The Fourth Crusade 1202 – 1204

by Sulis

In 1198 the great medieval pope Innocent III came to power. Innocent III had a great interest in crusading and one of his first acts was to promote a Fourth Crusade. The initial response was disappointing, but some inspired local preaching and the Pope’s decision to tax the church to subsidise the crusaders helped to create a nucleus of a force around the counts of Champagne, Blois and Flanders as well as some important lords of the Ile de France.

The destination of the crusade was to be Egypt, the centre of Muslim power in the Near East. Venice provided the fleet of ships and in April 1201 was contracted to ship 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires and 20,000 foot soldiers to their destination for a sum of 85,000 marks. However, only one third of the force had reached Venice by October 1202 and the crusaders were unable to raise this sum. In lieu of payment they agreed to help the Venetians recover the town of Zara, lost to Hungary in 1186. Pope Innocent declared as part of his call for the fourth crusade that no Christian city be attacked, but the crusaders took Zara the following month.

Whilst this confused start to the Fourth Crusade was stuttering into life, the Byzantine Empire was in a state of dynastic crisis. The emperor at the time, Isaac Angelus, had been deposed and blinded by his brother, Alexius III. Isaac’s son (Alexius IV) fled to the west for aid and made a startling proposition to the crusaders. In return for restoring him and his father to power, he would pay them the princely sum of 200,000 marks, as well as reuniting the Orthodox church with Rome and contribute a significant force for crusading operations in the Holy Land. Whilst the Venetians and most of the crusade leaders agreed to these terms, many of the crusaders themselves found this to be unacceptable and they left the main force for the Holy Land.

On 24th June 1203 the main army reached Chalcedon, near Constantinople. They stormed Galata on 6th July 1203 and marched to the walls of the city. The Venetians prepared to attack the city from the sea. On 17th July, following a general assault, Alexius III fled and Isaac was released.

Isaac’s son, Alexius IV, was crowned co-emperor with his father and promptly tried to meet his obligations to the allies, who were camped outside the city walls. The clergy and people of Constantinople resented the terms of the agreement and the very presence of the crusaders. Anti-western feelings exploded in riots and street fighting. It wasn’t long before the reign of Alexius IV and his father was cut short: they were deposed and murdered in January 1204. The new emperor Alexius V was overtly anti-western. The crusaders began to feel isolated and threatened and decided to take Constantinople themselves. In March 1204 the crusaders and Venetians signed a treaty which dismembered the Byzantine Empire and divided the spoils. After 3 days of terrible pillaging, the city was theirs. Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned the first Latin emperor of Constantinople and most of Southern Greece was conquered the following winter. Much of the Byzantine Empire was partitioned into new crusader states. The territories around Constantinople itself were controlled by the Latin emperors. Along the Northern Aegean as far as Athens, there was a new Latin kingdom of Thessalonica and in Morea, just north of Crete, the principality of Archaea was to be the most permanent of the crusader states in Greece.

Although the Byzantines recovered their capital in 1261, the Fourth Crusade did lasting damage to their Empire. By the time it was over, the friction and misunderstandings between East and West which had begun with the First Crusade had turned into permanent hatred.

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