Episode 293 - Governing Constantinople with John Giebfried

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 293,

Governing Constantinople with John Giebfried

Today is the last of our vantage point episodes as we look around Constantinople itself.

What was the physical state of the city under Latin rule and what was the Latin government like?

What was the relationship, for example, between the new quote-unquote emperor and his nobles?

To talk us through these topics we are joined by Dr.

John Giebfried, who you heard last week telling us about about the Venetian colony at the capital.

John completed his PhD in medieval history at St.

Louis University in 2015 and then went on to work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Georgia Southern University, East Georgia State College and since 2022 has been a faculty member at the University of Vienna.

There he teaches history and digital humanities and his academic work focuses on the Crusades and Crusader states and European interactions with the Mongols.

His doctoral work was on the final Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, and he will be back on the podcast in a couple of episodes time to tell us his life story.

Today, though, we focus on New Rome itself.

Here's the interview, and as I often do, I will butt in from time to time to add a few more details.

John Giebfried, welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Thank you so much, Robin.

I've been listening for years and it's an honor to be here with you today.

Hey, well, it's a pleasure to have you.

And

it's wonderful always to be talking to someone who's actually working on the material right now and

uncovering new insights.

And we bring you in at this juncture to tell us more about what's going on.

in Constantinople itself, because a lot of the action in the narrative has been happening out in the Balkans.

And we've been talking about Theodor Lascaris in Anatolia.

And

people are trying to

fill the power vacuum that's opened up with the sack of Constantinople.

So what's going on back in the city itself and the

new Crusader administration?

And so the first thing I think we'd like to talk about is the sack itself and the sort of physical state of Constantinople.

Because I, in my coverage of the sack, I felt it was important to push back on the kind of Wikipedia version of history, which suggests that the Crusaders committed this crime against humanity, destroying this wonderful, pristine city.

And I had a lot of caveats to that.

And it sounds like you are very much on the caveat side and want to correct some errors in that sort of popular version of the sack and the physical destruction of Constantinople.

Yeah.

I think, yeah, part of what we have been dealing with is some historians cast long shadows.

So, Stephen Runciman, the great Byzantinist, called the Fourth Crusade the greatest crime against humanity in history.

And that sentiment basically

was the dominant sentiment of every account of the Fourth Crusade for the next 50 years, and really is the dominant sentiment in every account of it.

And I think if you step back and look at the way

the primary sources say what happened, happened,

we get a very condensed picture.

And we shove everything that happened wrong from, say, Andronicus to 1261 and the Byzantines coming back into three horrible days of looting and destruction and violence and mayhem that are collectively the worst horrible possible thing that could ever happen.

And I think part of this is narrative convenience that historians very much like to say, and then horrible things happened to Constantinople and list off everything.

But if you read the sources about all of those things, you find that they didn't all happen at the same time and that so much of the destruction is really spread out.

And if you're counting the

most dangerous parts, the worst time to be a person or something of cultural value in Constantinople, The sack of Constantinople is not the worst period.

It may not actually be the second.

There might be a period later that's slightly worse, but it is not as if those three days are the epitome of evil and that everything comes together.

John is arguing along a similar line to the one mentioned by Max Lau a few episodes ago, that actually Constantinople was slowly despoiled over a much longer period of time.

Essentially, from Andronicus arriving in the city and allowing the locals to sack the Italian quarters all the way through to the end of Latin rule some 80 years later.

As a reminder,

after Andronicus attacked the Latins, he was overthrown by Isaac Angelos and his supporters stormed the palace when Andronicus was ousted.

And then Isaac Angelos' allies looted some of the suburbs when they defeated the rebel general Alexius Vranas.

He was then overthrown by his brother Alexius Angelos Komninos, who then ransacked the tombs of the emperors in order to pay off his debts, and then the great palace was looted again by the followers of John the Fat,

all of this before the Crusaders even arrived, which sort of pushes back against the idea that Constantinople was a pristine repository of the ancient world, which the Crusaders were solely responsible for destroying.

Their behavior, as I argued at the time, was better than is commonly believed.

For example, the most famous famous account of Latin degeneracy comes from Coniates, where he describes the Agia Sophia being stripped of all its wealth, and prostitutes dancing on the patriarch's throne, and beasts of burden being brought in to cart away the loot, but only to defecate on the floor.

But, says John, this particular scene didn't actually happen.

If there's one passage that people remember,

it's this famous passage where he talks about the destruction of the Haghia, how they tore down the iconostasis and they tore down the silver ambo and they smashed up the altar and all the jewels were divided and

all of it is just gone and destroyed.

And

as all these fantastical stories of carrying in oxen

who are dragging things out and the prostitute sitting on the patriarch's throne and all these colorful things that are there.

The problem is, it didn't happen.

It didn't happen that way at all.

So, how do we know that?

Well,

if you want to talk about the problems that come with Conianti's account, it's pretty simple.

He wasn't there.

He was hiding in a house protected by his Venetian friend.

He stays there under that friend's protection.

And then, on basically right after Easter, he and his family leave the city.

They never get a chance to see it, and he doesn't come back to Constantinople till 1206.

What we do know is that there is an eyewitness who sees what the Hagasophia looks like a week after the sack of Constantinople, and that's Robert of Clary.

So, Robert of Clary, you might remember, is

a knight from northern France who is one of the vassals of one of the more important lords, but he is one of the two main Latin historians that we have who's accounted there.

And after the sack is done and after Easter, basically the sack ends and people just go around being like tourists.

And they see all the sites that you would see as if you're on pilgrimage to Constantinople.

Now, a lot of stuff has been stolen, but a lot of stuff still remains.

And the parts that still remain are the parts where the powerful lords exerted their control over and said, we are going to keep this mostly in place.

So, for the most part, places like the Blecanae, where

Baldwin of Flanders hung out, was left largely intact at this period.

The Great Palace, where the leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montfort, was perfectly intact.

Everything is still there.

Everything is still going to be there by the 1240s when it gets sold off by John of Brienne and Baldwin II to deal with their mounting debts.

And importantly, also the Hagia Sophia, because the Patriarch's Palace and the Hagia Sophia are taken over by the most formidable person in the entire crusade, and that's Enrico Dandelo.

Dandelo is literally sitting right there.

He knows that this is going to be the seat of a Venetian patriarchate in a couple weeks or a couple months from now.

And he does not want his sort of crown jewel, literally the place where a year from now he's going to be buried, to be totally destroyed.

And so, with there's going going to be some things taken, but if you listen to what Robert of Clary has to say, that he very clearly in his account says it's all still there.

So, his account, he says that the church of San Sophia was entirely round.

There were domes, there were columns.

He goes and talks about all the things that the columns do.

But then you get to there that, and there was not a door on the church nor its hinges that were not made out of silver.

The master altar of the church was so rich and beyond price.

The table of the altar was made of gold and precious stones.

And he goes and just talks about the iconostasis and the dome over the altar and all the stuff that Coniante says is destroyed here a week after the sack.

It's still there.

And in the accounts of the coronation of Baldwin of Flanders and of Henry, that altar is still there.

It's not, it is

not, it is not destroyed for at least a year and a half.

And

my best guess as to it clearly is gone by the time Kaniates is back in the city.

Otherwise, him writing his history and passing it off, saying that everything was destroyed.

And if it's still up there, he has no sort of historical legitimacy.

He is sort of filling in the gaps, but forgetting that the sack of Constantinople really isn't just one moment, one three-day period in time.

It's a gigantic process.

Just to go back to Coniates' description of the Ardia Sophia for a moment,

by the time Coniates writes that, he's in Nicaea and presumably writing for an audience who want to hear that, that they want to hear the Latins did everything terrible you could imagine.

And so that story is calibrated for their expectations.

And so the stuff may be gone by that point, but he's imagining how bad it would have been.

And he's writing for an aristocracy who basically left the night before.

That these are people who also, like him, left and don't know what's happened for a year and a half.

That the people who are gathered around

the Las Caras court in Nicaea haven't been back to Constantinople, don't know.

Caniantes,

we think because he's temporarily trying to get a job with the Emperor Henry, but that doesn't work out.

So he goes to Nicaea, where it also doesn't work out.

But

it's still play,

he still has to sort of appeal to the line.

But more of what Kaniate is doing

is he's just writing a lament from classical and biblical tropes.

That Alicia Simpson has written a beautiful book on Kaniantes.

And although it doesn't talk nearly as much about the sack as I would want it to,

she really likes to highlight that, like,

so much of what he is doing is he is writing in a way that is emphasizing classical and biblical precedents.

And the sack, his account of the sack of Constantinople, might as well be, you know, the book of lamentations for the destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament.

You just change Jerusalem for Constantinople, and it's essentially the same thing.

So the Ahea Sophia was eventually robbed of its wealth, but not during the initial occupation, only later, when the Venetians ran out of money and had nowhere else to turn.

Had the Latin Empire been a success, it's possible they wouldn't have taken all the things they did.

The actual three-day sack of the city, says John, was far from the most destructive phase of the impoverishment of Constantinople.

That would obviously be the fires which the Crusaders set during the siege.

The removal of the remaining wealth of New Rome happened relatively slowly over the next few years, and John identifies five phases of this destruction.

There is sort of this phase zero of the various Greek civil wars that Max Lau was talking about, and then you sort of have five phases of destruction organized by the Latins.

One is the unintentional destruction by the fire.

The second is the sack proper, those three days where they are just taking everything that's not nailed down from the general parts of the city.

What you then have afterwards is sort of

over the summer and autumn of 1204, a lot of unorganized post-SAC looting.

And then phase four really sort of,

you could argue, is as

is probably more culturally destructive than the SAC is.

And that's really what's going on in 1205, 1206 in the aftermath of the Crusader defeat of Adrianople.

And Adrianople was about the, if the Crusaders were going to suffer a terrible like

defeat on the battlefield, not only did they lose the emperor who was captured and one of the leading nobles in Louis of Blas and most of their army, They also lost them at exactly the time that all the Venetian contract for their ships staying and the Crusaders year-long promise to stay, which all the Crusaders were made to swear a promise from after the coronation.

We're going to stay for about one year in order to do this.

Also, the Venetian fleet is going to stay here for one year.

And that one year promise ran out exactly after there was this devastating loss in battle.

And everybody is like, okay, time to go home.

At this point, there is sort of a mass exodus and you have large-scale sort of cultural looting.

It also doesn't help that the Doge is now dead and there is no central leadership on the Venetian part.

And no one knows exactly what happens because the accounts are there.

We do know in this period that the new emperor Henry, it's at this point he needs to pay his soldiers.

He's out of money.

And that is when a year and a half later, he melts down all the statues, the ancient Greek statues that are in the Hippodrome.

And so this, which in many accounts, including yours of the Fourth Crusade, you lump into, and then the sack, they melted down all the statues and all this.

That was a year and a half later, and is a response to the destruction that goes on there.

I suspect this is when the Hagia Sophia is looted and taken for pieces.

This is when the famous picture of the Tetrarchs and the horses are going to be taken as well.

And you also have a whole bunch of goodbye gifts, like, here, have some relics, tell your friends to come back and help.

And so, the Byzantine imperial relic collection, while the wholesale selling of it is going to go down another 35 years in the future, or mortgaging in redemption, and all that, because you can't sell relics.

There's a large number of relics sent away with departing crusaders in the hopes that this will encourage more people to come back and make up for the manpower shortage.

And I think it's fair to to say by the end of 1206,

the great wealth of Constantinople has left on the Venetian fleet and is left with the departing crusaders.

And while precious and cherished relics like the Crown of Thorns, like the large sections of the True Cross, stay behind, the number of men who are left can't maintain a city, can't maintain an infrastructure.

And so phase five, the final phase, is basically 50 years years of debt and neglect, where we're getting down to the guy, the last Latin emperor of Constantinople.

The only way he can make money is by taking lead off the roof of the great palace and melting it down and selling the lead.

And that's kind of like the sad sort of climax and end to this sort of

long, sad century of destruction that befalls Constantinople.

Of course, it's little consolation to us that the sacking of the city was spread out over the course of the Latin occupation, but it does again put into context the behaviour of the Crusaders.

They did attempt to preserve some important parts of Constantinople, but the shocking defeat at Adrianople and the sudden departure of most of their manpower saw the city further emptied, and from then on the situation became ever more desperate, meaning any movable wealth was eventually going to be taken.

As we've seen in the narrative, the Latin emperors were working with very limited resources.

Few men stayed around to serve the new emperor, many went to Greece or the Aegean, and new arrivals were as likely to sign up with the Romans at Nicaea or Epirus as they were the administration at Constantinople.

The Pope had not convincingly argued that dying in the Balkans would save anyone's soul, and the new Roman states were offering better pay.

The nature of Latin imperial imperial power further hampered their ability to command men to do their bidding.

John now explains the constitutional setup of the Latin administration.

As someone who teaches the Middle Ages to undergraduates a lot of the time, that when you look at American and British government, and I think the British have a better sense of this because you have Magna Carta,

that we talk a lot about Democratic Athens and Republican Rome as like this is the bedrock of modern democracy, and we all go back to Greece and Rome.

But we forget that it's the Middle Ages that brings us sort of the idea of a written constitution, which neither Athens or Rome ever had, and the idea of a bill of rights.

Both of these are distinctly medieval institutions, mostly negotiated between the aristocracy and the kings.

This is not, you know, great popular democracy, but

early British democracy until the the 19th century, and even the earliest American government was not exactly a, well, I mean, it was not democratic in that half the population, i.e., women, not to mention slaves and people who didn't hold property, were left out of it.

But generally speaking, the idea that you have a republic really rests on like the idea of a constitution and bill of rights, and that's very much a medieval institution.

And when I talk about medieval constitutions and Bill of Rights, everyone goes to Magna Carta.

But Magna Carta is not alone.

I like to call this moment the medieval constitutional reaction, that in the 12th and 13th century in Western Europe, you have people like King Henry II of England and King Philip Augustus of France,

who basically were able to consolidate large, powerful royal estates, and they handed it over to their successors to either use or misuse as they see fit.

And when it comes to misuse, we get to Magna Carta and famously King John,

and you have the nobles reacting to this as their way to limit the excesses of the monarchy, you get Magna Carta.

Now, Magna Carta is not a document in isolation.

All over Europe, there are these constitutional treaties between the aristocracy and the rulers of these countries.

It happens in Hungary in 1222 with a document known as the Golden Bull, which is against the excesses of King Andrew II.

You also in the Holy Roman Empire have what's called the Statute in Favor of the Princes in 1231.

And you see this especially in

areas affected by the Crusades.

It's in a frontier situation, like a crusader conquest, that you can really have the most leverage for nobles to have over their lords.

And the Fourth Crusade as a collection of nobles where you're taking one out of them to be raised up higher than everyone else really gives you a chance for the nobility to exact confessions.

Whereas in the West, you really need sort of a King John level incompetent monarch to get something like Magna Carta.

That's why when you have a century of like successful rule in France of people like Philip Augustus and Saint Louis, like literally a saint king, you don't get this kind of reaction because you have centralized power and you have a good monarch.

But where you don't have the power or where you don't have a good monarch, the aristocracy of the 13th century are really pushing back.

And I think the Latin Empire is one of, if not the best cases of this.

Okay.

So does this negotiation take place right immediately after the sack, or does this pushback go on over time?

So it's basically three documents make up what could be called the Constitution of the Latin Empire.

One is the March Pact.

This is the treaty that all the Crusade leaders make before entering the city, before they're about to try to attack the city.

And this lays out: we're going to elect an emperor.

If the emperor is a frank, the patriarch will be appointed as a venetian and vice versa it says we are going to have a partition treaty where we divide up the land which will be half divided up and the emperor gets a quarter of the land and the other three quarters are divided up half for franks half for venetians and you have this idea that there is going to be a there there's going to be some rules that come in uh about how we sack how things are divided how the money is brought up so basically the rough system and principle that we are going to elect an emperor and a patriarch and divide up the land is there.

Then you have a partition treaty, which happens

later in 1204 in October, where everything is divided up.

And that is sort of the second pillar of this constitutional system.

Here are the lands.

This is what we're all supposed to get.

more or less.

Finally, the most important part of this is the coronation oath of the Emperor Henry, the treaty of October 1205.

So Baldwin has died.

Henry is regent, but Henry wants to be crowned as emperor in his own right.

And he is going to make a lot of concessions to do this.

One of those concessions is to hand over a very powerful, famous icon of the Hodigatria to the Venetians.

And the other main concession he makes is this coronation oath that he has to take and every emperor after him has to take.

And this coronation oath sets up an executive council, which has has the emperor, the leader of the Venetians in Constantinople, the Porista,

and then six Frankish barons and six Venetian barons.

And together,

this council decides when we go for war and peace, where we attack.

It limits

when the emperor can bring war.

It demands that the emperor has to pay for siege weapons and other things as

part of the campaign.

And that this council is going to to be in charge of looking at making sure the partition is done fairly and that law and justice is respected within the empire.

And sort of most importantly of all,

this council can try anyone in the empire, including the emperor himself, who can be removed as emperor if he violates the terms of the three treaties, the March Pact before it, the partition,

or this coronation oath of the Emperor Henry.

And

this constitution

is, this oath is repeated by

every subsequent emperor.

You can see in various treaties when you bring in people from outside, they all have to agree to these positions.

And when they're promising certain lands to one of the imperial, like one of the external emperors that they're bringing in, a guy named John of Brienne, who's a former king of Jerusalem, what he's allowed to get is only what is allowed to be given to the emperor under this period.

So even though he wants to give some land that may fall into the Frankish or Venetian territory, that is technically not allowed.

And that is revised out of the various versions of the treaty that you can see.

But I'm pressing my case a little bit here, but you can make the argument that the Latin Empire of Constantinople is Europe's first constitutional monarchy.

And while you can't say there's a direct line from Henry and Constantinople to King John and Runnymede that flows all the way through to the American Founding Fathers, what you can say is that this sort of very early act of rebellion in the medieval constitutional reaction, a decade before Magna Carta, is the beginning of a wave that is sort of cresting over the monarchies of Europe and is one step along the way to a world of constitutional government, justice under law, and written bills of rights.

And it's very much completely forgotten that this is one of the good historical developments of the Latin Empire that

no one seems to notice except for one footnote in one small article and one passing reference somewhere else.

And so I hope I have made my case that this is a important document and an important moment.

And while, you know, it's not Magna Carta, it is part of that same story.

Yeah, and it's slightly ironic in narrative terms because

it's the worst thing for the survival of the Latin Empire

to divide power and to be held back and to.

um

splinter your resources um when you when you don't really control these lands.

It's true.

And the same thing is said about the Golden Bull of Hungary as well.

That while we look at these as great historical events today, the weakening of central power in Hungary and basically the nobles taking larger and larger control and not listening to a central authority means a generation later the Hungarian state is so weak the Mongols are just going to roll over it and destroy it.

And if you look at the hundred years after Magna Carta in British history, history, it's generally not fun times again.

And, you know, there's a civil war where

the barons take over.

And it's not really until Edward I that everything is back in line, working in England particularly well.

These constitutional limits on the emperor's power made his task even harder.

If the Latin Empire was going to survive with the limited manpower it had available, then a centralized system of power would have been needed, like the Roman Empire, which they had destroyed.

But that would have gone against the grain of European constitutional practice, as John argues.

Between this delegation of authority and the disinterested Venetian presence, the Crusader occupation of Byzantium was doomed to fail.

You really have fractured foundations all around, and a lot of the weaknesses of Latin rule, where they start out with all the advantages,

they spend more time fighting with each other, dividing power, and

weakening themselves such to a point that they could never get in a state to win.

That I think, as much as I'm a historian of the Latin Empire, and as much as I love the guy I wrote my PhD on, the last Latin Emperor Baldwin II, even I will say basically, with the death of the Emperor Henry, the project is dead.

Thank you so much to John.

We will hear more from him in a moment, and he'll be back to tell us about the life story of Baldwin II in a few episodes time.

For now, that is the end of our vantage point perspective.

I hope you've enjoyed the whiff of 2008 in this medieval tale.

In our next episode, the narrative will move forward again with just three remaining perspectives, those of Epirus, Constantinople, and Nicaea.

It will be their conflicts which will determine the fate of the Roman world.

But I have a couple more questions for John before we go.

Lots of listeners sent in queries about academia for the Professor Cauldell SQA, so I asked John about a couple of things he's working on.

The first is about a digital database being created at the University of Vienna.

I teach history and digital humanities at the University of Vienna.

The head of digital humanities, Tara Andrews, is working on sort of a giant project called Releven, or re-evaluating the 11th century.

Historians love to create giant databases that have every possible bit of data, every person, object, date that we can categorize and find,

you know, search through.

We all grew up in a land where you could search for anything at any time and you didn't have to open 500 books to find every reference.

So you build a database that has everything in those 500 books so that you can save yourself the time of rereading and searching through 500 indexes.

Releven is another one of these gigantic databases trying to understand sort of what's going on in the the Eastern Christian, Byzantine world around the period of the Battle of Manzikert in the second half of the 11th century, how things change, how things transform.

But it's also sort of the test project for a new methodology, a new way of doing large databases.

And it has to do with something that is a problem for all historians, but especially working in my field, that in history, there are very few undisputed facts, even on on basic questions of what day was this person born, or what year was this person born, what year did this person die?

You have different databases.

So,

different data points.

And so, how do you, as a database, deal with the fact that there are five sources, three of them say that this historical figure died in this year, and two died in this year?

So, one that you could do is you could just choose one.

Choose the one that you think makes most sense sense as a historian.

When my first job after I finished my PhD was working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and I was working on a giant database of the Mongol Empire, and when there was a disputed fact, you just picked what you thought as the researcher as this is the most likely, this is the most likely reason, but I didn't have to explain it.

There are other giant databases like the procipography of the Byzantine world that just gives multiple death dates.

And it just says, this person died in this year or this year or this year

and doesn't make a statement beyond that.

What Releven is trying to do is to add sort of the idea of claims into

a database.

Basically, when you have a question of what year did figure X die, you say, well, this source and this source claims that he died in 1148, but this source and this source claim that he died in this year.

And that way you can build sort of a network and a hierarchy that gives you a sense, that gives you

a deeper picture, a more accurate picture of how you sort of build and think about a database.

So I am not working on Releven.

They're in the same office as me on the other side.

But what they did made me think that if there's ever something where we have to evaluate various different eyewitness claims, the Fourth Crusade is very much a case of we need to work on this.

So, I am borrowing their model and trying to come up with my own database, looking especially at the movement of people and objects during this long sack of Constantinople.

So, what can we say about the individuals?

What is going on in this period to try to get a sense of the mobility of people, of armies, of objects, of relics?

Of like, what can we, what do the sources say about these things as they move?

And I'm at the beginning of this project.

I will have a lot more interesting things to say half a decade from now than I do now.

But I think the idea that we as historians have to not just say, this is the date, this is the date, and more attest our claims when we're working in these large databases is a useful thing.

It's not the most fun project I'm working on, but I think it is a useful historical framework when we're dealing with sort of large digital databases.

A really interesting idea, particularly when I was reading about all the relics, that you can actually track some of them.

Some of them are still in place and, you know, have their written attestations and things.

And so,

this is one of the projects that I've been on and off working on.

The famous reformer,

John Calvin, said that there was enough wood from the true cross that you could build a cargo, and that John and that John the Baptist had to have at least like must be some sort of hydra with like six or seven heads.

Every time you cut off a head, a new one sort of comes in.

But

one of the things that, as I've been working through looking at the relics, and you look at the various pieces, that there is a relic of the head of John the Baptist that had been hanging out in Constantinople from about the time of Heraclius onwards.

And if you look at all the purported quote-unquote heads of John the Baptist all over Europe, with the exception of one that's off in Spain, and you look at the descriptions of what those are, I think you can basically put together that each of the various pieces of the skull are accounted for, and that basically it's one Byzantine head being divided into about 10 or 12 different relics of the head of John the Baptist.

But yeah, that's one of the things that I'm very much trying to work on.

Yeah, really interesting.

And so the other question was about teaching.

Because obviously the aim of this podcast is to bring history alive.

And

obviously, teachers at universities can just give the same lecture for 20 years and maybe it's a good lecture and that's what they do.

But you're trying something different with the Fourth Crusade.

When you're an academic, so much of your day is really about teaching at the undergraduate level.

And that's the most fun.

That's the most fun part of the job for me is dealing with students.

Maybe it's I just get really tired of translating

all these medieval documents all the time.

One of the things that I discovered as a graduate student is a series of role-playing games called Reacting to the Past.

Basically, what you do in this period, in one of these games, is that you put the students into a key moment in history by putting them in the shoes of historical figures and then giving them the text that their historical alter egos would read would have read and then have them debate each other in sort of written and oral arguments so you have one game in the series where uh the students are assigned to be one of the various american founding fathers and they go debate what the u.s constitution should look like or you have one set at the first council of nicaea where students play constantine and all the various bishops both Orthodox and Arian, and try to debate out and figure out what the creed should historically look like.

And I think it's great because students are part of teams, which are called factions, and each of the factions are sort of working together to get their collective argument brought forward and to make as much of an influence as here.

So I taught other games.

I loved it so much.

And one day, after sort of giving an academic paper talking about the stuff we talked about earlier, one of my colleagues came up to me and said, this would make a really good reacting to the past game.

So we sat down, we wrote it, we iterated it, and after half a decade of work on it, it was published.

It is a game about the Fourth Crusade.

It starts in March 1204.

So Alexius IV is dead.

Alexius V has just given the Crusaders basically an ultimatum, leave or else.

And so the students are made, each get to portray one of the historical crusaders and have to decide, do we stay?

Do we fight?

Do we go on to Jerusalem?

Is it moral for us to attack the Greeks?

Is this in line with our goals as crusading?

And they read and understand what exactly a crusade is and learn about sort of what just war theory

means in this period.

They then sort of go on and debate the March Pact, this first constitutional treaty of the Latin Empire, and the students write their own version of it.

They negotiate power and the power and status of the emperor, whether we should keep the pranoia system around or whether we should impose like a Western feudal regime upon the Byzantine Empire, what trade rights should Venice get, and then all the church debates.

So they end up knowing what the Filioque clause is and all the various debates about papal supremacy.

And it gives you a sense of what the Crusaders and the Crusade leaders are thinking of.

So there are essentially four factions.

A quarter of the class will be various Venetians, as attested in the historical sources, led by Enrico Dandelo.

You have the Northern French with Baldwin of Flanders and Louis of Bois.

You have the Crusaders in the Holy Roman Empire led by Boniface of Montferrat as the sort of the third faction.

And then sort of a fourth faction of the clergy led by Nivellon Soissons, one of the bishops on the Fourth Crusade.

And because there are all these factions, you also have some neutral convinced convinced people who could be convinced of the game.

So you have Robert of Clary

as one of the playable characters, and even some of the Greeks who will later come over to the side,

the side of the Latins, famously Theodore of Ranas.

It's a really rich period of character history.

So the point of the game is to sort of put them in the footsteps of the Crusaders and when inevitably, almost always, they fail, just like the Crusaders, to make them realize sort of the difficult situation that the Crusaders were in.

Reacting to the past, I love because it's a wonderful, different way to approach history.

Normally, you know, you have one lecture on the Fourth Crusade and that's all you get.

Something like this would play out over two or three weeks in a classroom where me as an instructor, I just sit in the back.

watch maybe answer a question here and there, and the students get to see how the Fourth Crusade played out to see what the key decisions and sort of turning points are.

It's been a wonderful experience for all the students that I've worked with, and the whole reacting to the past series is really

transformed my teaching and how I make history accessible and understandable.

Thank you so much to John Giebfried.

He encourages those teaching history who like the sound of reacting to the past to get in touch with him or go to reactingconsortium.org to find out more.

There are published games on that site already covering a wide variety of historical topics from acid rain to ancient Athens and Confucianism to Chicago in 1968.

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