's life and career, and mapped out the implications of George's links to the empire of Nicaea, Demacopoulos argues that, for George, writing as he was from a Palaiologan perspective, Latin Christianity did not represent the same threat to Orthodox purity as it had to Demetrios Chomatianos. While George maintains a wary view of Latin Christians, he does not see sacramental unity as a threat to Orthodox purity, or the Greeks' status as the true Romans. Finally, Demacopoulos reflects on how George's text challenges some of the methodological assumptions maintained thus far in Colonizing Christianity, and especially whether the lens of postcolonial critique is compromised in this instance. He suggests that, while George may have been writing in a postcolonial context in order to assert Nicaean authority versus other Greek successor polities, it nonetheless emerges from and responds to the legacy of colonization; "the Latin Empire of Constantinople forever scrambled the way that the Byzantines made sense of their own identity" (101-102).
Demacopoulos returns to consider theories of hybridity and ambivalence in the final chapter of Colonizing Christianity, this time as tools for understanding The Chronicle of Morea, a text that first appeared in the early 1300s with the intention of providing "a nostalgic glimpse of a time gone by" (104); namely, the flourishing Frankish governance of the Morea under the Villehardouins. Demacopoulos observes that, while theChronicle's portrayal of Greek-Latin integration and mutual respect in the Morea in the years after 1204 is historically plausible, one should not ignore what he calls the "ideological payoff" (106) of such representations. He also argues that the Chronicle is much more critical of those Greek Christians beyond the Frankish Peloponnese who positioned themselves in opposition to Latin rule in the Morea; it is in its description of those Greeks that it has recourse to motifs of treachery, effeminacy, and cultural inferiority. Demacopoulos then sets out the evidence for ambivalence in the Chronicle. He argues that these incongruences, or "fissures" (112, 115)--usually contradictory discussions of Latin superiority versus Greek inferiority--should be interpreted as indicative of that broader rupture of the Latin episteme identified in chapter 3 and brought about by the crusader conquest of Constantinople. Finally, Demacopoulos offers some limited evidence of transcultural forms in the Chronicle, namely linguistic and performative examples, concluding that the text was deliberately proffering an image of Moreot Latin-Greek harmony and coexistence in the face of a rapidly changing socio-political context.
In sum, Colonizing Christianity employs aspects of postcolonial theory to reveal several insights into the rhetoric of justification and authorisation in Latin texts, and of sacramental anxiety (or lack thereof) in the Greek. In demonstrating how viewing the Fourth Crusade as a colonial encounter can offer new interpretive tools for making sense of the sources, it is a success. Demacopoulos paints a largely convincing picture of changing Latin and Greek representations of religious difference, of variously deployed narrative mechanisms and even religious factionalism, though this is undermined by a lack of engagement with important historiography at points. He provides important examples of how, in the wake of 1204, Orthodox Christian identities were defined in relation to one's own stance towards Latin Christians in the eastern Mediterranean. While the approach taken in the close reading of the source materials is undoubtedly a central strength of this book, it is also a cause for concern at points. Demacopoulos has perhaps looked too hard to find certain themes in his source materials, especially evidence of eroticism and sexual fantasy in the Latin Christian sources. In these instances, the sources struggle to support the weight of the arguments made, and some readers may balk at the suggestion that, while certain connections or ideas are not explicit in the sources, "if we look close enough we just might see a glimmer" (34). Regardless, this book takes a welcome step towards demonstrating the potential value of using postcolonial approaches to examine the crusades, and will be of interest to scholars and non-specialists interested in the history of the Latin and Greek Churches, and the representation of religious difference in medieval texts.
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Notes:
1. Unfortunately, Demacopoulos does not engage with the recent and important reappraisal of this view of Robert of Clari's text contained in Marcus G. Bull, Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018), 292-336.