Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline by Paul Cooper

Author:Paul Cooper [Paul Cooper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Adult
ISBN: 9780715655016
Amazon: B0CN5NWPLC
Goodreads: 202116564
Publisher: Duckworth Books
Published: 2024-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

Figure 36. Attack of the Crusaders on Constantinople — miniature in a Venetian manuscript, c. 1330.

The crusaders sailed into the port of Constantinople, and Alexios Angelos was crowned Emperor of the Romans on 1 August 1203. Sir Hugh, writing to the Pope and trying his best to make his conquest of Constantinople look like it had been a good idea, reassured him of Angelos’s promises:

Our new emperor, with everything that he had promised us fully and completely rendered, bound himself to us by oath to cross the sea with us in next March’s voyage, accompanied by ten thousand soldiers, and to provide food for one year to the entire army of the Lord.21

The actual situation was much different. When the previous emperor fled the city, he had taken with him more than 1,000 pounds of gold and some priceless jewels, leaving the imperial treasury drastically depleted. Clearly getting a little nervous about his new friends, Alexios gave leave for the Latin soldiers to take any priceless works of Byzantine art that they could find in the city’s churches, outraging the city’s people. These artefacts were destroyed and their gold melted down — but even then, Angelos barely made a dent in the sum he had promised the Latin warriors.

Riots broke out in the city, and, frustrated by their inability to fight with Muslims in the holy land, the crusaders began destroying Constantinople’s mosques instead. But the city had not earned its reputation as ‘the refuge of strangers’ for nothing: its residents came out in force to protect their Muslim neighbours. In retaliation, the crusaders set the city ablaze, and the riots soon spiralled into a full-blown revolution against the new emperor Alexios. He was swiftly overthrown by a rebel leader named Doukas, and strangled in early February 1204.

The crusaders demanded that this new Emperor Doukas honour the debt that had been promised to them. When he refused, they embarked on a campaign of revenge and destruction that saw the city ravaged over three days of blood and fire. The crusaders systematically violated the city’s holy sanctuaries, destroying or stealing all they could lay hands on. Thousands of Constantinople’s civilian population were massacred. The famous bronze horses from the Hippodrome were torn down and sent back to adorn the facade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where they remain to this day. Other statues were melted down to make bronze coins, about which Niketas Choniates quips: ‘Thus great things were exchanged for small ones.’22

Declaring a victory for Christendom, the crusaders selected a new emperor from among their own ranks, and divided the territory of the Byzantine Empire into various new crusader states. What followed was a period of Latin rule in Constantinople which lasted for the next sixty years or so — but the Latins soon found that governing this large and fractious empire was no easy matter. They lost one territory after another, until what was now called the Latin Empire was reduced to no more than the city of Constantinople.

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