The crusade that sacked a Christian capital instead of reaching the Holy Land
In April 1204 an army of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from its original course, stormed Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders plundered it for three days, shipped its bronze horses to Venice and carved up the empire, wounding relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches for centuries afterwards.
The detour began with a promise. Alexios Angelos, son of the deposed emperor Isaac II, persuaded Boniface of Montferrat and the Venetians to restore his father and make him co-emperor, pledging 200,000 marks of silver, the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome, supplies and help against the Saracens. After a siege in 1203 he was crowned Alexios IV on 1 August, but riots between Greeks and Latins turned the city against him.
When Isaac II died on 25 January 1204, crowds deposed Alexios IV. The chamberlain Alexios Doukas seized the throne on 5 February and had his rival killed three days later, then asked the crusaders to leave without payment. They refused, and in March the crusade and Venetian leaders agreed to conquer the city outright and split the empire between them. A first assault on 9 April failed in bad weather, but on 12 April a strong north wind carried Venetian ships close to the walls, attackers seized towers, and Alexios V fled.
For three days the city was plundered. The bronze horses of the Hippodrome went to adorn St Mark's Basilica in Venice, where they still stand, while a bronze Hercules by Lysippos, sculptor to Alexander the Great, was melted down for coin. Churches, monasteries and even imperial tombs were stripped, and around 2,000 civilians are estimated to have died. The total haul was put at about 900,000 silver marks.
Baldwin IX of Flanders was crowned emperor of the new Latin Empire in Hagia Sophia, and most Byzantine lands were divided among the victors. Byzantine nobles set up splinter states, and one, the Empire of Nicaea, retook Constantinople in 1261. But the restored empire never recovered its old territory or wealth and gradually fell to the Ottomans over the next two centuries. The sack is seen as a turning point that weakened eastern Christendom and eased later Ottoman advances into southeastern Europe.
Source: Sack of Constantinople
