The two sides prepared for the decisive encounter. The Westerners decided to focus their attention on the walls along the Golden Horn; as in the previous year’s assault, they would use the Venetian ships as the main method of gaining entry into the city. They hoisted huge beams above the decks and lashed them across the masts. The shipwrights and carpenters created a fighting platform about ninety-six feet above the deck. They covered this with hides to protect the men from fire and arrows as they walked two abreast along what was, in effect, a huge tube projecting out from the ships. The idea was to deliver the men to the top of the battlements so they could then fight their way onto the walls and gain a foothold for others to follow.

The Greeks did not sit by and wait passively. Murtzuphlus, who was by now crowned emperor, ordered the defenses along the Golden Horn to be strengthened. Byzantine workmen began to smother the regular line of crenellations and towers with a hideous shantytown of multistoried wooden constructions (some said to be six levels high) designed to make a barrier tall enough to defy the Westerners’ ships.

The Crusaders made their final preparations on April 8. The priests moved through the army, taking the confessions of all the men and praying for victory. The next morning ships sailed up to the walls and the onslaught began. Both sides fired a hail of stones at each other. Archers released clouds of arrows as the tumult of battle grew. Try as they might the Crusaders could not get their vessels close enough to land, and as the day wore on it became apparent that the Byzantines were holding firm. They began to taunt the Westerners with obscene gestures, delighting in their lack of progress. The dispirited Crusaders withdrew; it seemed that God had not favored them. Morale was terribly low, food was in short supply, and many of the men wanted to abandon the siege. At this darkest point of the campaign, the leaders gathered and resolved to make one more attack.

After a couple of days spent refitting their equipment, the Crusaders launched their last assault on April 12. At first they made little impact, and it seemed as if the expedition was about to disintegrate. Around midday, however, the Crusaders received a vital stroke of good luck — or, as they saw it, divine intervention. The wind began to blow from the north, and this finally pushed their ships right up to the walls of Constantinople. At last they could make a proper attempt to get into the city.

Two of the mightiest ships in the fleet, Paradise and Pilgrim, had been lashed together to create the biggest assault platform of all. As this leviathan inched forward, its twin flying bridges reached out to give a lethal embrace to one of the towers. Poised high above the ship, two Crusaders — one Venetian, one French — must have looked out of their protective tunnels at the defenses of Constantinople and prepared themselves to brave the line of grim-faced defenders. The Venetian jumped first, but defenders slaughtered him almost immediately. His comrade, Andrew Dureboise, was more fortunate and managed to resist the blows of the enemy long enough to allow others to join him. Soon they drove the Greeks from the tower; one small finger hold had been gained.

For real progress, however, the Crusaders would need a bigger bridgehead. Peter, lord of Amiens, saw a bricked-up postern gate with a narrow strip of land in front of it. He sent a contingent armed with pickaxes to try to break through. The gate became a magnet for the two sides; the Crusaders brought up protective shields as the Greeks gathered above to bombard them with rocks and pour boiling oil down upon them. The Westerners resisted, slowly chipping through the walls to make a small breach.

An eyewitness account of this episode from Robert of Clari, a northern French knight, represents an emerging genre of historical writing: narratives of martial experiences written by the knights and nobles who were directly involved instead of second-hand accounts written by clerics. Robert’s work is noteworthy because he was not one of the expedition’s leaders; his view is more that of a frontline soldier. Robert had a particular interest in this incident because the man who chose to go through the gap first was his brother, Aleaumes. The hole must have been small — imagine crawling through a fireplace — and on the other side waited heavily armed defenders. Robert was torn between admiration for his brother and a filial sense of protection. He tried to drag his brother back, but Aleaumes kicked him away and, putting his faith in God, squeezed through.

Immediately, the Byzantines descended upon him, raining down blows and cutting him with swords. Incredibly, the armored Aleaumes survived, rose to his feet, and warded them off. The Greeks were horrified; it was as if the knight had risen from the dead. Petrified, they turned and fled. ‘Lords enter hardily! I see them drawing back dismayed and beginning to run away,’ called Aleaumes, and other men pushed through the hole and joined him. Once inside, Peter of Amiens quickly directed them to the nearest gate in the walls, and within minutes the Crusaders opened it. They had breached Constantinople’s defenses and could now pour into the city.

Murtzuphlus tried to rally his troops, but he had to fall back. The Westerners took possession of the northern section of the city, then chose to consolidate their position rather than spread out across the entire metropolis and drastically dilute their strength. As happened the previous year after a serious military setback, the Byzantine emperor chose to flee rather than resist. Under the cover of darkness, Murtzuphlus scurried away to try to prolong his resistance to another day.

On the morning of April 13, a delegation of Byzantine churchmen and senior nobles offered their submission to the Crusaders. Their hopes for a peaceful takeover were, however, entirely in vain. The tension of waiting outside the city walls for months, suffering the attacks of the Greeks, and enduring the broken promises of food and aid, as well as a sense of anger toward people they viewed as heretics and murderers, spilled over into a surging mass of violence and destruction.

Over the next three days, the Crusaders swarmed across the city, breaking into churches, palaces, and houses, and seizing booty with an insatiable greed. Nicholas Mesarites, a contemporary Byzantine writer, observed ‘war-maddened swordsmen, breathing murder, iron-clad and spear-bearing, sword-bearers and lance bearers, bowmen, horsemen, boasting dreadfully, baying like Cerberus and breathing like Charon, pillaging the holy places, trampling down on divine things, running riot over holy things, casting down to the floor the holy images of Christ and His holy Mother and of the holy men who from eternity have been pleasing to the Lord God.’

Eventually, calm returned and the spoils of war could be apportioned; at last the Venetians were paid the money owed to them. The Crusaders elected Count Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople and divided the Byzantine lands amongst themselves and their Venetian allies.

Soon they began to send news of their achievement back to the West, arguing that God had exercised his judgment on the sinful Greeks. Initially, Pope Innocent was overjoyed and celebrated the Crusaders’ success, but as he received news of their atrocities against defenseless women and children and their plundering of the holy sites, he condemned them as ‘having turned away from the purity of your vow when you took up arms not against Saracens, but Christians…preferring earthly wealth to celestial treasures.’

The Crusaders faced a difficult struggle to establish their new empire. Many of the men returned home; some went on to complete their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Those who remained had to fight a series of battles against the surviving Greeks, as well as the fearsome king of the Bulgarians to the north. At first the Westerners’ strict discipline stood them in good stead, but eventually their good fortune deserted them; in April 1205, the Bulgarians defeated them and Emperor Baldwin perished. The Latin Empire struggled on until 1261, when the Greeks retook Constantinople, although the Venetian territories, based in the safer and commercially advantageous islands (especially Crete), flourished until the late sixteenth century.

The ruler of Venice, Doge Enrico Dandolo, was an incredible man; blind and over ninety years old, he still radiated enormous charisma and authority and was keen to close the contract and, as is often forgotten, to enable his people to share in the spiritual benefits of the Crusade. Venice was as full of churches as any other medieval city, and to suggest a complete absence of religious motives from his efforts to involve his city is simply not credible. Nonetheless, the opportunity to secure prime trading privileges in Alexandria, by far the most important port in the entire Mediterranean, was also highly attractive. For Dandolo the chance to assist the Christian cause and to place his city in a position of trading supremacy would represent a dazzling legacy to future generations.

In April 1201, the Crusaders agreed to return to Venice the following year with 33,500 men and eighty-five thousand marks — an enormous commitment — in return for passage and provisioning of a fleet. It is not known why these experienced negotiators made a contract on such a scale; perhaps they were convinced that many more were poised to take the cross. They were wildly optimistic in their calculations and unwittingly imposed a destructive and crippling straitjacket on the expedition.

To complete their side of the bargain, the Venetians closed their entire commercial operations for a year — a demonstration of the massive effort required to build and equip a fleet of such a size. The ships were of three basic types: troop carriers, horse transports, and battle galleys. The troop carriers were by far the largest, with the greatest called World in acknowledgement of its size. Evidence from mosaics, ceramics, and manuscripts reveal these vessels as short, rounded creations approximately 110 feet long and 32 feet wide. Wooden structures known as ‘castles’ took the height of the hull over forty feet, and a massive steering oar provided directional control. A crew of about one hundred men joined six hundred passengers for a journey to the East that lasted six to eight weeks. The horse transports had specially designed slings to carry their precious cargo; once the ship drew close to shore, a door below the waterline could be opened to allow a fully armed and mounted knight to charge directly into battle — rather like a modern landing craft disgorging a tank. Finally, the long, slim Venetian battle galleys formed the principal fighting force in the fleet. These vessels, powered by one hundred oarsmen and carrying a metal-tipped ram just above the waterline, protected the fleet from hostile ships.

The first of the northern European Crusaders started to gather in Venice in the summer of 1202, but as time wore on it became apparent that the huge army promised by the envoys was not going to materialize. In fact, only around twelve thousand men arrived, and they could not hope to find the necessary cash to pay the Venetians. Clearly, this was a crisis for the Crusaders; for Doge Dandolo it represented a disaster, too. He had urged his fellow citizens to take on the Crusaders’ contract, and now he had to explain to his people how he would protect their investment of time and effort.

The doge proposed an interim solution. Payment would be forestalled while the expedition went to the port of Zara (Zadar in modern Croatia) on the Adriatic. The city had recently escaped from Venetian overlordship, and the doge saw the presence of the Crusader army as an opportunity to reassert proper order. There was, however, one catch: The Zarans now were under the jurisdiction of King Emico of Hungary, and he had taken the cross. His lands, therefore, were subject to the protection of the papacy. Could a Crusade attack a Catholic city in such circumstances? To many in the army, such a scheme seemed abhorrent. Pope Innocent was furious and threatened the Crusaders with excommunication, but the Venetians insisted: Take Zara or they would not set sail.

The leadership of the Crusader army faced a dilemma. They were already deeply embarrassed by their failure to fulfill their side of the bargain at Venice. Now, if they refused the doge’s request, they would be forced to return home in shame. If, however, they tolerated this aberration, then the greater cause — recapturing Jerusalem — would still be attainable. The leaders suppressed Pope Innocent’s threat of excommunication. While some of the Crusaders left the fleet, the majority chose to stay, and they duly besieged and captured Zara in the autumn of 1202.

Pope Innocent wrote, ‘Behold, your gold has turned into base metal and your silver has almost completely rusted since, departing from the purity of your plan and turning aside from the path onto the impassable road, you have, so to speak, withdrawn your hand from the plough…for when…you should have hastened to the land flowing with milk and honey, you turned away, going astray in the direction of the desert.’ He excommunicated the Crusaders and the Venetians, and although a penitent delegation from the former group managed to gain absolution, the latter were viewed in a largely negative light from that time onward.

As the fleet wintered in Zara, they received a delegation bearing an intriguing offer. Representatives of Prince Alexius Angelos, a claimant to the throne of Byzantium, arrived at the Crusader camp. Well aware of their ongoing shortfalls of men and money, the prince offered to provide two hundred thousand silver marks, the services of ten thousand fighting men, provisions for all the Crusaders, and maintenance of a garrison of five hundred men in the Holy Land. Even more enticing, these Byzantines indicated that the Orthodox Church would recognize the authority of Rome.

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