Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and of Romania, involved in most of the important developments during the Fourth Crusade and rewarded with a fief in Thrace after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, dies in about 1212.

Considered one of the most important historians of the age, he leaves, in his unfinished account of the Crusade, an important prose history—the first written in French—including his eyewitness account of the sacking of the imperial city.

Villehardouin's account is generally read alongside that of Robert of Clari, a French knight of low station, Niketas Choniates, a high-ranking imperial official and historian who gives an eyewitness account, and Gunther of Pairis, a Cistercian monk who tells the story from the perspective of Abbot Martin who accompanied the Crusaders.