CHAPTER IX.
THE LATIN CONQUEST.
WO hundred and fifty years before the final overthrow of the Greek empire by the Ottomans, while the sceptre of Constantinople passed, like an unmeaning toy, from one grasp to another, each so feeble that the Bulgarians openly prayed that the life of him, their enemy, might be prolonged, there occurred in the dramatic history of this city an event more dramatic than anything in the records of humanity, the Latin conquest, a story before which the expedition of Pizarro pales, and the glory of Hernando Cortes is dimmed.
The horror and shame which the loss of Jerusalem spread through the whole of Christendom naturally raised up preacher after preacher, prophet after prophet, until the reverberation of the news slowly died away from shore to shore. All of them called upon princes and people to avenge the blood of the saints of Hattin, to recover the Holy Sites, to assume the Cross. None of them achieved any success until, some ten years after the city fell, Fulke de Neuilly, who possessed that divine
