The Glory of the Crusades (27 page)

The remaining Crusaders poured through. They threw open one of the major city gates, and the rest of the army rushed into the city in a wild rampage.

By nightfall the Crusader host was in Constantinople but its hold on the city was precarious. They only occupied a very small area and were still massively outnumbered. In order to solidify their position they lit a defensive fire, which soon raged uncontrollably through the city, destroying homes and businesses. In total, the three Crusader fires destroyed one-sixth of the city and prompted Villehardouin to remark, “More houses had been burned in the city than there are houses in any three of the greatest cities in the kingdom of France.”
416

The next day, April 13, Alexius V fled the city. The Crusaders were victorious. They had conquered “the greatest, most powerful, and most strongly fortified city in the world.”
417

The Sack

Once their position was secure, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople. Their actions over those three days in 1204 set in motion centuries of acrimony and recriminations between East and West.

It is easy to play “armchair historian” and fault the Crusaders for the sack of Constantinople. But to do so projects modern sensibilities onto a past governed by different behaviors and laws. In one sense, the Crusaders cannot be blamed for their actions in 1204. They “found themselves in a treasure-trove of unmitigated proportions.”
418
Expecting the Crusaders to ignore the wealth of the city after almost two years of arduous campaigning with frequent diversions, distractions, and disappointments seems unrealistic. But the people of Constantinople were left relatively alone, for the Crusaders were more interested in the riches of the city. There was no wholesale massacre or slaughter, although some people were killed and some Byzantine women, including nuns, were raped. Lamentably, soldiers have done such things in every age, and even in an army largely motivated by laudable religious zeal there was not a total absence of such soldiers.

The economic toll of the sack was more significant, as the Crusaders sought to remove as much wealth as they could carry and transport. Bronze statues throughout the city were melted down or shipped to the West, including the famous four bronze horses that had been placed over the starting gate of the Hippodrome. The horses were shipped to Venice where they were installed over the entryway to St. Mark’s Basilica.
419

The Crusaders plundered and pillaged sacred items as well, including the vast numbers of relics in the city. Altars were stripped of ornamentation and even destroyed. Icons were smashed to get the precious jewels embedded in them. Patens used by priests to hold the host during the celebration of Mass were used as ordinary bread plates and chalices normally reserved for containing the sacred blood were used as common drinking cups.
420

The amount of plunder was devastating to the citizens of Constantinople. Villehardouin as an eyewitness to the sack remarked that “so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world.”
421
The estimate of spoils, declared and undeclared, was staggering: 800,000 marks.
422
“The sack of Constantinople ranks as one of the most profitable and shameful in history.”
423

Pope Innocent III was shocked, saddened, and angered by the actions of the Crusaders. He had conceived the Crusade six years earlier as an expedition to liberate Jerusalem. He did not envision—indeed, he actively worked against—the many diversions undertaken by the nobles. In a letter to Boniface of Montferrat, Innocent condemned the Crusaders’ actions and chastised them for their poor choices:

You rashly violated the purity of your vows; and turning your arms not against the Saracens but against Christians, you applied yourselves not to the recovery of Jerusalem, but to seize Constantinople, preferring earthly to heavenly riches . . . These “soldiers of Christ” who should have turned their swords against the infidel have steeped them in Christian blood, sparing neither religion, nor age, nor sex . . . They stripped the altars of silver, violated the sanctuaries, robbed icons and crosses and relics . . . The Latins have given example only of perversity and works of darkness. No wonder the Greeks call them dogs!
424

The Memory and Legacy of the Fourth Crusade

Whatever explanation may be provided for the sack of Constantinople, there is no doubt it has tainted East-West relations through the centuries. Historians who describe the sack and the events of 1204 with great exaggeration have not helped this difficult and complex relationship. Sir Steven Runciman believed “there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade.”
425
Amazingly, he wrote that in 1951, only six years after the Second World War and the worldwide discovery of the full Nazi program of the Final Solution to eradicate the Jewish people. Although indeed devastating in terms of the amount of wealth and relics purloined by the Western warriors, to write, in the wake of the
Shoah,
that the sack of Constantinople was the greatest crime against humanity is the epitome of hyperbole.

In reality the destruction done to the city and the death of its inhabitants was minimal. Far from committing widespread slaughter, the Crusaders killed only half of one percent of the city’s citizens. A three-day sack of cities that initially refused to surrender was the convention in the medieval world. Although “the sack of Constantinople was an atrocity . . . in the terms of the day, [it was] not a war crime.”
426
It is true that the sack remains one of the enduring memories of the Crusades. Most people remember the event—or at least remember the anti-Catholic narrative about the event—and it continues to be used to further the falsehood that the Crusades were primarily “land-grabs” or motivated by greed and desire for booty. Yet not even the Fourth Crusade was motivated by greed. The Crusaders desired to campaign in Egypt and then the Holy Land with the ultimate goal of liberating Jerusalem. Due to a series of bad decisions, overzealous calculations, and the need to fulfill treaty obligations, the Crusade veered off course and—ignoring admonitions from the pope—pursued a course that led them to the sack of Constantinople. Although the Eastern world continues to fault the West and the Church for the fiasco of the Fourth Crusade, the simple fact remains that the Crusaders only diverted their expedition to Constantinople at the request of an Easterner. Absent Alexius Angelus’s pleading for Crusader help to place him on the throne, his actions while emperor and those of his people, who ultimately overthrew and killed him, there would have been no attack on and sack of Constantinople.
427

Despite Innocent’s unambiguous protestations at the time, blame today is still placed inappropriately on the Catholic Church for the events of the Fourth Crusade. When Pope John Paul II visited Athens in 2001, he was greeted along his route with Greek Orthodox monks protesting his visit while holding signs with “1204” printed on them. Indeed, “the Byzantines’ deep sense of betrayal and bitter anger toward the Latins became the legacies of 1204 that would not die with the generation that experienced the events. They would animate centuries of tragic history and, for many, still live today.”
428

Modern critics never tire of pointing out that Pope John Paul II apologized for the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. Unfortunately for those who use this “fact” to discredit the Crusade, the pope actually never apologized at all. In brief remarks during the visit of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to Rome on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, 2004, 800 years after the Crusade, John Paul II recalled the events of the spring of 1204 and remembered the prohibitions of Pope Innocent III against the Crusade’s diversion to Constantinople:

On this occasion we cannot forget what happened during the month of April 1204. An army that had set out to recover the Holy Land for Christendom marched on Constantinople, took it and sacked it, pouring out the blood of our own brothers and sisters in the faith. Eight centuries later, how can we fail to share the same indignation and sorrow that Pope Innocent III expressed as soon as he heard the news of what had happened?
429

The pope-saint also recognized the complexity of historical events and the inherent problems associated with relying on simple pronouncements of past events from a modern worldview, which leads to false narratives when he added, “After so much time has elapsed, we can analyze the events of that time with greater objectivity, yet with an awareness of how difficult it is to investigate the whole truth of history.”
430
In calling on East and West to approach the events of 1204 with greater objectivity, the pope quoted St. Paul: “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
431
Urging the reconciliation of the two halves of the Church, John Paul II offered a prayer appropriate not only for East-West relations but also for the restoral of the proper understanding and memory of the Crusades: “Let us pray together, therefore, that the Lord of history will purify our memory of all prejudice and resentment and obtain for us that we may advance in freedom on the path to unity.”
432

353
Raimbaut of Vaqueiras,
The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras
, ed. and trans. J. Liniskill (The Hague: 1964), 218–220, in Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, 88.

354
Spoken to the Crusaders upon arrival in Constantinople. Geoffrey of Villehardouin, “The Conquest of Constantinople,”
Chronicles of the Crusades
, trans. M.R.B. Shaw (London: 1963), 59, in Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, 159.

355
Albigensianism, or Cartharism, was a heresy that erupted in the south of France in the early part of the eleventh century. Migrating from the East, the heresy was a new manifestation of the ancient Gnostic and Manichaean heresies that infected the early Church. Pope Innocent III tried to stop the heresy by reforming the clergy in southern France, sending missionaries and urging secular rulers to intervene but to no avail. Frustrated by the lack of success and concerned with the growth of the pernicious heresy, Innocent called a Crusade in 1209. The Crusade, which was really a civil war, lasted twenty years and was exceptionally bloody. It achieved mixed results in combating the heresy, which was eventually eradicated through a new papal creation: the inquisitors.

356
R. Bartlett,
Medieval Panorama
(London: 2001), 12–13, and Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, xiv.

357
Innocent III,
Solitae
, in A.J. Andrea,
The Medieval Record: Sources of Medieval History
(Boston: 1997), 9, n.4, in Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, 5.

358
Innocent III,
Die Register Innocenz’ III
, ed. Othmar Hageneder and Anton Haidacher (Graz-Cologne: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1964), I:II, 18–20, in Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden,
The Fourth Crusade—The Conquest of Constantinople
, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997),
1.

359
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 480.

360
His first Crusade (the Fourth) was called less than six months into his pontificate. He called his last Crusade at Perugia in the rain less than ten weeks before his death. (Dickson,
The Children’s Crusade
, 30.) Among the Crusades called by Innocent are the major campaigns known as the Fourth and Fifth Crusades as well as the Albigensian Crusade.

361
Riley-Smith,
The Crusades
, 148–149.

362
This was instituted during the Albigensian Crusade and led to great difficulty in the prosecution of the campaign for the commanders of the Crusade, as manpower constantly fluctuated based on time rather than mission requirements.

363
Phillips,
The Fourth Crusade
, xiii.

364
Ibid., 47