Crusades (the wrong sort of armor)

"[When] the leading Crusaders were established in the Great Palace, .. . their soldiers were told that they might spend the next three days in pil­lage. The sack of Constantinople is unparalleled in history. For nine cen­turies the great city had been the capital of Christian civilization. It was filled with works of art that had survived from ancient Greece and with the masterpieces of its own exquisite craftsmen.... But the Frenchmen and Flemings were filled with a lust for destruction. They 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. . . . Palaces and hovels alike were entered and wrecked. Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets. For three days the ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles ...

"There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Cru­sade. Not only did it cause the destruction or dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored, and the mortal wound­ing of a civilization that was still active and great; but it was also an act of gigantic political folly. It brought no help to the Christians in Palestine. ... In the wide sweep of world history the effects were wholly disastrous. ... When a new, more vigorous Turkish tribe appeared, under the lead­ership of the brilliant house of Osman, the East Christian world was too deeply divided to make an effective stand. . . . Meanwhile hatred had been sown between Eastern and Western Christendom. . . . It was per­haps inevitable that the Church of Rome and the great Eastern Churches should drift apart; but the whole Crusading movement had embittered their relations, and henceforward, whatever a few princes might try to achieve, in the hearts of the East Christians the schism was complete, ir­remediable and final."

- Steve Runciman, A History of the Crusades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 3:123, 130-131 [as quoted in Mark Noll's Turning Points (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2007), 141]