Sack of Constantinople

• 1. Introduction

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  In April 1204, soldiers who had sworn to liberate Jerusalem instead turned on one of Christendom's greatest cities. The Sack of Constantinople was not a mistake or a moment of battlefield chaos. It was the calculated culmination of the Fourth Crusade, and it changed the medieval world in ways that took centuries to fully unravel.

  The city had stood for centuries as what many considered a bulwark of Christianity against Muslim expansion into Europe. Its fall to fellow Christians shocked the Orthodox world, severed the bond between Catholic and Orthodox churches for generations, and ultimately left the eastern frontier of Christendom so weakened that the Ottoman Turks would finish the job in 1453. How did a crusade aimed at the Holy Land end up looting the holiest churches of Byzantium? And what did the people who lived through it make of what they had done?

• 2. A Crusade Gone Sideways

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  Alexios IV Angelos, the son of deposed emperor Isaac II Angelos, made an offer that proved impossible to refuse. He persuaded Boniface of Montferrat and the Venetians to redirect the entire Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, promising 200,000 marks of silver, the submission of the Eastern Orthodox Church to Rome, and provisions for the expedition itself.

  Venetian merchants had carefully mapped Constantinople's harbours years before the sack, possibly anticipating its economic potential. When the crusade's leadership agreed to the diversion, a sizable portion of the army refused. Prominently, Simon de Montfort and his followers left the crusade entirely when the decision was made to place Alexios on the throne. Simon and his associates, including Guy of Vaux-de-Cernay, travelled instead to the court of King Emeric of Hungary and then on to Acre. Several other large contingents, including a Flemish fleet carrying Marie of Champagne, sailed directly to Acre as well.

  Byzantinist Jonathan Harris later wrote that those who remained agreed only very reluctantly, subjected to a mixture of financial and emotional pressure. Many hesitated before the final assault in April 1204, genuinely uncertain whether it was legitimate to attack a Christian city.

• 3. Broken Promises, Broken Empire

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  On the 1st of August 1203, following the siege of Constantinople, Alexios Angelos was crowned Emperor Alexios IV. He tried to keep order in the city, but riots erupted between anti-Crusader Greeks and pro-Crusader Latins later that month and dragged on until November.

  On the 25th of January 1204, the death of co-Emperor Isaac II triggered new rioting, and the people deposed Alexios IV. When he turned to the Crusaders for help, the imperial chamberlain Alexios Doukas seized him. Doukas declared himself emperor on the 5th of February, then had Alexios IV executed by strangulation on the 8th of February.

  The new emperor, Alexios V, tried to negotiate a Crusader withdrawal without payment. The Crusaders refused, insisting on avenging Alexios IV and collecting the money they had been promised. In March 1204, the Crusader and Venetian leadership formally agreed to the outright conquest of Constantinople in order to settle debts, drawing up a treaty to divide the Byzantine Empire between them.

• 4. Three Days of Plunder

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  On the 9th of April 1204, the Crusader and Venetian forces launched their first assault on the Golden Horn fortifications, crossing the waterway to the northwest wall. Bad weather drove them back under heavy archery fire in open ground between the city's fortifications and the shore.

  On the 12th of April, a strong north wind aided the Venetian ships near the Golden Horn, allowing attackers to seize towers along the wall. Around 70 Crusaders managed to enter the city. Some knocked holes in the walls large enough for knights to crawl through; the Venetians scaled the walls from the sea in extremely bloody fighting with the Varangian Guard. Emperor Alexios V fled that night through the Polyandriou Gate.

  What followed lasted three days. The famous bronze horses from the Hippodrome were shipped to Venice to adorn the facade of St Mark's Basilica, where they remain. A bronze statue of Hercules, said to have been made by Lysippos, court sculptor of Alexander the Great, was melted down for coins. Church altars were smashed for their gold and marble. Even the tombs of emperors in the Church of the Holy Apostles were pillaged. An estimated 2,000 civilians were killed. The total amount looted from Constantinople was said to be about 900,000 silver marks; of that, 500,000 silver marks were reportedly stolen by Crusader knights.

• 5. Voices Against the Sack

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  Pope Innocent III had explicitly forbidden the Crusaders from attacking the Byzantine Empire. His instructions to Boniface of Montferrat were direct: "The crusade must not attack Christians, but should proceed as quickly as possible to the Holy Land." When he learned what had happened, he sent two angry letters to Boniface. One asked how the Greek Church could ever return to unity with Rome when it had seen in the Latins "nothing except an example of affliction and the works of Hell."

  Monk and poet Guiot de Provins wrote a satirical play accusing the papacy of greed. The troubadour Guilhem Figueira followed with a sirventes making the same accusation, declaring in verse that Rome was "false and perfidious" with both Christians and Greeks.

  The Arab-Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir was the only contemporary historian from outside Christendom to provide a detailed account of the sack. He described it as an atrocity in its scale of destruction of centuries of classical and Christian civilisation. The medievalist Sir Steven Runciman, writing in 1954, called it "the greatest crime against humanity" of the Fourth Crusade. Historian Martin Arbagi placed most of the blame on Venice, in line with the view Pope Innocent III himself expressed.

• 6. A Fractured World After

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  Baldwin of Flanders was crowned Emperor in Hagia Sophia as Baldwin I of Constantinople, founding the Latin Empire. Boniface of Montferrat, whom the citizens apparently expected to rule, was passed over because the Venetians distrusted his family connections to the former empire; his brother Renier of Montferrat had been married to Maria Comnena, daughter of Manuel I. Boniface instead founded the Kingdom of Thessalonica. The Venetians founded the Duchy of the Archipelago in the Aegean Sea.

  Byzantine aristocratic refugees scattered and established their own successor states. Theodore Laskaris, a relative of Alexius III, founded the Empire of Nicaea. Others established the Empire of Trebizond and the Despotate of Epirus. The Patriarch and a column of aristocrats fled to Selymbria. The Byzantine historian and eyewitness Nicetas Choniates recorded that common people along the road jeered at the refugees, calling their poverty "equality," and bought up their property for nearly nothing.

  The Empire of Nicaea eventually recaptured Constantinople in 1261, but the restored empire never regained its former territory or economic strength. The weakened state left an opening for the Sultanate of Rum and then the Ottoman Turks to expand their influence. The city fell to Ottoman Muslims in 1453-57 years after the Greeks had returned.

• 7. Eight Centuries Later

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  Pope John Paul II twice expressed sorrow for the Fourth Crusade. In 2001, he wrote to Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens, acknowledging that the assailants who set out to secure access to the Holy Land had turned against their brothers in faith, and that the fact they were Latin Christians filled Catholics with deep regret.

  In 2004, while Bartholomew I, Patriarch of Constantinople, was visiting the Vatican, John Paul II asked how Catholics could not share, at a distance of eight centuries, the pain and disgust at what had happened. In April 2004, on the 800th anniversary of the city's capture, Patriarch Bartholomew I formally accepted the apology during a liturgy attended by Roman Catholic Archbishop Philippe Barbarin of Lyon. "The spirit of reconciliation is stronger than hatred," Bartholomew said. He acknowledged that a crime had been committed in Constantinople 800 years earlier, and he accepted the apology in the spirit of Easter and resurrection. His acceptance did not erase the historical wound between the two churches, but it marked the most formal acknowledgment either side had ever offered.