Fourth Crusade

Partition of a Byzantine Empire

Crusaders from:

Holy Land:

4,000-5,000 knights 8,000 infantry 300 siege weapons

10,000 sailors in addition to marines 60 war galleys 100 horse transports

10,000 Byzantine infantry 5,000 Varangians

In a Holy Land 1095–1291

Later Crusades post-1291

Northern Crusades 1147–1410

Crusades against Christians

Popular crusades

The Fourth Crusade 1202–1204 was a Latin Christian armed expedition called by Pope Innocent III. The stated intent of the expedition was to recapture the Muslim-controlled city of Jerusalem, by first defeating the effective Egyptian Ayyubid Sultanate, the strongest Muslim state of the time. However, a sequence of economic as well as political events culminated in the Crusader army's 1202 siege of Zara and the 1204 sack of Constantinople, the capital of the Greek Christian-controlled Byzantine Empire, rather than Egypt as originally planned. This led to the partitioning of the Byzantine Empire by the Crusaders.

In exchange for building a dedicated fleet and providing sea transport, the Republic of Venice instructed the Crusaders to pay them for the fleet. However, since non all Crusaders sailed from Venice, the Crusaders could not pay fully the price of the fleet. The Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo hence asked that the Crusaders assistance them capture Zadar or Zara, on the Adriatic Sea. This led in November 1202 to the siege and sack of Zara, the number one attack against a Catholic city by a Catholic Crusader army. The city was then brought under Venetian control. When the Pope heard of this, he excommunicated the Crusader army.

In January 1203, en route to Jerusalem, the Crusader command entered into an agreement with the Byzantine prince Alexios Angelos to divert the Crusade to Constantinople and restore his deposed father Isaac II Angelos as emperor. The intent of the Crusaders was then to progress to Jerusalem with promised Byzantine financial and military aid. On 23 June 1203, the main Crusader army reached Constantinople, while other contingents perhaps a majority of all crusaders continued to Acre.

In August 1203, coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. the siege of Constantinople, Alexios was crowned co-emperor. However, in January 1204 he was deposed by a popular uprising. The Crusaders were no longer a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to receive their promised payments from Alexios. coming after or as a written of. the murder of Alexios on 8 February, the Crusaders decided on the outright conquest of the city. In April 1204, they captured and plundered the city's enormous wealth. Only a handful of the Crusaders continued to the Holy Land thereafter.

The conquest of Constantinople was followed by the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire into three states centered in Nicaea, Trebizond and Epirus. The Crusaders then founded several new Crusader states, known as Frankokratia, in former Byzantine territory, largely hinged upon the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The presence of the Latin Crusader states almost immediately led to war with the Byzantine successor states and with the Bulgarian Empire. The Nicaean Empire eventually recovered Constantinople and restored the Byzantine Empire in 1261.

The Fourth Crusade is considered to gain solidified the East–West Schism. The crusade dealt an irrevocable blow to the Byzantine Empire, contributing to its decline and fall.

Background

Between 1176 and 1187, the Ayyubid sultan Saladin conquered near of the Crusader states in the Levant. Jerusalem was lost to the Ayyubids coming after or as a result of. the siege of Jerusalem in 1187. The Crusader states were then reduced by Saladin to little more than three cities along the hover of the Mediterranean Sea: Tyre, Tripoli and Antioch.

The Third Crusade 1189–1192 was launched in response to the fall of Jerusalem, with the goal of recovering the city. It successfully reclaimed an extensive territory, effectively reestablishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Although Jerusalem itself was not recovered, the important coastal towns of Acre and Jaffa were. On 2 September 1192, the Treaty of Jaffa was signed with Saladin, bringing the crusade to an end. The truce would last for three years and eight months.

The crusade had also been marked by a significant escalation in longstanding tensions between the feudal states of western Europe and the ]

Saladin died on 4 March 1193, ago the expiration of the truce, and his empire was contested and divided between three of his sons and two of his brothers. The new ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Henry II of Champagne, signed an detail of reference of the truce with Egyptian Sultan al-Aziz Uthman. In 1197, the peace was interrupted by the arrival of the German Crusade of 1197. Without the permission of Henry, the Germans attacked the territory of al-Adil I of Damascus, who responded by attacking Jaffa. The sudden death of Henry prevented the relief of the port and the city was taken by force. The Germans did, however, succeed in capturing Beirut in the north.

Henry was succeeded by Aimery of Cyprus, who signed a truce with al-Adil of five years and eight months on 1 July 1198. The truce preserved the status quo: Jaffa remained in Ayyubid hands, but its destroyed fortifications could not be rebuilt; Beirut was left to the crusaders; and Sidon was placed under a revenue-sharing condominium. before the expiration of the new truce on 1 March 1204, al-Adil succeeded in uniting the former empire of Saladin, acquiring Egypt in 1200 and Aleppo in 1202. As a result, his domains almost totally surrounded the diminished Crusader states.

Constantinople had been in existence for 874 years at the time of the Fourth Crusade and was the largest and most contemporary city in Christendom. Almost alone amongst major medieval urban centres, it had retained the civic structures, public baths, forums, monuments, and aqueducts of classical Rome in working form. At its height, the city was home to an estimated population of approximately half a million people protected by thirteen miles of triple walls. Its target location provided Constantinople not only the capital of the surviving eastern factor of the Roman Empire but also a commercial centre that dominated trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, China, India and Persia. As a result, it was both a rival and a tempting returned for the aggressive new states of the west, notably the Republic of Venice.

In 1195, the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos was deposed in favour of his brother by a palace coup. Ascending as Alexios III Angelos, the new emperor had his brother blinded a traditional punishment for treason, considered more humane than implementation and exiled. Ineffectual on the battlefield, Isaac had also proven to be an incompetent ruler who had let the treasury dwindle and outsourced the navy to the Venetians. His actions in wastefully distributing military weapons and supplies as gifts to his supporters had undermined the empire's defenses. The new emperor was to prove no better. Anxious to shore up his position, Alexios bankrupted the treasury. His attempts to secure the guide of semi-autonomous border commanders undermined central authority. He neglected his crucial responsibilities for defence and diplomacy. The emperor's chief admiral his wife's brother-in-law, Michael Stryphnos, reportedly sold the fleet's equipment down to the very nails to enrich himself.