Byzantine Culture

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The Latin Empire of Constantinople, 1204–1261

For fifty-seven years a French dynasty ruled from Constantinople over a bankrupt, shrinking state. The Latin Empire, its crusader states, the Greek successor realms, and its collapse.

Between 1204 and 1261 the city of Constantinople was ruled by a line of French counts styling themselves emperors of Romania. The regime they founded was poor, small, permanently at war, and dependent on Venice for everything that floated. It never controlled more than a fraction of the territory it claimed, and by the 1250s the emperor was selling the lead off the palace roofs and pawning relics to Venetian moneylenders.

The Latin Empire matters less for what it achieved than for what it destroyed and what it provoked. It ended the Byzantine Empire as a Mediterranean great power; it scattered the political inheritance among three Greek successor states; and it fixed a grievance between Orthodox and Catholic Christendom that formal diplomacy has never entirely removed.

The Partition

The Fourth Crusade took the city in April 1204. A treaty drawn up in March, before the assault, had already divided the empire: a quarter to the emperor, and the remaining three quarters split evenly between Venice and the other crusaders.

Baldwin of Flanders was elected emperor in May over Boniface of Montferrat, who was compensated with Thessalonica. Venice took the patriarchate and — with much more strategic sense than anyone else showed — the islands and ports that mattered: Crete, Euboea, Modon and Coron in the Peloponnese, the Ionian islands, and the harbour quarters of Constantinople itself. The Venetian share was chosen to secure a trading empire, and it lasted for centuries after the Latin Empire had gone.

Other crusader states formed on the mainland: the Principality of Achaea in the Peloponnese under the Villehardouins, the Duchy of Athens under a Burgundian family, and a scatter of lordships in Thessaly and Boeotia.

The Greek Successors

Three Byzantine states claimed the imperial inheritance:

  • Nicaea, in western Anatolia, under Theodore I Laskaris, with the exiled patriarch. The best organised and eventually the winner.
  • Epiros, in north-western Greece, under a branch of the Angeloi. It took Thessalonica in 1224 and briefly looked like the stronger claimant.
  • Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, founded days before the fall of Constantinople by grandsons of Andronikos I. It survived everyone, until 1461 — its story is told in the fall of Trebizond.

The Regime’s Impossible Position

The Latin Empire was doomed by arithmetic within a year.

Manpower. The crusader army numbered perhaps twenty thousand at its peak and dispersed rapidly. Few new settlers came from the west; the crusading energy of Europe was directed at Egypt and later at the Albigensians.

Revenue. The empire’s tax system depended on Anatolian and Balkan provinces it did not hold. Constantinople’s commercial revenues went to Venice under the treaty.

Legitimacy. The Greek population never accepted Latin rule, and the imposition of a Latin patriarch and Latin bishops turned the religious question into a national one. Villages paid what they had to and waited.

Enemies on every side. In April 1205, twelve months after the conquest, the Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan destroyed the Latin army at Adrianople and captured the emperor Baldwin, who died in a Bulgarian prison. The empire never recovered from the loss of its field army.

The Long Decline

Baldwin’s brother Henry of Flanders (1206–1216) was the one genuinely capable ruler of the regime. He beat the Bulgarians, stabilised the Anatolian frontier, and tried to conciliate the Greek population and clergy — a policy his successors abandoned.

After him the territory contracted steadily. Nicaea took the Asian shore; Epiros took Thessalonica; the Bulgarians and then the Nicaeans took Thrace. By the 1240s the Latin Empire consisted of Constantinople and its immediate suburbs.

The emperor Baldwin II spent most of his reign touring Europe asking for money. He mortgaged his son to Venetian merchants as security for a loan. He sold relics from the imperial collection to Louis IX of France — the Crown of Thorns among them — and Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house them, which is why the finest surviving building of the Latin Empire’s asset-stripping stands on the Île de la Cité. The trade in Constantinopolitan relics that followed 1204 is described in relics and pilgrimage in Byzantium.

The Recovery of the City

In July 1261 a Nicaean force under Alexios Strategopoulos found Constantinople undefended — the garrison and the Venetian fleet were away attacking a Black Sea island — and entered through a postern. Baldwin II fled by sea in such haste that he left his crown and sceptre behind, and they were sent to Nicaea as trophies. Michael VIII Palaiologos entered the city in August.

The Latin Empire had lasted fifty-seven years and died in a single night, without a battle. Its Greek successors in the Aegean and the Peloponnese lasted far longer: the Duchy of Athens until 1456, Venetian Crete until 1669.

What It Cost

The damage to Constantinople itself was not repaired. Three fires during the conquest destroyed large districts. The bronze statues of the Hippodrome — including a Herakles attributed to Lysippos — were melted for coin, an act the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates recorded in a famous passage of lament for works he had seen and knew would never be replaced. The four gilt-bronze horses now in Venice, taken from the Hippodrome, are the most conspicuous survival.

The empire restored in 1261 was a different kind of state: smaller, poorer, without a navy of its own, with its commerce in Italian hands, and facing an Anatolian frontier it could no longer garrison. Whether Byzantium could have survived the thirteenth century intact without 1204 is unanswerable, but the specific weaknesses that brought it down in 1453 are all traceable to the half-century of Latin rule and the terms of the recovery.

The religious breach was equally durable. Pope John Paul II expressed regret for the sack of 1204 in 2001 and again in 2004 on its eight-hundredth anniversary, and Patriarch Bartholomew’s response acknowledged the gesture — an exchange that indicates both how long the grievance lasted and that it is not, even now, entirely closed.

The Partition Treaty

The Partitio Romaniae, drawn up in March 1204 before the city was taken, is one of the more remarkable documents of the Middle Ages: a detailed carve-up of a functioning empire by men who had not yet captured its capital.

Its terms were precise. The emperor would receive one quarter of the empire, including a quarter of Constantinople with the Great Palace and Blachernae. The remaining three quarters would be split equally between Venice and the non-Venetian crusaders. Whichever party did not supply the emperor would supply the patriarch, and would control Hagia Sophia.

Venice negotiated the detail better than anyone. Its share was chosen for maritime utility rather than area: Crete, Euboea, Modon and Coron in the Peloponnese, the Ionian islands, the ports of Thrace, and the quarters of Constantinople controlling the harbours.

The document names Byzantine administrative districts, which is why it is a valuable source for the provincial organisation of the empire immediately before 1204 — the partitioners were working from Byzantine tax registers.

Why the Regime Could Not Be Fixed

Henry of Flanders (1206–1216) was a genuinely capable ruler, and his failure to stabilise the empire shows that the problem was structural rather than personal.

Henry did most of what could be done. He defeated the Bulgarians, secured a truce with Nicaea, and — unlike his predecessors and successors — actively conciliated the Greek population, confirming Orthodox clergy in their positions, and in 1208 reaching an accommodation that allowed Greek monasteries to keep their property. A Greek source notes his fairness.

It was not enough, for reasons no emperor could fix:

  • No recruitment base. Western settlers did not come in numbers, and the crusading impulse of Europe was directed elsewhere.
  • No revenue. The taxable provinces were held by Nicaea, Epiros and Bulgaria; the commercial revenues were Venetian by treaty.
  • No legitimacy. The Latin patriarchate turned every parish into a site of resistance.
  • Three hostile successor states, each of which claimed to be the empire and had populations that agreed.

Henry died in 1216, possibly poisoned, and the regime declined without interruption thereafter.

The Relic Trade

The systematic sale of Constantinople’s relics is the Latin Empire’s most conspicuous economic activity and its most durable legacy in western Europe.

Baldwin II’s transactions with Louis IX of France are the largest. Between 1237 and 1242 he transferred the Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, the Holy Lance, the Holy Sponge and a substantial group of other Passion relics — some of which had been pawned to Venetian financiers and had to be redeemed by Louis before shipment.

Louis paid an enormous sum and then built the Sainte-Chapelle, completed in 1248, to house them. The building cost substantially less than the relics did, which is a useful indication of relative values in the thirteenth century.

Hundreds of smaller transfers went to cathedrals and monasteries across France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries, and generated a literary genre — the translatio, a narrative explaining how a relic came west and arguing that the saint had consented. Gunther of Pairis’s account of the abbot Martin stuffing his robe with relics in a Constantinopolitan church is the most honest of them, and the least edifying. The wider cult is described in relics and pilgrimage.

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