The Sack of Constantinople 1204

The Sack of Constantinople in April 1204 was one of the most controversial events in the history of the Crusades and a defining moment in the relations between Western and Eastern Christianity. The Fourth Crusade, which had been diverted from its original purpose of recovering Jerusalem by a complex series of political and financial maneuvers, ended in the systematic pillage and destruction of the Christian city of Constantinople by the Crusaders. The Sack permanently weakened the Byzantine Empire and deepened the schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches that persists to the present day.

The standard English-language treatment is Jonathan Phillips, “The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople” (2004). Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s La Conquête de Constantinople and Niketas Choniates’ Historia are the contemporary sources, with the modern editions in the Recueil des historiens des croisades.

The Background to the Sack

The background to the Sack of Constantinople is rooted in the complex and troubled history of the Fourth Crusade. The Fourth Crusade had been proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in 1198, with the goal of recovering Jerusalem by attacking Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power. The Crusaders lacked the resources to mount the expedition alone, and they entered into a contract with the Republic of Venice, which agreed to provide the ships for the expedition in return for a large payment. The Crusaders were unable to pay the full sum promised to Venice, and the Venetians, led by the doge Enrico Dandolo, imposed alternative arrangements on the Crusaders that diverted the Crusade from its original purpose.

The first major deviation of the Crusade occurred in November 1202, when the Crusaders agreed to attack the Christian city of Zara (now Zadar in Croatia) on behalf of Venice, which had a commercial rival there. The Sack of Zara was a major embarrassment to the papacy, and Pope Innocent excommunicated the entire Crusade in response. The Crusade was further diverted in 1203, when Alexios IV Angelos, the son of the deposed Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos, arrived at the Crusader camp and promised large rewards if the Crusaders would help him regain the Byzantine throne. The Crusaders agreed, and they installed Alexios IV as co-emperor in August 1203.

The Sacking of the City

The Sack of Constantinople began on April 12, 1204, when the Crusaders stormed the walls of the city and broke through the defenses. The Crusaders proceeded to pillage the city in a systematic and brutal fashion. The chroniclers of the Sack — including the eyewitness account of Geoffrey of Villehardouin and the later account of Niketas Choniates — describe the massacre of the inhabitants, the rape of the women, the looting of the churches and palaces, and the destruction of the art and literature of the Byzantine world.

The Sack of Constantinople was a major trauma for the Byzantine world and for Christendom as a whole. The Byzantine Empire was permanently weakened, and the Byzantine state was never fully restored. The library of Constantinople, with its priceless collection of manuscripts of classical Greek literature, was partially destroyed, and many treasures of Byzantine art were lost or carried off to Western Europe. The relations between the Eastern and Western Churches were permanently damaged, and the schism that had existed since the eleventh century was deepened and entrenched.

The Crusaders looted the city of its treasures and its goods, and they distributed the loot according to a pre-arranged scheme. The Crusaders claimed that they were righting a wrong — the deposition of Isaac II and the usurpation of the throne by Alexios V Doukas — and they justified the Sack as a punishment of the Byzantines for their refusal to submit to the papacy and for their support of the usurper. The Byzantines, for their part, saw the Sack as a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, and they blamed the Crusaders for the destruction of Christian civilization.

The Latin Empire

The Latin Empire of Constantinople was established in the aftermath of the Sack, with Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin emperor (1204–1205). The Latin Empire claimed sovereignty over the Byzantine territories in Greece, Asia Minor, and the Aegean, and it allocated the Byzantine territories among the Crusader leaders. The Venetians received major territorial concessions, including Crete, parts of the Peloponnese, and the important port of Galata across the Golden Horn from Constantinople.

The Latin Empire was immediately challenged by Byzantine successor states that emerged in the wake of the Sack. The Empire of Nicaea, founded by the Byzantine imperial family in Asia Minor, gradually consolidated its control over the rump of the Byzantine world and eventually recaptured Constantinople in 1261, ending the Latin Empire. The Despotate of Epirus, founded by another branch of the Byzantine family in northwestern Greece, competed with Nicaea for the succession of the Byzantine Empire. The successor states of Trebizond, in northern Asia Minor, and of Cyprus, ruled by the Lusignan family, maintained a degree of autonomy for several centuries.

The Latin Empire was a precarious state from the outset. The Crusaders were a small minority in a vast and hostile empire, and they depended on support from Western Europe to maintain their position. The Empire lasted less than sixty years, and it collapsed in 1261 when the Byzantine forces recaptured Constantinople. The collapse of the Latin Empire was a major setback for the Latin presence in the East, but the memory of the Latin Empire and the Sack of Constantinople continued to shape the relations between Western and Eastern Christianity for centuries.

The Aftermath of the Sack

The aftermath of the Sack of Constantinople was far-reaching. The Sack permanently weakened the Byzantine Empire, and it contributed to the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was a major event in the history of Christianity and Islam, and it marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the beginning of the Ottoman hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople shut the land route to the East and stimulated the European age of exploration, and it was a major factor in the rise of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The Sack of Constantinople also had a major impact on the Crusading movement itself. The Sack discredited the Crusade as an institution, and it contributed to the decline of the Crusading ideal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The later Crusades — the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), the Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), the Seventh Crusade (1248–1254), and the Eighth Crusade (1270) — were all marked by the decline of Crusader enthusiasm and the growing strength of the Muslim states of the Near East. The failure of the Crusading movement was a major factor in the decline of the papal monarchy and the rise of the royal state in the late medieval period.

The Sack of Constantinople also contributed to the transmission of Byzantine learning to the West, and it helped to prepare the ground for the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Byzantine scholars who fled to Italy after the Sack brought with them a rich knowledge of Greek language and literature, and they contributed to the revival of Greek studies in Western Europe. The transmission of Byzantine learning to the West was a major factor in the development of humanism and the Renaissance, and it helped to shape the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe.

The Legacy of the Sack

The legacy of the Sack of Constantinople is complex and controversial. On the one hand, the Sack was a brutal and unjustifiable act that caused enormous suffering and loss of life, and that permanently damaged the relations between Western and Eastern Christianity. The Sack is often cited as an example of the dangers of religious intolerance and Crusader violence, and it is a subject of ongoing historical and theological debate.

On the other hand, the Sack contributed to the transmission of Byzantine learning to the West, and it helped to prepare the ground for the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Sack also weakened the Byzantine Empire and contributed to the Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe, and it set the stage for the major political changes of the subsequent centuries. The Sack is a major subject of modern historical study, and it is a subject of ongoing debate in the modern era.

The Sack of Constantinople is commemorated in numerous monuments, museums, and cultural events in Greece, Turkey, and other parts of the world, and it continues to shape the memory of the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades in the modern era. The Sack is a major subject of Greek and Turkish national identity, and it is a subject of ongoing debate about the relations between Christianity and Islam in the medieval and modern worlds.

Sources

Principal sources used in this article:

Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (Hodder, 2004).

Further reading:

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (1954).

For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).