Siege of Thessalonica by the Normans

August 24, 1185

A Sicilian Norman army under William II besieged and sacked the second-largest city of the Byzantine Empire. Contemporary eyewitness Eustathios of Thessalonica described the slaughter and desecration. Byzantium's western provinces never fully recovered. The sack revealed how thinly stretched Byzantine defenses had become after Manuel I's death, and the memory of Norman brutality fueled Greek hostility toward all Latin westerners for generations.