had previously made bishop of Tarsus; he was a native of Valence who had come from the West as chaplain to the bishop of Puy. Of course he was a priest of the Latin Church and subject to the pope. It was the same with Dagobert whom the Crusaders had made patriarch of Jerusalem. He was their patriarch; he was no patriarch of the indigenous Christians.
The situation at Constantinople was infinitely worse. It was a Christian city in the hands of -a Christian government when the Crusaders captured it. Therefore it had its patriarch at the time. This man was John Camaterus.[1] He fled to Didymotichum, but although he was no longer treated as the head of the Church, there was no disposition on the part of the Greeks to acknowledge the Latin usurper of his throne at St. Sophia. Two years later (a.d. 1205) Michael Antorianus was elected to the patriarchate by the Greeks of Nicæa with as much ceremony as if it had been at St. Sophia; and so the Greek Church went on in its independence notwithstanding the boasted union of East and West at Constantinople, for which Pope Innocent was grateful.
When we plant ourself in imagination among the Greeks, we see how ridiculous the very idea of a Latin Empire at Constantinople must have seemed to them. There never was any Latin Empire in the East. A huge band of brigands had seized the city; that was about all that had been done. Theoretically the barons divided out the territory of the Byzantine Empire. But they did not even know what that territory was, for in their distribution they included Assyria and Egypt and other parts of the Turkish dominions. Meanwhile they were actually only in possession of Constantinople and its immediate neighbourhood. Even here the "emperor" was little more than one of the barons who found it hard to maintain his authority over his turbulent fellow barons—like his contemporary King John in England. After reigning only one year the first "emperor" Baldwin was lost and probably killed among
