Just finished this book about the sack of Constantinople by knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and started on another book about the final sack by the Turks in 1453. This was a hard book to read, because from the very beginning, you know that a thousand-year old culture, which had roots hundreds of years before that, was totally destroyed when the Latin Christians crusading to recover Jerusalem were diverted to Constantinople. The book does a good job of explaining the motives of the various parties, and how this was not a clash of good and bad forces, but rather the result of intense pressures on the crusaders by their debts to the Venetians, which eventually caused them to sack the city of Constantinople to gain the money necessary to pay their debts to Venice. The abysmal condition of the Byzantine leadership was new to me, as was the remarkable courage of the crusaders, their lack of good judgment in overestimating the size of the crusade when ordering transportation from the Venetians (which started the whole train of events) and the startling leadership displayed by the Venetian doge that accompanied the crusade to protect his city's interests.
But what goes unexplained, and what never fails to shock, is the astonishing depravity of the sack of the city itself. Not that the Byzantines, or indeed any other culture (with the notable exception of the Saracens) did much different when it took a city, but the scale of the theft and the rape and cruelty and the plunder was, and is, unparallelled. And that it was committed by Christian knights who had sworn an oath to do no such thing the day before, and yet did it to fellow Christians, is shocking. The blasphemy that the knights subjected the holy sites of Constantinople and the Eastern church to is still impossible to comprehend. This is one of the low points in the history of Western civilization. There have certainly been worse atrocities, but in terms of single events, caused by religious forces, this has to be right up there. The level of hypocrisy is impossible to understate. What began as a religious crusade (a flawed proposition from the beginning) descended into an unparalleled orgy of greed and destruction.
Overall, a very depressing (although well-written) book. It says something that I was glad to finish it and get started on the next sack of the city, by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. By comparison, his motives were at least honest ones, and he stopped his soliders from the sort of sack that the Christian knights were only too happy to engage in.