The Crusades by Abigail Archer

Author:Abigail Archer [Abigail Archer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Medieval
ISBN: 9781612308630
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

The Fourth Crusade was a disgrace.

Pope Innocent III launched this crusade in 1200, the second year of his tumultuous papacy, sending preachers to whip up enthusiasm in England, France and Germany. But he could recruit no royals. Richard Lionheart had died the previous year, and his brother John was busy fighting his former ally, Philip II of France. In Germany, all the royals were bitterly disputing the succession of the Holy Roman Empire. The leaders who took the cross this time were mainly French nobles, including Count Baldwin of Flanders, his brother-in-law Count Thibaut of Champagne, Count Hugh of St Pol and Count Louis of Blois, joined by Marquis Boniface of Montferrat in northern Italy.

All were tough and experienced warriors. Louis of Blois had fought in the Third Crusade, and the rest were veterans of the tournament circuit. Although chivalry was well entrenched in the knightly code, tournaments had not evolved into the formal jousts and mock battles they would become in the next century. They were huge, milling contests between picked teams of warriors, sometimes involving hundreds of knights on each side. The object was to capture opponents, not to kill or injure them, but accidents often happened in the wild tumult. The tournaments, immensely popular throughout Europe, were, in fact, dress rehearsals for real battles. Tourneys began with a charge of mounted lancers, followed by hand-to-hand combat, with the winning side usually the one that managed to preserve some sort of order in the melee.

Regardless of how competent the leaders of the Fourth Crusade were, they did not have enough followers to attain their goals. In exchange for 85,000 silver marks, the leaders had contracted a Venetian fleet to transport 33,500 men to the Holy Land and provision them for a year, but by the summer of 1202, only about a third of the crusaders had arrived in Venice, with nowhere near the required funds.

The wily old Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, had his own plans for the crusaders. He would agree to settle the crusaders’ debt if they would recapture the port of Zara for him (now Zadar in Croatia), which he had recently lost to the King of Hungary. There was a catch, however: Both Zara and the King of Hungary were loyal to the pope; if the crusaders attacked it, they could be excommunicated. Some of the crusaders rebelled and sought other ways to reach the Holy Land, but a sizeable number joined a fleet of 200 Venetian ships to cross the Adriatic and capture Zara. On November 24, without much difficulty, they planted the flag of Venice on the city wall.

The pope did issue a bill of excommunication, but withdrew it after a French delegation persuaded him that taking Zara was the only way they could carry on the crusade. Dandolo, however, was dragging his feet, and while the crusaders were still camped outside Zara, another temptation arrived. Prince Alexios IV Angelos, the exiled rightful heir to the throne of the Byzantine Empire, offered

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