Fourth Crusade

11 Key excerpts on "Fourth Crusade"

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  The Crusades, 1095-1204

  • Jonathan Phillips(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13 The Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople, 1202–4

  O n 8 January 1198, at 38 years of age Lothario dei Conti di Segni was elected Pope Innocent III. His eighteen-year pontificate (1198–1216) saw crusading reach unprecedented levels of intensity and diversity with campaigns directed at Cathar heretics in southern France (the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–18), against political opponents of the papacy in southern Italy and as we will see, more by accident than design, against the Christian Byzantine Empire, an event that culminated in the disastrous sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Innocent encouraged further crusading ventures in north-eastern Europe and the continuation of the reconquest of Spain. Contemporaries were so caught up in their enthusiasm for holy war that his pontificate also saw the near-legendary Children’s Crusade (1212). Inspired by visionary experiences, groups of young people near Chartres and Cologne became convinced that they could recover Jerusalem. They marched through France and Germany to the port of Genoa, only to be refused passage to the East because they had no money or equipment. While some were sold into slavery most returned home to be ridiculed for their foolishness. In no sense was this a ‘proper’ crusade – it was certainly not endorsed by the papacy – but the naïve hopes of these young people demonstrated popular enthusiasm to liberate the holy city and reflected the passion for crusading Innocent had generated. Taken together, these campaigns show just how flexible and adaptable a concept crusading had become by the early thirteenth century.

  THE ORIGINS OF THE Fourth Crusade, 1198–1201

  At the close of the twelfth century Christianity seemed to be on the back foot. Neither the Third Crusade nor the German Crusade of 1196–97 had managed to reclaim Jerusalem while the Christian kings of Spain had been thrashed at the Battle of Alarcos (1195) in central-southern Iberia. In the aftermath of this latter campaign, however, one interesting development took place showing how the scope of crusading continued to widen. Aside from fighting the Muslims the Spanish monarchs had also been in conflict with one another; such was the bitterness of this struggle that King Alfonso IX of León made an alliance with the Muslim Almohads. In consequence, Pope Celestine III (1191–98) excommunicated Alfonso and declared that those who fought the king would have ‘the same remission of sins as we give to those who take up arms against the Saracens’ (Edbury, 2008: 135). In other words, Celestine had granted crusading indulgences to those who opposed a Christian ruler allied with Muslims. As far back as the conflict between King Roger II of Sicily (1130–54) and Pope Innocent II (1130–43) a decree at the Council of Pisa (1135) had offered the latter’s supporters the same remission of sins as that granted by Pope Urban at the Council of Clermont for those who had set out to Jerusalem; in other words a crusade indulgence. In a similar vein, during the early years of Pope Innocent III’s pontificate a crusade was briefly and ineffectually preached in 1199 against Markward of Anweiler, a German adventurer in southern Italy. In trying to establish his power there Markward formed an alliance with Muslim colonies in Sicily which threatened the position of the papacy and that of the boy-king Frederick II for whom Innocent acted as regent. Such actions were also a potential hindrance to the prospect of bringing relief to the Holy Land; thus the pope promised a full crusade indulgence to those Sicilians who resisted the German and his Muslim allies. Such episodes show the idea of holy war against other Christians was not entirely unknown, although events at Constantinople were of a markedly different tenor and scale.

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  Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century

  • Giles Constable(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 13 The Fourth Crusade

  The crusades have a bad name today, and none of them worse than the Fourth Crusade, of which the eight hundredth anniversary was commemorated in 2004. Most scholars have little or nothing good to say about the expedition that was diverted or, in the opinion of many, perverted from its original goals in Egypt and the Holy Land and culminated with the capture and sack of Constantinople. ‘There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade,’ said Steven Runciman in 1954, and subsequent writers have echoed his words, calling the crusade ‘ungodly’, ‘unholy’, ‘obviously criminal’, and ‘the ultimate perversion of the crusading idea’.1 It has caste a dark shadow not only over the participants, to whom some historians would deny the name of crusaders, but also over its promoters, including Innocent III, who has been compared to Stalin.2 Jane Sayers in her biography of Innocent called the crusade ‘an unqualified and dreadful disaster’ with an ‘ignominious and shameful outcome’.3

  This negative view of the Fourth Crusade is in part owing to the nature of the sources, which tell us in some respects too much (if that is possible) and in other respects too little about the undertaking.4 For the most part they go up to, but not beyond, the conquest of Constantinople, and pay little attention to the subsequent events. Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari, who were both participants, give detailed, though not entirely compatible, accounts of the external events. They were the first secular, and among the first vernacular, historians of the crusades. Their works were designed to be read aloud to noble audiences, and they each had a distinctive point of view and, to some extent, an axe to grind.5 The letters of Innocent III and the Deeds of Innocent III , written about 1208, manifestly present the papal position.6 Gunther of Pairis, like many of the minor sources published by Paul Riant in his Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae , is primarily concerned with the relics taken by the crusaders from Constantinople to the west.7 In these Latin sources, the capture and sack of Constantinople was the real end of the crusade. The Greek historians Choniates and Mesarites likewise concentrate on the events in and around Constantinople.8 If there were similarly detailed accounts of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the prevailing view of the first crusade might be more like that of the fourth. ‘As “a crime against humanity”,’ Michael Angold wrote, ‘the conquest of Constantinople hardly rates beside the crusader sack of Jerusalem in 1099 or the excesses of the Albigensian crusade’9

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  Sacred Plunder

  Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade

  • David M. Perry(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  As for the crusade itself, the publication of The Fourth Crusade by Donald Queller, later revised with the help of Thomas Madden, has shifted scholarly debate away from an endless argument about blame and diversion. There is wide scholarly agreement about the basic facts of the crusade. Neither papal, military, nor Venetian leaders intended the crusaders to become badly indebted or to be diverted to Constantinople, but rather designed what seemed to be a reasonable plan to fund an amphibious assault on Egypt. Plans went awry and various actors took advantage of the situation. When the crusaders turned toward Constantinople, they still expected to set sail for Egypt in the near future. No one expected Constantinople to fall to the Latin forces—not even the Latins. But outside the narrow constraints of crusade and Mediterranean scholar- ship, the memory and meaning of the Fourth Crusade remain contested ground to this day, a contest that can still fixate on relics and narrative. On November 27, 2004—950 years since mutual excommunications officially began the great schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and 800 years after the Fourth Crusade—Pope John Paul II presented two relics to the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew I of Istanbul in Rome. The relics were the bones of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nazianzus, both fourth-century prelates who played pivotal roles in the formation of normative Christianity. The plan was that these relics would be placed in new reliquaries of crystal, given to the patriarch on the twenty-seventh, and reinstalled in Istanbul on November 30, the feast of St. Andrew, patron saint of Istanbul. A week before the handover, disputes between the patriarchal staff in Istanbul and the curia had soured the mood of reconciliation. On Sunday, 8 Sacred Plunder November 20, the patriarch gave a sermon in which he praised the pope for his apologetic gesture.

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  Fighting for the Cross

  • Jaroslav Pelikan(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  The organization and 16 FIGHTING FOR THE CROSS co-ordination of Christendom's crusading efforts by the Church had reached their height: in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council, the most glittering clerical assembly of the entire Middle Ages, passed legislation ('canons') that applied to the forthcoming crusade and to all future ones. Some of the Fifth Crusade s participants took part in a lacklustre campaign in Palestine in 1217, but at its heart there lay an ambitious attempt to carry out the same strategy of attacking Egypt that had been envisaged for the Fourth Crusade. The reasoning was that Christian control of all Egypt would ensure the military recovery of Jerusalem; alternatively, if the sultan of Egypt lost enough land in the Nile delta he'd agree to hand Jerusalem back, together with sufficient territory to make the city s defence viable over the long term. In this way crusading commanders would avoid the strategic impasse that had frustrated Richard I in 1191-2. In May 1218 the crusaders landed near Damietta and laid siege to the port. Capturing Damietta was far from easy, but in November 1219 the town was finally occupied. Then, much like their predecessors at Antioch in 1098—9, the crusaders fell victim to bickering and inactivity. No kings from the West had joined the crusade s Egyptian phase and strong leadership was absent. The army s composition was also unusually fluid, because crusaders arrived and left for home in successive spring and autumn voyages or 'passages'. The sultan made two offers to return to the Christians all the land that they'd held before the battle of Hattin in exchange for their withdrawal from Egypt. The Muslims were even prepared to grant a truce lasting thirty years, which would have given their opponents the time needed to refortify all of their castles. Both offers were turned down. There's no doubt that the expedition was spectacularly misman-aged.

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  The Story of Christianity: Volume 1

  The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation

  • Justo L. Gonzalez(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • HarperOne

    (Publisher)

  The news shook Christendom, and Pope Clement III called for a renewal of the crusading enterprise. This Third Crusade was led by three sovereigns: Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Richard the Lionhearted of England, and Philip II Augustus of France. This too failed. Frederick drowned, and his army dissolved. Richard and Philip achieved nothing but taking Acre after a siege that lasted two years. Philip then returned to Europe, hoping to take advantage of Richard’s absence to take some of the latter’s lands. Richard himself, on his way home, was captured by the emperor of Germany and kept a prisoner until an enormous ransom was promised.

  The Fourth Crusade, called by Innocent III, was an even greater disaster. Its goal was to attack Saladin at his headquarters in Egypt. A famous preacher, Foulques de Neuilly, was entrusted with the task of raising armies and funds for the Crusade. Foulques was a radical opponent of usury and all forms of social injustice who was incensed at the manner in which the developing monetary economy allowed the rich to use their money to become even richer, while the poor remained in poverty. In preaching the Crusade, Foulques declared that the poor were elected by God to fulfill this great task. All could participate in this project. Those who could not go on Crusade, no matter how poor, should support others who could. The rich must also join, for in so doing their exploitations were forgiven. Thus an army was raised eager to attack Saladin in his own capital.

  But, unbeknownst to Foulques and even to Pope Innocent, there were other plans afoot. The throne in Constantinople was disputed by two rivals, one of whom asked Innocent to send the Crusade first to Constantinople to place him on the throne. In exchange, he would then support the Crusade against Saladin. Innocent refused, but the Venetians, whose fleet was charged with the task of transporting the crusaders to Egypt, agreed to take them instead to Constantinople in exchange for large sums of money. Thus, the Crusade was rerouted to Constantinople, which the crusaders took. They then named Baldwin of Flanders emperor of Constantinople, and thus was founded the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204–1261). A Latin patriarch of Constantinople was also named, and thus, in theory at least, East and West were reunited. Innocent III, at first incensed by this misuse of the Crusade, eventually decided that it was God’s way of reuniting the church. But the Byzantines did not accept matters so easily, and continued a long resistance, founding various states that refused to accept the authority of the Latin emperors. Finally, in 1261, one of these splinter states, the Empire of Nicea, retook Constantinople, and ended the Latin Empire. The net result of the entire episode was that the enmity of the Greek East toward the Latin West grew more intense.

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  Medieval Weapons

  An Illustrated History of Their Impact

  • Robert D. Smith, Kelly DeVries(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  But he died suddenly and unexpectedly before he could mount the campaign. A stronger pope, Innocent III, was elected to replace Celestine at his death in 1198, and, determined to reinvigo- rate the crusades, he immediately called for a fourth one. However, the Fourth Crusade was doomed from the start. Al- though not as many as were anticipated, a large force gathered in Venice in 1201 with the goal of traveling to the Holy Land. Yet they never came close to achieving that goal. They tried to arrange pas- sage by sea but, not having enough money, they struck a deal with the Venetians to transport them there. However, first the Venetians compelled the crusaders to attack a Hungarian city, Zara, which— despite being Catholic—threatened the Adriatic trading monopolies of Venice. Following this the crusaders were taken to Byzantium where in 1203 they began to besiege Constantinople, because the emperor had recently signed a trading pact with the Genoese, rivals to the Venetians. Under the guise of asking for money and supplies to proceed to the Holy Land, the crusaders became impatient with the inhabitants’ unwillingness to comply with their requests and took the city by storm. The Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which they established there, lasted until 1261 when an attack from the exiled Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, acting in concert with the Genoese, restored Constantinople to the Byzantine Empire. The rifts between Byzantium and the West, and between Greek and Ro- man Christianities, would never be healed. The result of the Fourth Crusade excited few in Europe, except for the Venetians.

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  The Unknown Europe

  How Eastern Europe Got That Way

  • James R. Payton Jr.(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  chapter 9

  The Fourth Crusade (12 0 4 )

  “The Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople is one of the most ghastly and tragic incidents in history. . . . The price was the lasting enmity of Greek Christendom. The Fourth Crusade could never be forgiven nor forgotten by the Christians of the East.”131

  On May 4 , 2001 , at a meeting with the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Athens, Pope John Paul II startled his host by asking forgiveness for the Fourth Crusade, which sacked, pillaged, and looted Constantinople, the chief city of Eastern Christianity. Few people in the West even know what happened in the Fourth Crusade: they may know a little about the crusades, but most are unaware of what happened during the fourth one.

  In contrast, virtually all Eastern Europeans know about that crusade all too well. As a Pole, John Paul II was acquainted with it in a way no other pope had been since the event. As head of the church whose crusaders so long ago perpetrated its horrors, this Polish pope knew just how painful a memory the Fourth Crusade has been for centuries to many Eastern Europeans.

  It is striking that the head of the Roman Catholic church asked forgiveness for what the crusaders had done so long ago. After the Fourth Crusade, 760 years elapsed before a pope and an ecumenical patriarch (from Constantinople, the leading hierarch of the Orthodox world) even met face to face, when Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I did so in 1964 . That gives some sense of the deep rift opened up by the Fourth Crusade. But the 19 64 event went no further than an embrace and a polite kiss on the cheek; in 2001 , the pope asked forgiveness for what had happened in 1204 . For multiplied centuries, the Eastern Orthodox have lived with the pain, remembering the horror of what took place in 1204

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  Power and Faith

  Politics and Religion in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century

  • Richard Huscroft(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At this point, a political crisis within the Byzantine Empire changed the course of the crusade once again. In 1195, the emperor Isaac Angelus (1185–95) had been deposed and blinded by his brother Alexius III (1195–1203). Isaac’s son, also called Alexius, fled the empire to seek help, and his envoys arrived at the crusader camp outside Zara in the winter of 1202. Their proposal was astonishing: if the crusaders helped restore Alexius and his father to their rightful positions, Alexius would pay them 20,000 marks, add 10,000 Byzantine troops to the crusading expedition in the Holy Land and, most startlingly, reunite the eastern and western Christian churches under the authority of the pope. The Venetians and most of the crusade leaders agreed, but once again there were plenty of crusaders who viewed with dismay the prospect of attacking another Christian city and left the crusade to head directly for the Holy Land. Meanwhile, at the end of June 1203, the main army arrived outside Constantinople, and on 17 July, the city was taken. This was not straightforward: the crusade army had run dangerously short of supplies by the time of the final assault, and the attack of 17 July was made out of desperation against a much larger Byzantine force defending the city. Alexius III, however, inexplicably refused to engage the crusaders, withdrew his troops behind the city walls and then fled during the night. Isaac Angelos was released from captivity, and Prince Alexius was crowned alongside him and became Alexius IV. There was little chance of Alexius’s pledges to the crusaders being fulfilled. Isaac was horrified by what his son had promised and strong anti-western sentiment soon developed within the general population. By Christmas 1203, relations between the Byzantines and the crusaders had broken down completely. At the same time, Alexius IV’s authority over his own subjects, never strong, had evaporated, and he was deposed and murdered along with his father in February 1204. By killing their erstwhile ally and patron, the new emperor, a Byzantine noble who styled himself Alexius V, had handed the crusaders a justifiable reason to attack Constantinople. Given how low they were on supplies and how poor the prospects for the crusade looked, they probably didn’t need one and would have acted anyway, but in any event on 13 April 1204, the assault began, and, having forced their way into the city, the crusaders embarked on three days of unrestrained looting and violence. The people of Constantinople were brutally targeted, Hagia Sophia was ransacked, and thousands of treasures were plundered, packed and subsequently taken back to the West. Finally, in May 1204, Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned the first Latin emperor of Constantinople in the great church which his troops had so recently desecrated.

  The Fourth Crusade was a failure. After the sack of Constantinople, the idea of carrying on to the Holy Land never seems to have resurfaced, and the westerners who had travelled so far now lacked the resources and support to go any further. Having said that, much of what constitutes modern Greece was quickly partitioned after 1204 into a series of new crusader states which would last for most of the thirteenth century, the Venetians were delighted to assume control of Byzantium’s trade routes and, although its conquests were not the ones originally intended, the crusade did well militarily: the argument that control of Constantinople would benefit future crusades was worth making even if later expeditions tended to bypass it entirely. And Innocent III had not given up his dream of retaking Jerusalem. In 1213, four years after he had launched the crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc and buoyed by news of the great Christian victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Innocent announced the start of a new crusade in his bull Quia maior

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  John of Brienne

  King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Constantinople, c.1175–1237

  • Guy Perry(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The Fifth Crusade What we now call the ‘Fifth Crusade’ was formally launched by Pope Innocent III in April 1213. Then followed long years of planning and preparation across Latin Christendom, under papal leadership. The cru- sade actually began in the Holy Land in the autumn of 1217. In spring the next year it switched to target Egypt, where it soon became bogged down in a lengthy and taxing siege of the port-city of Damietta. During this period the new Egyptian sultan, al-Kamil, made at least one peace offer to the Christians. There was a further round of negotiations just before the crusade’s end. It was the eventual capture of Damietta, though, that really brought the latent tensions in the crusader host to a head. A serious dispute broke open, above all between King John, as the leader of the crusade, and the papal legate Pelagius, standing for the distant ‘great powers’ of the pope and the emperor-elect, Frederick II. John managed to win the lordship of Damietta, at least for the present. However, soon after this, he and many followers quit Egypt altogether, heading back to the Holy Land. They remained there for more than a year. Eventually John was summoned back to participate in a great advance south from Damietta, towards Cairo. But it led to disaster. The Fifth Crusade ended with the crusaders evacuating Egypt altogether in September 1221. This is not the place for a comprehensive treatment of the whole expedition. Instead, our focus is solely on the crusade from John’s per- spective – that is, on those aspects of it that affected him most profoundly. The Fifth Crusade was the hinge of John’s reign as king. Everything had been leading up to it, certainly since 1213, and its ultimate failure dictated the course of the rest of John’s rule.

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  The Crusades: A History

  • Jonathan Riley-Smith(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The Third Crusade and the crusade of 1197 demonstrated that the movement could inspire real enthusiasm in Europe when there was a crisis in the Levant and that large forces could be put into the field at such a time. The record of these years, if judged in terms of the men and matériel channelled to the East, is remarkable. And after a slow start the crusaders’ achievements were outstanding. In 1188 the Christians had been left only with the city of Tyre and one or two isolated fortresses inland. By 1198 they held nearly the whole of the Palestinian coast. This ensured that the kingdom would last for another century, because it removed any threat from a Muslim fleet in the Nile Delta to the sea-lanes to Europe at precisely the time when Acre was becoming the chief commercial port in the eastern Mediterranean region. The crusade seems to have been the first to make use of paid soldiery on a really large scale. In 1191–2 these must have been employed in Palestine, which was always awash with them, but in 1197 Henry VI intended to export an impressive mercenary force from the West. The invasion of Egypt, which had been on the minds of crusaders and settlers in the Levant from the start, had also moved to the forefront of thinking. In June 1192, with his sojourn in the East coming to an end, Richard of England had initiated a discussion on the choice of a final goal. A committee, made up of brothers of the military orders, Western settlers and crusaders, had decided on Egypt, but this had not been acceptable to the contingent that had been left behind by Philip of France. The crusaders had shown a new realism in their decision not to risk all in the Judaean hills, but the result was that Jerusalem had eluded them. This helps to explain the obsessive concern with crusading that continued to be displayed at all levels of society.

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  Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations

  • Jessalynn Bird, Jessalynn L. Bird, Jessalynn Bird, Jessalynn L. Bird(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  6. Innocent III and the Beginning of the Fourth Crusade Edward Peters* Bird, Jessalynn (ed.), Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations . Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462986312/ch06 Abstract Disappointed by a series of failures on the part of kings to win back the Holy Land and burdened with a host of other responsibilities at the outset of his pontif icate, Pope Innocent III in 1198 turned to another form of crusade management, one which employed the pastoral concerns for ecclesiastical and devotional reform developed at the new schools of Paris. That reform movement consisted of articulate papal letters regularly recorded in registers, trusted ecclesiastical administrators, talented papal legates, and inspired charismatic preachers. He also set about creating a home front for the crusade, one that made it the centre of a new pastoral reform mission that included every Christian, whether an actual crusader or not. This new home front was to be managed by ecclesiastical provinces and their cities and nobles, assisted by papal legates and reform and crusade preachers, and of fering new and extensive spiritual privileges. This is the context and the outcome of the tourna-ment at Ecry-sur-Aisne in November, 1198, the assembling of an army by the counts of Champagne/Brie, Blois, and Flanders/Hainaut and their novel financ ial arrangements with the Venetians. With characteristic attention to detail, Innocent also issued instructions for crusaders who failed to appear. Although no single source includes all of these decisions and Innocent’s sustained attention, there is little doubt that Innocent III paid close attention to the crusade from the very beginning of his pontif icate. * This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at a memorial session for Jim Powell at the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in May, 2012.

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