Sack of Constantinople
| Siege of Constantinople (1204) | |||||||||
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| Part of the Fourth Crusade | |||||||||
 The Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople, by Eugène Delacroix. |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Byzantine Empire |
 Crusaders Republic of Venice
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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Alexios IV Angelos Alexios V Doukas |
Boniface I Enrico Dandolo
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| Strength | |||||||||
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Byzantines: 15,000 men,
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Crusaders: 10,000 men
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Unknown | Unknown | ||||||||
Byzantines: 15,000 men,
Crusaders: 10,000 men
Venetians: 10,000 men
The Sack of Constantinople or Siege of Constantinople occurred in 1204 and marked the culmination of the Fourth Crusade. Mutinous Crusader armies captured, looted, and destroyed parts of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. After the capture, the Latin Empire was created and Baldwin of Flanders was crowned Emperor Baldwin I of Constantinople in the Hagia Sophia.
After the city's sacking, most of the Byzantine Empire's territories were divided up and controlled by the Crusaders. Byzantine aristocrats also established a number of small independent splinter states, one of them being the Empire of Nicaea, which recaptured Constantinople in 1261 and proclaimed the reinstatement of the Empire. However, the restored Empire would never return to its former territorial or economic status, and eventually fell to the rising Ottoman Sultanate in the 1453 Siege of Constantinople.
The sack of Constantinople is a major turning point in medieval history and Christianity more generally. The Crusaders' decision to attack a major Christian capital was unprecedented and immediately controversial, even among the Crusaders themselves. Relations between the western and eastern Christian worlds were severely wounded and would not fully recover for hundreds of years afterwards, and the Byzantine Empire became poorer, smaller, and less able to defend itself against the Turkish conquests that followed. The Fourth Crusade therefore left Christendom more divided and weakened than before.
The Massacre of the Latins (Italian: Massacro dei Latini; Greek: Σφαγή τῶν Λατίνων), a large-scale massacre of the Roman Catholic or "Latin" inhabitants of Constantinople by the Eastern Orthodox population of the city in May 1182, had a dramatic effect on the schism between the Western and Eastern Christian churches. The massacre also further worsened the image of the Byzantines in the eyes of the Western powers, and, although regular trade agreements were soon resumed between Byzantium and Latin states, the underlying hostility would remain, leaving many westerners seeking some form of revenge.
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