Crusades Persuasive Essay

The Crusades of the Middle Ages, while uniting Europe under a common goal, caused a rift between Christians and adherents of other faiths, this along with their brutality caused the crusades to become a controversial episode of European history. The Fourth Crusade, which took off in 1201 and ended tragically in 1204 might be the most controversial of them all. The crusading army, mostly made up of Frenchmen and Venetians, had Egypt as its initial target. However, the crusade was diverted, first to Zara and later to Constantinople. This meant that instead of fighting Muslims, the crusaders ended up battling against fellow Christians. Historians have been discussing what happened, and more importantly why it happened, for a long time. They have

Obviously this angered Venice and they retaliated by sending a war fleet. From 1171 until the mid-1180’s Venice and Byzantium would be at war. Byzantium would have the upper hand as the Venetian war fleet would be struck by the plague and forced to retreat in 1172. After this, Venice send many embassies with the aim to create peace with Byzantium. However, these were mostly ignored by the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Komnenus. While sending more peace envoys, Venice aided the Germans in the siege of Ancona, a Greek territory in Italy, as well, in the hope of persuading the Byzantines. In 1175 the Venetians also allied themselves with the Normans, the enemy of Byzantium. All of this proved to be more or less futile in freeing the Venetians held prisoner by Byzantium and reestablishing the trading privileges. In the end peace was established, although the exact date of when this agreement was reached is unclear, certain is that by 1184 Venetians were active again in Constantiople. Even though the conflict was eventually resolved, Venice did learn that it could never be certain of its trading interests in Byzantium being preserved while Byzantium was under rule of a Byzantine emperor. The absence of Venetian merchants did mean that the Venetians were mostly spared during the

After pope Innocent III had called for a crusade in 1198 and the necessary support for it had been gathered, it was quickly decided that the crusaders would travel to the Holy Land by sea. Previous crusaders had had experienced great difficulty during their expedition by land. However, the nobles taking part in the crusade did not possess fleets which could transport the crusaders to the Holy Land and thus help was needed from one of the Italian trading cities. In the past Pisa, Genoa and Venice had all taken part in crusades by sending out fleets carrying crusaders. For example, in the first crusade all three of them had launched expeditions and as mentioned before the Venetians carried out their own crusade in 1122. Since Pisa and Genoa were in no state to mobilize a large fleet to transport the crusaders, the only remaining option was Venice. This partnership was made official by the treaty of Venice in 1201, in which it was agreed on that Venice would prepare a fleet for the transport of 4500 knights and their horses, 9000 squires and 20.000 foot soldiers. In total this would add up to 33.500 people. In return the crusaders would pay the Venetians 85000 marks. However, this number of people would prove to be a gross overestimation that would come to dictate many of the events that followed. Venice itself joined the crusade after Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian doge, offered to