O City of Byzantium

Niketas Choniates

4 ideas

1. A Senior Official Walks Out as Refugee

   When the Crusaders took Constantinople in April 1204, Niketas Choniates, a former Grand Logothete, sheltered with his family in the house of a Venetian merchant friend. The friend posed as their captor to turn away looting soldiers, then walked them out of the city on foot among the refugees toward Selymbria, Niketas's wife pregnant. On the road Niketas chased down a Crusader who had seized a young girl from their group and shamed him into releasing her by appealing to the other Latins nearby.

2. Fellow Christians Proved Crueler Than Muslims

   Choniates argues that the Latin crusaders, who wore the cross, behaved worse than Saladin's Muslims did when they retook Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin's men, he says, spared women and let captives ransom themselves. Shared religious identity gave the Byzantines no protection, and the crusading vow became cover for plunder rather than a restraint on it.

3. The Pretender's Unpayable Promise to Foreign Allies

   The young Alexios IV Angelos won Crusader backing for his claim to the throne by promising 200,000 silver marks, troops for the crusade, and submission of the Greek Church to Rome, all of which he could not deliver once in power. His failure to pay turned his hired protectors into creditors with an army inside his walls. The same promises made him hated by his own subjects, so he ended up with no base on either side. The mechanism is that an outside force invited in on credit converts unpaid debt into a claim on the whole state.

4. Looters Melt Meaning Into Bullion

   Choniates records the Latins pulling down the city's ancient bronze statues, including the colossal Hera and Lysippos's Herakles, and melting them into coin. The objects that carried a civilization's memory were valued by the conquerors only for their metal weight. Seen this way, a sack is measured by the conversion of irreplaceable meaning into fungible value as well as by the dead.

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