History Of The Fourth Crusade

On August 15, 1199, Pope Innocent III called for a renewed effort to deliver Jerusalem from the Infidel, but the Fourth Crusade had a very different outcome from the one he preached. Proceeding no further than Constantinople, the Crusaders sacked the capital of eastern Christendom and installed a Latin ruler on the throne of Byzantium. This revised and expanded edition of The Fourth Crusade gives fresh emphasis to events in Byzantium and the Byzantine response to the actions of the Crusaders. Included in this edition is a chapter on the sack of Constantinople and the election of its Latin emperor. A History Book Club selection.

In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered and raped old and young - they desecrated churches, plundered treasuries and much of the city was put to the torch. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock and disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips follows the fortunes of the leading players and explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement.

The Fall of Constantinople: Being the Story of the Fourth Crusade by Edwin Pears, first published in 1885, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

The Fourth Crusade (1202-4) was one of the key events in medieval history The fall of Constantinople to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade in April 1204 was its climax. It ensured that Byzantium’s days as a great power were over. It equally ensured that westerners would dominate the Levant – the lands of the old Byzantine Empire –until the end of the middle ages. This book asks just how important was the Fourth as a turning point in the Middle East.. The broad setting is the encounter of Byzantium with the West within the framework of the crusades. Differences of outlook and interest meant that this encounter was soon overburdened with mutual distrust. 1204 was some kind of a solution and created situations scarcely conceivable even two years before when the fourth crusade set sail from Venice.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the standoff by federal agents and members of the Branch Davidians *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable." - Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe The Fourth Crusade from 1202-1204 is significant in medieval history because it was the first time a crusade was directed against another Christian group. It was also significant since it encompassed two of the four major sieges of Constantinople, and it also sparked a third in 1235 (an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Latin gains in 1204). Given that legacy, it's ironic that like the Crusades before it, the Fourth Crusade was originally intended as an invasion of Egypt, which had been conquered by Saladin and his uncle nearly four decades earlier. Egypt had been joined with Syria into one Muslim empire under Saladin, but it had fallen apart into two separate realms after his death shortly after the Third Crusade in 1193. Following that crusade, the main objective of the Crusaders in the 13th century was to conquer Egypt and use it as a beachhead against the Muslims in Syria who threatened Christian Palestine, a goal that should have been beneficial to all of Christendom in both the West and East. Instead, during the Fourth Crusade, tensions between the Latin Christians of Western Europe and the Greek Christians of Constantinople came to a head after a century and three previous Crusades. This resulted in a critical breakdown of communications that resulted in an internal war within Christendom and led to the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders. After this, the Crusaders established a Latin Kingdom in Constantinople for nearly 60 years, but it remained shaky and was eventually retaken by the Byzantine Greeks. The Fourth Crusade was also a result of the imperialist ambitions of Pope Innocent III, one of the strongest and proudest popes of the Middle Ages, and it was a precursor of the Albigensian Crusade, the first true "internal" crusade. With that, the Latin Christians began to lose focus on the dwindling territories in Palestine, and instead Christians fell upon each other, engaging in Crusades against other Christian groups and bleeding much-needed support from the Latin kingdoms in Palestine. In the west, the Fourth Crusade also saw the rise in power of the Byzantines' most bitter rivals in the West: the Venetians and Genoese. The Venetian Doge was later blamed for inciting the Crusaders to fall upon his Byzantine enemies, and while the situation was more complicated than that, the involvement of the Venetians in the altered direction of the Crusade cannot be denied. Thus, even though no one realized it at the time, the Fourth Crusade was the turning point for the Crusades; after this one, the slow decline toward the Latin Christians losing the Holy Land became inevitable. Constantinople, whether as a Greek or a Latin Empire, was also fatally weakened and would eventually fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, long after the end of the Crusades. The Fourth Crusade would inevitably lead to the fall of the Crusader states less than a century later and also the fall of Constantinople two and a half centuries later to the Muslims. The latter would be a permanent loss to Christianity, while Christian forces would not regain control of Palestine until the 20th century. The Fourth Crusade: The History of the Crusade that Resulted in the Sack of Constantinople chronicles one of the most controversial events of the Middle Ages. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the 4th Crusade like never before, in no time at all.

The Fourth Crusade (1202-4) was one of the key events in medieval history The fall of Constantinople to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade in April 1204 was its climax. It ensured that Byzantium’s days as a great power were over. It equally ensured that westerners would dominate the Levant – the lands of the old Byzantine Empire –until the end of the middle ages. This book asks just how important was the Fourth as a turning point in the Middle East.. The broad setting is the encounter of Byzantium with the West within the framework of the crusades. Differences of outlook and interest meant that this encounter was soon overburdened with mutual distrust. 1204 was some kind of a solution and created situations scarcely conceivable even two years before when the fourth crusade set sail from Venice.

The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204), launched to restore Jerusalem to Christian control, veered widely off course, finally landing at Constantinople which it conquered and sacked. The effects of the crusade were far-reaching during the Middle Ages and remain powerful even today, which explains the continued vibrancy of its historiography. This volume, based on studies presented at the Sixth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East in Istanbul, Turkey in 2004, represents some of the best new research on this fascinating event. With the "Diversion Question" of the past centuries now largely settled, these studies focus on three aspects of current scholarship: evaluations of the event itself, investigations into the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, and analyses of the evolving perceptions and memories of the event in Europe and the Middle East. Together these essays help to place the Fourth Crusade within the larger context of medieval Mediterranean history as well as larger issues such as agency, accommodation, and memory that inform new aspects of modern historiography.