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Fourth Crusade
The ongoing suspicions between the “Latins” and the “Greeks” during the first
three Crusades were now to reach a crescendo. The Fourth Crusade entailed a
series of events that still live in infamy in Greek minds to this day. In total
disregard of the mission to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity, in 1204 the
crusaders diverted their attentions away from Jerusalem and instead proceeded to
attack, sack, pillage, occupy, and rule Constantinople itself in the name of the
Roman Church for many years. This indeed was a “civilizational” cataclysm, the
final psychological breaking point between the two great churches and Christian
cultures of East and West, with incalculable repercussions that still echo today.
Pope Innocent III had not in fact approved any attack on Constantinople. But
Latin clerics closer to the scene were driven by other motivations, including
cupidity and the quest for power, and sought to override the pope’s view. The
prominent contemporary Greek historian Spiros Vryonis describes the crusader
attack on Constantinople in the following terms:
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. Constantinople had become a veritable museum
of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that
the Latins were astounded at the riches they found. Though the Venetians
had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were
themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others
destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine,
violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox clerics. The Crusaders vented
their hatred for the Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the
greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the
icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal
throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the
Church’s holy vessels.
The estrangement of East and West, which had proceeded over the
centuries, culminated in the horrible massacre that accompanied the
conquest of Constantinople. The Greeks were convinced that even the
Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin
Christians. The defeat of Byzantium, already in a state of decline,

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accelerated political degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually
became an easy prey to the Turks. The Crusading movement thus resulted,
ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of course the exact
opposite of its original intention.
The disastrous future implications of this Latin assault upon Constantinople
were indeed fully grasped by Pope Innocent III, whose long-term aspiration was
actually to restore church unity between East and West—albeit under his own
leadership. The pillage of Constantinople removed all possibility of such a
rapprochement for—what he could not know—nearly a thousand years. As the
pope himself wrote:
How is the Church of the Greeks, when afflicted with such trials and
persecutions, to be brought back into the unity of the Church and devotion
to the Apostolic See? It has seen in the Latins nothing but an example of
perdition and the works of darkness, so that it now abhors them worse
than dogs. For they who are supposed to serve Christ rather than their own
interests, who should have used their swords against the pagans, are
dripping with the blood of Christians. They have spared neither religion,
nor age, nor sex and have committed adultery and fornication in public,
exposing matrons and even nuns to the filthy brutality of their troops. For
them it was not enough to exhaust the riches of the Empire and to despoil
both great men and small; they had to lay their hands on the treasures of
the Church… seizing silver valuables from the altar, breaking them into
pieces to divide amongst themselves, violating the sanctuaries and
carrying off crosses and relics.
The crusaders then imposed a Latin prelate over the city. The population
meanwhile rejected the crusaders’ candidate for emperor and popular anger
against the “Latins” boiled over. But a Latin emperor nonetheless assumed the
throne in Constantinople and ruled for fifty-seven years, until the city was
recaptured by the Byzantines in 1261. None of these events have been forgiven
or forgotten by the Orthodox Church. Subsequent efforts at reconciliation or
establishment of theological union by the pope at various times following the
sack of Constantinople were rebuffed by the Eastern Church; the strongest voice
of rejection came from public opinion, which vilified any Orthodox priests who
would even contemplate negotiations of potential terms of unity under Rome’s

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conditions.
Some eight hundred years later, in 2001, Pope John Paul II expressed his
sorrow to the Orthodox Church in his first visit to Orthodox territory, in
Romania. In 2004, the apology was finally accepted by the Ecumenical Patriarch
Bartholomew I. These actions constitute useful first steps in healing what is still
a prickly relationship going back nearly two millennia. Rome’s confrontation
with Constantinople during the Crusades ranked at least as high in importance to
the Eastern Empire as any confrontation with the Muslims, possibly more so
since it came from ostensibly fellow Christians. In a sense, then, the Crusades
wreaked incalculable damage upon the relationship between the Eastern and
Western churches, which perhaps exceeded the anger sowed at the time between
the Muslim and Western worlds. The world still lives with the legacy of both.

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