The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (1204)
In brief
The Fourth Crusade set out to recover the Holy Land and instead, in April 1204, captured and sacked Constantinople — the greatest Christian city in the world. For three days a Western army looted its churches, seized its relics, and desecrated its altars, then set up a Latin empire on the ruins of Byzantium. More than the excommunications of 1054, it was 1204 that made the schism between East and West feel final — a wound the Orthodox have never entirely forgotten. The Pope who had launched the crusade himself condemned what it had done.
How a crusade turned on Constantinople
The Fourth Crusade was called by Pope Innocent III and aimed at Egypt as the road to Jerusalem. It went astray almost at once. The crusaders, gathered at Venice, could not pay the enormous fee they owed for their fleet; the aged and shrewd Doge, Enrico Dandolo, bent the expedition toward Venetian interests. Then a Byzantine prince seeking his family’s throne offered rich rewards if the crusaders would restore him, and so the army was drawn to Constantinople.
When the promised payments failed and relations collapsed, the crusaders resolved to take the city by force. Historians still debate how much of this was cold calculation and how much a chain of debts, quarrels, and accidents; but the outcome was not in doubt. In April 1204 they stormed the walls of the capital of Eastern Christendom — a Christian army assaulting the greatest Christian city on earth.
Three days
For three days the city was given over to pillage. Churches were stripped of their treasures; tombs and altars were broken open; the gathered relics and sacred vessels of centuries were carried off to the West, where many remain to this day. In Hagia Sophia itself, the great church of Holy Wisdom, soldiers tore apart its silver furnishings, and by the horrified account of the Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates a woman of the streets sang and danced on the patriarch’s throne. Even Western chroniclers who took part wrote of plunder on a scale the world had not seen.
On the ruins the victors founded a Latin Empire, crowning Baldwin of Flanders as emperor in Hagia Sophia and installing a Latin patriarch. Byzantine rulers in exile recovered the City only in 1261, and the empire never regained its former strength. The four bronze horses that still stand over the entrance of St. Mark’s in Venice were among the spoils of those days — a monument, to Orthodox eyes, of a Christian treasure taken by Christian hands.
The wound that would not heal
The importance of 1204 is not only political but spiritual. Before it, the schism was a dispute many still hoped to mend; after it, the breach lived in the memory of ordinary Orthodox Christians, who had seen the holiest places of their world defiled by fellow Christians wearing the cross. Reunion councils at Lyons (1274) and Florence (1438-39) would later gather signatures, but the Eastern faithful would not receive a union that the memory of 1204 had poisoned.
Honesty requires two things to be said together. The sack was a real and grievous wrong, and it wounded the unity of the Church for centuries. And it was condemned at the time by the very Pope who had launched the crusade: Innocent III, learning what his soldiers had done, rebuked them bitterly for turning their swords against Christians and defiling holy things. Centuries later, in 2001, Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for the events of 1204 to the Orthodox, and in 2004 spoke of them again with regret. The Church remembers this history not to nurse a grievance but because reconciliation must begin with the truth honestly told on both sides.