Oh I’m sorry about that smile emoticon Athanaios pointed out a video about the 4th Crusade that helped him understand it better. But the video was focused on money and economics. One of the commenters on the video noted that the guy who made the video _completely_ neglected events in 1182, only 24 years before the 4th crusade attacked Constantiple, where the Eastern Christians massacred 60,000 Latins.
So it’s likely that the 4th crusade was primarily (or at least partially motivated) as payback for their brethren.
piecing together controversial parts of history is tough to do because there are so many perspectives involved and lots of blame thrown this way and that.
Ah! Here we go. This is a good example of an Alternative Perspective of history we rarely get to see in the West. If you can bypass the “flowery awesomeness” language [as it’s a history geared towards believers of Eastern Orthodox persuasion) – nevertheless it presents a good source of an alternative perspective that may help fill in some of the gaps in World History knowledge.
http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith7053
The awesome thing about viewing multiple perspectives of history is you begin to realize that NO SINGULAR PERSPECTIVE is entirely correct, nor entirely wrong, but ALL have a bias.
You start to notice what I *think* they call the subtext; maybe not the right word; but what I mean is: Certain things get mentioned OVER and OVER again as motivators.
In the video that you provided Athanasios Phronesis – which was excellent and very well done; was from an Adam Smith perspective : he mentioned GREED and MONEY as motivational factors; part of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy that “Man is a rational creature who works solely to maximize his own profit as his motivation”.
I summarized Adam Smith here even though I put it in quotes.
Now we live in an Adam Smith dominated world. We talk and think in these terms and would consider it normal to view all of history through the light of greed-as-motivation.
Yet, it’s our cultural bias. We may think ourselves secular, facts-only, but that’s not true. We’re products of our cultural leanings and it shows up in how we interpret ourselves and history as well.
That’s why I love multiple perspectives; and the more biased they are, the better. In the link I provided above, the team aspect could be summarized as:
Greeks: Yay! We’re Awesome!
Slavic People: Yay! They’re awesome because we made them who they are, AND we gave them a written language AND WE didn’t force them to use _our_ language so SEE modern world, we were INCLUSIVE before y’all know what it was.
Latins: Boo, Bad.
Islam: “We’re SOOO different from them and they took us over… but they didn’t change us.. although it was hard… but they worked with us, even though it sucked”.
Interesting about the portrayal of Islam, as you have to consider today’s world, and the way the history is written has to be sensitive somewhat to the very real fact that Constantiple is Instanbul and Islamic leaders _are_ in control of the historical Christian churches, including Hagia Sofia…. turned into a Mosque. So, they have to be somewhat careful in their telling of history but not very. The boastfulness just makes me smile all the way through.