The Fourth Crusade was sold to Christian commoners ... and even defiled the Hagia[a] Sophia. The Byzantine Empire, already weakened by internal struggles, never fully recovered.

The textbooks say the Byzantine ... the third and fourth centuries.) Harder for modern Westerners to appreciate is the relationship between the emperor’s authority and the empire’s laws.

Rarely does a documentary film about Medieval history evoke such heated discussion and growing polemic in society as did the film, The Fall of an Empire—the Lesson of ... by Latin knights during the ...