MED0064 – The Venetians assault the walls of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade, 1204

The Fourth Crusade and the Venetian assault on Constantinople, 1204

No crusading expedition missed its objective as completely as the Fourth. Proclaimed by Innocent III in 1198 to recover Jerusalem by way of Egypt, it ended six years later with the sack of the largest Christian city in Europe by a Christian army. This was not the result of a plan. It was the consequence of a shipping contract that nobody could honour.

A debt that could not be paid

The crusaders had commissioned from Venice a fleet for thirty-five thousand men. Fewer than a third turned up, and the agreed sum remained due in full: the Republic had suspended its merchant marine for a year to build those ships. Doge Enrico Dandolo, in his eighties and nearly blind, proposed payment in military service — first the recapture of Zara, a Christian and Hungarian city, then intervention in a Byzantine dynastic dispute. Each step was a reasonable answer to the immediate problem, and each step carried the expedition further from the Holy Land.

Assault from the sea

Giuseppe Rava depicts what made the operation possible: the attack delivered from shipboard against the sea walls along the Golden Horn, the thinnest section of the circuit, with flying bridges lowered from the masts onto the walkways. The technique demanded skilled seamen as much as soldiers, and Venice was the only Latin power able to supply them. The Theodosian land walls, which would hold for another two and a half centuries, were never the real target.

The sack

The city fell on 12 April 1204 and was plundered for three days. Libraries, reliquaries and ancient works were lost in quantities impossible to estimate; part of the spoil is still visible in Venice, beginning with the bronze horses of St Mark’s. The political consequences lasted: the Byzantine Empire, broken into Latin and Greek successor states, was reassembled only in 1261 and never recovered its former strength.

A breach that never closed

In religious terms 1204 weighed more than any theological dispute. The schism between Rome and Constantinople, formally dated to 1054, became from that point a rupture felt by ordinary people rather than argued by clerics. John Paul II expressed regret for the sack in 2001, nearly eight centuries later.