immune from faction. It was the flight of the young Alexius IV Angelus, to the court of Philip of Swabia, an uncle by marriage, after his father the Emperor Isaac had been dethroned and blinded in 1195, that involved the Germans in the political manœuvres which surrounded the launching of the Fourth Crusade in 1202. The debate about whether Pope Innocent III sent off the expedition in the full knowledge that it would attack Constantinople rather than the Muslim powers is still an active one though there is certainly evidence to suggest that he was unhappy about the way Venetian and German interests dictated the direction the enterprise took. It seems clear, however, that the Venetians looked upon the crusade, for which they had supplied the ships, as a means of increasing their own power in the east. In the event, after a hard-fought siege, Constantinople finally fell to Latin forces on 12 April 1204 amidst scenes of carnage and pillage which shocked even hardened contemporaries.
And so perished the empire of the God-protected Kostyantingrad and the Greek land in the quarrel of Tsars; and the Franks rule it.
The gloom-laden comment of the Novgorod Chronicle summed up the shocked reaction of the Byzantine world to the loss of the city. For many, it was the price to be paid for imperial mismanagement and corruption; for some, God's punishment for consorting with schismatic Latins and seemingly accepting their outrageous views on papal primacy. But although it would be misleading to describe the fall of Constantinople as 'inevitable', it was the culmination of a process already noted by the crusader historian Fulcher of Chartres in 1100. Describing the Frankish settlers in their new homes in the Holy Land he commented that 'we who were occidentals are now orientals'. The reverse was also true and it was the growing interdependence of the Mediterranean world--in trade, in religious observances, and in political attitudes and alliances--that culminated in the temporary eclipse of Byzantine power in 1204. The Mediterranean was now a Frankish Lake.
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