A crew of about one hundred men joined six hundred passengers for a journey to the East that lasted six to eight weeks. The horse transports had specially designed slings to carry their precious cargo; once the ship drew close to shore, a door below the waterline could be opened to allow a fully armed and mounted knight to charge directly into battle — rather like a modern landing craft disgorging a tank.
Finally, the long, slim Venetian battle galleys formed the principal fighting force in the fleet. These vessels, powered by one hundred oarsmen and carrying a metal-tipped ram just above the waterline, protected the fleet from hostile ships. The first of the northern European Crusaders started to gather in Venice in the summer of , but as time wore on it became apparent that the huge army promised by the envoys was not going to materialize.
In fact, only around twelve thousand men arrived, and they could not hope to find the necessary cash to pay the Venetians. Clearly, this was a crisis for the Crusaders; for Doge Dandolo it represented a disaster, too. The doge proposed an interim solution. Payment would be forestalled while the expedition went to the port of Zara Zadar in modern Croatia on the Adriatic.
The city had recently escaped from Venetian overlordship, and the doge saw the presence of the Crusader army as an opportunity to reassert proper order.
There was, however, one catch: The Zarans now were under the jurisdiction of King Emico of Hungary, and he had taken the cross. His lands, therefore, were subject to the protection of the papacy. Could a Crusade attack a Catholic city in such circumstances? To many in the army, such a scheme seemed abhorrent.
Pope Innocent was furious and threatened the Crusaders with excommunication, but the Venetians insisted: Take Zara or they would not set sail. The leadership of the Crusader army faced a dilemma. They were already deeply embarrassed by their failure to fulfill their side of the bargain at Venice. If, however, they tolerated this aberration, then the greater cause — recapturing Jerusalem — would still be attainable. While some of the Crusaders left the fleet, the majority chose to stay, and they duly besieged and captured Zara in the autumn of As the fleet wintered in Zara, they received a delegation bearing an intriguing offer.
Representatives of Prince Alexius Angelos, a claimant to the throne of Byzantium, arrived at the Crusader camp. Well aware of their ongoing shortfalls of men and money, the prince offered to provide two hundred thousand silver marks, the services of ten thousand fighting men, provisions for all the Crusaders, and maintenance of a garrison of five hundred men in the Holy Land.
Even more enticing, these Byzantines indicated that the Orthodox Church would recognize the authority of Rome. Back in , a long-running dispute between the Orthodox and the Catholic churches over differences of liturgy and doctrine resulted in a formal schism which lasts to the present day.
If Prince Alexius fulfilled his promise, this development would represent a huge increase in authority for the Catholic Church. There was, of course, a price attached to this. The Crusaders had to take the prince back to Constantinople and secure the imperial throne for him. This, his envoys assured the Crusaders, would be easy since the people resented the incumbent ruler of Byzantium, Emperor Alexius III, and would welcome the young man with open arms.
Once again the Crusade was plunged into a terrible crisis. To them the ultimate goal of the Crusade remained Jerusalem, and with this in mind, they accepted the proposal in January With the support of Prince Alexius they would be in a far stronger position to accomplish their aim. The supreme irony is, therefore, that it was through the direct invitation of a Greek prince that the Fourth Crusade turned toward Constantinople. Contrary to many speculations, there had never been any premeditated plan to do this.
Conspiracy theories have abounded. For example, some historians have claimed Doge Dandolo was blinded on an earlier visit to Constantinople and now sought revenge. In reality, contemporaries attest that he could see long after this date. The Venetians have been accused of steering the Crusade toward the wealth of Byzantium, yet the spoils in Egypt were far, far greater. The reality remains: Prince Alexius was responsible for bringing the Crusade to Constantinople.
In June , the fleet sailed through the Dardanelles and down the Bosporus. As they caught their first glimpse of Constantinople, many of the knights were awestruck. Never had they seen such a splendid sight. Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of the county of Champagne, wrote:. I can assure you that all those who had never seen Constantinople before gazed very intently upon the city, having never imagined there could be so fine a place in the entire world.
They noted the high walls and lofty towers encircling it, and its rich palaces and tall churches, of which there were so many that no one would have believed it to be true if he had not seen it with his own eyes, and viewed the length and breadth of that city which reigns supreme over all others. There was indeed no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight.
Nor was this to be wondered at, for never had so grand an enterprise been carried out by any people since the creation of the world. Roman emperors seeking a safe haven from the barbarians ravaging their homelands had founded Constantinople in the fourth century. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, however, the Byzantine Empire was in a seriously weakened condition. For much of the twelfth century there had been genuine order, but the death of Manuel Comnenus in had provoked a period of instability that continued to plague the empire.
The precarious condition of the Byzantine Empire could only benefit the Crusaders. Emperor Alexius III proved an astute, capable political operator. This was a calamity for the Crusaders; now they would have to fight. On July 5, , across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, they mounted the largest amphibious assault yet attempted in medieval warfare.
The Greeks did not oppose their landing, and the Crusaders quickly drew themselves up into the ordered battle line that they would adopt repeatedly over the next few years. They formed up into seven divisions, according to their origins: two from Flanders; one each from Blois, Amiens, Burgundy, and Champagne; and a rear guard of a combined Lombard and German force.
The Venetians remained in charge of the fleet. Soon the Crusaders captured the suburb of Galata, and then the fleet broke through the huge chain slung across the entrance to the Golden Horn.
The chain was designed to protect the slightly weaker walls along the inlet, and its destruction allowed the Crusaders precious access to this more vulnerable side of the city. Soon both elements of the Crusader army began to engage the Greek forces and to demonstrate their special military expertise.
The Venetian ships used scaling ladders and crossbeams to try to breach the walls along the Golden Horn while their comrades deployed themselves on the open land outside the Blachernae Palace at the northwestern tip of the city. By July 17, the Venetians managed to get a hold on the walls, but Emperor Alexius sent his crack troops, the formidable Varangian Guard, to resist them.
These men were mercenaries, often of Scandinavian origin, whose chief weapon was a mighty ax. After a couple days of futile bombardment, the Byzantines decided to deploy their field army. The size of their force — up to seventeen divisions — dwarfed that of the Westerners. The Franks formed up in good order, with archers and crossbowmen in front of the knights. Even the camp followers joined in, donning horse quilts and copper cooking pots for protection. The Greeks advanced toward the Crusaders.
The Western leaders had laid down the strictest instructions not to break ranks before a formal command. So many times in the past — desperate to perform an act of heroism — individuals or small groups of men had charged at an enemy only to fatally compromise the strength of their forces and to lose their own lives.
At one moment the Crusaders nearly lost formation, but they carried on until the enemy stood just across a small brook.
The Westerners were terrified; one wrote that it felt as if a huge wave was about to come crashing down on them. They were poised to retreat when, unbelievably, Emperor Alexius gave the signal for his men to withdraw. The Crusaders were amazed. They could barely comprehend why such a vast force had not challenged them. It will never be known why the emperor made this decision; perhaps the reputation of the Crusader heavy cavalry — said to be able to charge through the walls of Babylon — deterred him.
Their determined march toward the Byzantine forces may have made him fear the cost of breaking their lines. Retreating before us they dared not fight. In any case, the emperor had lost the will to fight.
On that same night, he stole out of Constantinople and fled into exile. The following day, the news began to spread and the Crusaders and their young ally made a triumphal entry into the city. Plainly, this did not happen. What destroyed the dream of Orthodox-Catholic cooperation?
The agreement between Alexius IV and the Crusaders meant that the citizens of Constantinople were required to produce the huge sums of money promised to the Westerners.
The Crusaders began to push for settlement of the debt. The harder Alexius IV tried to pressure his subjects into paying, the more they resisted. The young man had little political experience and lacked a solid local power base.
Soon he was hopelessly trapped. Amid increasing tensions, the virulently anti-Western noble Murtzuphlus murdered the emperor on February 8, Attacks on the Crusader camp followed. An audacious attempt to destroy the Venetian fleet using fire ships almost succeeded. They struggled for supplies and faced ever-increasing hostility from the Greeks.
As they considered their position, few options remained. They could return home as failures or they could carry on to the Holy Land, although their weakened condition made it unlikely that they could recover Jerusalem. A third alternative was to assault Constantinople itself. While an attack on a Christian city still seemed contrary to their vows, they could now construct a case in which the Greeks were murderers and oath-breakers. Furthermore, the Orthodox Church remained independent of Rome; the legacy of the schism could be brought to bear, and the Byzantines could be branded as heretics.
Pope Innocent III would doubtless have objected to these arguments, but the churchmen in the Crusader army, dealing with their desperate position outside Constantinople, endorsed an attack as part of the Crusade. The two sides prepared for the decisive encounter. They hoisted huge beams above the decks and lashed them across the masts. The shipwrights and carpenters created a fighting platform about ninety-six feet above the deck.
They covered this with hides to protect the men from fire and arrows as they walked two abreast along what was, in effect, a huge tube projecting out from the ships. The idea was to deliver the men to the top of the battlements so they could then fight their way onto the walls and gain a foothold for others to follow. A common technique in his work is to narrate a battle or episode along subjective and even militaristic guidelines, and follow this with his personal and religious explanation of what the results were.
Villehardouin makes constant hints and references to future events and the inability of the men taking part in events at the time to know what the outcomes will be. However, his objectivity is curtailed as he defined the outcome in his own terms, without allowing his readers to reach their own conclusions. The Fourth Crusade, Villehardouin realized, was more than a Holy War alone; it was a political event of such enormous magnitude that he knew he had to capture it in great detail, describing the motivations of the actors as completely as possible.
For example, Villehardouin describes the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, as a blind man who valiantly leads his men into battle. Most likely, he was just near-sighted or had poor eyesight overall. At the outset, Villehardouin states that he is a pilgrim — as all crusaders were supposed to be when they were instigated after Christian pilgrims were stopped from visiting the Holy Land — but he never explains this tenet of the Crusade.
Villehardouin captures the Council at Zara in great detail, and creates a more or less accurate view of this portion of the Crusade. He also points out that the knights from France refused attack Zara and that many then immediately deserted the Crusader army. This matter-of-fact manner of the recording of history continues with his description of the Siege at Constantinople as well. He is clearly appalled at the actions of the Crusaders and describes the destruction and theft of objects of inestimable value.
He stated with awe that the great city of Constantinople had priceless ancient relics that were equivalent to what the rest of the world possessed combined. Scholars say that throughout his book, Villehardouin shows an understanding of history and of Greek culture that allows for a more complete view than what one may be inclined to believe, knowing that he was a Crusader himself.
The Latin Empire — , centered in Constantinople and encompassing Thrace and Bithynia, was created as the successor of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade, while also exercising nominal suzerainty over the other Crusader principalities.
Its territories were gradually reduced to little more than the capital, which was eventually captured by the Empire of Nicaea in The Principality of Achaea, which was an entity existing from to , encompassed the Morea, or Peloponnesian peninsula. It quickly emerged as the strongest state in the new Latinized empire, and prospered even after its demise.
Its main rival was the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, which eventually succeeded in conquering the Principality. The Duchy of Athens, which existed as a political entity from to , with its two capitals of Thebes and Athens, encompassed Attica, Boeotia, and parts of southern Thessaly. In , the Duchy was conquered by the Catalan Company, and in , it passed into the hands of the Florentine Acciaiuoli family, which kept it until the Ottoman conquest in The Greek island of Rhodes became the headquarters of the military monastic order of the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John in , and the Knights retained control of the island and the neighboring islands of the Dodecanese island group until ousted by the Ottomans in See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.
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