CHAP. VII. EXCOMMUNICATION OF THE VENETIANS.

143

of Zara. Innocent admitted their plea-it was his only course. He gave permission to the Bishop of Soissons and John of Noyon provisionally to suspend the interdict till the arrival of his legate, Peter of Capua; but the Barons were bound under a solemn pledge to give full satisfaction to the Pope for their crime. But notwithstanding the bold remonstrance of John of Noyon (Innocent commanded him to be silent), they were compelled to bear a brief letter of excommunication against the Venetians. Boniface had the prudence to prevent the immediate publication of that ban. He sent to Rome their act of submission, couched in the terms dictated by the Cardinal Peter; and intimated that the Venetians were about to send their own messengers to entreat the forgiveness of the Pope for the conquest of Zara. But the Venetians made no sign of submission. Positive orders were given to deliver the brief of excommunication into the hands of the Doge. If the Doge received it, he received it with utter indifference; and two singular letters of Innocent prescribe the course to be followed by the absolved Crusaders, thus of necessity, on board the fleet of Venice, in perpetual intercourse with the profane and excommunicated Venetians. They might communicate with them as far as necessity compelled so long as they were on board their ships; no sooner had they reached the Holy Land, than they were to sever the ungodly alliance; they were on no account to go forth to war with them against the Saracens, lest they should incur the shameful disaster of those in the Old Testament, who went up in company with Achan and other sinners against the Philistines.

condemns

tion to Con

The mission of the Crusaders had been entirely silent as to the new engagement to place the young Innocent Alexius on the throne of Constantinople. Inno- the expedi cent either knew not or would not know this new stantinople. delinquency. He received the first authentic intelligence from the legate Peter of Capua. The Pope's letters denounced the whole design in the most lofty admonitory terms. "However guilty the Emperor of Constantinople and his subjects of blinding his brother and of usurping the throne, X Epist. vi. 93, 100.

it is not for you to invade the Empire, which is under the especial protection of the Holy See. Ye took not the Cross to avenge the wrongs of the Prince Alexius; ye are under the solemn obligation to avenge the Crucified, to whose service ye are sworn." He intimated that he had written to the Emperor of Constantinople to supply them with provisions. The Emperor had faithfully promised to do so. Only in the case that supplies were refused them, then, as soldiers of Him to whom the earth and all its produce belonged, they might take it by force; but still in the fear of God, faithfully paying or promising to pay for the same, and without injury to person.

Fleet off Con

But already the fleet was in full sail for Corfu, the Prince Alexius on board. Of the excommunistantinople. cation against the Venetians no one took the slightest heed, least of all the Venetians themselves. Simon de Montfort alone, who had stood aloof from the siege of Zara, on the day of embarkation finally separated himself from the camp of the ungodly, who refused obedience to the Pope. With his brother and some few French knights he passed over to the King of Hungary, and after many difficulties reached the Holy Land. In truth, the Crusaders had no great faith in the sincerity of the Pope's condemnation of the enterprise against Constantinople. The subjugation of the heretical, if not rival Church of Byzantium, to the Church of St. Peter, had been too long the great aim of Papal ambition for them to suppose that even by more violent or less justifiable means than the replacing the legitimate Emperor on the throne, and the degradation of an usurper, it would not soon reconcile itself to the Papal sense of right and justice. Some decent regard to his acknowledgment of, to his amicable intercourse with the usurper, might be becoming; even as a step to the conquest of the Holy Land, it might well be considered the most prudent policy. In a short time the submission of the Greek Church, the departure of the Crusaders under better auspices to the Holy Land (for as yet even the ambitious Venetians could hardly apprehend the absolute conquest of Constantinople, and the establishment of a Latin Empire), would allay the seeming resent

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 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

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.