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Historical The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips $15 / Penguin Books / 2005 In 1202, European knights and their entourages massed in Venice to embark on the Fourth Crusade, in an effort to extricate the Holy Land from Muslim control. Initially, the plan was to sail from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, where they would rendezvous with other crusading armies. Instead, they fell under financial obligation to Enrico Dandolo, the aged doge of Venice. The Venetians pressed the crusaders to help them capture the Hungarian port of Zara, then to proceed not to Jerusalem but to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). There, the Fourth Crusade became an orgy of shame, as the Europeans abandoned their calling and instead plundered the great city, slaughtering thousands of its citizens. Even the Christian church that the Europeans established at Constantinople was short-lived. In 1261, Constantinople was retaken by Byzantine forces and in 1453, it became part of the Ottoman Empire. Author Jonathan Phillips provides here a valuable description of late medieval life, going beyond analyses of political and religious dynamics to describe how the participants lived. Even for readers not particularly interested in the Crusades, there is rich information about conditions and customs of the early 13th century, such as streets filled with merchants and the aromas of cooking; dirt-floored churches (where one ailing cleric, St. Bernard, kept a vomit hole dug beside his pew); and wild tournaments at which knights brutally prepared themselves for battle. Phillips details the Europeans' fervor for reclaiming the Holy Land, based on a desire for material and spiritual rewards as well as a desire to liberate it from non- Christian domination. Phillips also scrutinizes the debacle at Constantinople and the circumstances leading up to it. By considering the crusade from all angles, including its setting, motives, logistics, and physical and psychological stresses, Phillips gives readers a lucid picture of the Fourth Crusade and of life at the time. —Daniel Elton Harmon

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