The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople

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In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade had set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered old and young, raped women and girls, desecrated churches and plundered treasuries, and much of the city was put to the torch. Some contemporaries felt God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock and disgust. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong, and even today its violence and brutality provokes deep ill-feeling towards the Catholic Church.--From publisher description