On August 15, 1199, Pope Innocent III called for a renewed effort to deliver Jerusalem from the Infidel, but the Fourth Crusade had a very different outcome from the one he preached. Proceeding no further than Constantinople, the Crusaders sacked the capital of eastern Christendom and installed a Latin ruler on the throne of Byzantium. This revised and expanded edition of The Fourth Crusade gives fresh emphasis to events in Byzantium and the Byzantine response to the actions of the Crusaders. Included in this edition is a chapter on the sack of Constantinople and the election of its Latin emperor. A History Book Club selection.

The Fourth Crusade

In 1202, zealous Western Christians gathered in Venice determined to liberate Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But the crusaders never made it to the Holy Land. Steered forward by the shrewd Venetian doge, they descended instead on Constantinople, wreaking terrible devastation. The crusaders spared no one: They raped and massacred thousands, plundered churches, and torched the lavish city. By 1204, one of the great civilizations of history had been shattered. Here, on the eight hundredth anniversary of the sack, is the extraordinary story of this epic catastrophe, told for the first time outside of academia by Jonathan Phillips, a leading expert on the crusades. Knights and commoners, monastic chroniclers, courtly troubadours, survivors of the carnage, and even Pope Innocent III left vivid accounts detailing the events of those two fateful years. Using their remarkable letters, chronicles, and speeches, Phillips traces the way in which any region steeped in religious fanaticism, in this case Christian Europe, might succumb to holy war.

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople

The Fourth Crusade (1202-4) was one of the key events in medieval history The fall of Constantinople to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade in April 1204 was its climax. It ensured that Byzantium’s days as a great power were over. It equally ensured that westerners would dominate the Levant – the lands of the old Byzantine Empire –until the end of the middle ages. This book asks just how important was the Fourth as a turning point in the Middle East.. The broad setting is the encounter of Byzantium with the West within the framework of the crusades. Differences of outlook and interest meant that this encounter was soon overburdened with mutual distrust. 1204 was some kind of a solution and created situations scarcely conceivable even two years before when the fourth crusade set sail from Venice.

The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204), launched to restore Jerusalem to Christian control, veered widely off course, finally landing at Constantinople which it conquered and sacked. The effects of the crusade were far-reaching during the Middle Ages and remain powerful even today, which explains the continued vibrancy of its historiography. This volume, based on studies presented at the Sixth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East in Istanbul, Turkey in 2004, represents some of the best new research on this fascinating event. With the "Diversion Question" of the past centuries now largely settled, these studies focus on three aspects of current scholarship: evaluations of the event itself, investigations into the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, and analyses of the evolving perceptions and memories of the event in Europe and the Middle East. Together these essays help to place the Fourth Crusade within the larger context of medieval Mediterranean history as well as larger issues such as agency, accommodation, and memory that inform new aspects of modern historiography.

The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions

This volume presents English translations of seven major bodies of Latin sources for the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204). Combined, the different perspectives of these sources deepen our understanding of this complex and controversial moment in Western-Byzantine relations.

Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade

The Fourth Crusade was the first, and most famous of the 'diverted' Crusades, which saw the Crusade diverted from its original target, Ayyubi Egypt, to attack the Christian city of Zadar in modern Croatia instead, an attack that was little more than a mercenary action to repay the Venetians for their provision of a fleet to the Crusaders. This book examines the combined action and sacking of the city of Zara, which saw the Crusaders temporarily excommunicated by the Pope. It goes on to evaluate how the influence of the Venetians prompted an attack on Constantinople, analyses the siege that followed and describes the naval assault and sacking of the city which saw the Crusaders place Count Baldwin of Flanders on the Byzantine throne.

The Fourth Crusade 1202–04

The Remaking of the Medieval World, 1204 allows students to understand and experience one of the greatest medieval atrocities, the sack of the Constantinople by a crusader army, and the subsequent reshaping of the Byzantine Empire. The game includes debates on issues such as "just war" and the nature of crusading, feudalism, trade rights, and the relationship between secular and religious authority. It likewise explores the theological issues at the heart of the East-West Schism and the development of constitutional states in the era of Magna Carta. The game also includes a model siege and sack of Constantinople where individual students' actions shape the fate of the crusade for everyone.

The Remaking of the Medieval World, 1204

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the standoff by federal agents and members of the Branch Davidians *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable." - Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe The Fourth Crusade from 1202-1204 is significant in medieval history because it was the first time a crusade was directed against another Christian group. It was also significant since it encompassed two of the four major sieges of Constantinople, and it also sparked a third in 1235 (an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Latin gains in 1204). Given that legacy, it's ironic that like the Crusades before it, the Fourth Crusade was originally intended as an invasion of Egypt, which had been conquered by Saladin and his uncle nearly four decades earlier. Egypt had been joined with Syria into one Muslim empire under Saladin, but it had fallen apart into two separate realms after his death shortly after the Third Crusade in 1193. Following that crusade, the main objective of the Crusaders in the 13th century was to conquer Egypt and use it as a beachhead against the Muslims in Syria who threatened Christian Palestine, a goal that should have been beneficial to all of Christendom in both the West and East. Instead, during the Fourth Crusade, tensions between the Latin Christians of Western Europe and the Greek Christians of Constantinople came to a head after a century and three previous Crusades. This resulted in a critical breakdown of communications that resulted in an internal war within Christendom and led to the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders. After this, the Crusaders established a Latin Kingdom in Constantinople for nearly 60 years, but it remained shaky and was eventually retaken by the Byzantine Greeks. The Fourth Crusade was also a result of the imperialist ambitions of Pope Innocent III, one of the strongest and proudest popes of the Middle Ages, and it was a precursor of the Albigensian Crusade, the first true "internal" crusade. With that, the Latin Christians began to lose focus on the dwindling territories in Palestine, and instead Christians fell upon each other, engaging in Crusades against other Christian groups and bleeding much-needed support from the Latin kingdoms in Palestine. In the west, the Fourth Crusade also saw the rise in power of the Byzantines' most bitter rivals in the West: the Venetians and Genoese. The Venetian Doge was later blamed for inciting the Crusaders to fall upon his Byzantine enemies, and while the situation was more complicated than that, the involvement of the Venetians in the altered direction of the Crusade cannot be denied. Thus, even though no one realized it at the time, the Fourth Crusade was the turning point for the Crusades; after this one, the slow decline toward the Latin Christians losing the Holy Land became inevitable. Constantinople, whether as a Greek or a Latin Empire, was also fatally weakened and would eventually fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, long after the end of the Crusades. The Fourth Crusade would inevitably lead to the fall of the Crusader states less than a century later and also the fall of Constantinople two and a half centuries later to the Muslims. The latter would be a permanent loss to Christianity, while Christian forces would not regain control of Palestine until the 20th century. The Fourth Crusade: The History of the Crusade that Resulted in the Sack of Constantinople chronicles one of the most controversial events of the Middle Ages. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the 4th Crusade like never before, in no time at all.

In the year 1202, tens of thousands of crusaders gather in Venice, preparing to embark for Jerusalem to free the Holy City from Muslim rule. Among them is a lowly vagabond Briton, rescued from damnation by a pious knight who burns with zealous fire for their sacred undertaking. And so they set sail, along with dedicated companions—and with a beautiful, mysterious Arab "princess" whom the vagabond liberates from a brutish merchant. But the divine light guiding their "righteous" campaign soon darkens as the mission sinks ever deeper into catastrophe, disgrace, and moral turpitude—as Christians murder Christians in the Adriatic port city of Zara, tragic events are set in motion that will ultimately lead to the shocking and shameful fall of Constantinople. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, Nicole Galland's Crossed is a stunning tale of the disastrous Fourth Crusade—and of the hopeful, brave, and driven who were caught up in and irrevocably changed by a corrupted cause and a furious battle beyond their comprehension or control.

Crossed

The first great city to which the Crusaders came in 1089 was not Jerusalem but Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Almost as much as Jerusalem itself, Constantinople was the key to the foundation, survival and ultimate eclipse of the crusading kingdom.

Byzantium and the Crusades

The Papal Preparations for the Fourth Crusade

Excerpt from The Fall of Constantinople, Being the Story of the Fourth Crusade My object is to call attention to the political aspect of the conquest of Constantinople, to point. Out that the empire had fought continuously, and in the main successfully, for one hundred and fifty years against the forces of Asia, and had spent its strength partly in this struggle and partly in educat ing the races which had ﬂowed into the empire, and that it was only when it was struck in the rear that the New Rome was unable to defend itself; that the conquest of the empire was the final blow given after a long series of attacks by ene mies on every side, and that the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders was the cause which brought about the fall of the Roman Empire in the East, and rendered its ultimate capture by the Turks both certain and easy. The conquest of Constantinople was the first great blunder committed by the West in dealing with the Eastern question. That question really means whether Asiatic inﬂuences and an Asiatic re. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Fall of Constantinople, Being the Story of the Fourth Crusade (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Fourth Crusade Robert de Clari, xvi-xvii, in Hopf: Chroniques, pp. 11-12. Old French. XVI. In the meantime the crusaders and the Venetians remained at Zara during the winter. They considered how great the expense had been and said to one another that they could not go to Babylon or Alexandria or Syria; for they had neither provisions nor money for the journey. They had already used up everything they had, either during the sojourn that they had made or in the great price that they had paid for the vessels. They said that they could not go and, even if they should go, they would accomplish nothing; they had neither provisions nor money sufficient to support them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Fourth Crusade (Classic Reprint)

Be it known to you that eleven hundred and ninety-seven years after the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the time of Innocent Pope of Rome, and Philip King of France, and Richard King of England, there was in France a holy man named Fulk of Neuilly - which Neuilly is between Lagni-sur-Marne and Paris - and he was a priest and held the cure of the village. And this said Fulk began to speak of God throughout the Isle-de-France, and the other countries round about; and you must know that by him the Lord wrought many miracles.

Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople

An engrossing chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, from the bestselling author of Thermopylae. At the dawn of the thirteenth century, Constantinople stood as the bastion of Christianity in Eastern Europe. The capital city of the Byzantine Empire, it was a center of art, culture, and commerce that had commanded trading routes between Asia, Russia, and Europe for hundreds of years. But in 1204, the city suffered a devastating attack that would spell the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The army of the Fourth Crusade had set out to reclaim Jerusalem, but under the sway of their Venetian patrons, the crusaders diverted from their path in order to lay siege to Constantinople. With longstanding tensions between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the crusaders set arms against their Christian neighbors, destroying a vital alliance between Eastern and Western Rome. In The Great Betrayal, historian Ernle Bradford brings to life this powerful tale of envy and greed, demonstrating the far-reaching consequences this siege would have across Europe for centuries to come.

The Great Betrayal

Why read an interpretation of a historical event when you can read an eye-witness account. The History Matters series bypasses secondary sources to give you the primary source to start your historical inquiry. The fourth crusade is a highly contentious episode in the history of the crusades. It was here that the Latin-led crusaders turned on their own resulting in the attack on Constantinople, home of the Greek and Eastern Christians which ultimately led to the schism between the Greek and Latin churches. Originally written in French, not Latin, this eye-witness memoir by one of the crusaders is a must-read if one wants to get into the real history of the fourth crusade.

Memoirs of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople

1204, the Unholy Crusade

Medieval Diplomacy and the Fourth Crusade

A Century of Controversy on the Fourth Crusade

The Fourth Crusade and the End of Outremer

Peter and the Fourth Crusade

The Fourth Crusade. Edited by D. C. Munro

Innocent III and the Fourth Crusade

The Novgorod Account of the Fourth Crusade

Venetian Culpability in the Fourth Crusade

The Fourth Crusade and the Just-war Theory

The Fourth Crusade, launched in 1202, aimed to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim control but took an unexpected turn. Instead of reaching their intended target, the Crusaders were diverted to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, due to political and financial disputes. In 1204, they successfully sacked Constantinople, leading to the establishment of the Latin Empire in the city. This diversion and the subsequent sack of Constantinople mark a significant and controversial episode in the history of the Crusades, highlighting the complex interplay of religious zeal, political ambitions, and economic interests during this period of medieval history.