Explain the fourth crusade. what the fuck happened

explain the fourth crusade. what the fuck happened

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Deus didn't vult so much

Byzantines btfo

Italians ruined everything, like they always do

muh crusaders dindu nuffin
they wuz preachin da word of god

Crusaders that were more interested in looting and pillaging than smiting gods enemies

The Eternal Greek betrayed the righteous soldiers of God and were repaid in just due.

Sixth crusade is best crusade. Leave it to the Germans.

Frankish knights/nobles/crusaders commission a fuck ton of ships from the venetians. Venetians say ok, but it'll be expensive.
venice puts its economy on hold for a year in order to build all these transports. Crusaders wildly overestimated how many people would actually show up. Venetians refuse to let them leave Venice without payment. Finally, the Venetians will agree to take them part of the way if the crusaders will help them retake the town of Zara, a christian city. Some of the crusaders split off from the fourth crusade when they hear this, most notably simon de montfort. The pope sends a letter to the papal legate accompanying the crusade, saying if you all attack Zara you will all be excommunicated. The leaders of the crusade suppress this letter. Zara, is sacked. Pope only ends up excommunicating leaders of the crusade in the hope that crusade will resume its mission. keep sailing east. get to constantinople. This is getting long so i'll try to be brief. Basically there was byzantine infighting and the son of the last emperor was not on the throne, but rather his uncle was. The Franks would've thought that the son should be the rightful emperor due to their inheritance laws. The Venetians still havent been paid in full. The son of the late emperor promises to pay the crusaders and acknowledge papal supremacy. The crusaders put him on the throne, more infighting. In short, the crusaders never got paid and then they attacked and sacked Constantinople. The pope condemned this and excommunications flew out left and right. However, the pope later accepted spoils from the crusaders on their return. A small part of the fourth crusade actually fought muslims in spain and the middle east. Resulted in the Latin Empire which was essentially Frankish and Venetian puppets in greece.

Correction, actually I'm not entirely sure there were that many excommunications after the sack of Constantinople

>gets excommunicated
H O L Y

Just the largest and most righteous and holy repo in history.

Eternal venetian

Greeks not paying denbts

Why were ships so freaking hard to come by in the middle ages? It seemed like the Byzantine were the only state with an actual navy. Also, would it have killed them to order half the ships and just make 2 trips?

? Ships to carry thousands of men, pack animals, and the food and provisions to feed and care for all of them, and with enough quality to make the voyage down the Adriatic, through the notoriously stormy seas between Italy and Albania, and then across open sea to Egypt (where they were originally headed) are expensive. The amount of man-hours spent making only one such ship is enormous, one of those ships was definitely worth several horses, or maybe a good sturdy house.

Making two trips is almost as retarded as walking to Egypt.

How is that retarded? You half your investment and it makes for a more flexible time schedule for the first arrivals. It lets them scout, set up base camps, etc.

Plus with all that saved money you can actually afford to resupply

You need supplies and cash to feed and house all those men in or around Venice, or down the Italian coast, for the weeks or months it takes the first expedition to reach Egypt and the ships to return. Your forces in Egypt are half what they should be, and weaker against any enemy response, and can't expect any reinforcement in terms of supplies or men because of the weeks or months it'll take for the second expedition to arrive. There are no ships for resupply or pulling out in event of a beachhead/harbor fortress siege, meaning a massacre will result if you don't have enough information about the enemy.

>It seemed like the Byzantine were the only state with an actual navy
Venice was the Byzantine navy..

Ships were expensive to build, to outfit, to man, and to maintain. Maritime trading city-states like Venice had an overwhelming advantage in building navies in this time period because they generated a lot of wealth, had lots of craftsman in one place, gathered lots of sailors from their shipping industry, and could convert their entire commercial shipping fleet into a merchant marine when needed.

That's why it was so expensive for the Fourth Crusade. The number of ships they thought they needed meant only Venice could supply them immediately, but it was such a large number that Venice couldn't do so without converting most of its commercial fleet into naval transports. This meant a cessation of all their business while these ships were on loan for the crusade, and Venice generated most of its income from taxing this business. When the Fourth Crusade failed to materialize the required number of men to pay for the fleet, this meant Venice had kept a large number of ships in harbor for no reason and no compensation, resulting in tens of thousands of ducats in losses. Thus to make up for it they suggested the crusade sack Zara to return it to Venetian control, and then of course the Byzantine pretender arrives later to offer Venice and the Crusade lots of money to pay back their losses if they came with him to Constantinople. Everything afterwards was politics and mob violence coming to a head in the sacking of the city.

The Massacre of the Latins had nothing to do with it besides sour Byzantine-Venetian relations for two decades.

At most a fleet even half the size of the Fourth Crusade would take months to travel to Egypt, help take a city, and return. A second trip would not have been possible by the time winter arrived, forcing the other half remaining behind to winter in Venice while the other half is bottled up in some Egyptian port stranded. The former would lack grain since they're right next to a massive city full of competing mouths to feed and they've already shipped off most of the years harvest with the latter group so they can survive in Egypt.

ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS PAY THE DEBNTS.

>having money
You can only shake the jews down so many times

Venetians capitalizing on european faith to set back their commercial and territorial rivals.

>Venetians capitalizing on european arrearage to set back their commercial and territorial rivals.
FTFY

Reminder

If you want memes you came to the right place, but if you want and educational answer watch this:

youtube.com/watch?v=0r376MkZwLI

You atheist! D:

>Real Crusades History
All I got was memes again