Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

The Fourth Crusade and Byzantium 

Page 11

For some days the capital stubbornly defended itself. Finally arrived the fatal day, the 13th of April, 1204, when the crusaders succeeded in taking possession of Constantinople. The Emperor Alexius V Ducas Mourtzouphlos, fearing to be caught and to fall into the teeth of the Latins as a tidbit or dessert, fled. Constantinople passed into the hands of the crusaders. The capital of the Byzantine Empire fell when assailed by that criminal filibustering expedition, the Fourth Crusade.

Taking up the narration of the events of this period, Nicetas Choniates wrote: What a state of mind must, naturally, be his who will narrate the public disasters which have befallen this queen of cities (Constantinople) in the reign of the earthly angels (Angeli)!

After the taking of the city, for three days, the Latins treated the city with appalling cruelty and pillaged everything which had been collected in Constantinople for many centuries. Neither churches, nor relics, nor monuments of art, nor private possessions were spared or respected. The western knights and their soldiers, as well as the Latin monks and abbots, took part in the pillaging.

Nicetas Choniates, an eyewitness of the capture of Constantinople, gives a striking picture of appalling sacking, violation, sacrilege, and ruin effected by the crusaders in the capital of the Empire; even the Muhammedans had been more merciful towards the Christians after the capture of Jerusalem than these men who claimed to be soldiers of Christ. Another stirring description of the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders, was given by another eyewitness, Nicholas Mesarites, metropolitan of Ephesus, in his funeral oration on the occasion of the death of his elder brother.

In those three days when the crusaders were allowed to pillage Constantinople, a mass of precious monuments of art perished; many libraries were plundered; manuscripts were destroyed. St. Sophia was mercilessly robbed. The contemporary Villehardouin observed: Since the world was created, never had so much booty been won in any city! A Russian chronicle of Novgorod describes in particular detail the scenes of pillage in churches and monasteries. The disaster of 1204 is also mentioned in Russian chronographies.

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Cf. Venetians and Crusaders take Constantinople (1204) - Plunder of the Sacred Relics, by E. Pears

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