fourth crusade

Indeed, not all the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Crusade. According to a prearranged treaty, the empire was apportioned between Venice and the crusade's leaders, and the Latin Empire of Constantinople was established. The Pope was not best pleased to hear the news that Christian Zara had been sacked on 24 November 1202 CE, and he promptly excommunicated the Crusaders and the Venetians. After the failure of the Fourth Crusade to hold Constantinople or reach Jerusalem, Innocent III launched the first crusade against heretics, the Albigensian Crusade, against the Cathars in France and the County of Toulouse. In August 1203, the crusaders attacked a mosque, which was defended by a combined Muslim and Greek opposition. Speros Vryonis in Byzantium and Europe gives a vivid account of the sack of Constantinople by the Frankish and Venetian Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade: The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. In 1198 he called a new Crusade through legates and encyclical letters. The Byzantines were considered to lack the will to fight the common Muslim enemy while, from the other side, the Crusaders were seen as opportunists out to grab the choicest parts of the Byzantine Empire in the east. In 1199 a tax was levied on all clerical incomes—later to become a precedent for systematic papal income taxes—and Fulk of Neuilly, a popular orator, was commissioned to preach. The Venetians took three-eighths of Constantinople, the Ionian islands, Crete, Euboea, Andros, Naxos, and a few strategic points along the coast of the Sea of Marmara. It is a fact that a crime was committed here in the city 800 years ago." In the eyes of all Greeks who knew of this decision, it was a shocking sign of desperation and weak leadership, which deserved to be punished by God. Still, a good number of second-tier nobles were inspired to join up or ‘take the cross’, as it was known, especially from northern France. Cities & Buildings The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates characterized it as "the turning point towards the decline of the Roman state". A slaughter of the defenders and the city’s some 400,000 inhabitants followed. The Pope’s timing was not the best, especially considering the Holy City had anyway been in Muslim hands since 1187 CE. Meanwhile, Byzantine refugees founded their own successor states, the most notable of these being the Empire of Nicaea under Theodore Lascaris (a relative of Alexius III), the Empire of Trebizond, and the Despotate of Epirus. The 300 knights were too few to ever consider attacking well-fortified Jerusalem, or any other important city for that matter, but they did manage to assist the Latin states in perpetuating their precarious existence in the Muslim-dominated Middle East. Given the recent history of rebellions and takeovers in Byzantium, this was perhaps a rather simplified view of possible events. With few options, the Crusaders agreed, even though Zadar was a Christian city under the control of the king of Hungary, who had taken the Crusader’s vow. At that point the young emperor ordered the destruction and melting of valuable Byzantine and Roman icons in order to extract their gold and silver. "The spirit of reconciliation is stronger than hatred," he said during a liturgy attended by Roman Catholic Archbishop Philippe Barbarin of Lyon, France. By 1201 the bulk of the crusader army was collected at Venice, though with far fewer troops than expected; 12,000 instead of 33,500. While the Papal Representative to the Crusade Peter Cardinal Capuano endorsed the move as necessary to prevent the crusade's complete failure, Pope Innocent was alarmed at this development and wrote a letter to the Crusading leadership threatening excommunication.[6]. Reluctant to jeopardize the Crusade, Innocent gave conditional absolution to the Crusaders, but not to the Venetians. After bickering between laymen and the papal legate led to the collapse of the Fifth Crusade, later crusades were directed by individual monarchs, mostly against Egypt.

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