Nikolaos G. Chrissis. Crusading in Frankish Greece: A Study of Byzantine-Western Relations and Attitudes, 1204–1282.

Abstract

On April 12, 1204, the desperate soldiers of the troubled Fourth Crusade succeeded where armies of Arabs, Persians, and Slavs had previously failed: they captured the ancient city of Constantinople. Although the crusade had been launched to shatter the Muslim hold on Jerusalem, it ended by looting the greatest Christian city in the world. Amid the broken ruins of the Byzantine Empire, the western crusaders proceeded to build a new state, referred to by modern historians as the Latin Empire of Constantinople. It was a pitiful thing, struggling for survival in the treacherous Balkans for nearly six decades before collapsing with a whimper. The Latin Empire (1204–1261) has long remained understudied, traditionally appealing neither to medievalists nor to Byzantinists. Strangely, it has also attracted little interest among crusade historians, despite the wide diversification of the field in the past twenty years. In this book, Nikolaos G. Chrissis seeks to correct this oversight by focusing his attention on the crusaders' shifting agenda for Greece during the thirteenth century. The Latin Empire, he points out, was a crusader state no less than others in Syria, the Baltic, and Iberia. It thus requires examination as a crusade destination before it can be set into the larger ideology of contemporary crusading. In this regard, Chrissis aspires to do for the Latin Empire what Jonathan Phillips did for the Latin East in his Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119–1187 (1996).