Sailing to Byzantium

On this day in 1204, one of the worst atrocities against Christendom was perpetrated by … Christians.

I refer, of course, to the sack of Constantinople.

This atrocity was committed to satisfy Venetian commercial interests, who were owed a great deal of money by the Crusaders for transportation. In so doing, they destroyed one of the great bulwarks against the continued expansion of militant Islam in the Medieval era.

It would be like the Americans coming over to France in 1917 to fight the Germans… and then looting Paris instead.

The fires alone left 15,000 people homeless.

The Crusaders looted and vandalized Constantinople for three days, during which many ancient and medieval Roman and Greek works were either stolen or destroyed. The famous bronze horses from the Hippodrome were sent back to adorn the facade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where they still remain.

The Library of Constantinople was destroyed. Despite their oaths and the threat of excommunication, the Crusaders systematically violated the city’s holy sanctuaries, destroying, or stealing all they could lay hands on; nothing was spared.

(Wikipedia)

The city never recovered. The empire never recovered. The Christian frontier against the Turks never recovered.

At the time, Pope Innocent III had demanded that the crusaders not attack upon pain of excommunication. When he heard that they’d ignored him and attacked anyway, he was filled with shame and rage. He strongly rebuked the Venetians and the Crusaders, but by then it was far too late.

In apologizing to Patriarch Bartholomew 800 years later Pope John Paul II said, “In particular, we cannot forget what happened in the month of April 1204. How can we not share, at a distance of eight centuries, the anger and the pain?”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this shameful betrayal marked a turning point in Catholic European civilization: the Age of Commerce was eclipsing the Age of Faith.

I am always on this day reminded of Yeats:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.