Behind the scenes: The Fourth Crusade, Biggest Robbery in History.

It's that time again, the now-obligatory "behind the scenes" article on my latest historical YouTube video. The one that just dropped this afternoon (April 6, 2024) is titled "The Fourth Crusade: Biggest Robbery in History," and it's a fairly rare, for my channel, foray into medieval history. I know I say this every time, but it's been a tremendous amount of work. With the exception of teaching my in-person classes, I've done almost nothing else for a week--actually longer than a week--but edit video and put together this immensely complicated, tragic and thought-provoking story. It's so new, and I don't really have the objectivity to judge what might be my "best" deep-dive video to date, but this might be it.

The Fourth Crusade is sometimes viewed as an outlier among the medieval religious conflicts that compete, somewhat fiercely and often controversially, for the historical label of "crusades." In 1095, Pope Urban II, responding to an outreach from Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, called for knights and soldiers from Western Europe to capture Jerusalem, which had been under Muslim rule for most of the previous 350 years. The First Crusade succeeded in this objective, and the two major succeeding conflicts, one beginning in 1147 and another in 1189, were aimed at retaking pieces of Christian territory that had been conquered by Muslim counterattacks, including Jerusalem itself, recaptured by Saladin in 1187. The Fourth Crusade started out as following that script, but later got sidetracked. Instead of Jerusalem or any Muslim-held territory, the crusaders this time wound up sacking and looting two Christian cities, Zara (now Zadar), and most importantly Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. How and why this happened, and the implications of the brutal conquest and looting of what was the Christian world's richest city, have preoccupied and puzzled historians ever since.

Having long been a devotee of Byzantine/Eastern Roman history, I was fascinated by the story of the wayward Fourth Crusade since the first time I discovered it more than 20 years ago. Reading the accounts of the conquest of Constantinople, and particularly its rapacious looting by the crusaders, is a sobering and eye-opening experience. All wars are bitter and tragic, but something about this one seems especially craven and shocking--particularly the wide disconnect between the lofty religious goals that the crusaders professed to be following, and their actual practice, which, as the title of my video suggests, was little more than armed robbery on a colossal scale. The medieval world was starkly violent and unjust, but the Fourth Crusade seems to violate even what few moral standards can be argued to have existed in the early 13th century. Part of its fascination as a historical object is how difficult it is to explain in the context of what the other crusades were supposed to have been about.