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116 DESTRUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIEE defences of Europe against the forces of Asia, and of aiding its emperors in their efforts to check the Turkish invasion. They were the prime ministers of Western Europe and almost the only persons who regarded the Eastern question as statesmen. Unfortunately, while the popes saw the necessity of preventing the progress of the barbarians, they attached conditions to their offers of help which made them un- acceptable and which indeed were impossible : namely, that the Greeks should accept the Union of the Churches, with which Union was associated the supremacy of the pope. A succession of pontiffs during the two hundred years preceding the Moslem conquest of the city worked for Union with marvellous persistency. The same passionate desire for reunion is not less manifest now in the occupant of the chair of St. Peter ; but modern efforts are made with this essential difference, that while in the period which concerns us it was believed that reunion could be imposed, every one now recognises that if it is to be brought about, it must be by voluntary and full consent. Errors in j n fourteenth century it never seems to have W est re- m J gardmg occurred either to popes or emperors that people cannot be Church, compelled to change their religious opinions. The idea was that the great mass of people were ready to accept any opinion sanctioned by the ordinary civil authorities. The early negotiations leave the impression that the Churchmen of the West thought that the emperor and the patriarch could bring about a Union by their simple decree, could change the profession of belief and obtain the admission of papal supremacy without the voluntary consent of even the Greek ecclesiastics. It never appears to have dawned upon Boman Churchmen that the members of the Orthodox Church might refuse to accept Union and a change in belief when these had been accepted by the civil and religious chiefs. Such a view showed ignorance at once of the charac- ter, always intensely conservative, and of the history of the Orthodox Church. Without entering into a discussion of how far the population of the capital and the empire was