The Debate on the Fourth Crusade

Abstract

This article examines attempts over the past 200 years to account for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople and its sack of the city in 1204. While nineteenth-century scholars dreamed up far-fetched conspiracy theories, their successors often put the whole thing down to a series of unforeseen accidents. The debate now seems to have reached a stage where historians set the episode in a much wider context and consider a multitude of factors, though the element of chance will probably always have to feature.