Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

Policies of Manuel I and the Second Crusade 

Page 10

The unsuccessful campaign of Manuel in Italy clearly showed Frederick Barbarossa that the Byzantine Emperor had in view the conquest of that country. Therefore he definitely broke with the Byzantine alliance. An historian contemporary with Frederick, Otto of Freising, wrote: Although (Frederick) hated William, he did not, however, wish that the strangers might take away the territory of his Empire, which had been unjustly seized by the violent tyranny of Roger. Any hope for a reconciliation with Barbarossa disappeared, and therewith disappeared all Manuel's hopes for the restoration of Italy. In 1158 a peace was made between Manuel and William of Sicily. This peace, the exact conditions of which are not known, meant the abandonment by Byzantium of her long cherished and brilliant plans as well as the rupture of the friendship and alliance between the two Empires which had existed under Lothar of Saxony and John Comnenus and later had been strengthened by the personal relations between Conrad and Manuel. The Byzantine troops never saw Italy again.

Under the new conditions the aims of the Byzantine policy changed. Now it had to oppose the tendency of the Hohenstaufens to annex Italy, which Frederick Barbarossa believed must acknowledge his power. Byzantine diplomats began to work actively in a new direction. Manuel, wishing to destroy the relations between Frederick and the pope, sought the support of the papal curia in his coming struggle with Frederick and seduced the pope by hints of a possible union between the eastern and western churches. By evoking a conflict between the pope and the king of Germany, Manuel hoped to restore the Eastern Empire in the whole fulness of its rights and put an end to the anomaly which existed in the shape of the Western Empire. Yet those negotiations failed, because the popes were not at all willing to fall into a state of dependence from one emperor to the other; on the contrary, the popes of the twelfth century, imbued with theocratic ideals, wished themselves to reach superiority over the Byzantine Emperor.

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