In 1204 the leaders of the Fourth Crusade made a “detour” and conquered
Constantinople instead. We shall later explore some of the reasons why they did so.
But in the context of Byzantine history, the question is not why the Europeans
attacked but rather why the Byzantines lost the fight.
Certainly the Byzantines themselves had no idea they were “in decline.” Prior to
1204, they had reconquered some of Anatolia. In the capital, the imperial court
continued to function; its bureaucracy and machinery of taxation were still in place;
and powerful men continued to vie to be emperors—as if there were still power and
glory in the position. Yet much had changed from the heyday of the Comneni.
While the economy, largely based on peasant labor, boomed in the twelfth
century, this ironically brought the peasants to their knees. Every landowner needed
cultivators, but peasants had no way to bargain to improve their lot. Peasants worked
for the state on imperial lands. They worked for military men when the emperors
took to giving out pronoiai—grants of land to soldiers rather than wages in return for
military service. Finally, peasants worked for the dynatoi, the great landowners who
dominated whole regions. To all they paid taxes and rents. But there were only so
many peasants, certainly not enough to cultivate all the land that the elites wanted to
bring into production.
Manpower was scarce in every area of the economy. Skilled craftsmen, savvy
merchants, and seasoned warriors were needed, but where were they to be found?
Sometimes Jews were called upon; more often foreigners took up the work. Whole
army contingents were made up of foreigners: Cumans, “Franks” (the Byzantine
name for all Europeans), Turks. Forced to fight on numerous fronts, the army was
not very effective; by the end of the twelfth century the Byzantines had lost much of
the Balkans to what historians call the Second Bulgarian Empire.
Foreigners, mainly Italians, dominated Byzantium’s long-distance trade. Italian
neighborhoods (complete with homes, factories, churches, and monasteries) crowded
the major cities of the empire. At the capital city itself, stretched along the Golden
Horn like pearls on a string, were the Venetian Quarter, the Amalfitan Quarter, the
Pisan Quarter, and the Genoese Quarter: these were the neighborhoods of the Italian
merchants, exempt from imperial taxes and uniformly wealthy. (See Map 4.1 on p.
116.) They were heartily resented by the rest of Constantinople’s restive and
impoverished population, which needed little prodding to attack and loot the Italian
quarters in 1182 and again in 1203, when they could see the crusaders camped right
outside their city.
To be sure, none of this meant that Europeans had to take over. Yet in 1204,
