Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Europa" in Romanian language version.
And though the final blow was struck by the Ottoman Turks, it can plausibly be argued that the fatal injury was inflicted by the Latin crusaders in 1204.
Western Christians, not Muslims, fatally crippled Byzantine power and opened Islam's path into the West.
Ancient Greece is often called the cradle of western civilization. ... Ideas from literature and science also have their roots in ancient Greece.
The Byzantine Empire also interacted with the world of Islam to its east and the new European civilization of the west. Both interactions proved costly and ultimately fatal.
These Christian allies did not accept the authority of Byzantium, and the Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople and established the so-called Latin Empire that lasted until 1261 was a fatal wound from which the empire never recovered until its fall at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (Queller and Madden 1997).
continue to stand for another 250 before ultimately falling to the Muslim Turks, but it had been irrevocably weakened by the Fourth Crusade.
1204 The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople, destroying and pillaging many of its treasures, fatally weakening the empire both economically and militarily
However, the fifty-seven years of plunder that followed made the Byzantine Empire, even when it retook the capital in 1261, genuinely weak. Beginning in 1222, the empire was further weakened by a civil war that lasted until 1355. ... When the Ottomans overran their lands and besieged Constantinople in 1453, sheer poverty and weakness were the causes of the capital city's final fall.
Not only did the fourth crusade further harden the resentments Greek-speaking Christians felt toward the Latin West, but it further weakened the empire of Constantinople, many say fatally so. After the restoration of Greek imperial rule the city survived as the capital of Byzantium for another two centuries, but it never fully recovered.
Although the empire was revived, the events of 1204 had so weakened Byzantium that it was no longer a great power.
Later they established themselves in the Anatolian peninsula at the expense of the Byzantine Empire. ... The Byzantines, however, had been severely weakened by the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (in 1204) and the Western occupation of much of the empire for the next half century.
two-and-a-half centuries to recover from the Fourth Crusade before the Ottomans finally took Constantinople in 1453, ... They fatally wounded Byzantium, which was the main cause of its weakened condition when the Muslim onslaught came. Even on the eve of its final collapse, the precondition for any Western help was submission in Florence.