Download The Fourth Crusade: The History of the Crusade That Resulted in the Sack of Constantinople AudioBook Free
The Fourth Crusade from 1202-1204 is significant in medieval history because it was the very first time a crusade was directed against another Christian group. It was also significant since it encompassed two of the four major sieges of Constantinople, and it also sparked a 3rd in 1235 (an unsuccessful try to invert the Latin gains in 1204). Considering that legacy, it's ironic that like the Crusades before it, the Fourth Crusade was at first supposed as an invasion of Egypt, which had been conquered by Saladin and his uncle nearly four decades previously. Egypt had been joined with Syria into one Muslim empire under Saladin, but it acquired fallen apart into two distinct realms after his death shortly after the 3rd Crusade in 1193. Following that crusade, the primary goal of the Crusaders in the 13th hundred years was to overcome Egypt and make use of it as a beachhead resistant to the Muslims in Syria who threatened Christian Palestine, a goal that should have been beneficial to most of Christendom in both Western and East. Instead, through the Fourth Crusade, tensions between the Latin Christians of European European countries and the Greek Christians of Constantinople arrived to a mind after a hundred years and three past Crusades. This led to a critical breakdown of communications that led to an internal war within Christendom and resulted in the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders.
