The Fall Of Constantinople: The Rise Of The Byzantine Empire

He folded his hands on the table and began to tell his story. “A city known as Constantinople was founded in 324 AD by the emperor Constantine, in the Greek city of Byzantium. His reason for this? Western Europe, where Rome had once thrived, was being torn apart by attacks from other parts of Europe. Constantine decided that he would have to move somewhere else in order to be safe from destruction and invasion. Western Europe would later be known as Christendom, because of the importance of Christianity there, and the part of Europe where Constantinople was later became known as the Byzantine Empire. 200 years later, Justinian I became the emperor of Constantinople. He later married an exotic dancer named Theodora, who would have a big impact …show more content…
However, worse things were to come. Some years after the Great Schism, when Constantinople was beginning to decline, the Seljuk Turks, from Central Asia, began to move into the Byzantine Empire. These people had become Muslim, and that made the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, very afraid. He feared that these Muslims would take over the empire, which was a Christian one. He then took his problem to the pope, who was in Western Europe, and implored him to help wage a holy war against the Turks. In 1095 AD, Pope Urban II initiated the first Crusade, which was a ‘war of the cross’. The pope hoped that the Crusade would remove the Turks from Constantinople, and he also hoped that he could recover the city of Jerusalem, a holy city in the eyes of a Christian, from Muslim rule. In 1099 AD, the Crusaders attacked the Muslims in Jerusalem, and were successful in overtaking the city. A second Crusade began when the Muslims defeated one of the Christian colonies that the Crusaders set up, but this time, the Muslims were prepared and did not lose. At the end of this second Crusade, Saladin, who was a Muslim general, started a Jihad, which was an Islamic holy war. Doing this, he took back Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 AD. This led to yet another Crusade, the third one, led by King Richard ‘The Lion-Hearted’ of England, but it was not successful. In the end, both sides accepted a truce in which the Muslims would control the ‘Holy Lands’, but Christian people would be able to visit their shrines there as well. Even though the Crusades were horrible wars, the only positive result was that new knowledge was brought over from Eastern Europe into Western