How lonely sits the city                                                                         That was full of people!                                                                       How like a widow is she,                                                                            Who was great among the nations!                                                   The princess among the provinces                                                         Has become a slave!

 She weeps bitterly in the night,                                                         Her tears are on her cheeks;                                                                  Among all her lovers                                                                             She has none to comfort her.                                                                  All her friends have dealt treacherously with her;                           They have become her enemies.

Lamentations 1: 1-2

For 900 years, the city had stood inviolate.  Constantinople had defeated the onslaught of Goths and Huns, Persians and Arabs, Cumans and Patzinaks, Bulgars and Russ.  Even after Rome collapsed in the fifth century, Constantinople remained, its citizens proudly assuming the mantle Romanoii for themselves.  These Romans were different, to be sure, from the Latin worshippers of Apollo or Jupiter.  The Greek speaking Romans of Constantinople were Christians, and it was their sacred duty to protect Christian Europe from the powerful professors of competing faiths who ruled the East, whether from Persia, Arabia, or the vast steppes of Asia. 

As the sun rose on the morning of April 12, 1204, a great army was once again encamped near the walls of Constantinople.  This was a far different foe than previous ones the city had faced.  This army was not pagan or Moslem.  This was a European army of Crusaders, sent by the pope to fight the Infidels who had recently conquered Jerusalem.   However, under the leadership and financing of the Doge of Venice, and with the silent blessing of the Bishop of Rome, the mostly French army of the Fourth Crusade had been diverted from its Holy War to support Venetian imperial designs for control of the Mediterranean and lucrative trade with the East. 

By the spring of 1204, the Empire was a far cry from the mighty realm of Constantine or Justinian.  For 25 years, it had suffered a series of civil wars and dynastic squabbles.  Serbia and Bulgaria were breaking free from Constantinople’s authority, and Venice had extended its reach down the entire Adriatic coast.  Normans were in the Byzantine lands of Southern Italy, and were now threatening Epirus, in northwestern Greece.  On top of these troubles in the West, the Seljuk Turks were extending their dangerous presence into western Anatolia. 

Although the situation appeared dire, Constantinople had seen worse.  It had pushed back a series of invaders, and reasserted its supremacy on several occassions during the previous 900 years.  The East Roman, or Byzantine, Empire was not a continually contracting entity.  Its history had been characterized by cycles in which each contraction was followed by a period of vitality and growth.  Surely, the Empire was simply in another of its weaker phases, just waiting for the arrival of a strong dynasty to restore its rightful place as the protector of Christendom. 

Circumstances were different this time, however.  The Crusading army was not camped before the imposing land walls of the city like previous invaders.  The land walls had proven to be impregnable ever since Emperor Theodosius built them early in the fifth century.  For the first time since Emperor Constantine changed the name of the city from Byzantium to Constantinople, an invading army had managed to wrest control of the city’s harbor, the body of water called the Golden Horn, from the Byzantine navy.  No alien force had ever managed to control the Golden Horn, and this made all the difference.  The harbor defenses were far weaker than those of the land walls. 

The assault began at sunrise.  Venetian ships rowed south across the Golden Horn towing great siege towers, battering rams, and heavily armored French knights.  Late in the morning, the wind shifted so that it blew across the harbor from the north, producing high waves and raising the sea level on the southern shore to enable siege tower ramps to reach the defensive towers on the harbor wall.  The first knights to cross the ramps were quickly cut down, their bodies thrown to the rocky beach below.  But the harbor towers were too small to hold a large defensive force.  As more and more ships reached the walls with their siege tower ramps, the defenders were overwhelmed.  Crusader knights began to take control of the harbor defenses. 

Byzantine infantry was redeployed from the land walls to meet this threat.  This was a huge mistake.  Crusaders high up in the harbor wall towers signaled to their compatriots down below that part of the land wall had been left largely undefended.  Soon, battering rams punched a hole in one of the land wall’s great wooden gates.  More Crusaders entered the city, and managed to open another of the land wall’s gates from the inside, enabling French cavalry to pour into the city.

By the time night fell, the northwestern neighborhoods of Constantinople were in enemy hands.  The pillage had already commenced.  The next day, faced with the unthinkable, the decadent and demoralized Byzantine army disintegrated.  The Byzantine nobility offered to instate a new emperor who would be amenable to Venetian and Crusader demands for tribute and trading concessions.  But this was not to be.  The invaders had already signed an agreement to dissolve the empire and divide the spoils.  After 900 years, the Eastern Roman Empire finally fell, not to infidels from the east, but to Christians from the West. 

Christian charity, however, was in short supply.  Geoffrey de Villehardouin, one of the French leaders of the Crusade, later recalled, “All of us gave thanks to God for the victory and rejoiced, for even those of us who had been poor now lived in wealth and comfort.”  Wealth and comfort, of course, were not achieved without cruel brutality.  “They respected nothing,” wrote a Greek eye witness, “neither the churches, nor the sacred images of Christ…They acted like enemies of the Cross!  They committed atrocities upon men, respectable women, virgins, and young girls.”  Drunken cavarlymen rode horses into Haggia Sophia and took whatever valuables they could carry.  Ancient works of art too large to loot were destroyed on the spot.  Nuns seeking refuge behind the great altar were taken away for the pleasure of the victorious Crusaders.

Constantinople remained occupied by “Latins” for 57 years.  Much of the Greek court, along with the Orthodox Patriarch, fled to the old Byzantine city of Nicea in northwestern Anatolia.  Eventually, the Nicene Greeks re-entered Constantinople and restored the Byzantine Empire in the year 1261.  The restored empire, however, was just a shell of its former self.  The city had been utterly devastated, its former wealth completely looted, its opulent churches left empty and bare.  Much of the city was depopulated and lay in ruins; it would never approach its former glory.  The restored empire never came close to matching even the contracted boundaries of 1204. 

Incredibly, this rump “empire” lasted nearly 200 years.  But it existed at the whim of outside forces, first Serbia, and later the Ottoman Turks, to whom the humiliated Byzantines were forced to pay tribute as a vassal.  Many today think of the year 1453 as the end of the Byzantine Empire, for that is the year it fell to the Ottomans.  But it was really the year 1204 that sealed Byzantium’s fate.  As the Turks readied their own conquest of Constantinople, many in that city remembered what had happened 200 years before, and expressed preferance for the Sultan’s turban to the Pope’s mitre. 

1204 is a year whose aftermath is still felt 800 years later.  After the events of 1204, the division of Christendom between the Roman Catholic West and the Orthodox East became irrevocably permanent.  After the events of 1204, Western Europe achieved a prominence over Eastern Europe that has remained to this day.  After the events of 1204, Greek scholars versed in the artistic and scientific heritage of classical Greece began to pass their knowledge to students from Italy, marking the true start of the Italian Renaissance.  After the events of 1204, a dark distrust often poisoned relations between the Latin and Germanic West, and the Slavic and Greek East.  After the events of 1204, leadership of the Orthodox East began moving away from the city of Constantinople, to the center of a new empire far to the north.  To be sure, 13th century Moscow was not yet ready to assume the imperial mantle of Byzantium.  But years later, a Russian monk would proclaim, “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands fast, and a fourth there cannot be.”  In Moscow, rulers would take the title of “Caesar” (czar), and assume the imperial trappings of the Byzantine court.  Even today, a modified Russian Empire continues to hold sway over much of the Orthodox East.  Its sense of entitlement and influence over peoples once under the suzerainty of Constantinople has remained a factor in Weltpolitik for hundreds of years.  The world changed on April 12, 1204, and many of those changes remain with us today.