Venice and the Sack of Constantinople

1204 CE — Italy, Venice

Today: Venice, Italy — and Constantinople

Venice was a republic of merchants built on mud, with no farmland and no army worth the name, that made itself rich as the hinge between Europe and the East. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, deep in debt to Venice for its ships, was redirected — with Venetian encouragement — to Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, which the crusaders sacked and stripped. Byzantium never recovered. A crusade launched to fight Islam destroyed the eastern Christian empire instead, and its financier took the trade routes.

Worth knowing: The four bronze horses on St Mark's Basilica were looted from Constantinople's hippodrome in 1204. They had already been looted once, from Greece by Rome, and Napoleon later took them to Paris. Venice got them back.

Pattern: Trade-route shift — The path or medium of exchange moves, and a place or power rises or declines because it sits on or off the new route.

Entry 123 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.