In obedience to the soothsayers, the devotees of Louis the Pious had perished by tens of thousands, and over their corpses the Moslems had marched to victory. The defenders of Christ’s cross had been slaughtered like sheep upon the mountains of the Beatitudes, and sold into slavery in herds at Damascus and Aleppo; even the men who, at the bidding of God’s vicar, had left Dandolo to fight for the Sepulchre upon the barren hills of Palestine, had been immolated. Five hundred had perished in shipwreck, more had been massacred in Illyria, none had received reward. But those who, in defiance of the supernatural and in contempt of their vow, had followed the excommunicated Venetian to plunder fellow-Christians, had won immeasurable glory, and been sated with incalculable spoil.
The pilgrims who, constant to the end, had been spilling their blood in God’s service, came trooping to the Bosphorus to share in the last remaining crumbs; the knights of the Temple and the Hospital set sail for Greece, where money might still be made by the sword, and the King of Jerusalem stood before the Tomb, naked unto his enemies. Innocent himself was cowed; his commands had been disregarded and his curse defied; laymen had insulted his legate, and had, without consulting him, divided among themselves the patronage of the Church; and yet for the strongest there was no moral law. When Baldwin announced that he was emperor, the pope called him “his dearest son,” and received his subjects into the Roman communion.[141]
But yesterday, the greatest king of Christendom had stood weeping, begging for the life of his wife; a hundred years earlier an emperor had stood barefoot, and freezing in the snow, at the gate of Canossa, as a penance for rebellion; but in 1204 a Venetian merchant was blessed by the haughtiest of popes for having stolen Christ’s army, made war on his flock, spurned his viceregent, flouted his legate, and usurped his patrimony. He had appointed a patriarch without a reference to Rome. All was forgiven, the appointment was confirmed, the sinner was shriven; nothing could longer resist the power of money, for consolidation had begun.
Yet, though nature may discriminate against him, the emotionalist will always be an emotionalist, for such is the texture of his brain; and while he breathes, he will hate the materialist. The next year Baldwin was defeated and captured by the Bulgarians, and then Innocent wrote a letter to the Marquis of Montferrat, which showed how the wound had rankled when he blessed the conqueror.
He said bitterly:—
“You had nothing against the Greeks, and you were false to your vows because you did not fight the Saracens, but the Christians; you did not capture Jerusalem, but Constantinople; you preferred earthly to heavenly treasures. But what was far graver, you have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex, and you have committed adulteries, fornications and incests before men’s eyes.... Nor did the imperial treasures suffice you, nor the plunder alike of rich and poor. You laid your hands on the possessions of the Church, you tore the silver panels from the altars, you broke into the sanctuaries and carried away the images, the crosses and the relics, so that the Greeks, though afflicted by persecution, scorn to render obedience to the apostolic chair, since they see in the Latins nothing but an example of perdition and of the works of darkness, and therefore rightly abhor them more than dogs.”[142]
For the north and west of Europe the crusade of Constantinople seems to have been the turning point whence the imagination rapidly declined. At the opening of the thirteenth century, everything shows that the genuine ecstatic type predominated in the Church—the quality of mind which believed in the miracle, and therefore valued the amulet more than money. Innocent himself, with all his apparent worldliness, must have been such a man; for, though the material advantages of a union with the Greek Church far outweighed the Sepulchre, his resistance to the diversion of the army from Palestine was unshaken to the last. The same feeling permeated the inferior clergy; and an anecdote told by Gunther shows that even so late as the year 1204 the monks unaffectedly despised wealth in its vulgar form.
“When therefore the victors set themselves with alacrity to spoil the conquered town, which was theirs by right of war, the abbot Martin began to think about his share of the plunder; and lest, when everything had been given to others, he should be left empty-handed, he proposed to stretch out his consecrated hand to the booty. But since he thought the taking of secular things unworthy, he bestirred himself to obtain a portion of the sacred relics, which he knew were there in great quantities.”[143]
The idea was no sooner conceived than executed. Although private marauding was punished with death, he did not hesitate, but hastened to a church, where he found a frightened old monk upon his knees, whom he commanded in a terrible voice to produce his relics or prepare for death. He was shown a chest full to the brim. Plunging in his arms, he took all he could carry, hurried to his ship and hid his booty in his cabin; and he did this in a town whose streets were literally flowing with gold and silver. He had his reward. Though a sacrilegious thief, angels guarded him by sea and land until he reached his cloister at Bâle. Then he distributed his plunder through the diocese.