Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/395

L OF THE EOMAN EMPIRE 373 to the nation and religion of the Latins. ^^ During his reign, and that of his successor Alexius, they were exposed at Con- stantinople to the reproach of foreigners, heretics, and favour- ites ; and this triple guilt was severely expiated in the tumult which announced the return and elevation of Andronicus.-*^ The people rose in arms ; from the Asiatic shore the tyrant dis- theirmaa- patched his troops and galleys to assist the national revenge ; iiss ' and the hopeless resistance of the strangers served only to jus- tify the rage, and sharpen the daggers, of the assassins. Neither age nor sex nor the ties of friendship or kindred could save the victims of national hatred and avarice and religious zeal ; the Latins were slaughtered in their houses and in the streets ; their quarter was reduced to ashes ; the clergy were burnt in their churches, and the sick in their hospitals ; and some esti- mate may be formed of the slain from the clemency which sold above four thousand Christians in perpetual slavery to the Turks. The priests and monks were the loudest and most active in the destruction of the schismatics ; and they chaunted a thanks- giving to the Lord, Avhen the head of a Roman cardinal, the pope's legate, was severed from his body, fastened to the tail of a dog, and dragged with savage mockery through the city. The more diligent of the strangers had retreated, on the first alarm, to their vessels, and escaped through the Hellespont from the scene of blood. In their flight they burned and rav- aged two hundred miles of the sea-coast ; inflicted a severe revenge on the guiltless subjects of the empire ; marked the priests and monks as their peculiar enemies ; and compensated, by the accumulation of plunder, the loss of their property and friends. On their return, they exposed to Italy and Europe the wealth and weakness, the perfidy and malice of the Greeks, whose vices were painted as the genuine characters of heresy and schism. The scruples of the first crusaders had neglected the fairest opportunities of securing, by the possession of Con- stantinople, the way to the Holy Land ; a domestic revolution invited and almost compelled the French and Venetians to achieve the conquest of the Roman empire of the East. 1* The suspicions of the Greeks would have been confirmed, if they had seen the political epistles of Manuel to pope Alexander III., the enemy of his enemy Fre- deric I., in which the emperor declares his wish of uniting the Greeks and Latins as one flock under one shepherd, &c. (see Fleury, Hist. Eccl^s. torn. xv. p. 187, 213. 243)- -"See the Greek and Latin Narratives in Nicetas (in Alexio Comneno, c. 10), and William of Tyre (1. xxii. c. 10-13): the first, soft and concise; the second, loud, copious, and tragical.