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THE CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1200. 225 against the general corruption. The work of Niectas Choni- ate, our principal Greek authority on the history of the Latin conquest, is imbued with a religious spirit — religious in the sense that he believed that God rules the world and will pun- ish national immorality, that morality implies progress and immorality the reverse. He and others with him protested in the strongest manner against the corruption in government, the dissoluteness of the court, the absence of morality in states- manship. In reading the history of his own times we are apt sometimes to forget that these protests were written in the thirteenth and not in the nineteenth century. The abuses in the State and the cruelty of the emperors were hateful to him. But for the fact that we meet with passages showing that his religion partook of the superstition of his age, we should hardly remember that he was the contemporary of what he records. The very discontent, amounting to querulousness, which runs through the whole of his narrative, and which is found in other contemporary, or nearly contemporary, writers, is one of the most hopeful signs of his time. That he and so many of his contemporaries were profoundly dissatisfied with the condition of the empire gives reasonable hope that, had the Latin invasion turned out otherwise than it did, there would have been a national movement towards reform or revolution. This movement, as in Western Europe, would probably have first been felt in religion, and the Eastern Church might again have taken the lead in shaping the creed of Western Europe. For, in spite of the subserviency into which the Church had fallen, its nominal masters were obliged to respect the opinion of its governing bodies. The disgust felt by Nicetas over the frequent change of patriarchs made by Isaac Angelos, and the excuses which that emperor had to make use of in order to justify his action, show that the influence of the Church was still great. The lethargy was already passing away ; discon- tent at the prevailing corruption was widespread, both in Church and State. We, who have seen an Italy resurgent and Greece and Bulgaria re-entered among civilized nations, may well refuse to believe that an intelligent people, who were at that time the first in civilization, would not have shaken oft' 15