The Fourth Crusade Sacks Constantinople

Envoys of the French barons who had taken the cross hired a fleet from Venice. The doge, Enrico Dandolo, offered ships and provisions for 85,000 marks, and fifty galleys in return for half of all conquests (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 6–7). Too few crusaders came, and 34,000 marks stayed unpaid. The doge offered to defer the debt if the army helped Venice retake Zara (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 15–16). A Cistercian abbot forbade the attack in the pope’s name, because the people of Zara were Christians. The city was taken all the same, and Innocent III afterwards absolved the barons (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 20–21, 26).

At Zara came an offer on behalf of Alexius, son of a dethroned emperor. If the army restored him, he would bring the empire back to obedience to Rome, from which it had long been separated (see the Schism of 1054), pay 200,000 marks and support the crusade (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 22–23). The fleet sailed to Constantinople, and Alexius was crowned beside his father (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 47–48). Then Greeks and crusaders fell out. A courtier, Mourzuphles, seized the throne and strangled Alexius, and the clergy with the army declared the war just, because of the murder and because the Greeks had withdrawn from obedience to Rome (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 55–56). Robert of Clari, a knight in the ranks, reports that the bishops called the Greeks enemies of God and promised absolution, in the pope’s name, to all who attacked them (Robert of Clari, Conquest of Constantinople chs. 72–73).

Franks and Venetians agreed beforehand how to divide booty and empire (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople p. 59). On a Monday in April 1204 they scaled the walls. Mourzuphles fled in the night, and men in the crusader camp set a fire that burned through the next day (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 61–64). Villehardouin writes that so much booty had never been won in any city since the creation of the world. It was shared between Franks and Venetians, and Baldwin of Flanders was elected emperor (Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople pp. 65–68).

The Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates tells what this meant inside the city: icons trampled, relics thrown out, the consecrated bread and wine spilled, the altar of Hagia Sophia broken up and shared out, pack animals led into the sanctuary to carry off its silver, a prostitute seated on the patriarch’s throne (Niketas Choniates, History, Reign of Alexios Doukas, 3–4). Innocent III wrote to his legate in July 1205 that the crusaders had spared neither age nor sex, had violated women, nuns among them, and had stripped the churches of altar plate, crosses and relics. The Greek church, he wrote, now detested the Latins “more than dogs”, and with reason (Innocent III, Letters, to the legate Peter, 12 July 1205).

The conquest stood. Innocent’s council of 1215 spoke of the Greeks as returning to Roman obedience and ranked a patriarch of Constantinople, who was to receive his pallium from the pope, next after Rome (Fourth Lateran Council, constitutions 4–5). In 2004 John Paul II, receiving the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, named April 1204 among the memories that weigh on the two churches and said he shared Innocent’s indignation and sorrow (John Paul II, Address to Bartholomew I (29 June 2004) 3).