In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, a community of Flemish and French aristocrats, known to historians as the Franks, settled in Constantinople and other conquered Byzantine lands. This community was a small elite, ruling over indigenous populations in unfamiliar lands, and they came to think and act in ways foreign to their kin and colleagues in the west. This dissertation brings together western and eastern sources to consider the Franks’ relationship to the west and their interactions with neighbors and subjects.

The dissertation explores the transforming identities of the Franks in Constantinople from their installment in 1204, through exile in 1261, to the final major push to retake the city in 1282. The first generation, representated by the Flemish emperors Baudouin I and Henri, retained its western affiliations and prejudices, but was increasingly willing to make alliances and enter into marriages with neighboring powers. The Courtenays, who came to power after Henri’s death in 1216, brought with them a closeness to the Capetian monarchy and the papacy which shaped the Latin Empire’s relationship with the west until the mid-1240s. The 1230s and the arrival of Jean de Brienne as regent-emperor saw a deepening reliance on the west culminating in Baudouin II’s two trips to the west. The failure of papal and Capetian support to result in sufficient aid resulted in an expansion of Frankish appeals to the Hohenstaufen and Spanish rulers. This wider net characterized the search for aid after the Byzantines retook the city in 1261 as well.

During these decades, the Franks pulled back from engagement with their neighbors and the pursuit of alliances with them, focusing instead on western aid. I argue that this reorientation and the Franks’ communication with the west create false impressions of continued prejudice against eastern neighbors and of a lasting, unaltered western identity. The Franks’ actions, including disengagement from their western land, describe more flexible attitudes than their language suggests. Even in their limited time in Constantinople, the Franks made a varying set of accommodations to life in the east and the resulting culture was neither fully western nor wholly other.