The Sack of Constantinople, 1204

On 12–13 April 1204 the army of the Fourth Crusade stormed Constantinople, and for three days the greatest Christian city in the world was given over to slaughter, rape, and a sack whose systematic profanation of churches — Hagia Sophia above all — was recorded by the Greek eyewitness Niketas Choniates and rebuked in Pope Innocent III’s own letters. Assessed from within the Church, 1204 is an atrocity against the Church, whatever its strategic context; this file documents it from the sources on both sides.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

How the Crusade Came to the City

The Fourth Crusade was preached by Innocent III in 1198 for the recovery of Jerusalem via Egypt. Its diversion was stepwise, and the scholarship has long since abandoned both the old “treason theory” (a Venetian master-plot) and the apologetic of pure accident in favor of a documented chain of decisions: the treaty of 1201 with Venice for transport the crusaders could not pay for; the sack of the Christian (and Hungarian, hence crusader-protected) city of Zara in November 1202 to discharge the debt, for which Innocent excommunicated the army; the offer of the Byzantine pretender Alexius Angelos — restoration to the throne with his father Isaac II in exchange for money, military aid, and the submission of the Greek Church to Rome; the first capture of the city in July 1203; and the collapse of the puppet regime, the coup of Alexius V Mourtzouphlos, and the crusaders’ March 1204 pact to conquer and partition the empire outright (Queller and Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 2nd ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, the standard account of the diversion; Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004; Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context, Harlow: Longman, 2003; the March 1204 partition treaty in Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, Leiden: Brill, 2000). Behind the contingencies lay the deeper estrangement this collection has traced — and its recent violent expressions, above all the Constantinopolitan mob’s massacre of the city’s Latin residents in 1182, which Latin memory had not forgiven (Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, on 1182; Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, conclusion).

On 12 April 1204 the Venetian ships carried the walls on the Golden Horn; on the 13th resistance ceased; and the customary three days’ sack began in a city of perhaps 400,000 — the wealthiest and most relic-filled in Christendom (Phillips, The Fourth Crusade, 2004; Queller and Madden, The Fourth Crusade, 1997).

The Greek Eyewitness: Niketas Choniates

Niketas Choniates — senior imperial official, historian, present in the city with his family — left the fullest eyewitness account in his Annals and the set-piece lament on the city’s fall. His testimony, in Harry Magoulias’ translation (O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), records: the indiscriminate killing and the violation of women, including nuns; the plundering of the Great Palace and the tombs of the emperors; and, at the center of his indictment, the profanation of the sanctuaries. In Hagia Sophia the crusaders smashed the altar and iconostasis for their precious metal, loaded the holy vessels and Gospel-covers onto mules driven into the sanctuary — beasts that slipped and were slaughtered where they fell, fouling the pavement with blood and dung — while, in the scene that became the emblem of the whole, “a certain harlot” was set on the patriarch’s synthronon to sing and dance her obscenities in the holy place (Choniates, Annals, the sack narrative, trans. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, 1984; the desecration of Hagia Sophia and the harlot on the synthronon are in the account of the city’s capture). Choniates’ comparative judgment is famous: even the Saracens, he wrote, had been merciful and kind by comparison when they took Jerusalem — Saladin in 1187 had neither violated the women nor stripped the inhabitants nor filled the Holy Sepulchre with corpses; “thus,” he concludes of the crusaders, did the professed soldiers of Christ deal with Christians (Choniates, Annals, trans. Magoulias, 1984, in the reflections on the sack).

Choniates was a partisan witness with literary designs, and modern scholarship reads him critically; but on the substance — massacre, mass rape, systematic sacrilege, and the stripping of the city’s sacred treasure — his account is corroborated from the Latin side, where the same deeds appear as boasts or confessions: Geoffrey of Villehardouin marvels that “so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world” (Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Shaw, in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), and the monk Gunther of Pairis celebrates his own abbot’s relic-thefts in the Hystoria Constantinopolitana (Gunther of Pairis, Hystoria Constantinopolitana, trans. Andrea, The Capture of Constantinople, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). The diverted stream of relics and treasure — the horses of San Marco, the Halberstadt and Venice treasuries — is itself physical evidence (Phillips, The Fourth Crusade, 2004, on the relic translations).

[Disputed: the casualty and loot figures for the sack. No contemporary source gives a credible casualty total for the three days: the crusader-side Devastatio Constantinopolitana gives 2,000 Greeks killed at the initial breach; Choniates gives no numbers; and modern historians decline to estimate totals, speaking of killing "on a large scale" rather than of figures (Devastatio Constantinopolitana, trans. in Andrea, Contemporary Sources, 2000; Queller and Madden, The Fourth Crusade, 1997; Phillips, The Fourth Crusade, 2004). For the loot, Villehardouin reports the officially pooled booty at some 400,000 silver marks besides what was privately stolen (Villehardouin, Conquest, trans. Shaw, 1963); historians treat the figure as an order-of-magnitude contemporary estimate, not an audited sum (Phillips 2004; Queller and Madden 1997). Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, contested statistics are given here only as named sources' claims.]

The Pope’s Own Rebuke

Innocent III’s reaction is documented in his registers and must be reported in both its phases — it is cited often, and often carelessly. In the first news of November 1204, Innocent welcomed the conquest as a “magnificent miracle” by which God had transferred the empire “from the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the devout, from schismatics to Catholics,” and moved to secure the new Latin order (Innocent III to Baldwin of Flanders, November 1204, Register 7:153; trans. in Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, Leiden: Brill, 2000). Only later, as fuller reports arrived — and as the crusade’s failure to proceed to the Holy Land became undeniable — did he write the famous rebuke to his legate Peter Capuano (summer 1205):

“How, indeed, is the Greek church to be brought back into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See when she has been beset with so many afflictions and persecutions that she sees in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs? As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood, they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex… they exposed both matrons and virgins, even those dedicated to God, to the sordid lusts of boys” (Innocent III to Peter Capuano, Register 8:126 [ed. Hageneder et al., Die Register Innocenz’ III., vol. 8, Vienna, 2001]; trans. Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, 2000).

The letter concedes, from the summit of the Latin Church, the two points the Orthodox indictment rests on: that the deeds themselves were unspeakable, and that they made the schism humanly unhealable — the Greeks now “with reason” detesting the Latins. Innocent nonetheless did not undo the result: the Latin empire and the Latin patriarchate were confirmed, and the conquest was absorbed into the canonical order of the Western church (Andrea, Contemporary Sources, 2000; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, ch. 6; see The Latin Empire and the Popular Schism).

The Church’s Assessment

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1 this collection assesses 1204 from within the Church, and the assessment is not complicated: the sack of Constantinople was an atrocity against the Church — the desecration of her greatest sanctuary, the violation of her consecrated women, the theft of her holy things — committed by armies vowed to Christ, absolved and organized within the Western obedience, and retained in its fruits by the Western church. The strategic context (Venetian debt, Byzantine coups, the 1182 massacre, the ordinary savagery of medieval war) explains the event; it does not alter its character, which Innocent III’s own register states as plainly as any Orthodox polemic. Nor is the judgment merely retrospective: it was the judgment of the victims recorded by Choniates, and of the pope. What 1204 did to the schism — making it popular, mutual, and effectively irreversible — is the subject of the companion file (Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, conclusion: for the Orthodox, the Fourth Crusade is where the schism became fact in the hearts of the people; see The Latin Empire and the Popular Schism).

References

Choniates, Niketas. O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates. Trans. Harry J. Magoulias. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. (The Greek eyewitness: the sack, Hagia Sophia, the harlot on the synthronon, the comparison with Saladin.)
Innocent III. Die Register Innocenz’ III. Ed. O. Hageneder et al. Vienna: Verlag der ÖAW. Register 7:153 (to Baldwin, November 1204) and 8:126 (to Peter Capuano, 1205). English trans. in Andrea, Contemporary Sources. (The two-phase papal reaction; the rebuke.)
Andrea, Alfred J. Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade. Leiden: Brill, 2000. (The registers, the Devastatio Constantinopolitana, the partition treaty.)
Villehardouin, Geoffrey of. The Conquest of Constantinople. Trans. M. R. B. Shaw, in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. (The marshal’s account; the booty.)
Gunther of Pairis. Hystoria Constantinopolitana. Trans. Alfred J. Andrea, The Capture of Constantinople. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. (Latin relic-theft narrated from within.)
Queller, Donald E., and Thomas F. Madden. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. (The standard modern history of the diversion and sack.)
Phillips, Jonathan. The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. (Narrative history; the relic translations; assessment of figures.)
Angold, Michael. The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context. Harlow: Longman, 2003. (The event in Byzantine context.)
Nicol, Donald M. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. (The 1182 massacre of the Latins and Venetian-Byzantine relations.)
Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Conclusion. (1204 as the completion of the schism.)
Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. Ch. 6. (The Orthodox historical assessment.)