sexual intercourse, but now they were raping Greek women. “In truth,” he wrote, “they were exposed as frauds. Seeking to avenge the Holy Sepulchre, they raged openly against Christ and sinned by overturning the Cross with the cross they bore on their backs, not even shuddering to trample on it for the sake of a little gold and silver. By grasping pearls, they rejected Christ.”21 Niketas attempts to present the incursion as an unholy war that played out in diametric opposition to the crusaders’ holy mission. With such an agenda, he found the violation of relics rhetorically useful. Of all the crimes committed against the city by the conquering Latins, the chronicler chose to recount the sacrilegious looting first and the breaking of the sacred oath last, thus bookending his account with the worst offenses. Niketas sought to convey his horror at the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by these “Franks,” who should have been trying to liberate the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. He evoked the Antichrist and Judgment Day. He compared the Latins to the most despised people in the New Testament—those who participated in the shaming and execution of Christ. He did not eschew describing the other iniquities of the conquerors but began with the violation of the sacred.22 That decision may reflect a quick sense on his part that the memory of the sack would be ruled by the postconquest behavior of the Latins. That said, his account must largely be rejected.
Niketas was working within the genre of lament, not history, and thus employed hyperbole as a rhetorical strategy. His goal was to blame and weep in prose, not to make a historical argument about causation. Even other elements of his own chronicle call his descriptions into question. Wisely, Niketas was in hiding during the initial chaos, so at best he knew only secondhand of the depredations. As Michael Angold has noted, when Niketas actually encountered crusaders, one Frank did try to rape a girl in his party, but several Italians intervened and threatened to hang the Frank if he did not give her back. She was returned unscathed. The Chronicle of Novgorod, naturally sympathetic to Orthodox clergy, complains about the robbing of clergy and nuns but not of their murder or rape.23 Another Greek eyewitness, Nicholas Mesarites, tells the story of his brother John, who took refuge in a monastery and faced crusaders who broke into the sacred house without fear. Impressed by his faith, the crusaders treated him with respect and did him no harm.24 If, as Angold has supposed, the leader of the Latins who met John Mesarites in the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana was Count Hugh of Saint-Pol, who took over St. George’s after the conquest, this episode provides more evidence for the quick reassertion of control by the crusade leadership, especially over ecclesiastical properties.25 The Latin leadership did what it could to roll back the fog of war.
The Latin accounts support the notion that the churches of Constantinople were spared significant damage from the looting soldiers, although the fires certainly scorched them. Robert of Clari, representing the viewpoint of the rank-and-file soldier in the army, reserves harsh criticism for the conduct of many of his fellows. He finds the vast riches of Constantinople amazing but also witnesses the tensions that they caused within the army. He writes that, according to the Greeks, Constantinople had been filled with “two-thirds of the wealth of the world.”26 Now that wealth belonged to the Latins. Yet, Clari laments, little of the profit made its way into the hands of the common soldiers. Instead, the victors fought over how much each one should take from the spoils, and many “who ought to have guarded this wealth took the jewels of gold and whatsoever else they desired, and robbed the spoil.”27 These moments of anger and disappointment with his lack of loot stand in stark contrast to his commentary on the relics of the city.
Relics, in Clari’s narrative, receive nothing but words of wonder and praise. He exults in their capture, lists the major acquisitions, and recounts histories and provenance insofar as he knows them. He writes of the Holy Lance, the pieces of the Cross, the robe of Mary, the head of St. John the Baptist, and the shroud of Christ, and then adds that he saw even more relics than he could possibly describe. And these were just the relics that the crusaders found at the Bucoleon Palace. The chance for the Latins to view such holy objects as their “owners”—not as the somewhat unwelcome guests of the Greeks—delighted Clari.
The difference in tone between the descriptions of normal plundering and the capture of relics is striking. When a particular hoard of gold and gems or a piece of property fell into a crusader’s hands, Clari names the crusader (or group) or at least labels the acquisition’s point of origin.28 These statements are usually accompanied by words of condemnation for not properly sharing the plunder. When a crusader found a relic, however, Clari rarely mentions the individual who uncovered it. He reserves his narration for descriptions of the relic and its resting place, expresses wonderment at the miracles associated with the object, and then moves on to the next one. The chronicler was not afraid to document internal divisions in the force or to criticize when his fellows erred or sinned. He presents the acquisition of the relics, however, as a victory for all of the crusaders.
Curiously, the most complete account of the Fourth Crusade, that of Geoffrey of Villehardouin, never refers to the acquisition or looting of relics. As is typical of accounts of crusades, God and providence play active roles in the narrative. Sermons and other religious affairs appear regularly, and relics are mentioned when oaths are sworn over them. Villehardouin even refers to the relics of Constantinople, specifically, in one key passage. After Alexius III had fled and Alexius IV had taken the throne with his father, the chronicler writes, “Now you may know that many people from the army went to look at Constantinople, its sumptuous palaces, its many impressive churches and its great riches, of which no other city ever had as many. It is impossible even to begin to describe all the saints’ relics since there were as many in the city at that time as there were in the rest of the world put together.”29 Villehardouin notes the existence of the relics but omits any reference to the specific objects captured after the final conquest. He discusses plundering in general. He, like Clari, excoriates those who stole valuables for themselves and is quick to point out how the army’s leaders—of which he was one—punished the offenders. Regarding the looting, he writes, “Individuals began to come forward with their booty and it was gathered together. Some were honest in presenting their spoils, others deceitful. Greed, which is the root of all evil, knew no restraint; from that time forward greedy people started to hoard things for themselves, and Our Lord started to love them less. Oh God—they had behaved so loyally up to that point!”30 Villehardouin laments that even the threat of excommunication did not deter these men from keeping some portion of the booty for themselves instead of turning it over to their leaders to be divided “fairly.” That they could ignore the sacred sanctions they were risking seems to have infuriated the chronicler more than their lack of fear of being hanged—the bodily punishment for theft. Had crusaders been breaking into vaults and claiming relics or stripping away golden reliquaries from their sacred bones with wild abandon throughout the city, Villehardouin could have described it as yet another outrage. His silence on the subject might speak to ignorance of such sacrilege or embarrassment about the conduct of his fellow crusaders. On the other hand, perhaps Villehardouin, the best-informed of the Fourth Crusade chroniclers, was silent precisely because whatever pillaging of Greek churches took place did not seem egregious. Rather, it fell within normal medieval conduct of war.
Villehardouin was not alone in omitting any discussion of relics from his account. The Devastatio Constantinopolitana, a harsh critique of the crusade, never mentions the sacred objects removed from Constantinople. This text is a curious and brief account—only five pages in the single extant manuscript—that expends most of its fury on the perfidy of the crusade’s leaders. The author, who felt that the poor men of the crusade had been cheated, emphasized the misdeeds of the Frankish and Venetian leadership, especially when it came to the acquisition of wealth. Had the leadership immediately claimed the relics for themselves personally, rather than opening Constantinople’s shrines and their sacred objects to crusader veneration, one might expect the Devastatio Constantinopolitana to discuss it.31
Taken as a whole, these arguments suggest the lack of direct evidence for the kind of widespread sacrilegious looting of churches cited by both Innocent and Niketas. Indeed, in their omission of descriptions of persistent sacrilege, the major Greek and Latin eyewitness
