manned the walls. A hasty truce was arranged; the merchants loaded
every ship with their families and their property; the Latin fleet
sailed down the Dardanelles, and the Latin Empire in the East was at
an end.

It began with violence and injustice: it ended as it began. There were
six Latin emperors, of whom the first was a gallant soldier; the
second, a sovereign of admirable qualities, and an able administrator;
the third, a plain French knight, who was murdered on his way to
assume the purple buskins; the fourth, a weak and pusillanimous
creature; the fifth, a stout old warrior; and the last, a monarch of
whom nothing good can be said and nothing evil, except that which was
said of Boabdil (called _El Chico_), that he was unlucky. As the
Latins never had the slightest right or title to these possessions in
the East, so the western powers were never impelled to assist them,
and their downfall was merely a matter of time. In the interests of
civilization their occupation of the city seems to have been
unfortunate; they learned nothing for themselves, they taught nothing;
neither East nor West profited. They destroyed the old institutions,
so that the ancient Roman Empire was broken up by their conquest; they
inflicted irreparable losses on learning and art; and perhaps the only
good result of their conquest was that, for the moment, at least, it
deflected the course of trade with the East from the Golden Horn, and
sent it by another route to Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.




INNOCENT III EXALTS THE PAPAL POWER