CHAP. VII.

TAKING OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

145

ment of Innocent. In the mean time, no doubt many hearts were kindled with the romance of this new adventure and the desire to behold this second Rome; vague expectations were entertained of rich plunder, or at least of splendid reward for their services by the grateful Alexius; it is even said that many were full of strange hopes of more precious spoils, the pillage of the precious reliques which were accumulated in the churches of Constantinople, and of which the heretical Greeks ought to be righteously robbed for the benefit of the more orthodox believers of the West.

Constanti

The taking of Constantinople and the foundation of the Latin Empire concern Christian history in Taking of their results more than in their actual achieve- nople. ment. The arrival of the fleet before Constantinople; the ill-organised defence and pusillanimous flight of the usurper Alexius; the restoration of the blind Isaac Angelus and his son; the discontent of the Greeks at the subservience of the young Alexius to the Latins; his dethronement, and the elevation of Alexius Ducas (Mourzoufle) to the throne; the siege; the murder of the young Alexius; the flight of Mourzoufle, and the storming of the city by the Crusaders, were crowded into less than one eventful year. A Count of Flanders sat on the throne of the Eastern Cæsars. Europe, it might have been expected, by the Latin conquest of Constantinople and of great part of Partition of the Byzantine Empire, would have become one the conquest. great Christian league or political system; European Christendom one Church, under the acknowledged supremacy of the Pope. But the Latin Empire was not that of a Western sovereign ascending the Byzantine throne, and ruling over the Greek population, undisturbed in their possessions, and according to the laws of Justinian and the later Emperors of the East. His followers did not gradually mingle by intermarriages with the Greeks, and so infuse, as in other parts of Europe, new strength and energy into that unwarlike and effete race. The Emperor was a sovereign elected by the Venetians and the Franks,

The fleet reached Constantinople 1203. The storm took place April 13, the eve of St. John the Baptist, June 23, 1204.

VOL. IV.

L

governing entirely by the right of conquest. It was a foreign settlement, a foreign lord, a foreign feudal system, which never mingled in the least with the Greeks; the Latins kept entirely to themselves all honours, all dignities, (no Greek was admitted to office,) even all the lands; the whole country, as it was conquered, was portioned out, as Constantinople had been, into great fiefs between the Venetians and Franks. This western feudal system so established throughout the land implied the absolute, the supreme ownership of the soil by the conquerors. The condition of the Greeks under the new rule depended on the character of their new masters. In Constantinople the high-born and the wealthy had gladly accepted the permission to escape with their lives; the Crusaders had taken possession of such at least of their gorgeous palaces and splendid establishments as had escaped the three fires which during the successive sieges had destroyed so large a part of the city. When the Marquis of Montferrat took possession of Thessalonica he turned the inhabitants out of all the best houses, and bestowed them on his followers: in other places they were oppressed with a kind of indifferent lenity. But they were, in truth, held as a race of serfs, over whom the Latins exercised lordship by the right of conquest; they were left, indeed, to be governed, as had been the case with the subject Roman population in all the German conquests, by their own laws and their own magistrates. The constitution of the Latin Empire was the same with that of the kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the midst of a population chiefly Mohammedan; their code of law was the Assises of Jerusalem. No Greek was admitted to any post of honour or dignity till after the defeat and capture of the Emperor Baldwin. Then his successor, the Emperor Henry, found it expedient to make some advances towards conciliation; he endeavoured to propitiate by honourable appointments some of the leading Greeks. But to this he was compelled by necessity. The original Crusaders

In the conflagration on the night of the capture, caused by some Flemings, who thought by setting fire to the houses to keep off the attack of the

Greeks, as many houses were destroyed, according to Villehardouin, as would be found in three of the largest cities in France.

CHAP. VII.

LATIN CHURCH IN THE EAST.

147

gradually died off, or were occupied in maintaining their own conquests in Hellas or in the Morea; only few adventurers, notwithstanding the temptations and promises held out by the Latin Emperors, arrived from the West. The Emperor in Constantinople became a sovereign of Greeks. It is surprising that the Latin Empire endured for half a century: had there been any Greeks of resolution or enterprise Constantinople at least might have been much sooner wrested from their hands.

of Latin

The establishment of Latin Christianity in the East was no less a foreign conquest. It was not the con- Establishment version of the Greek Church. to the creed, the Christianity. usages, the ritual, the Papal supremacy of the West; it was the foundation, the super-induction of a new Church, alien in language, in rites, in its clergy, which violently dispossessed the Greeks of their churches and monasteries, and appropriated them to its own uses. It was part of the original compact between the Venetians and the Franks, before the final attack on the city, that the churches of Constantinople should be equally divided between the two nations: the ecclesiastical property throughout the realm was to be divided, after providing for the maintenance of public worship, according to the Latin form, by a Latin clergy, exactly on the same terms as the rest of the conquered territory. The French prelates might, indeed, claim equal rights, as having displayed at least equal valour and confronted the same dangers with the boldest of the barons. The vessels which bore the bishops of Soissons and Troyes, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, were the first which grappled with the towers of Constantinople, from which were thrown the scaling ladders on which the conquerors mounted to the storm; the episcopal banners were the first that floated in triumph on the battlements of Constantinople."

Like the Emperor Alexius, the Patriarch of Constanstinople, John Camaterus, had fled, but it was at a time and under circumstances far less ignominious. The clergy had not been less active in the defence of the city, than the Frankish bishops in the assault. After the flight * See the despatch to Pope Innocent announcing the taking of Constantinople.

of Mourzoufle they had chiefly influenced the choice of Theodore Lascaris as Emperor; the Patriarch had presented him to the people, and with him vainly endeavoured to rouse their panic-stricken courage. It was not till the city was in the hands of the enemy that the Patriarch abandoned his post. He was met in that disastrous plight described by Nicetas, riding on an ass, reduced to the primitive Apostolic poverty, without scrip, without purse, without staff, without shoes. It was time, indeed, to fly from horrors and unhallowed crimes which he could not avert. The Crusaders had advanced to the siege of Constantinople in the name of Christ; they had issued strong orders to respect the churches, the monasteries, the persons of the clergy, the chastity of the nuns. The three Latin bishops had published a terrible excommunication against all who should commit such sacrilegious acts of violence. But of what effect were orders, what awe had excommunications for a fierce soldiery, flushed with unexpected victory, let loose on the wealthiest, most luxurious, most dissolute capital of the world, among a people of a different language, whom they had been taught to despise as the most perfidious of mankind, the base enemies of all the former armies of the Cross, tainted with obstinate heresy? Nicetas, himself an eye-witness and sufferer in these terrible scenes, may be suspected of exaggeration, when he contrasts the discipline and self-denial of the Mohammedans, who under Saladin stormed Jerusalem, with the rapacity, the lust, the cruelty of the Christian conquerors of Constantinople. But the reports which had reached Pope Innocent would hardly darken the truth. "How,"

he writes, "shall the Greek Church return to ecclesiastical unity and to respect for the Apostolic See, when they have beheld in the Latins only examples of wickedness and works of darkness, for which they might well abhor them worse than dogs? Those who were believed to seek not their own but the things of Christ Jesus, steeping those swords, which they ought to have wielded against the Pagans, in Christian blood, spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex; they were practising fornications, incests, adulteries, in the sight of men; abandoning matrons and virgins dedi

CHAP. VII.

PLUNDER.

149

cated to God to the lewdness of grooms. Nor were they satisfied with seizing the wealth of the Emperors, the spoils of the princes and the people; they lifted their hands to the treasures of the churches; what is more heinous, the very consecrated vessels; tearing the tablets of silver from the very altars, breaking in pieces the most sacred things, carrying off crosses and reliques." Some revolting incidents of this plunder may be gathered from the Historians. Many rushed at once to the churches and monasteries. In the Church of Santa Sophia the silver was torn off from the magnificent pulpit: the table of oblation, admired for its precious material and exquisite workmanship, broken to pieces. Mules and horses were led into the churches to carry off the ponderous vessels; if they slipped down on the smooth marble floor, they were forced to rise up by lash and spur, so that their blood flowed on the pavement. A prostitute mounted the Patriarch's throne, and screamed out a disgusting song, accompanied with the most offensive gestures. Instead of the holy chants the aisles rung with wild shouts of revelry or indecent oaths and imprecations. The very sacred vessels were not spared; they were turned into drinking cups. The images were robbed of their gold frames and precious stones. It is said that the body and blood of the Lord were profanely cast down upon the floor, and trodden under foot.c

There was one kind of plunder which had irresistible attraction for the most pious, that of reliques. These, like the rest of the spoil, were to have been brought into the common stock, to be divided according to the stipulated rule. But even the Abbot Martin was guilty of this holy robbery. His monastery of Paris in Alsace, as well

Innocent, Epist. viii. 126 (apud Brequigny and Du Theil). Compare the whole detailed account in Wilken, v. p. 301, et seq.

Wilken conjectures that the expression of Nicetas may refer to a casket, which was supposed to contain some of the actual body and blood imparted by the Lord to his disciples before his crucifixion.-See Wilken, p. 305.

"Indignum ducens sacrilegium, nisi in re sacra, committere."- Gunther, who gives a full account of this holy theft of

d

the Abbot Martin. His spoil was a stain (vestigium) of the blood of the Lord, a piece of the Holy Cross, the arm of the apostle James, no small portion of the bones of John the Baptist, some of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, and many more.-Wilken, Gunther. See, too, the theft of the head of S. Clement, Pope and martyr, by Dalmatius of Sergy, from the Biblioth. Cluniac, also in Wilken. The note in Wilken, v. p. 306, is full of curious details.