Whew!! I never thought two words would bring, shall I say, “slightly heated” comments on Gideon’s blog and mine, while basically everything else I posted that night would be ignored.

I’m not taking sides with either the Papist Christians or the Orthodox Christians. I’m neither. In this awful story, both sides were “nominally Christian.”

What the Venetians, Normans, and Germans did to Byzantium was evil, there is absolutely no doubt about it. They committed countless atrocities and blasphemies to satisfy their own greed, all in the name of God. Pope Innocent denounced them vehemently.

In the eyes of the whole world you have abandoned yourselves to debauchery, adultery and prostitution. You have not only violated married women and widows, but even women and virgins whose lives were dedicated to Christ. You have … despoiled the very sanctuaries of God’s Church. You have broken into holy places, stolen the sacred objects of altars…. It is hardly surprising that [the Greek Church] sees in all Latins no more than treachery and the works of the Devil, and regards all of them as curs.

But the Byzantines were by no means innocent and righteous victims. According to Bradford, Nicetas Choniates, author of one of the most well-known eyewitness accounts of the sack of Byzantium, wrote a fair account.

His work is, in a sense, a cry of pain and shame — pain at the destruction of the city and the Empire, and shame at the way in which the later emperors and their courtiers conducted themselves. Sir Edwin Pears described him as “imbued with a religious spirit — religious in the sense that he believes that God rules the world and will punish national immorality.”

… Much though [Nicetas] may loathe the Latins who sacked and conquered his city, he is at pains to point out that it was the corruption of the Byzantines themselves that led to their downfall.

As we look at history, God often uses a more evil country to punish a less evil one. Judgement starts at the house of God. I don’t know enough about the Byzantines to say whether it was more or less corrupt than its attackers, though I hope I will be learning more Byzantine history soon.

To put it simply, if I were to explain the story of the Fourth Crusade to my darling three-year-old and four-year-old students, I would say, “The Crusaders were bad. The Byzantines were bad. God used the Crusaders to punish the Byzantines. Then He punished the Crusaders, too.” (Many of the leaders of the Crusade died violent deaths.)

And at the risk of inflaming even more people, may now I suggest that

(1) a defective view on worship and
(2) a lack of understanding about the covenant

were factors which contributed to the weakness of the Byzantine church and the subsequent weakness of the Roman church?