It was a accident

it was a accident

Okay, I give.

Mr. Dandalo, I give. I've only just realized that this whole Byzaboo thing I've been nursing since those glorious summers as a 14-17 year old playing CrusaderKangzToo has spiraled out of control. What began as simply a reflexive glee spurred by feeling myself possessor of some esoteric knowledge ("Well, most people don't actually know that the Roman Embire dint even fall until 1453 [or was it 1204???]...), is now a gross sublimation of something all the more sinister. Now, now this reflexive cringe and whinge -- dare I admit, trigger -- whenever anyone as much mentions Manzikert or Mehmed or even your very own Fourth, Mr. Dandalo, now I know that it is merely a stand-in, a convenient formula of metaphor and synapse by which I can subconsciously give shape to a number of ills and self-loaths I never even knew were there.

Don't you see Mr. Dandalo? I want to thank you! Thank you and all your blessed four-score and teen years of existence for collecting one final debt. That which I owe to myself. For you see, I was never reaally in love with the Byzantines. Few are, at least, not those of us who attach so much emotion to something of the past. Instead, I used that faded codicil of the good ol' Imperium as a cypher for regret, to sublimate all my own past mistakes, regrets, and poor decisions. The idea of the wrecked empire, Mr. Dandalo, was nothing ever more than my finally peering down from the mouse -- or even, up at a mirror -- and not being able to help but notice the degradation of flesh, that waste that the silent hours have long since stolen from me. Oh don't get me wrong Mr. Dandalo, this isn't a bitter realization, no! This is a jubilant one, for you see, we all feel regret, we can't help it. I'm sure you carried your own all those years after personally witnessing the fruits of your labor wrecked by Byzantine agency.

Yes, we all carry regret, path not taken and all that. I'm just glad that now, I can do something about it. Now that its out in the open, and no longer being subsumed as 'utterly' futile butthurt, NOW I can go out and seize hold of what years I have left (that I may have have of yours total more). Thank you Mr. Dandalo. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I bet that holy cross splintered up did wonders for all those Italian and French churches, and I'm sure that French whore sung wonderfully on the Patriarch's throne, and if it weren't for you, I bet the Quadriga would have long since been a Turkish cannon, killing many a Hungarian or Armenian. Thank you, THANK YOU Mr. Dandalo. What's that? You want to see if that little Ancona under your manskirt can still feel a tickle? Well Mr. Dandalo, if you insist! Please me to please you! Haha! Yes! [gargling down your spire of St. Mark]. Oh Mr. Dandal-OH!

Alexios IV was a mistake

Actually, according to most modern scholars...yes, it was an accident.

>Alexios IV goes to Pope to ask for help getting throne back
>Pope tells him to get fucked
>Crusade prepares for Egypt, tells everyone it's going to be for Holy land to be sneaky
>most of the crusaders go to the holy land
>Rest of 'em can't pay for the massive fleet they booked
>agree to go with the Venetians and scare towns into obeying Venice
>fine.jpg
>get to one town, Crusader goes 'lol it's a joke we aren't helping them'
>Town closes up
>Venetians and Crusaders have to sack the place
>Start fighting over the winter
>German Emperor's peeps bring Alexios IV over to 'em
>Offers them a load of shit in exchange for helping him
>Crusader leaders argue to do it. JUST DO IT
>Dandalo shrugs and goes along with it
>Get to Constantinople
>Install Alexios IV after a bit of 'wtf?! WHY AREN'T THEY ALL PRAISING THEIR HEIR IN THE FUEDAL MANNER?!'
>shit goes horribly wrong
>end up burning down half the city when raiding a mosque for islamic diplomats
>Alexios ends up killed
>Dandalo (both the Byzantine and Latin accounts record this) goes to negotiate with the new Emperor
>Crusaders charge at the emperor mid conversation, he barely escapes
>Latins from inside the city tell the Doge that Venice is gonna lose their privilages to the other Italians because of this
>Doge gives up and agrees to help sack the place to get the money to pay things back
TLDR: German Emperor and his man on the Crusade wanna support Alexios IV (marriage links). Shit goes wrong

Seriously, the meme of Venice being the enternal enemy of the ERE is wrong. They were loyal traders and partners. They came from the damn same people.

But nooo, one accident occurs, a angry Byzantine clerk blames the Venetians, then the Papacy and Crusaders roll with it to shift the blame. Now everyone assumes Venice lead it.

>Venice
>Zara
>Adriatic Sea
>Epirus
>Corfu
>Ionian Sea
>to the Holy Land
>"Hey guys we're gonna take a quick detour."
Constantinople

...

Holy shit I audibly kekled

>medieval ships
>crossing open water
>not hopping from Port of call to port of call

And Constantinople was a deliberate detour to get the crusade funded and supplied by Alexios IV

>accident

>Seljuk
>of
>Rum

no, it was the burning of zadar(zara)

never trust venetians

>Now everyone assumes Venice lead it.
You can thank napoleonic propaganda for that.

Hello there everyone.

>middle ages
>sailing in the open sea

Actually, before te Age of discovery you could only travel by coast I very much doubt the mediterranean islands were even settled at the time, you can only go there with modern (at least renaissance) technology

I assume you retards have never taken a boat.

Do you have the slightest idea of how actually BIG the sea is?
Do you think medieval fucking retards who couldn't even read could do such a travel?

It would take years perhaps even decades to go from Venice to Cyprus and the ship could break at any time and in that case, woops, you're dead.

Even if they knew about the island from Roman times no body in their right minds would have gone there risking so much.

Medieval fuckers couldn't read, get this through your head, their intelligence level was so fucking low that they couldn't read, perform an action as simple as reading, how the fuck do you think that they could travel the fucking open (not coastal) the OPEN sea with a fucking shitty wooden boat, oh yeah this is the middle ages, no telescope, no nothing, only sea for hundreds of miles, only fucking sea, even in modern times you need experts on the ships to sail through the sea hence why the airplane was invented and we use it instead of ships.

Going through the sea requires deep knowledge of mathematics, physics, geometry, something medieval people did NOT fucking have before the renaissance/age of discovery.

>It would take years perhaps even decades to go from Venice to Cyprus
What the actual fuck. This is trolling right? Venice to Cyprus is two weeks' worth of sea travel on a fucking galley.

I mean we literally got a Stanford project dedicated to reconstructing travel times in ancient Rome (look Altinum to Paphos), I doubt shit got any slower a thousand years later.

...

They are mememing.
Is incorrectly using civ 5 tech tree here. Incorrect, because the med isn't 'open sea' on any of the civ 5 maps.

See Or pick up a book on the subject from the last 10 years.

>It would take years perhaps even decades to go from Venice to Cyprus

My phone with the screencap is dead
Someone else post it before he gets more (You)'s

>You can thank napoleonic propaganda for that.
tell me more

Hownew.ru

the truth was alexios IV was a moron and almost everyone else from the angeloi dynasty were morons too

shit was bound to go wrong eventually, Dandolo just went with it to profit his own state.

>tell me more
Basically Napoleon needed a justification for conquering Venice, a sovereign neutral power, so he set one of his pet historians to write an extremely scathing history of Venice full of fake anecdotes.
Honestly I can't really be arsed to look up how the guy was called, but he was part of Boney's inner circle. His bullshit basically became the standard history of Venice for the rest of the century (afterall who's gonna complain, the austrians? They would havre been more than happy for any further reason to tighten their hold on the region), and the Serenissima's reputation went down the drain.

Venice was better than Constantinople in every way.

He tried to warn us about the greeks and their debts. Why didn't we listen?