It’s one of the great poetic coincidences of history that the Byzantines blinded people to remove them from political life (one of the most famous cases their talented general Belisarius that brought so much acclaim to Justinian’s rule got his peepers poked out) and when the 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 one of the crusade’s leaders was Enrico Dandalo, the blind doge of Venice.
It’s one of the great poetic coincidences of history that the Byzantines blinded people to remove them from political life (one of the most famous cases their talented general Belisarius that brought so much acclaim to Justinian’s rule got his peepers poked out) and when the 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 one of the crusade’s leaders was Enrico Dandalo, the blind doge of Venice.