Fourth Crusade, diversion and assaults

What you are looking at

Three events: the diversion to Zara in November 1202, and the two assaults on Constantinople in July 1203 and April 1204.

How to read this layer

The position of each point is the place, not the event. A state record in this dataset has no geometry of its own; it names the places it happened at, and the layer draws it there. Every feature declares modern_reference so the borrowing is visible.

That matters most for the diversion. What changed at Zara was the terms of a contract, and the point on the map marks where the negotiation happened rather than a thing that had an extent.

Historical scope

1202 to 1204.

Sources and evidence

Villehardouin was there and wrote as a participant with a case to make. Robert of Clari was there and lower down the hierarchy, and disagrees. Niketas Choniates was inside the city in 1204 and is the reason the sack has a victim’s account in this corpus rather than only the crusaders’.

All three are research_only, every locator reads pending, and this layer is therefore not evidence of anything except what the project has compiled.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Dates are recorded to the month. The chronicles disagree on days, and settling that here would settle it by data entry.

Editorial decisions

The 1203 and 1204 assaults are two records, not one. They had different causes, different outcomes, and only the second ended in the sack.

Data fields

See the Crusades data fields.

Data and downloads

CC BY 4.0 for the compiled records. In review; not citable as established evidence.