n troops to
aid the rioters. The Latins were slaughtered in their own homes and in
the streets; their clergy were burned in the churches, their sick in the
hospitals, and their whole quarter reduced to ashes; nay, 4,000 of the
survivors were sold into perpetual slavery to the Turks. They cut off
the head of the Cardinal Legate, and tied it to the tail of a dog, and
then chanted a _Te Deum_. What could be said to such a people? What
could be made of them? The Turks might be a more powerful and energetic,
but could not be a more virulent, a more unscrupulous foe. It did not
seem to matter much to the Latin whether Turk or Greek was lord of
Constantinople; and the Greek justified the indifference of the Latin by
declaring that he would rather have the Turban in Constantinople than
the Tiara.

2. It is the nature of crime to perpetuate itself, and the atrocities of
the Greeks brought about a retaliation from the Latins. Twenty years
after the events I have been relating, the Crusading hosts turned their
arms against the Greeks, and besieged and gained possession of
Constantinople; and, though their excesses seem to have been inferior to
those which provoked them, it is not to be supposed that a city could be
taken by a rude and angry multitude, without the occurrence of
innumerable outrages. It was pillaged and disfigured; and the Pope had
to publish an indignant protest against the work of his own adherents
and followers. He might well be alarmed and distressed, not only for the
crime itself, but for its bearing on the general course of the Crusades;
for, if it was difficult under any circumstances to keep the Greeks in a
right course, it was doubly difficult, when they had been injured, even
though they were the original offenders.

4.

3. But there were other causes, still less satisfactory than those I
have mentioned, tending to nullify all the Pope's efforts to make head
against the barbarian power. I have said that the period of the Ottoman
growth was about 270 years; and this period, viz., the fourteenth and
fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, was the most
disastrous and melancholy in the internal history of the Church of any
that can be named. It was that miserable period, which directly prepared
the way for Protestantism. The resistance to the Pope's authority, on
the part of the states of Europe generally, is pretty nearly coincident
with the rise of the Ottomans. Heresy followed; in the midd