crept through a hole in the walls of the once impregnable city and quietly recovered Constantinople for its own people. But disappointment followed. The hopes kindled at Nicæa were not realised. It was impossible really to restore the Byzantine Empire. The so-called Crusaders—of the fourth Crusade—had done little good to themselves, and infinite harm to the empire. The wonderful system of Roman administration was broken beyond possibility of repair. Thus these pretended defenders of Christendom against Islam prepared the way for the final overthrow of Christian government in the East. If Constantinople had not been captured by Latin Christians in the thirteenth century, probably it would not have been besieged and taken by Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth. At the door of these professed Crusaders lies the awful guilt of the ruin of the city and the opening of the road for the advent of a Turkish Empire in Europe and all its attendant miseries.
The newly restored Greek government under Michael at Constantinople found itself opposed by two enemies—the Latin power in the West, coldly sympathetic with the exiled Baldwin, but more effectually energetic in response to the demands of the popes, and the Turkish power, growing and spreading like a fungus till it reached the very gates of the city. Thus once again the Byzantine Empire shrank to the limits of the walls of Constantinople.
It is worthy of notice that the Church did not decay with the empire. We have often had occasion to contrast the subserviency of the Greek clergy with the independence of the papacy. But we have met with many exceptions, and these are all the more remarkable from the fact that the patriarch of Constantinople never had the position held by the pope at Rome. If he resisted the government it was at his peril, for he was only a subject living under the shadow of the imperial palace—not an independent prince, sometimes the most powerful personage in Europe, able to play one kingdom off against another, as was the case with the great Innocent iii. and his able successors.
Michael Palæologus stained his succession to the throne
