A Christmas to Save the Byzantine Empire

On Christmas Day 1400 the English king Henry IV and the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos sat down to their festive dinner at Eltham Palace in southeast England. The embattled emperor had arrived four days earlier, on the final leg of a desperate tour across Europe, a last-ditch effort to encourage the emerging powers of Western Christendom to come to the aid of his empire in the event of a (highly likely) Ottoman conquest; the imperial city was already enduring an extended siege. Manuel’s tour was unprecedented. With the exception of his father, John V, no Byzantine emperor had ever left the borders of his empire. Even John had not strayed far, travelling between Naples and Rome in October 1369 in a failed attempt to end the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity through a formal conversion to Roman Catholicism at St Peter’s. Manuel’s journey, by contrast, had brought him to the British Isles, which, from a Roman point of view, were located at the very edge of the world.

Manuel’s visit to Britain, lasting a little over three months, was one of the more successful stops on his tour. But when he and Henry shared Christmas together in 1400 they were dining across the same religious divide that John had been unable to bridge in 1369. Manuel, emperor of the Byzantine Empire, was an Eastern Orthodox Christian, loyal to the Patriarch of Constantinople; Henry, king of the English, was a Roman Catholic, loyal to the pope in Rome. How they celebrated Christmas mattered; as far as Manuel was concerned, the fate of the Roman Empire depended upon it.

Desperate Byzantines

Manuel’s journey was an act of desperation. The ancient empire he had come to rule nearly 40 years earlier was in the final stages of what had been a centuries-long decline. External threats from the advancing Ottoman armies combined with internal strife (chiefly, attempts by his nephew, John VII, to usurp the throne) meant that his position was far from secure. The only hope for the struggling last vestige of the once mighty empire lay outside in the increasingly powerful states of the Latin West.

Manuel was not the first Byzantine emperor to seek Western help, but doing so had not proved a winning strategy for his predecessors. Alexios I Komnenos had sought aid from his Christian brothers during the troubled 11th century when the Turkic warlord Seljuk, leader of the Oghuz Turks, had led his people to the banks of the Syr Darya River, where they converted to Islam. Under Seljuk and his heirs the Oghuz began a period of conquest across central Asia and parts of Anatolia that would become the Seljuk Empire, the first significant Islamic threat to the Byzantine Empire since the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries. In response to this threat, Alexios sought the support of the West, sending ambassadors to the Council of Piacenza to appeal to Pope Urban II. The response was the First Crusade, the first in a series of religiously motivated military campaigns under the direction of the Roman Catholic Church. But the Crusades would turn out to be a greater existential threat to the Byzantines than to the Islamic empires they sought to defeat. Less than 200 years after Alexios’ appeal, Western crusaders would sack Constantinople and occupy the city for nearly two years.

Not that this should have come as any great surprise. Alexios had sent his plea for help at a very awkward time. The two halves of the Roman Empire (as divided by Diocletian in AD 296) were split by language and culture. This division had in turn created genuine differences in practice and belief. In the middle of the 11th century, these differences reached a moment of particular tension with the mutual excommunications of Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael I. This came to be viewed as the moment of final division between what would later become known as the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church – even if the idea of a ‘schism’ or even the use of the term would not appear with any regularity until the Reformation in the 16th century. That division only deepened in the 350 years between the initial schism in 1054 and Manuel’s tour in 1400, and seemed so deep as to be unbridgeable to the generations who came after the Ottoman conquest that Manuel had sought to prevent. In reality, however, this was not the case.

Indeed, the state of Eastern-Western ecclesiastical relations remained much more fluid than is commonly assumed. Faced with a genuine threat – such as the Ottomans – the Christian world could find a bridge between East and West. That was the case with Manuel’s unprecedented European tour and his Christmas with an English king, an event that reveals something often missed by historians: the divisions and differences which split Christianity in the late medieval era were less real for those who lived through them.

Looking west

Manuel’s own experience offers compelling evidence for this view. After three years of relative calm following the death of his father in 1394 the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid, began a blockade of Constantinople which would last until 1402. Shortly after, the Hungarian king (and future Holy Roman Emperor) Sigismund of Luxembourg was defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. The defeat brought about the end of the Orthodox Second Bulgarian Empire – and brought the Ottomans to the threshold of central Europe. It also increased the pressure domestically on the already faltering Byzantine emperor. Aware of his stake in Sigismund’s cause, Manuel had sent military support. In the wake of the defeat, he looked elsewhere for help.

In 1397 Manuel sent his adviser and relative Theodore Kantakouzenos and the statesman John of Natala to the court of the French king Charles VI. They carried a letter begging for help against the advancing Ottomans. While the two men did manage to secure some support from the French court, they were denied help from England, where Richard II was in the final months of his troubled reign.

The man sent to command the French reinforcements proved to be their greatest asset. Jean II Le Maingre (also known as Boucicaut) was a knight, a seasoned crusader and an emerging statesman. He was also familiar with both East and West in a way that few men of his age would have been. He had begun his military career at the age of 12, when he accompanied Louis II, duke of Bourbon in a campaign against the Duchy of Normandy. Knighted at 16, at 18 he set out on his first great journey, heading to Prussia to assist the Teutonic Order in their war against the unconverted Lithuanians, who were shortly brought into the fold of the Catholic Church. He would later fight alongside the duke of Bourbon against the Moors in Spain and France as well as the English at the Battle of Agincourt, before setting out on a two-year journey that took him through the Balkans, the Near East and the Holy Land.

Boucicaut was at the disastrous Battle of Nicopolis and had been taken captive by the sultan. Unlike the vast majority of his companions, Boucicaut not only escaped with his life but regained his freedom as well, when he was eventually ransomed. Upon his arrival at the Byzantine court with the French reinforcements in 1397 he endeared himself to Manuel. He achieved this, partly, by offering assistance during yet another Ottoman assault on the city, and partly by brokering a peace, albeit an uneasy one, between Manuel and his nephew John. (John had both a legitimate claim to the throne and the desire – and the generals – to take it.) The charming Frenchman became one of the emperor’s closest advisers.

And Boucicaut’s advice was that Manuel should go himself to seek aid from the West. It was a bold, dangerous, even desperate idea. Byzantine emperors as a rule did not travel. Why should the most powerful man in the world (in theory) need to leave his empire? Others ought to come to him. From a practical perspective, travel was dangerous. There were the obvious dangers that applied to everyone: shipwrecks, bandits and disease. But there were also the dangers that were particular to kings and emperors. Medieval politics were turbulent. An absent monarch made himself vulnerable to usurpation and foreign attack. Considering that Manuel was already threatened by both, his decision to leave Constantinople on a diplomatic jaunt around Western Europe was not without risks. Nonetheless, he took Boucicaut’s advice. Manuel set off on 10 December 1399.

The trip

Leaving his wife and children in the care of his brother, Theodore I Palaiologos, despot of the Morea in the Peloponnese, Manuel departed for Italy. In Venice he was received by the doge and addressed the Great Council, likely making an appeal for the unity of Christendom. There, Manuel and his French guide parted company. While Manuel continued on to Padua to seek the support of the powerful da Carrara family who ruled the city, Boucicaut headed to France to prepare the French court for the emperor’s arrival. When Manuel did at last arrive in France on 3 June 1400, after another stop in Pavia, he was greeted with great warmth and ceremony by Charles VI. Known for suffering from extremely poor mental health and psychosis, Charles welcomed Manuel in the midst of one of his periods of lucidity.

It is in the accounts of the French chroniclers – the authors of the Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys and Chronique du règne de Charles VI, roi de France – that we find insight into how those experiencing this most unusual meeting of East and West dealt first-hand with the differences in religious custom that divided the two halves of the Christian world. In Manuel’s entourage were a number of Orthodox clergy, there to provide the emperor with spiritual assistance (including the sacraments) as he travelled. In Paris, these clerics celebrated a public liturgy, likely, though not definitely, at Sainte-Chapelle. The French clerk and historian Jean Juvénal des Ursins noted of the Eastern rites that the services were ‘unusual’ but that ‘everyone could attend’. Differences in custom – perhaps even in theology – did not appear to stop a shared celebration of the Eucharist, the ultimate symbol of Christian unity.

This became more apparent when Manuel left Paris for England, landing at Blackhead in Dorset on St Thomas’ Day, 21 December 1400. He was greeted by the newly crowned Henry IV and a contingent of Augustinian monks from Canterbury. Christmas was just a few days away. How would these two kings from separate ends of the Christian world – theoretically under the protection of bishops in schism with each other – celebrate Christmas together?

An English Christmas

While late medieval Christians, regardless of where they lived or to which bishop they were loyal, would have celebrated Easter in a largely similar (though not identical) fashion, the series of winter feast days between the Nativity of Christ on 25 December and the Epiphany (or Theophany) on 6 January was a different story.

Christians had always celebrated the Resurrection; Easter had been the central feast day on the Christian calendar from the faith’s earliest days. Christmas, however, was another matter. This was partly a consequence of the process of synchronicity that Christianity underwent as it spread into the far-flung parts of the Roman Empire and beyond. For those who lived in the cold, dark corners of northern Europe, the celebrations around the winter solstice – with the promise of the sun’s return – were highly important. In pre-Christian times this had given birth to a host of complex rituals, celebrations and festivals aimed at ensuring that the long winter would give way to spring. As people and tribes further and further north were brought into the fold of the Christian faith, celebrations of the sun’s rebirth at the winter solstice were transformed into the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. It is for this reason that the Feast of the Nativity, the first of the 12 days of Christmas, celebrated on 25 December, is the only major Christian feast to have moved from West to East. And while by 1400 Eastern Christians were most certainly celebrating Christmas, there would have been little to prepare Manuel for the importance and grandeur with which the feast was celebrated in England.

The medieval Great Hall at Eltham Palace (the current Great Hall is a different room that post-dates these events) would have been the centre of these events. Unfortunately, we have very little by way of first-hand accounts of what transpired over the 12 days of festivities. We are forced, therefore, to piece them together from what we know about Christmas in late medieval England. There would almost certainly have been a Christmas tournament and days of hunting, singing and dancing. A host of traditional English dishes would have been presented to the emperor for his delectation.

The most significant question is what Henry IV and Manuel II’s priests did regarding the celebration of the religious services, including multiple Eucharistic services – the religious aspect of the medieval Christmas. From late antiquity, significant differences had existed in the celebration of the Eucharist between East and West. Most visible among them, Eastern Christians used leavened bread which they mixed into the chalice, while Western Christians used unleavened bread and separated the distribution of wine and bread. The answer, however, is far from clear. Later descriptions of the events – most of which are from the centuries after the Reformation, when the divisions within Christianity, and particularly divisions over the Eucharist and its proper form, were much more pronounced – tend to declare unquestioningly that neither the two rulers nor their priests would have celebrated together. This certainty is anachronistic at best.

It is unclear if there would have been a co-celebration or not, particularly since the English Church, while technically part of the Latin Church, maintained a self-appointed autonomy from Rome. Both the English and the Byzantines saw the English Church as being semi-independent, and so not necessarily party to the growing division between Rome and Constantinople. Moreover, there are plenty of instances, many well into the 18th century, of Eastern and Western priests co-celebrating the Eucharist when practical or political concerns were at play. English diplomats would often receive communion in Orthodox churches, both in Russia and in the Ottoman Empire, and Greek sailors aboard Spanish ships were communed by Catholic priests.

In the case of Christmas 1400, the question was not just of ceremonial importance. There were serious, worldly, concerns at stake. At the heart of Manuel’s pilgrimage to the West was a central premise: that the Christian Church, whatever conflicts or disagreements there might be, was still united and that Christian brothers ought to unite with one another against a common enemy. For this premise to hold, Manuel and his priests would have needed to emphasise the ways in which the Church of Christ remained united – or rather that they were still members of the One, Holy, True and Apostolic Church.

Of course, one might say that had such a momentous event as a co-celebration of the Eucharist occurred – had priests from Canterbury and priests from Constantinople celebrated the Eucharist together – there would most certainly have been some sort of record. But what if it was not as remarkable an occurrence as we, from our vantage point of 600 years, might think? In the four centuries between the so-called ‘Great Schism’ and Manuel’s arrival in England, relations between the Eastern and Western halves of the Christian world had ebbed and flowed. And co-celebration, if not common, was not unheard of. There is reason to think that it was possible – maybe even likely – that the priests of Henry’s court and those of Manuel’s celebrated together that Christmas.

Festive friends

What is known is that the two monarchs liked each other a great deal, and that Henry offered Manuel a significant amount of aid. In a missive to his court, Manuel wrote how:

The prince with whom we are now, the King of Great Britain, this land that could be called another world, a prince inundated with wealth, adorned with a thousand qualities, has followed his natural instinct by becoming for us a harbour after a double storm: of nature and of fortune. His conversation is full of charm; he delights us in every way, honours us, and loves us equally. He grants us assistance in men-at-arms, archers, money, and ships, which will transport the army wherever needed.

Henry’s generosity was motivated, partly, by the much-needed legitimacy his friendship with Manuel gave his reign. He had only recently dethroned his cousin, Richard II.

In the end, however, as was the case with the other Western kings Manuel met, it was largely chivalric promise with no substance. The aid never did materialise. Manuel returned to his besieged empire, ruling for another 25 years, forced to pay the Ottomans tribute as a means of starving off their relentless attacks. If even a single letter was exchanged between Henry and Manuel, it does not survive.

But beyond the immediate political concerns, this curious episode at Eltham Palace in 1400 offers a window into a time when divisions between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, though certainly present, had not yet hardened into the later, unbridgeable schisms that have come to define the received views of modern religious history. 
 

Katherine Kelaidis is a research fellow at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge.