The Fourth Crusade was definitely the funniest Crusade because all these French and Italian knights got together with a big Venetian fleet at the urging of the pope to retake the Holy Land in service of a great and benevolent all-loving god but the pope said "OK I will give this crusade my blessing but DON'T DO VIOLENCE AGAINST CHRISTIANS" and exactly the first thing the crusaders did was sack a Christian city and then the pope said "WHAT DID I JUST FUCKING SAY?" and excommunicated them all but they said "Well gee, I guess you should just use your OTHER army and massive fleet to capture the Holy Land" so he relented and gave them his blessing again and said "BUT DO NOT DO VIOLENCE AGAINST _ANY MORE_ CHRISTIANS AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT" so they went to Constantinople, the most magnificent city in Christendom and seat of the thousand-odd-year-old actual no-shit Roman Empire and the pope sent word to the priests in the army and said "DO NOT SACK THAT FUCKING CHRISTIAN CITY I SWEAR TO GOD" but the priests passed along this message by sort of mumbling and saying "fine, it'll be fine" and then the priests expelled all the prostitutes from the crusader camp because they wanted to "purify" the army for its holy and noble work to come and then they burned a fuck-ton of Constantinople to the ground and sacked the shit out of it and never even got to the Holy Land, the end.
Anyway, read this, it is pretty good but it doesn't play the whole megillah for laughs the way it definitely should be.
@GrimmReality Hahaha. I *really* enjoyed your post. Hilarious but accurate.
The history of the Crusades is fascinating but I never understood them until I learned the original point of it, which was not covered in the histories I'd read up to that point.
What I learned was that around the time of the First Crusade, one of the big problems faced by The Church was an over-armed Europe. Every two-bit guy with a land-grant had a little army. There were thousands of these fiefdoms of all sizes. They all had "knights" and "warriors" who were often just thugs and criminals.
These guys were paid a stipend and fed, and had lots of spare time. In their spare time, they'd loot and rape the peasants. The outcry from the peasants to the Church was very loud and getting louder. The Church badly needed to do something and was looking for a solution. A Crusade was a perfect way to put all these thugs, I mean "knights", to work and get them the hell out of Europe. Give them something worthwhile to do.
