Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
Eastern Glory
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557)
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,March 23–July 4, 2004.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 658 pp., $75.00; $50.00 (paper)
In 1204, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for nearly nine hundred years, fell to a band of soldiers bound for Jerusalem on the Fourth Crusade. Theirs was no clash of religions; the Crusaders were Christians from different parts of northern Europe (French, Flemish, Lombard, German, and Venetian) on a mission to preserve the Holy Land for Christianity, at least until they saw the glittering wealth of this New Rome on the Bosporus and its Orthodox Christian rulers. Then greed got the best of piety: the loot was simply more than a warrior horde could resist. After stripping the city bare and torching its library, the Crusaders made cursory attempts to set up a government, but without much conviction; in 1206, they finally sold the plundered city to Venice, which had become a great colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean. But Venice, too, lost interest in governing a city of this size and complexity; by 1261, Constantinople was back in Greek Orthodox hands. So it remained for another two hundred years, until a band of Christian mercenaries conquered it for the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Review, 3620 words
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