On July 17th, 1203, the army entered Constantinople, after
a short siege. Alexius III escaped by flight and Alexius IV was installed in
his place. Still the Crusaders lingered in a city the outward splendour of which
appealed irresistibly to their imagination and their avarice. The winter, they
said, was approaching, and their candidate far from secure upon the throne;
they would wait for the spring. Before that date, and in spite of their
countenance, he had fallen before a nationalist rebellion (January 1204); and
the army hailed the opportunity of reuniting the Greek Church to Rome and
partitioning the Greek Empire among themselves. An agreement was made with the
indispensable Venetians for the election of a Latin Emperor, to be endowed with
one-fourth of the provinces; the booty of Constantinople and the remaining
lands of the Empire were to be divided equally between the Venetians and the remaining
leaders. For the second time Constantinople was carried by storm; a fire
destroyed a large part of the city; and the Crusaders completed the devastation
by three days of indiscriminate plunder and massacre.
Neither the treasures of
the churches nor the priceless monuments and statues of the public places were
spared. The sum-total of the booty was thought to be equal to all the wealth of
Western Europe; but when it came to the official division all that the knights
obtained was twenty marks apiece; ten were the portion of a priest, and five of
a foot-soldier. The other articles of the treaty, which had been referred for
form's sake to the Pope, were executed without awaiting his reply. The
Venetian candidate, Count Baldwin of Flanders, was elected to the Empire and
received the Asiatic provinces. Boniface of Montferrat obtained, as a solatium,
the kingdom of Thessalonica, embracing roughly the modern provinces of Thessaly
and Macedonia; his followers were allowed to establish themselves by degrees in
Central Greece and the Morea. The Venetians took the islands of the Ionian Sea,
the Cyclades, and Aegina and Negropont; the provinces of Albania, Acarnania,
and Aetolia; the city of Adrianople with the adjacent territories, and other possessions
of less note.
