under a year. As the knights prepared to fight their way through the rest of the city they found themselves confronted with an open city. No one opposed them. A contingent of Church leaders approached them and begged for mercy. While Boniface pondered the proposal, his army flowed into Constantinople like a river at high tide. The plunder began.
To sack a city as large and rich as Constantinople required the efforts of not just untamed soldiers, revengeful knights, or greedy leaders. All three segments of the army needed to unite in the crusader-like cause of killing, raping, stealing, destroying, and violating six or seven other commandments. To pillage a massive city like Constantinople indeed required all hands to participate. And all did.
Lathered into an uncontrollable and unholy horde, the crusaders descended into one of the bloodiest and most grotesque sprees in history. The nobles invaded palaces, headed straight to the treasure room, and ran their bloody hands through the loot. Knights and soldiers raped women, slashed the heads off children, and pillaged artifacts from churches. Many treasures were simply destroyed; others were carefully packed up for shipment back to the West. Even the priests got into the action and stripped religious artifacts to carry home to adorn their churches in France. They viciously assaulted the holiest place in the Eastern Church, the Hagia Sophia, destroying or stealing virtually any item of value, leaving mounds of animal excrement on the floors. For the crusaders’ amusement a prostitute danced on the great church’s altar.
Of all the crusader kings who ruled over the Holy Land none perhaps was as unusual as the Leper King of Jerusalem. Either as a testament to their egalitarian spirit or sign of their desperation, the crusader leaders in 1174 appointed a thirteen-year-old leper as king.
Known as Baldwin IV, he was extolled for his bravery, intelligence, and foresight. While his eyes still worked, he led the Christian forces against the legendary Muslim leader Saladin and fought him to a draw.
As the king’s body parts withered, his battlefield victories piled up, temporarily restoring the power of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At age twenty-four, in 1185, after having summoned his strength to do battle against Saladin’s army, he died of leprosy not long after his final battle. Like his face and body eaten away by the disease, his legend has been lost down through the centuries.
When the plunder stopped days later, or perhaps when they ran out of targets, the crusader leaders collected their booty and divvied it up. They had hit the jackpot. The triple-deal-making doge got his share plus more. The French got enough to spread a handsome purse to everyone. All that remained was to appoint a new emperor. And now the winner, who would become the seventh emperor of the Greeks in the ten months since the crusaders arrived, was Baldwin of Flanders, who by chance happened to be the doge’s choice. The old man always seemed to get his way. In an elaborate ceremony in the Hagia Sophia, presumably now cleaned of mule dung and dancing prostitutes, Baldwin received the crown, ushering in what became known as the Latin Empire. He had the unenviable job of restoring a city depleted of money and filled with ruined churches and angry people, in addition to half the city having been burned to the ground. To raise money for his new government, Baldwin resorted to pillaging the tombs of long-dead emperors, ensuring the dead received equal sacking treatment as the living.
In a series of letters explaining how the crusaders set out to kill Muslims and free the Holy Land and instead ended up deeply in debt, joyriding with a Greek prince, defeating six Greek emperors, and raping and killing defenseless Christians, Baldwin proclaimed that because they had succeeded in conquering Constantinople, their actions must have received God’s blessing.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
While Baldwin wrestled with governing a city he helped destroy, three other emperors still roamed the countryside. Two of them, Alexius III — the original emperor when the crusaders showed up — and Unibrow — the emperor next to flee — agreed to ex-emperor-to-ex-emperor talks and possibly join forces to fight Baldwin. Alexius III also agreed to set up Unibrow with one of his beautiful daughters. Alexius III tricked Unibrow into meeting with him privately, and at this point some of Alexius’s men grabbed Unibrow and blinded him. That November, Baldwin captured Unibrow, brought him back to Constantinople, and forced the now-blind ex-emperor to leap to his death from the city’s tallest column. Around the same time Alexius III was also captured. Baldwin spared him for no apparent reason and packed him off to lifetime exile in Italy. And with that, calm descended upon the new Latin Empire. A short-lived calm, but a calm nonetheless. By the spring of 1205 the crusader army began to break up. Some went to the Holy Land, most went home. That summer, the pope’s man with the crusaders released them all from their vow to reach the Holy Land. The crusade had ended leaving this less than admirable scorecard:
In the spring of 1205 Baldwin, the adventure-addicted doge, and other leading crusaders, such as Louis of Blois, one of the three founding nobles, took off with a small army to quell a rebellion around the inland city of Adrianople. On April 14, one year after the sack of Constantinople, the crusaders tangled with a larger force under King Johanitza of Bulgaria. Separated from the bulk of his army, Baldwin and some knights were overrun by vastly superior numbers. Louis was cut down; Baldwin, fighting like a savage, was dragged to Johanitza’s prison in the Balkan Mountains and was never seen again.
The triple-deal-making doge and the bulk of the army survived and returned to Constantinople. The blind Venetian leader died of old age in June of 1205. He was buried in the Hagia Sophia, never having reached the Holy Land or returned to Venice. He magnificently channeled the energies of the crusading spirit into profits for his beloved Venice and the city-state flourished for centuries afterward.
Pope Innocent III was livid when he heard the crusade had ended without Jerusalem having entered his realm. When he learned of the full extent of the destruction of Constantinople he blanched in horror. He cheered up, however, when he realized his Catholics were now in charge of the Greek empire. He issued no further excommunications because of the massive deaths his own army caused.
The Latin Empire lasted until 1261 when the Greeks retook the city. Constantinople underwent resurgence but never regained its former glory, and it eventually fell to the Turks in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. The Catholics held out in the Holy Land, buttressed by a series of further crusades, until 1291. Europeans didn’t make it back to Jerusalem until 1917 when the British captured it.
The Greeks never forgave the crusaders and the pope for unleashing their hellacious army on their city and pillaging their holy places. The break between the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox had become too great to fix. The Great Schism was complete. The two wings of the Christian Church would never reunite.
In 2001 Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for the odious deeds of the Fourth Crusade.
THREE.
THE WHISKEY REBELLION: 1794
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness make for warm and fuzzy reading in declarations of independence. But when push comes to shove, what really matters is money. The glorious new American republic was no different. Shortly after birth its essential character had already been formed: financial matters took precedence over everything else, including the continued enslavement of an entire race, the slow-motion holocaust of Native Americans, and the disenfranchisement of half of the population based on sex.
The Whiskey Rebellion was a haphazard, unorganized, poorly armed struggle by frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania against what they felt to be unfair taxes, the very philosophy upon which the United States of
