While focused on this threat, the Greeks took their eyes off perhaps their most vulnerable point. Along the water’s edge, the city’s walls had gates, which in peacetime were used for loading and unloading merchant ships. These gates were sealed when the crusaders first approached the city in 1203. But apparently this work was not as sturdy as the regular sections of the wall. Focusing on this vulnerability, groups of Special Forces knights hacked away at one gate with swords and picks while other knights defended them from barrages of stones and boiling pitch. The ferocious knights now punched a small hole in the wall. They peered through and saw swarms of Greeks awaiting them. Whichever knight dared to go through first was on a sure suicide mission. One of the crusading churchmen, Aleumes, dove through the tiny opening and emerged in the city. He charged at the Greeks, a lone fighter with a sword, not even a knight, and, lo and behold, what surely has become an enshrined custom by this time, the Greeks turned and fled. More knights seeped through the opening, and soon nearly three dozen crusaders were inside the city. Unibrow led a charge to throw them out, but as he approached the knights he stopped, carefully considered the situation and — can it be true? — turned and fled. A handful of crusading knights had scattered the mighty Greek emperor and his troops.
Knights now flooded into the city. They fanned out and headed to Unibrow’s headquarters. His loyal guard caught one glimpse of the bloodthirsty crusaders… and turned and fled. In fact, with the wholesale flooding of knights into the city, the Greek custom of turning and fleeing reached an impressive scale.
That night, realizing that his position was untenable, Unibrow followed the well-trod path of prior emperors and fled the city. As the city’s elite awoke the next morning, April 13, they heard the news of the emperor’s defection. To organize resistance, they drew lots to select the new emperor because no clearheaded person was even willing to volunteer for the job. The unfortunate winner was Constantine Lascaris. He urged everyone to resist the crusaders. But at the first sight of the knights just limbering up for the day’s fight, the Greeks turned and fled. Their new emperor joined them in hastily abandoning the city, the second emperor in a day to flee and the third in under a year. As the knights prepared to fight their way through the rest of the city they found themselves confronted with an open city. No one opposed them. A contingent of Church leaders approached them and begged for mercy. While Boniface pondered the proposal, his army flowed into Constantinople like a river at high tide. The plunder began.
To sack a city as large and rich as Constantinople required the efforts of not just untamed soldiers, revengeful knights, or greedy leaders. All three segments of the army needed to unite in the crusader-like cause of killing, raping, stealing, destroying, and violating six or seven other commandments. To pillage a massive city like Constantinople indeed required all hands to participate. And all did.
Lathered into an uncontrollable and unholy horde, the crusaders descended into one of the bloodiest and most grotesque sprees in history. The nobles invaded palaces, headed straight to the treasure room, and ran their bloody hands through the loot. Knights and soldiers raped women, slashed the heads off children, and pillaged artifacts from churches. Many treasures were simply destroyed; others were carefully packed up for shipment back to the West. Even the priests got into the action and stripped religious artifacts to carry home to adorn their churches in France. They viciously assaulted the holiest place in the Eastern Church, the Hagia Sophia, destroying or stealing virtually any item of value, leaving mounds of animal excrement on the floors. For the crusaders’ amusement a prostitute danced on the great church’s altar.
Of all the crusader kings who ruled over the Holy Land none perhaps was as unusual as the Leper King of Jerusalem. Either as a testament to their egalitarian spirit or sign of their desperation, the crusader leaders in 1174 appointed a thirteen-year-old leper as king.
Known as Baldwin IV, he was extolled for his bravery, intelligence, and foresight. While his eyes still worked, he led the Christian forces against the legendary Muslim leader Saladin and fought him to a draw.
As the king’s body parts withered, his battlefield victories piled up, temporarily restoring the power of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At age twenty-four, in 1185, after having summoned his strength to do battle against Saladin’s army, he died of leprosy not long after his final battle. Like his face and body eaten away by the disease, his legend has been lost down through the centuries.
When the plunder stopped days later, or perhaps when they ran out of targets, the crusader leaders collected their booty and divvied it up. They had hit the jackpot. The triple-deal-making doge got his share plus more. The French got enough to spread a handsome purse to everyone. All that remained was to appoint a new emperor. And now the winner, who would become the seventh emperor of the Greeks in the ten months since the crusaders arrived, was Baldwin of Flanders, who by chance happened to be the doge’s choice. The old man always seemed to get his way. In an elaborate ceremony in the Hagia Sophia, presumably now cleaned of mule dung and dancing prostitutes, Baldwin received the crown, ushering in what became known as the Latin Empire. He had the unenviable job of restoring a city depleted of money and filled with ruined churches and angry people, in addition to half the city having been burned to the ground. To raise money for his new government, Baldwin resorted to pillaging the tombs of long-dead emperors, ensuring the dead received equal sacking treatment as the living.
In a series of letters explaining how the crusaders set out to kill Muslims and free the Holy Land and instead ended up deeply in debt, joyriding with a Greek prince, defeating six Greek emperors, and raping and killing defenseless Christians, Baldwin proclaimed that because they had succeeded in conquering Constantinople, their actions must have received God’s blessing.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
While Baldwin wrestled with governing a city he helped destroy, three other emperors still roamed the countryside. Two of them, Alexius III — the original emperor when the crusaders showed up — and Unibrow — the emperor next to flee — agreed to ex-emperor-to-ex-emperor talks and possibly join forces to fight Baldwin. Alexius III also agreed to set up Unibrow with one of his beautiful daughters. Alexius III tricked Unibrow into meeting with him privately, and at this point some of Alexius’s men grabbed Unibrow and blinded him. That November, Baldwin captured Unibrow, brought him back to Constantinople, and forced the now-blind ex-emperor to leap to his death from the city’s tallest column. Around the same time Alexius III was also captured. Baldwin spared him for no apparent reason and packed him off to lifetime exile in Italy. And with that, calm descended upon the new Latin Empire. A short-lived calm, but a calm nonetheless. By the spring of 1205 the crusader army began to break up. Some went to the Holy Land, most went home. That summer, the pope’s man with the crusaders released them all from their vow to reach the Holy Land. The crusade had ended leaving this less than admirable scorecard:
Christian cities sacked: two
Greek emperors defeated during the crusade: six
Times the Greeks turned and fled: thousands
Muslims killed: zero
In the spring of 1205 Baldwin, the adventure-addicted doge, and other leading crusaders, such as Louis of Blois, one of the three founding nobles, took off with a small army to quell a rebellion around the inland city of Adrianople. On April 14, one year after the sack of Constantinople, the crusaders tangled with a larger force under King Johanitza of Bulgaria. Separated from the bulk of his army, Baldwin and some knights were overrun by vastly superior numbers. Louis was cut down; Baldwin, fighting like a savage, was dragged to Johanitza’s prison in the Balkan Mountains and was never seen again.