Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

The Fourth Crusade and Byzantium 

Page 8

But the followers of the theory of premeditation did not confine themselves to the attempt to prove the fact of the treason of Venice. In 1875 a new motive was brought forward by a French scholar. Count de Riant, who tried to prove that the chief instigator of the change of direction of the Fourth Crusade was not Dandolo, but the king of Germany, Philip of Swabia, son-in-law of the deposed Isaac Angelus. In Germany a skillful political intrigue had been woven which was to direct the crusaders upon Constantinople. Boniface of Montferrat fulfilled Philips' plans in the East. In the change of direction of the crusade Riant sees one of the episodes of the long struggle between the papacy and the Empire. By his leading role in the crusade Philip humiliated the pope and falsified his conception of the crusade; welcoming the restored Byzantine Emperor as an ally, Philip might hope to be successful in his strife with the pope and with his rival in Germany, Otto of Brunswick. But a blow was struck to Riant's theory by an investigation of Vasilievsky, who showed that the flight of the prince Alexius to the West took place not in the year 1201, as all the historians believed, but in 1202, so that for a complicated and long conceived political intrigue Philip was left neither place nor time; thus the German intrigue may be proved as illusive as the Venetian.

The accurate investigation of a Frenchman, Tessier, on the basis of examination of contemporary sources, refuted the theory of the German sovereigns' role and returned to the acknowledgment of the great significance of the narrative of Villehardouin, that is to say, to the prevailing standpoint before 1860, the theory of accidents. Tessier said that the Fourth Crusade was a French crusade, and the conquest of Constantinople was an achievement neither Germanic nor Venetian, but French. Of Riant's premeditation theory there remains only the fact that Philip of Swabia took part in the change of direction of the crusade and, like Henry VI, claimed the Eastern Empire; but the sources do not justify affirming the existence of a leading and subtle plan on Philip's part on which could depend the destiny of the whole Fourth Crusade.

At the end of the nineteenth century a German historian, W. Norden, definitely refuting the theory of premeditation and agreeing essentially with the theory of accidents, endeavored to investigate the latter more deeply, discussed the problem of the Fourth Crusade in the light of the political, economic, and religious relations between the West and East, and tried to elucidate the inner connection between the Fourth Crusade and the history of the previous hundred and fifty years.

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