a single attendant. The sacred vessels in the churches were turned into drinking cups. Icons, even portraits of Christ, were used as gaming tables. At St. Sophia the splendid altar was broken in pieces, and a harlot, whom Nicetas calls "a minion of the furies," seated herself on the patriarch's throne, and sang and danced in the church, ridiculing the Greek hymns and processions. It was a scene of outrage and profanity anticipating Paris at the Revolution.[1]
A Latin Empire was now set up at Constantinople with Baldwin of Flanders as its first emperor (a.d. 1204). The Pope Innocent iii. at first expressed strong disapproval of the perversion of a Crusade against the infidels into a war of conquest fought with Christians. But these Greek Christians were heretics and schismatics, and when he saw the great city of Constantinople brought under Latin authority he sent the pallium to the new patriarch, Thomas Morosini, a Venetian, and boasted that at last Israel, after destroying the calves at Dan and Bethel, was again united to Judah. Of course this was no real end to the separation of the two churches. Among the Greeks the Latin patriarch was regarded as an intruder; he was only recognised by the dominant invaders from Europe. The rule of the Franks at Constantinople lasted for about sixty years; but it was no credit to its unscrupulous founders. At length, with the aid of the Genoese, Michael viii. (Palæologus) expelled them and restored the Greek Empire (a.d. 1261).
Meanwhile the Crusades went on as an intermittent stream of warriors pouring over from Europe into Egypt and Syria. In the year 1228 the German emperor, Frederic ii., driven to make good his word by threats of excommunication from Pope Gregory ix., after much procrastination, set off for the Holy Land, where by good fortune he found that the Sultan Camel of Egypt was engaged in war with his nephew, and therefore willing to make terms with the Franks. This Mussulman ruler
- ↑ Nicetas, p. 757 ff.
