Religious Events

The Fourth Crusade

Crusade

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "The Fourth Crusade." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/religious-events/the-fourth-crusade.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). The Fourth Crusade. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/religious-events/the-fourth-crusade

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-the-fourth-crusade,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {The Fourth Crusade},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/religious-events/the-fourth-crusade},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Launched by Pope Innocent III to retake Jerusalem by way of Egypt, the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land. Deep in debt to Venice for the fleet it had contracted, the crusading army was diverted first to the Christian Hungarian city of Zara, sacked in 1202 despite Innocent's excommunication threat, and then to Constantinople, where a disputed Byzantine succession drew the crusaders into the city's politics. The crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople in April 1204, installing a Latin emperor over what became known as the Latin Empire. The sack deepened the rupture between the Latin and Byzantine churches that the East-West Schism of 1054 had already opened, and the Byzantine Empire never fully recovered its former territory or standing.

Facts

Disputed

Death Toll

from 2000 5

Donald M. Nicol's standard scholarly history of Byzantine-Venetian relations puts the civilian dead in the April 1204 sack of Constantinople at roughly 2,000. Recorded as a single point estimate, not a range: Queller and Madden's standard account of the crusade warns that the medieval chroniclers' own figures cannot be taken as reliable head counts, since the crusaders wanted a living, lootable city rather than a depopulated one, and no second modern historian's count of comparable rigor exists to bound a range against.

Death Toll

to 2000 5

See death-toll-min: this atlas records death-toll-min and death-toll-max as the same single figure rather than a true range, because Donald M. Nicol's roughly 2,000 civilian dead is the only figure this atlas treats as a documented modern estimate, and Queller and Madden's standard account warns the medieval chroniclers' own numbers cannot be taken as reliable head counts, so no second credible modern count exists to bound a genuine range against.

The Event

When It Happened

1202 to 1204, culminating in the sack of Constantinople on 12 and 13 April 1204. 1

Period

1202 to 1204 2

Where It Happened

Zara on the Adriatic, then Constantinople 1

Victim Group

The Eastern Orthodox Christian population of Constantinople, whose churches, monasteries and imperial treasury were sacked over three days in April 1204 by an army that had set out under papal sanction to recover Jerusalem for Latin Christendom. 3

Perpetrator Regime

The Fourth Crusade's Latin army, led by Boniface of Montferrat, and the Republic of Venice under Doge Enrico Dandolo, who diverted the crusade first to Zara and then to Constantinople over unpaid debts and a disputed Byzantine succession, resulting in the city's sack and the installation of a Latin emperor. 3

Convened or Ordered By

Pope Innocent III, in 1202 2

Consequences

What It Settled

Constantinople was stormed and sacked in April 1204; a Latin Empire replaced Byzantine rule in the city until 1261. The plunder was later estimated at roughly 900,000 silver marks in total, against only around 300,000 marks formally pooled and divided among the Crusaders and Venetians as agreed, the remainder hidden or kept back by individual knights rather than surrendered. The bronze statue of Hercules by the sculptor Lysippos was melted down for coin, and many other ancient and medieval Greek and Roman works held in the city were seized or destroyed. 3

Scholarship

How Its Legacy Is Contested

Widely read as the event that made the East-West Schism of 1054 practically irreversible, though the two churches were already estranged before it 4

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A Crusade Diverted

Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Crusade in 1202 with Egypt as its intended target, reasoning that Jerusalem could be more securely held once Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power, was neutralized. The crusade's leaders contracted with Venice for a fleet to carry a projected army of thirty three thousand men, and Venice built the ships at considerable cost on that expectation; far fewer crusaders actually arrived at Venice to embark, leaving the army unable to pay what it owed.

Venice proposed a way to work off the debt: the crusaders would help it recapture Zara, a Christian city on the Adriatic that had rebelled against Venetian rule and placed itself under the Hungarian crown. Innocent III forbade the attack and threatened excommunication, but the crusade's leadership went ahead regardless, and Zara was sacked in November 1202. Innocent excommunicated the Venetians and, more reluctantly, the crusaders, though he later lifted the sentence on the crusaders themselves while it remained on Venice. Innocent's own legate, present with the army, had no real power to overrule the crusade's secular leadership once the debt to Venice made the diversion to Zara appear unavoidable to the barons who actually commanded it, a foretaste of how little control the papacy would keep over the campaign that followed.

The Sack of Constantinople and Its Long Aftermath

Diverted a second time, the crusade was drawn into a dispute over the Byzantine throne when the deposed emperor's son, Alexios Angelos, offered the crusaders a large payment and Byzantine support for the crusade if they restored his father. The crusaders sailed to Constantinople and installed Alexios and his father as co-emperors in 1203, but the promised payment never materialized in full, and the new regime collapsed within months. Rather than withdraw, the crusader army and the Venetian fleet stormed the city on 12 and 13 April 1204.

The sack that followed lasted several days and included widespread looting of the city's churches, palaces and relic collections, a considerable quantity of which was carried back to Western Europe. The crusaders installed a Latin emperor over what became the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and divided much of the remaining Byzantine territory among themselves and Venice, while Byzantine successor states held out at Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond. Constantinople was recovered for Byzantine rule in 1261, but the empire never regained its former extent or wealth. Coming a century and a half after the East-West Schism of 1054, the sack of a Christian capital by a crusade called in the name of Christian unity hardened the estrangement between the Latin and Byzantine churches into something the centuries since have not fully undone.

Cross-Tradition Connections