The aggrandisement of the Sultan Mehmet II was naturally to be desired by his contemporaries, and it has continued to the present day. But the fact remains that when the Turks captured the city, it was moribund. Practically nothing remained of what had once been the great Byzantine Empire. The Turks were already on the banks of the Danube, and the fall of Constantinople had been inevitable for many years. Even the victorious Sultan commented on the city’s derelict appearance. Vast acres of it were in ruins long before the Turkish army swept in through the breached walls. Vegetable gardens, trees and sown fields grew over the sites of forgotten palaces, roads had reverted to dust tracks, and churches were deserted or roofless.

The conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet II in 1453 was something of a hollow affair. It is true that the city provided a convenient capital for Turkey in Europe’, and that its fall was important in terms of morale (for the sacred city of the Christians was something that had long been regarded as an ultimate reward for the Faithful). But Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire had received their death-blow from the Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries before.

It cannot be denied that, at the time the Fourth Crusade was diverted to Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire was corrupted by a succession of indifferent rulers, and weakened by the onslaught of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor. Nevertheless the Empire had been through weak phases before, had survived and had re-emerged to carry on its great tradition. For the Byzantine achievement is something that can only be comprehended when the price at which it was bought is also fully understood. As N. H. Baynes wrote in his introduction to Byzantium: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the civilisation of western Europe is a by-product of the Byzantine Empire’s will to survive.”

Nineteenth-century historians found the date of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople a convenient one for marking the close of the Middle Ages. It was suggested that after 1453 an influx of Byzantine learning, arts and crafts into western Europe contrived to fertilise the Renaissance. More is now known about the origins of the Renaissance, and it is quite apparent that a slow and steady emigration of talent from the East to the West had begun several centuries before this date—had begun, indeed, almost immediately after the Latin conquest of the city in 1204. As Sir Steven Runciman has remarked in The Fall of Constantinople, 14531 “There is no point at which we can say that the medieval world changed itself into the modern world. Long before 1453 the movement that is called the Renaissance was under way in Italy and the Mediterranean world…”

It was in the centuries immediately following upon the Latin conquest that men of learning and ability began to leave the decaying city, and turn towards the rising mercantile stars of Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi. No great art-treasures from the long centuries of Byzantium reached Europe after the Turkish conquest. Such as remained—and they were few enough—stayed in the city to inspire the Turkish conquerors, while the influence of great buildings like Santa Sophia continued to permeate the Near East for centuries to come.

All the great art-treasures of Constantinople (excepting the vast number which had been destroyed, or melted down for coin) reached Europe after the return of the Venetians and the Crusaders in the years immediately after 1204. The famous Quadriga of St. Mark’s is no more than loot from Constantinople. The Treasury of St. Mark’s itself is a monument to Venetian piracy—and even the famous Pala d’Oro (within which rests the body of St. Mark) is decorated with loot stemming from the Fourth Crusade. There is hardly a major cathedral in western Europe which does not boast some reliquary or enamelled trophy dating from the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders.

The ironic result of the Fourth Crusade was that the Crusaders—who had set out to conquer Egypt, with the view to freeing the Holy Land—facilitated the conquest of eastern Europe by Islam. Duped by the Venetians, betrayed by their own leaders, and enslaved by their passions, they destroyed an irreplaceable legacy: the unity that Byzantine civilisation had constructed out of many races, territories and scattered islands. The greatest irony of all was that these ‘Christian Soldiers’ ensured that the schism between Rome and the Orthodox Church would endure for centuries. Technical ‘reconciliations’ have taken place in subsequent years, but most members of the eastern Churches continue to regard Rome as the great apostate and eternal enemy.

Political, human and religious motives diverted the Fourth Crusade. As George Meredith wrote:

 

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

We are betrayed by what is false within.

 

There were indeed ‘villains’ involved in this tragic episode of human history, but they were petty compared to what they achieved.