La Cuarta Cruzada y el saqueo de Constantinopla

In April of the year 1204 one of the darkest episodes of the crusades took place. Two years earlier, the armies of Western Christendom had marched, filled with religious fervour, to liberate Jerusalem from the clutches of Islam. However, the intrigues of the Venetians would divert the Crusaders from that goal and, in a dramatic turn of events, would turn their weapons against Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the largest Christian metropolis in the medieval world. After an epic assault that shocked all of Europe, the crusaders took the city, until then considered impregnable, and sacked it with brutal savagery, murdering and raping women, desecrating churches, looting the treasury and letting the flames consume their neighborhoods. Some Christian contemporaries celebrated the news, taking it as confirmation that God had condemned the treacherous Greeks; others were horrified at this perversion of the Crusader ideal. In this extraordinary new story of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips, an expert historian of the time, brings Enrico Dandolo, Alexios IV, Baldwin of Flanders and the other protagonists of this story to life, detailing their motivations and the chain of events. which led to one of the most infamous massacres in all of crusader history.