The Day the Icon Fell: Relic Conquest in the Fourth Crusade

During the Fourth Crusade, Latin knights, originally bound for Egypt, laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The city was eventually sacked. A short-lived Latin empire was installed to rule over the empire, and a great horde of valuables was taken back to the West. Among this booty were many holy relics. Upon their reception, these holy artifacts required justification and explanation for how they came to be where they were. The Sack of Constantinople is now remembered as a confused tragedy: an unprovoked crusade that pitted Christian against Christian. In these hagiographic sources, however, we see the narrative that contemporary Latin churchmen preferred to give the Fourth Crusade. Focusing on a particularly prolific battle in which the crusaders seized a famous Greek icon, this paper examines how focusing on the seizure of relics allows these sources to paint the Fourth Crusade as a divinely ordained conflict. This contradicts most modern accounts and many of the most famous contemporary sources.