1

stipulations had reached the French clergy, their cold reception of the Patriarch is at once explained. So deep, indeed, was the feud, that Innocent found it necessary to send another Legate to Constantinople, the Cardinal Benedict, who enjoyed his full and unlimited confidence. The former Legate to the East, Peter of Capua, with his colleague the Cardinal Soffrido, had caused great dissatisfaction to the Pope. He had released the Venetians from their interdict, he had deserted his proper province, the Holy Land; and, in a more open manner than Innocent thought prudent, entered into the great design for the subjugation of the Greek Empire. He had absolved the crusaders, on his own authority, from the fulfilment, for a limited period, of their vows to serve in Palestine. He had received a strong rebuke from Innocent, in which the Pope dwelt even with greater force on the cruelties, plunders, sacrileges committed after the storming of Constantinople. The Saracens in Palestine, instead of being kept in the salutary awe with which they had been struck by the capture of Constantinople, could not be ignorant that the Crusaders were now released from their vow of serving against them; and would fall with tenfold fury on the few who remained to defend the Holy Land.

The Cardinal Benedict, of Santa Susanna, conducted his office with consummate skill; perhaps the disastrous state of affairs awed even the jealous clergy with the appreConstitution hension, that their tenure of dignity was but of the Clergy precarious. The Emperor Baldwin had now fallen a captive into the hands of the King of Bulgaria; his brother Henry, the new Sovereign, made head with gallantry, but with the utmost difficulty, against the Bulgarians, who, with their wild marauding hordes, spread to the gates of Constantinople; Theodore Lascaris had established the new Greek Empire in Asia. The Cardinal not only reconciled the Frank clergy to the supremacy of the Patriarch, Morosini himself was inclined to the larger views of the churchman rather than

A.D. 1206.

him from observing it; from the profane ditary among the Venetian aristocracy. attempt to render the patriarchate here--Gesta, c. xc.

Gesta, xiv.

CHAP. VII.

SETTLEMENT OF THE CLERGY.

159

the narrow and exclusive aims of the Venetian. He gladly accepted the Papal absolution from the oath extorted at Venice; and, so far from the Venetians obtaining a perpetual and hereditary majority in the Chapter of Santa Sophia, or securing the descent of the Patriarchate in their nation, of the line of the Latin Patriarchs after Morosini there was but one of Venetian birth. The Legate established an ecclesiastical constitution for the whole Latin Empire. The clergy were to receive one-fifteenth of all possessions, cities, castles, tenements, fields, vineyards, groves, woods, meadows, suburban spaces, gardens, saltworks, tolls, customs by sea and land, fisheries in salt or fresh waters; with some few exceptions in Constantinople and its suburbs reserved for the Emperor himself. `If the Emperor should compound for any territory, and receive tribute instead of possession, he was to be answerable for the fifteenth to the Church; he could not grant any lands in fief, without reserving the fifteenth. Besides this, all monasteries belonged to the Church, and were not reckoned in the fifteenth. No monastery was to be fortified, if it should be necessary for the public defence, without the permission of the Patriarch or the Bishop of the diocese. Besides this, the clergy might receive tithe of corn, vegetables, and all the produce of the land; of fruits, except the private kitchen-garden of the owner; of the feed of cattle, of honey, and of wool. If by persuasion they could induce the landowners to pay these tithes, they were fully entitled to receive them. The clergy and the monks of all orders were altogether exempt, according to the more liberal custom of France, from all lay jurisdiction. They held their lands and possessions absolutely, saving only allegiance to the See of Rome, and to the Patriarch of Constantinople, of the Emperor, and of the Empire."

Even towards the Greeks, as the new Emperor discovered too late the fatal policy of treating the Toleration of conquered race with contemptuous hatred, so the Greeks. ecclesiastical rule gradually relaxed itself, and endeavoured to comprehend them without absolute abandonment of

"Dated 16 Calends, April. Confirmed at Ferentino, Nones of August.

A.D. 1209.

their ritual, without the proscription of their clergy. Where the whole population was Greek, the Patriarch was recommended to appoint a Greek ecclesiastic; only, where it was mixed, a Latin. Even the Greek ritual was permitted where the obstinate worshippers resisted all persuasions to conformity, till the Holy See should issue further orders. Nor were the Greek monasteries to be suppressed, and converted, according to Latin usage, into secular chapters; they were to be replaced, as far as might be, by Latin regulars; otherwise to remain undisturbed. This tardy and extorted toleration had probably no great effect in allaying the deepening estrangement of the two churches. Nor did these arrangements pacify the Latin Byzantine Church; there were still jealousies among the Franks of the Venetian Patriarch, excommunications against his contumacious clergy by the Patriarch, appeals to Rome, attempts by the indignant Patriarch to resume some of the independence of his Byzantine predecessors, new Legatine commissions from the Pope, limiting or interfering with his authority. Even had the Latin conquerors of the East the least Kings of disposition to resist the lofty dictation of the Bulgaria. Pope in all ecclesiastical concerns, they were not in a situation to assert their independence as the undisputed sovereigns of Eastern Christendom. On Innocent might depend the recruiting of their reduced, scattered, insufficient forces by new adventurers assuming the Cross, and warring for the eventual liberation of the East, and so consolidating the conquest of the Eastern Empire; on Innocent might depend the deliverance of their captive Emperor, of whose fate they were still ignorant. The King of Bulgaria, by the submission of the Bulgarian Church to Rome, was the spiritual subject of the Pope. Henry, while yet Bailiff of the Empire, during the captivity of Baldwin, wrote the most pressing letters, entreating the mediation of the Pope with the subtle Johannitius. The letter described the insurrection of the perfidious Greeks, the invasion of the Bulgarians, with their barbarous allied hordes, the fatal battle of Adrianople in

* Gesta, ch. cii.

CHAP. VII. INNOCENT AND THE KING OF BULGARIA. 161

which Baldwin had been taken prisoner: the Latins fled to the Pope as their only refuge above all kings and princes of the earth; they threw themselves in prostrate humility at his parental feet.

Innocent delayed not to send a messenger to his spiritual vassal, the King of Bulgaria; but his letter was in a tone unwontedly gentle, persuasive, unauthoritative. He did not even throw the blame of the war with the Franks of Constantinople on the King of Bulgaria: he reminded him that he had received his crown and his consecrated banner from the Pope, that banner which had placed his kingdom under the special protection of St. Peter, in order that he might rule his realm in peace. He informed Johannitius that another immense army was about to set out from the West to recruit that which had conquered the Byzantine Empire; it was his interest, therefore, to make firm peace with the Latins, for which he had a noble opportunity by the deliverance of the Emperor Baldwin. "This was a suggestion, not a command. On his own part he would lay his injunction on the Emperor Henry to abstain from all invasion of the borders of Bulgaria; that kingdom, so devoutly dedicated to St. Peter and the Church of Rome, was to remain in its inviolable security!" The Bulgarian replied that "he had offered terms of peace to the Latins, which they had rejected with contempt; they had demanded the surrender of all the territories which they accused him of having usurped from the Empire of Constantinople, themselves being the usurpers of that Empire. These lands he occupied by a better right than they Constantinople. He had received his crown from the Supreme Pontiff; they had violently seized and invested themselves with that of the Eastern Empire; the Empire which belonged to him rather than to them. He was fighting under the banner consecrated by St. Peter; they with the cross on their shoulders, which they had falsely assumed. He had been defied, had fought in self-defence, had won a glorious victory, which he ascribed to the intercession of the Prince of the Apostles. As to the Emperor, his release was impossible, he had already

VOL. IV.

Epist. viii. 132.

M

Effects of

gone the way of all flesh." It is impossible not to remark the dexterity with which the Barbarian avails himself of the difficult position of the Pope, who had still openly condemned the invasion of Constantinople by the Crusaders, had threatened, if he had not placed them under interdict for that act; how he makes himself out to be the faithful soldier of the Pope. Nor had either the awe or fear of Innocent restrained the King of Bulgaria from putting his prisoner to a cruel death (this seems to be certain, however the manner of Baldwin's death grew into a romantic legend ), nor did he pay the slightest regard to the pacific counsels of Rome; the consecrated banner of St. Peter still waved against those who had subdued the Eastern Empire under allegiance to the successor of St. Peter. Till his own assassination, Johannitius of Bulgaria was the dangerous and mortal foe of the Latins in the Empire of the East. The conquest of Constantinople by the Latins, that strange and romantic episode in the history of conquest of the Crusades, in its direct and immediate reple. sults might seem but imperfect and transitory. The Latin Empire endured hardly more than half a century, and reverted to its old effete masters. The Greeks who won back the throne were in no respect superior either in military skill or valour, in genius, in patriotism, in intellectual eminence, to those who had been dispossessed by the Latins. The Byzantine Empire had to linger out a few more centuries of inglorious inactivity; her religion came back with her, with all its superstition, with nothing creative, vigorous, or capable of exercising any strong impulse on the national mind. As the consolidation therefore of Europe into one great Christian confederacy the conquest was a signal failure; as advancing, as supporting the Christian outposts in the East it led to no result; the Crusades languished still more and more; they were now the enterprises of single enthusiastic princes, brilliant, adventurous expeditions like that of our Edward I.; even national armaments like those of

Constantino

Ephraim, 1. 7406, 7, p. 300, edit. Bonn; Nicetas, p. 847; George Acropolita, p. 24, give different versions of his death. See also Ducange's note on

Villehardouin, and Alberic des trois Fontaines, on the impostor who represented him.-Gesta Ludov. viii., apud Duchesne, Matt. Paris.