The outcome was inevitable: by April 1204, the defenses of Constantinople were breached in a climactic attack, and the crusaders surged in, despoiling the churches and palaces, killing the priests, and raping the women. It was the most merciless sack ever inflicted on a Christian city. Baldwin of Flanders was proclaimed emperor, and the Greek Orthodox Church, which had no say in the matter, was finally united with the Roman, under the authority of the pope.
It may be said to Innocent III’s (rather limited) credit that he did not authorize, still less organize, this atrocity. He protested against it and even excommunicated those Venetians who had facilitated it. On the other hand, he was not reluctant to see his church benefit from it. He did nothing to force the Venetians to restore their loot to the prostrate city. The matchless Greek bronze horses from Constantinople were installed on the façade of Saint Mark’s, never to return. Hundredweights of precious stones were lost to the Venetians; many of them may still, a thousand years later, be seen set in the Pala d’Oro, behind the high altar of Saint Mark’s. Gold, silver, and bejeweled reliquaries, monstrances, ciboriums, pyxes, patens, and chalices by the ton were distributed to church treasuries all over Europe but especially in Italy. The very icons were torn from the churches and broken up in thousands, burned to extract the precious metal from their gold-leaf backgrounds, which ran down into glittering puddles amid the ash. And nobody knows (though it is not hard to guess) what happened to such things as the high altar of Hagia Sophia, which beggared the descriptive powers of such crusaders as Robert de Clari, an unlettered knight dictating a memoir of the sack years after his return to France:
The master altar of the church was so rich that it was beyond price … made of gold and precious stones broken up and crushed all together, which a rich emperor had made. This table was fully fourteen feet long. Around the altar were columns of silver supporting a canopy over the altar which was made just like a church spire and it was all of solid silver and was so rich that no one could tell the money it was worth.
“Now about the size of the city,” recalled de Clari,
about the palaces and the other marvels that are there, we shall leave off telling you. For no man on earth, however long he might have lived in the city, could number them or recount them to you. And if anyone should recount to you the hundredth part of the richness and the beauty and the nobility that was found in the abbeys and the churches and in the palaces and in the city, it would seem like a lie and you would not believe it.
Neither richness, nor beauty, nor nobility could do anything to deflect the horde of ravening Frankish thugs who stripped Constantinople in the name of Jesus. The city was replete with other wonders, not of an artistic kind. It had a magical tube the size of a shepherd’s pipe hanging by the silver portal of Hagia Sophia, “of what material no man knew”; if a sick man put one end in his mouth, “it sucked out all the sickness and it made the poison run out of his mouth and it held him so fast that it made his eyes roll and turn in his head, and he could not get away until the tube had sucked all the sickness out of him.” And of course there were relics in profusion: wonder-working icons, pieces of the True Cross, the iron of the lance that pierced Jesus’ side on Calvary, the robe of our Lady, the head of John the Baptist, “and so many other rich relics that I could not recount them to you or tell you the whole truth.”
So much has been said about the importance of the Crusades as the collision of two utterly incompatible worldviews that their significance is habitually overblown. In the end, they did not make much difference to either Islam or Christianity, except as largely symbolic events.
The eleventh-to-thirteenth-century assaults of Christian forces were a peripheral affair in the Muslim world, and the Muslim counterattacks hardly menaced the stability of the Christian empire. (The later Ottoman surge against Europe, in the sixteenth century, so memorably beaten back from the walls of Vienna and repulsed by the galleys of Don John of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto, was of course quite a different matter.) Nevertheless, their memory retained enormous rhetorical power, casting the Arabs in European eyes as cruel, barbarous infidels, and the Christians in Muslim eyes as culturally bestial thugs. That is why the Islamic media, to this day, continue to refer to the American armies in Iraq as “crusaders”—not by any means the compliment that the stupider voices of American faith fancy it to be. What gets ignored in this clang and rattle of poisoned stereotypes is the immense cultural heritage shared between Islam and Christianity—though not the Christianity of the ranting American fundamentalist bigots, or the Islam of the murderous lowbrow ayatollahs. As Christians once built Chartres and Saint Peter’s, Muslims once built the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the courts and gardens of the Alhambra. Their librarians preserved all that we have of classical drama and philosophy. They created in al-Andalus, the Arab name for Moorish Spain, one of the supreme cultures in world history—supreme, not least, in its tolerance for other faiths and creeds, a tolerance not shared by the anti-Semitic Catholic brutes who did the dirty work of the Reconquista for Ferdinand and Isabella.
Today, Islam’s fundamentalist descendants can invent nothing, preserve nothing, create nothing. Comparing them with the remarkable figures of their own history is like comparing some illiterate IRA kneecapper to Seamus Heaney or William Butler Yeats. And it is the same on our side, where the Christian fundamentalists have no sacred art to show, no writing of aesthetic significance, and little architecture beyond drive-in megachurches.
Next only to the Fourth Crusade, the worst of all exercises in medieval crusading took place inside Europe and was also launched by Pope Innocent III. It was directed, not against the Byzantine Church, not against Saracens and other “infidels,” but against Europeans: a heretical religious movement of the French, the Cathars, whom Innocent III and his hierarchy were determined to wipe out by all possible means, by proscription, fire, and the sword.
“Catharism” comes from the Greek root katharos, meaning pure—and the Cathars saw purification as their appointed mission in a spiritually fallen world. It was strongest in France, where the tragic and bloody dénouement of its growth and repression took place in the early thirteenth century; but at its height, Catharist “cells” grew up all over Europe, including Italy, where they survived until the early 1300s and were experienced, by Rome, as a powerful threat to Christianity itself—as cancerous, potentially, as Stalinist cells in Western democracies were seen to be by the Catholic Church and the U.S. government in the postwar years of Pius XII’s papacy.
The first reports of Catharist belief communities actually came from Cologne, in 1143. But France was the stronghold of the cult, and in particular the Languedoc, in the Midi region of southern France, with its strong sense of exception, its remoteness from the great power-center of Paris, its separate language (Provençal, close to Catalan), and its traditions of vehement pietism.
Where did the Catharist faith come from? Because nearly all its “scriptures” and holy books were destroyed, burned along with the Cathars themselves,3 it is difficult to be certain about this, but most scholars seem to agree that it was an Eastern import whose roots lay in the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. It was related to the beliefs of the Bogomils, or “Friends of God,” who, being particularly strong in Bulgaria, were also known as the Bougres—whence our durable term of extreme disparagement “buggers.”