“The sack of Constantinople,” writes Sir Steven Runciman, “is unparalleled in history. For nine centuries the great city had been the capital of Christian civilization. It was filled with works of art that had survived from ancient Greece and with the master-pieces of its own exquisite craftsmen. The Venetians indeed knew the value of such things. Wherever they could, they seized treasures and carried them off to adorn the squares and churches and palaces of their town. But the Frenchmen and Flemings were filled with a lust for destruction. They rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder and to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars for their refreshment. Neither monasteries nor churches nor libraries were spared. In St. Sophia itself drunken soldiers could be seen tearing down the silken hangings and pulling the great silver iconostasis to pieces, while sacred books and icons were trampled under foot.
While they drank merrily from the altar-vessels, a prostitute set herself on the Patriarch's throne and began to sing a ribald French song. Nuns were ravished in their con-vents. Palaces and hovels alike were entered and wrecked. Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets. For three days the ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles. Even the Saracens would have been more merciful, cried historian Nicetas, and with truth.
“At last the Latin leaders realized that so much destruction was to nobody's ad-vantage. When their license exhausted the soldiers, order was restored. Anyone who had stolen a precious object was forced to give it up to the Frankish nobles; and unfortunate citizens were tortured to make them reveal the goods that they had contrived to hide. Even after so much had wantonly perished, the amount of booty was staggering. No one, wrote Villehardouin, could possibly count the gold and silver, the plate and the jewels, the samite and silks and garments of fur, vair, silver-grey and ermine; and he added, on his own learned authority, that never since the world was created had so much been taken in a city.
“There was never a greater crime against humanity, than the Fourth Crusade. Not only did it cause the dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored, and the mortal wounding of a civilization that was still active and great; but it was also an act of gigantic political folly. [...] In the wide sweep of world history the effects were wholly disastrous. Since the inception of its Empire Byzantium had been the guardian of Europe against the infidel East and the barbarian North.”
...“though the Greeks regained Constantinople some fifty years later, the damage to the Empire was too great to allow it to resume its former political role. In the course of the next two hundred years it was overrun by the Turks, who swept all before them up to the walls of Vienna. The Crusaders, combining greed, barbarity and religious intolerance (the West rejoiced at the fall of ‘heretical' Constantinople), had eventually achieved the exact opposite of what they had been bargaining for. Instead of ending the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches and chasing Islam out of the Holy Land, they left a memory of cruelty among the Eastern Christians that would never be forgiven, and handed the Middle East and parts of Europe to Islam on a platter. For Islam, once it had stepped into the highly sophisticated administrative shoes of the Eastern Roman Empire, acquired a tremendous strength that allowed it to shape much of modern history, with dire consequences for the rest of the world.”
...υπενθυμίζεται όμως ότι και οι Βυζαντινοί λίγα χρόνια πριν είχαν σφάξει όλους τους Λατίνους της Πόλης διότι ένιωθαν οικονομική ασφυξία από αυτούς και τα προνόμιά τους...και τύφλωσαν τον Δανδολο, μετέπειτα δόγη της Γαληνοτάτης, ο οποίος οδήγησε τους Σταυροφόρους έξω από τα τείχη της Βασιλεύουσας το 1204!
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