The state which had been drained of its resources by the energetic but
 wasteful Manuel, and disorganized by the rash and wicked Andronicus, now
 passed into the hands of the two most feeble and despicable creatures who
 ever sat upon the imperial throne--the brothers Isaac and Alexius Angelus,
 whose reigns cover the years 1185-1204.
 
 Among all the periods which we have hitherto described in the tale of the
 East-Roman Empire, that covered by the reign of the two wretched Angeli
 may be pronounced the most shameful. The peculiar disgrace of the period
 lies in the fact that the condition of the empire was not hopeless at the
 time. With ordinary courage and prudence it might have been held together,
 for the attacks directed against it were not more formidable than others
 which had been beaten off with ease. If the blow had fallen when a hero
 like Leo III., or even a statesman like Alexius I. was on the throne,
 there is no reason to doubt that it would have been parried. But it fell
 in the times of two incompetent triflers, who conducted the state on the
 principle of, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Isaac and
 Alexius felt in themselves no power of redeeming the empire from the evil
 day, and resignedly fell back on personal enjoyment. Isaac's taste lay in
 the direction of gorgeous raiment and the collecting of miraculous
 "eikons." Alexius preferred the pleasures of the table. Considered as
 sovereigns there was little to choose between them. Each was competent to
 ruin an empire already verging on its decline.
 
 The disaster which the Angeli brought on their realm was rendered possible
 only by its complete military and financial disorganization. As a military
 power the empire had never recovered the effects of the Seljouk invasions,
 which had robbed it of its great recruiting-ground for its native troops
 in Asia Minor. After that loss the use of mercenaries had become more and
 more prevalent. The brilliant campaigns of Manuel Comnenus had been made
 at the head of a soldiery of whom two-thirds were not born-subjects of the
 empire. He, it is true, had kept them within the bounds of strict
 discipline, and contrived at all costs to provide their pay. But the weak
 and thriftless Angeli were able neither to find money nor to maintain
 discipline. A state which relies for its defence on foreign mercenaries is
 ruined, if it allows them to grow disorderly and inefficient. In times of
 stress they mutiny instead of fighting.
 
 The civil administration was in almost as deplorable a condition, while
 those two "Earthly Angels" (as a contemporary chronicler called them) were
 charged with its care. Isaac Angelus put the finishing touch to
 administrative abuses, which had already been rife enough under the
 Comneni, by exposing offices and posts to auction. Instead of paying his
 officials he "sent them forth without purse or scrip, like the apostles of
 old, to make what profit they could by extortion from the
 provincials." His brother Alexius promised on his accession to make
 all appointments on the ground of merit, but proved in reality as bad as
 Isaac. He was surrounded by a ring of rapacious favourites, who managed
 all patronage, and dispensed it in return for bribes. When high posts were
 not sold, they were given as douceurs to men of local influence, whose
 rebellion was dreaded.
 
 The history of the twenty years covered by the reigns of the two Angeli is
 cut into two equal halves at the deposition of Isaac by his brother in
 1195. It is only necessary to point out how the responsibility for the
 disasters of the period is to be divided between them.
 
 Isaac's share consists in the loss of Bulgaria and Cyprus. The former
 country had now been in the hands of the Byzantines for nearly two hundred
 years, since its conquest by Basil II. But the Bulgarians had not merged
 in the general body of the subjects of the empire. They preserved their
 national language and customs, and never forgot their ancient
 independence. In 1187, three brothers named Peter, John, and Azan stirred
 up rebellion among them. If firmly treated it might have been crushed with
 ease by the regular troops of the empire. But Isaac first appointed
 incompetent generals, who let the rebellion grow to a head, and when at
 last he placed an able officer, Alexis Branas, in command, his lieutenant
 took the opportunity of using his army for revolt. Branas marched against
 Constantinople, and would have taken it, had not Isaac committed the
 charge of the troops that remained faithful to him to stronger hands than
 his own. He bribed an able adventurer from the West, Conrad, Marquis of
 Montferrat, by the offer of his sister's hand and a great sum of money to
 become his saviour. The gallant Lombard routed the forces of Branas, slew
 the usurper, and preserved the throne for his brother-in-law. But while
 the civil war was going on, the Bulgarians were left unchecked, and made
 such head that there was no longer much apparent chance of subduing them.
 Isaac took the field against them in person, only to see the great towns
 of Naissus, Sophia, and Varna taken before his eyes.
 
 While a national revolt deprived the Emperor of Bulgaria, Cyprus was lost
 to a meaner force. Isaac Comnenus, a distant relative of the Emperor
 Manuel II., raised rebellion among the Cypriots and defeated the fleet and
 army which his namesake of Constantinople sent against him. He held out
 for six years, and appeared likely to establish a permanent kingdom in the
 island. This revolt was of the worst augury to the empire. It had often
 lost provinces by the invasion of barbarian hordes, or the rebellion of
 subject nationalities. But that a native rebel should sever a civilized
 Greek province from the empire, and reign as "Emperor of Cyprus," was a
 new phenomenon. By the imperial theory the idea of an independent "Empire
 of Cyprus" was wholly monstrous and abnormal. The successful rebellion of
 Isaac Comnenus pointed to the possibility of a general breaking up of the
 Byzantine dominion into fragments, a danger that had never appeared
 before. Till now the provinces had always obeyed the capital, and no
 instance had been known of a rebel maintaining himself by any other way
 than the capture of Constantinople. Isaac Comnenus might, however, have
 founded a dynasty in Cyprus, if he had not quarrelled with Richard
 Coeur-de-Lion, the crusading King of England. When he maltreated some
 shipwrecked English crews, Richard punished him by landing his army in
 Cyprus and seizing the whole island. Isaac was thrown into a dungeon, and
 the English king gave his dominions to Guy of Lusignan, who called in
 Frank adventurers to settle up the land, and made it into a feudal kingdom
 of the usual Western type.
 
 While Isaac II. was in the midst of his Bulgarian war, and misconducting
 it with his usual fatuity, he was suddenly dethroned by a palace intrigue.
 His own brother, Alexius Angelus, had hatched a plot against him, which
 worked so successfully that Isaac was caught, blinded, and immured in a
 monastery long before his adherents knew that he was in danger.
 
 Alexius III. never showed any other proof of energy save this skilful
 _coup d'etat_ aimed against his brother. He continued the Bulgarian war
 with the same ill-success that had attended Isaac's dealings with it. He
 plunged into a disastrous struggle with the Seljouk Sultan of Iconium, and
 he quarrelled with the Emperor Henry VI., who would certainly have invaded
 his dominions if death had not intervened to prevent it. But as long as
 Alexius was permitted to enjoy the pleasures of the table in his villas on
 the Bosphorus, the ill-success abroad of his arms and his diplomacy vexed
 him but little.
 
 But in 1203, a new and unexpected danger arose to scare him from his
 feasting. His blind brother Isaac had a young son named Alexius, who
 escaped from Constantinople to Italy, and took refuge with Philip of
 Suabia, the new Emperor of the West. Philip had married a daughter of
 Isaac Angelus, and determined to do something to help his young
 brother-in-law. The opportunity was not hard to seek. Just at this moment
 a large body of French, Flemish, and Italian Crusaders, who had taken arms
 at the command of the Pope, were lying idle at Venice. They had marched
 down to the great Italian seaport with the intention of directing a blow
 against Malek-Adel, Sultan of Egypt. The Venetians had contracted to
 supply them with vessels for the Crusade, but for reasons of their own had
 determined that the attack should not fall on the shore for which it had
 been destined. They were on very good terms with the Egyptian sovereign,
 who had granted them valuable commercial privileges at Alexandria, which
 threw the whole trade with the distant realms of India into Venetian
 hands. Accordingly they had determined to avert the blow from Egypt and
 turn it against some other enemy of Christendom. The leaders of the Fourth
 Crusade proved unable to pay the full sum which they had contracted to
 give the Venetians as ship-hire, and this was made an excuse for keeping
 them camped on the unhealthy islands in the Lagoons till their patience
 and their stores were alike exhausted. Henry Dandolo, the aged but wily
 doge, then proposed to the Crusaders that they should pay their way by
 doing something in aid of Venice. The Dalmatian town of Zara had lately
 revolted and done homage to the King of Hungary; if the Crusaders would
 recover it, the Venetian state would wipe out their debts and transport
 them whither they wished to go.
 
 The Crusaders had taken arms for a holy war against the Moslems. They were
 now invited to turn aside against a Christian town and interest themselves
 in Venetian politics. Conscientious men would have refused to join in such
 an unholy bargain, and would have insisted in carrying out their original
 purpose against Egypt. But conscientious men had been growing more and
 more rare among the Crusaders for the last hundred years. There were as
 many greedy military adventurers among them as single-hearted pilgrims.
 The more scrupulous chiefs were over-persuaded by their designing
 companions, and the expedition against Zara was undertaken.
 
 Zara fell, but another and a more important enterprise was then placed
 before the Crusaders. While they wintered on the Dalmatian coast the young
 Alexius Angelus appeared in their camp, escorted by the ambassadors of his
 brother-in-law, the Emperor Philip of Suabia. The exiled prince besought
 them to turn aside once more before they sailed to the East, and to rescue
 his blind father from the dungeon into which he had been cast by his cruel
 brother Alexius III. If they would drive out the usurper and restore the
 rightful ruler to his throne, they should have anything that the Byzantine
 Empire could afford to help them for their Crusade--money in plenty,
 stores, a war fleet, a force of mercenary troops, and his own presence as
 a helper in the war with Egypt.
 
 Pope Innocent III. had already been storming at the adventurers for
 shedding Christian blood at Zara, and tampering with their Crusader's
 oath. But the prospect of Byzantine gold seduced the needy Western barons,
 and the desire of keeping the war away from Egypt ruled the minds of the
 Venetians. They hesitated and began to treat with Alexius, though they
 knew that thereby they were calling down on themselves the terrors of a
 Papal excommunication. All now depended on the leaders, and among them the
 abler minds were set on the acceptance of the proposal of the young
 Byzantine exile. The three chiefs of the Crusade were the Doge Henry
 Dandolo, Boniface Marquis of Montferrat, and Baldwin Count of Flanders. In
 Dandolo the ruthless energy of the Italian Republics stood incarnate; he
 was the one man in the crusading army who knew exactly what he wanted. Old
 and blind, but clear-headed and inflexible, he was set on revenging an
 ancient grudge against the Greeks, and on furthering, by any means, good
 or evil, the fortunes of his native city. Baldwin and Boniface, the two
 secondary figures in the camp of the Franks, are perfect representations
 of the two types of crusader. The Fleming, gallant and generous, pious and
 debonnair, worthy of a more righteous enterprise and a more honourable
 death, was a true successor of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the heroes of the
 First Crusade. The Lombard, a deep and hardy schemer, to whom force and
 fraud seemed equally good, was simply seeking for wealth and fame in the
 realms of the East. He cared little for the Holy Sepulchre, and much for
 his own private advancement. Behind these three leaders we descry the
 motley crowd of the feudal world; relic-hunting abbots in coats of mail,
 wrangling barons and penniless knights, the half-piratical seamen of
 Venice, and the brutal soldiery of the West.
 
                               
 
          View Of Constantinople. (From The Side Of The Harbour.)
 
 
 Boniface of Montferrat and Doge Dandolo gradually talked over the more
 scrupulous Baldwin and his friends, and the crusading fleet was launched
 against Constantinople, after a treaty had been signed which bound Alexius
 Angelus and his blind father, Isaac II., to pay the Crusaders 200,000
 marks of silver, send ten thousand men to Palestine, and acknowledge the
 supremacy of the Pope over the Eastern Church. In these conditions lay the
 germs of much future trouble.
 
 The Crusading armament reached the Dardanelles without having to strike a
 blow. The slothful and luxurious emperor let things slide, and had not
 even a fleet ready to send against them in the Aegean. He shut himself up
 in Constantinople, and trusted to the strength of its walls to deliver
 him, as Heraclius and Leo III. and many more of his predecessors had been
 delivered. If the siege had been conducted from the land side only, his
 hopes might have been justified, for the Danes and English of the
 Varangian Guard beat back the assault of the Franks on the land-wall. But
 Alexius III., unlike earlier emperors, was attacked by a fleet to which he
 could oppose no adequate naval resistance. Though the Crusaders were
 driven off on shore, the Venetians stormed the sea-wall, by the expedient
 of building light towers on the decks, and throwing flying bridges from
 the towers on to the top of the Byzantine ramparts. The blind Doge pushed
 his galley close under the wall, and urged on his men again and again till
 they had won a lodgment in some towers on the port side of the sea-wall.
 The Venetians then fired the city, and a fearful conflagration followed.
 
 Hearing that the enemy was within the ramparts, the cowardly Alexius III.
 mounted his horse and fled away into the inland of Thrace, leaving his
 troops, who were not yet half beaten, without a leader or a cause to fight
 for. The garrison bowed to necessity, and the chief officers of the army
 drew the aged Isaac II. out of his cloister prison and proclaimed his
 restoration to the throne. They sent to the Crusading camp to announce
 that hostilities had ceased, and to beg Prince Alexius to enter the city
 and join his father in the palace.
 
 The end of the expedition of the Crusaders had now been attained, but it
 may safely be asserted that the chief feeling in their ranks was a bitter
 disappointment at being cheated out of the sack of Constantinople, a
 prospect over which they had been gloating ever since they left Zara. They
 spent the next three months in endeavouring to wring out of their
 triumphant proteges, Isaac and Alexius, every bezant that could be scraped
 together. The old emperor, already blind and gout-ridden, was driven to
 imbecility by their demands: his son was a raw, inexperienced youth who
 could neither be firm, nor frank, nor dignified in dealing with any one.
 He angered the Franks by insincere diplomacy, and the Greeks by his
 reckless schemes for extracting money from them. The winter of 1203-4 was
 spent in ceaseless wrangling about the subsidy due to the Crusaders, till
 Alexius, growing seriously frightened, began exactions on his subjects
 which drove them to revolt. When he seized and melted down the golden
 lamps and silver candelabra which formed the pride of St. Sophia, stripped
 its eikonostasis of its rich metal plating, and requisitioned the jewelled
 eikons and reliquaries of every church in the city, the populace would
 stand his proceedings no longer. They would not serve an emperor who had
 sold himself to the Franks, and only reigned in order to subject the
 Eastern Church to Rome, and to pour the hoarded wealth of the ancient
 empire into the coffers of the upstart Italian republics.
 
 In January, 1204, the storm burst. The populace and troops shut the gates
 of the city, and fell on the isolated Latins who were within the walls.
 They were not long without a leader; a fierce and unscrupulous officer
 named Alexius Ducas put himself at their head and determined to seize the
 throne. Isaac II. died of fright in the midst of the tumult; his son
 Alexius was caught and strangled by the usurper. Thus the Angeli ceased
 out of the land, and Alexius V. reigned in their stead. He is less
 frequently named by chroniclers under his family name of Ducas, than under
 his nickname of "Murtzuphlus," drawn from the bushy overhanging eyebrows
 which formed the most prominent feature of his countenance.
 
 Alexius Ducas had everything against him. He was a mere usurper, whose
 authority was hardly recognized beyond the walls of Constantinople. The
 Angeli had so drained the treasury that nothing remained in it. Twenty
 years of indiscipline and disaster had spoilt the army; the fleet was
 nonexistent, for the admirals of Alexius Angelus had laid up the vessels
 in ordinary, and sold the stores to fill their own pockets. Nevertheless
 Murtzuphlus made a far better fight than his despicable predecessor and
 namesake. He collected a little money by confiscating the properties of
 the unpopular courtiers and ministers of the Angeli, and used it to the
 best advantage. The army received some of the arrears due to them, and
 Alexius spent every spare moment in seeing to their drill and endeavouring
 to improve their discipline. He strengthened the sea-wall, whose weakness
 had been proved so fatally four months ago, by erecting wooden towers
 along it, and building platforms for all the military engines that could
 be found in the arsenal. He ordered, too, the enrolment of a national
 militia, and compelled the nobles and burghers of Constantinople to take
 arms and man the walls. To the discredit of the Byzantines this order was
 received with many murmurs: the citizens complained that they paid taxes
 to support the regular army, and that they therefore ought to be excused
 personal service. Little good was got out of these new and raw levies;
 they swelled the numbers of the garrison, but hardly added anything
 appreciable to its strength.
 
 Alexius Ducas himself with his cavalry scoured the country round the
 Crusading camp every day, to cut off the foraging parties of the Franks,
 and when not in the field, rode round the city superintending the works,
 inspecting the guard-posts, and haranguing the soldiery. If courage and
 energy command success, he ought to have held his own. But he could not
 counteract the work of twenty years of decay and disorganization, and felt
 that his throne rested on the most fragile of foundations.
 
 The Crusaders took two months to prepare for their second assault on
 Constantinople, which they felt would be a far more formidable affair than
 the attack in the preceding autumn. They directed their chief efforts
 against the sea-wall, which they had found vulnerable in the previous
 siege, and left the formidable land-wall alone. The ships were told off
 into groups, each destined to attack a particular section of the wall, and
 covered with as many military engines as they could carry. Flying bridges
 were again prepared, and landing parties were directed to leap ashore on
 the narrow beach between the wall and the water, and get to work with rams
 and scaling ladders. The attack was made on April 8th, at more than a
 hundred points along two miles of sea-wall, but it was beaten off with
 loss. Alexius Ducas had made his arrangements so well, that the fire of
 his engines swept off all who attempted to gain a footing on the ramparts.
 The ships were much damaged, and at noon the whole fleet gave back, and
 retired as best it could to the opposite side of the Golden Horn.
 
 Many of the Crusaders were now for returning; they thought their defeat
 was a judgment for turning their arms against a Christian city, and wished
 to sail for the Holy Land. But Dandolo and the Venetians insisted upon
 repeating the assault. Three days were spent in repairing the fleet, and
 on April 12th a second attack was delivered. This time the ships were
 lashed together in pairs to secure stability, and the attack was
 concentrated on a comparatively small front of wall. At last, after much
 fighting, the military engines of the fleet and the bolts of its
 crossbowmen cleared a single tower of its defenders. A bridge was
 successfully lowered on to it, and a footing secured by a party of
 Crusaders, who then threw open a postern gate and let the main body in.
 After a short fight within the walls, the troops of Alexius Ducas retired
 back into the streets. The Crusaders fired the city to cover their
 advance, and by night were in possession of the north-west angle of
 Constantinople, the quarter of the palace of Blachern.
 
                               
 
     Byzantine Reliquary. (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris,
                              Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 While the fire was keeping the combatants apart, the Emperor tried to
 rally his troops and to prepare for a street-fight next day. But the army
 was cowed; many regiments melted away; and the Varangian Guard, the best
 corps in the garrison, chose this moment to demand that their arrears of
 pay should be liquidated; they would not return to the fight without their
 money! The twenty years of disorganization under the Angeli was now
 bearing its fruit, and deeply was the empire to rue the next day.
 
 Alexius Ducas, in despair at being unable to make his men fight, left the
 city by night. He was soon followed by the last Greek officer who kept his
 head, the general Theodore Lascaris, who endeavoured to make one final
 attack on the Crusaders even after his master had departed. Next morning
 the Franks found themselves in full possession of the city, though they
 had been expecting to face a hard day of street-fighting before this end
 could be attained.
 
 In cold blood, twelve hours after all fighting had ended, the Crusaders
 proceeded with great deliberation to sack the place. The leaders could not
 or would not hold back their men, and every atrocity that attends the
 storm of a great city was soon in full swing. Though no resistance was
 made, the soldiery, and especially the Venetians, took life recklessly,
 and three or four thousand unarmed citizens were slain. But there was no
 general massacre; it was lust and greed rather than bloodthirstiness that
 the army displayed. All the Western writers, no less than the Greeks,
 testify to the horrors of the three days' carnival of rape and plunder
 that now set in. Every knight or soldier seized on the house that he liked
 best, and dealt as he chose with its inmates. Churches and nunneries fared
 no better than private dwellings; the orgies that were enacted in the
 holiest places caused even the Pope to exclaim that no good could ever
 come out of the conquest. The drunken soldiery enthroned a harlot in the
 patriarchal chair in St. Sophia, and made her rehearse ribald songs and
 indecent dances before the high altar. There were plenty of clergy with
 the Crusading army, but instead of endeavouring to check the sacrilegious
 doings of their countrymen, they devoted themselves to plundering the
 treasuries of the churches of all the holy bones and relics that were
 stored in them. "The Franks," remarked a Greek writer who saw the sack of
 Constantinople, "behaved far worse than Saracens; the infidels when a town
 has surrendered at any rate respect churches and women."
 
 After private plunder had reigned unchecked for three days, the leaders of
 the Crusaders collected such valuables as could be found for public
 division. Though so much had been stolen and concealed, they were able to
 produce no less than L800,000 in hard gold and silver for distribution.
 The sum was afterwards supplemented by the use of a resource which makes
 the modern historian add a special curse of his own to the account of the
 Crusaders. Down to 1204 Constantinople still contained the monuments of
 ancient Greek art in enormous numbers. In spite of the wear and tear of
 900 years, her squares and palaces were still crowded with the
 art-treasures that Constantine and his sons had stored up. Nicetas, who
 was an eyewitness of all, has left us the list of the chief statues that
 suffered. The Heracles of Lysippus, the great Hera of Samos, the brass
 figures which Augustus set up after Actium, the ancient Roman bronze of
 the Wolf with Romulus and Remus, Paris with the Golden Apple, Helen of
 Troy, and dozens more all went into the melting-pot, to be recast into
 wretched copper money. The monuments of Christian art fared no better; the
 tombs of the emperors were carefully stripped of everything in metal, the
 altars and screens of the churches scraped to the stone. Everything was
 left bare and desolate.
 
 Such was "the greatest conquest that was ever seen, greater than any made
 by Alexander or Charlemagne, or by any that have lived before or after,"
 as a Western chronicler wrote, while the Greeks grew hyperbolical in
 lamentation, as they saw "the eye of the world, the ornament of nations,
 the fairest sight on earth, the mother of churches, the spring whence
 flowed the waters of faith, the mistress of Orthodox doctrine, the seat of
 the sciences, draining the cup mixed for her by the hand of the Almighty,
 and consumed by fires as devouring as those which ruined the five Cities
 of the Plain."
 
 At last the Crusaders sat down to divide up their conquests. They elected
 Baldwin of Flanders Emperor of the East, and handed over to him the ruined
 city of Constantinople, half of it devoured by the flames of the
 conflagrations that attended the two sieges, and all of it plundered from
 cellar to attic. Four-fifths of the population had fled, and no one had
 remained save beggars who had nothing to save by flight. With the capital
 Baldwin was given Thrace and the Asiatic provinces--Bithynia, Mysia, and
 Lydia, all of which had still to be conquered. His colleague, Boniface of
 Montferrat, was made "King of Thessalonica," and did homage to Baldwin for
 a fief consisting of Macedonia, Thessaly, and inland Epirus. The Venetians
 claimed "a quarter and half-a-quarter" of the empire, and took out their
 share by receiving Crete, the Ionian Islands, the ports along the west
 coast of Greece and Albania, nearly the whole of the islands of the
 Aegean, and the land about the entrance of the Dardanelles. They seized on
 every good harbour and strong sea-fortress, but left the inland alone;
 commerce rather than annexation was their end. The rest of the empire was
 parcelled out among the minor leaders of the Crusade; they had first to
 conquer their fiefs, and were then to do homage for them to the Emperor
 Baldwin. Most of them never lived to accomplish the scheme. Meanwhile a
 Venetian prelate was appointed patriarch of Constantinople, and news was
 sent to the Pope that the union of the Eastern and Western Churches was
 accomplished, by the forcible extinction of the Greek patriarchate.
 
 It only remains to speak of Alexius Ducas, the fugitive Greek emperor. He
 fell into the hands of the Crusaders, was tried for the murder of the
 young Alexius Angelus, and suffered death by being taken to the top of a
 lofty pillar and hurled from it. The Greeks saw in this strange end the
 fulfilment of an obscure prophecy about the last of the Caesars, which had
 long puzzled the brains of the oracle-mongers.