ELITE PALM SUNDAY processions in the Byzantine and, later, Russian empires were also marked by ceremonial splendour. Whereas in the Latin west, supreme power was geographically divided (and often contested) between a pope in Rome and an emperor north of the Alps, eastern patriarchs and emperors or tsars negotiated shared power as neighbours within the same capital city. In Constantinople, shared power required two separate Palm Sunday processions, one presided over by the patriarch, the other by the emperor. Moscow opted for a different approach: the tsar led the patriarch's horse in the city's annual Palm Sunday procession, leaving historians to disagree over which of the two rulers was thereby represented as the more powerful. I consider Moscow in Chapter 8. In the meantime, my discussion of Palm Sunday in Constantinople begins not with the city's annual Greek Orthodox processions, but— by way of a bridge from the Latin west— with a violent exception, when victorious crusaders observed Palm Sunday according to their own rites and a dozen renegade crusaders took advantage of the occasion to loot relics.

Capital of the eastern Roman Empire since the time of Constantine, after whom it was named, Constantinople was captured by the forces of the Fourth Crusade on April 12, 1204. A majority of the crusaders were French; other sizable contingents came from Flanders, the German Empire, and Venice, which, for a substantial fee, had provided the necessary war galleys and transport ships. Diverted from their stated goal of liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rule, and unable to pay the growing debt owed to the Venetians, the crusaders chose to intervene in a dispute over Byzantine imperial succession and attack Constantinople instead. The successful breach of the city's defences took place six days before Palm Sunday.

For three days, crusaders looted the city. Impoverished French and Flemings “rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder or to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars for their refreshment. Neither monasteries nor churches nor libraries were spared … Nuns were ravished in their convents. Palaces and hovels alike were entered and wrecked.