Fourth Crusade Ep 2: When Crusaders attacked and burned Constantinople

We started the story of the Fourth Crusade in our last episode, and to briefly remind you of where we are, Pope Innocent III had sent out the call for the Fourth Crusade.

Not because there had been anything new that had happened in the Near East, but because the Third Crusade hadn't succeeded in retaking Jerusalem, and the Pope wanted to try again.

We left the men of the Fourth Crusade encamped in the city of Zara on the Adriatic coast, what is now the coast of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

So how did they end up there? Well, the people who organized the Fourth Crusade estimated that some 30,000 men would sail from Venice and embark on this mission.

The problem was that only about 10,000 of the expected soldiers actually showed up.

A few thousand never came to Venice at all and simply arranged their own passage to the Near East, and that left the ones who did arrive in Venice with a very large transportation bill.They had done a contract with Venice to build the ships that would be necessary to carry the army of the Fourth Crusade into the Near East.

The ships were ready.

The Venetians had held up their end of the bargain.

But the crusaders needed to cough up the cash.

The problem was that with only 10,000 men available, paying passage for 30,000 was going to leave them significantly in debt.

There just weren't enough men to pay their share to fill out the amount of money that had been promised to the Venetians.

So after some tense negotiations, the Doge of Venice, the man who was the head of the Venetian city-state, a guy called Enrico Dandolo, proposes a deal to the leaders of the Fourth Crusade.

And he says, "You can pay off the remaining money that you owe Venice out of the proceeds of the crusade, out of the booty and the spoils that you're gonna obtain after fighting successful battles.

But in the meantime, we're gonna do a little diversion and stop off at the city of Zara because we in Venice have had control of this city in the past and we've recently lost it to the Hungarians.

We want Zara back.

So you, the armies of the Fourth Crusade, are going to sail along with us to Zara and we're gonna put Zara back under Venetian control." Now, this was an incredibly unpopular move for many of the men in the Fourth Crusade.

First of all, it was kind of a high-level deal that was done between a nobleman called Boniface of Montferrat, who was the de facto leader of the Fourth Crusade, and the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo.

They were trying to work out a deal that would give the Venetians and the crusaders what both of them needed.

But for the everyday rank and file crusader, your standard infantryman, he wasn't privy to this deal.

He thought that he was still going directly to the Near East.

And so there was a good deal of discontent and downright anger when the crusaders find themselves rolling up on the shores of Zara and they're told that their first task is going to be to attack this city.

Zara's a Christian city.

It's under the control of the Hungarians who have been Christian for some time and the Hungarian king has even taken the crusader cross himself.

So for many of the guys on the crusade, this felt like a completely illegitimate target.

They thought they'd signed up to fight Muslims and not Christians.