Hey There, According to Cambridge historian Steven Runciman there was “never a greater
crime against humanity” than the sack of Constantinople.
For 1000 years Constantinople had been the repository of the riches of Rome, one of the
greatest empires the world has ever known.
The Eastern Roman Empire, which some call Byzantine Empire, had had many ups and downs
over its centuries of power.
But it had never been sacked.
Its massive walls, built in the 400s AD had kept it safe.
These wall didn’t just preserve the cultural achievements and riches of the Christian Byzantines.
As the final capital of the Roman Emperors, it also held the greatest works of Greek and
Roman antiquity as well.
All of this was burnt, destroyed and stolen.
For centuries the Greeks, and to some extent other Christians, including a lot of folks
in my comments, have lamented the final fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The Turks finally breached Those ancient walls and took the city.
Greek fantasies of taking back this city, and the Aegean coast of Turkey have caused
hundreds of thousands of deaths as recently as the last century.
The fall of Constantinople has been remembered as one of the greatest crimes Muslims ever
committed against Christians.
But all this anger, and all of this resentment is based on a myth.
It wasn’t Muslims who destroyed Constantinople.
Christians destroyed it.
That historian Steven Runciman wasn’t talking about the fall of Constantinople in 1453,
he was talking about the city’s true destruction, which took place in 1204.
Around 1200 the Eastern Roman Empire was perhaps running out of steam a bit, but it was still
tremendously powerful, and Constantinople was probably the most impressive city in the
world.
Since the 1070s the Eastern Romans had been threatened by Turkish raiders.
So they decided to ask the Christians of the West for help.
Those Christians, led by the Catholic Pope, launched what became known as the Crusades
to help fight off this Muslim threat.
This never worked very well.
These militant Christian fanatics were more interested in setting up their own kingdoms
than they were in restoring lands to the Eastern Roman Empire.
They took Jerusalem for themselves in 1099 and then lost it 100 years later.
But It was the 4th crusade that truly revealed the limits of Christian solidarity in 1204.
There’s only one man with a visible grave in Haghia Sophia, the Eastern Roman Empire’s
greatest surviving Church.
Enrico Dandolo, a Venetian Doge is a surprising choice.
He was the man who convinced the Crusaders that sacking Jerusalem again wouldn’t be
anywhere near as profitable as taking Constantinople.
The inconvenient fact that the city was held by their fellow Christians didn’t hold them
back one bit.
First they installed a pretender on the throne, and when that didn’t work, they took the
city themselves, destroying everything in their path.
Some of Venice’s proudest possessions were stolen at this time, but much more was destroyed
than taken.
“In the Cathedral of St. Sophia the ample veil of the sanctuary was rent asunder for
the sake of the golden fringe; and the altar, a monument of art and riches was broken in
pieces and shared among the captors.
Their mules and horses were laden with the wrought silver and gilt carvings which they
tore down from the doors and pulpit; and if the beasts stumbled under the burden they
were stabbed by their impatient drivers, and the holy pavement streamed with their impure
blood.”
Edward Gibbon, who wrote that description, can go overboard sometimes, but the contemporary
accounts aren’t much better.
It still puzzles me why Dandolo’s grave is visible in Haghia Sophia today.
Maybe the Turks want to acknowledge Constantinople’s true conqueror?
The Western Christians held Constantinople for almost 60 years, running the once great
city into the ground.
The Eastern Roman Empire never fully re-consolidated their three successor states.These states
fought each other, and the Western Christians right up until the end.
One of them did manage to take Constantinople back in 1261, but the Ottoman Turks began
their rise shortly after that.
The Ottomans first rose up on land that would probably have been safely Christian if it
weren’t for the fourth Crusade.
This Christian empire never came back from what Christians did to it.
And that’s the crazy thing.
The Eastern Roman Empire invited this horror on themselves.
The first crusade was launched back in 1095 by Pope Urban at the invitation of an Eastern
Roman Emperor.
The emperor thought that the violent religious crusading spirit would save his empire.
It ended up killing it.
Again and again in history, from the Crusades to modern Saudi Arabia, we see people who
think religious fanaticism will help them somehow.
It usually ends up hurting their own people most of all.
Next up we’ll cover a Muslim myth of Christian evil, the fall of Al-Andalus and the end of
Muslim Spain
Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and thanks so much to our producers and patrons.
If you want to know more about religious myth and religious fanaticism and how it works
today, I suggest you check out my essay “Everybody’s Lying About Islam” available in paperback
and on the Amazon Kindle.