The passages above describe the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 CE. The first was scripted by a prominent Greek intellectual and native of the Byzantine capital; the second by a poor Latin knight from Picardy, France. Both individuals were supposedly eyewitnesses to the shocking events that unfolded during the city’s capture. Despite their obvious differences in style, language, and point of view, both accounts evince a common feature: a predilection for the statues that were so prominent a part of the capital and which were brutally destroyed during the sack. That the statues were varied in depiction, startlingly naturalistic, and precious in terms of their material value is evident from the reportage. Known variously as stele, agalma, andrias, or eikon by Greek writers over the centuries, they dominated the environs in which they stood to a degree impossible to imagine today owing to their unceremonious disappearance all those years ago. And yet they impressed both the citizen and the invader as inalienable features of the capital of the Romans, so much so that their destruction, for Nicetas Choniates and Robert de Clari, stood for the fall of the empire itself.