There is the story of Degas standing weeping with sadness in front of The death of sardenopolis at the way its colors had faded over time.
[1] https://api-www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/styles/w1059_h...
https://api-www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/styles/w0_hNaN...
This image at 3688x2081 can be zoomed into
https://api-www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/2026-05/prise-...
(and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prise_de_Constantinople_par_le... )
give a bit more context.
Stood out to me:
> 498 cm × 410 cm (196 in × 160 in)
- let's go and reclaim Jerusalem from those non-Christian infidels!
- Sure. We're gonna need a bigger boat. Let's ask the Venetians.
- Here are your ships, guys.
- Err, we have no money.
- Sigh. ok. Go and attack our rivals over there.
- The byzantines in Constantinople? They're Christian.
- You want something to do, or not?
- Fine. let's kill them all, boys.
Result: Constantinople is ravaged. Byzantine Empire fatally weakened. Ottomans take the city 200 years later.
For instance the first Crusade was organized as a military relief expedition by the Byzantine emperor and the pope to save the empire from Turkish invasion and liberate the recently conquered Anatolia. Jerusalem was mostly an aspirational and symbolic goal.
Most people who joined did it because of sense of duty and various degrees of religion fanaticism. There was little prospect of profit and while the expedition was enormously more successful than anyone could have anticipated the overwhelming majority of initial participants were dead by the time they reached Jerusalem. Even those that survived to the end didn’t necessarily profit that much.
Strictly speaking, this is not what happened, and a gross oversimplification. The Byzantines were not exactly rivals of the Venetians. The whole thing was quite bizarre in fact, Roger Crowley has a pretty good story of the events leading up to this in "City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire" if I'm not mistaken.
