Their mules and horses were laden with the wrought silver and gilt carvings which they tore down from the doors and pulpit; and if the beasts stumbled under the burden, they were stabbed by their impatient drivers, and the holy pavement streamed with their impure blood. A prostitute was seated on the throne of the patriarch; and that daughter of Belial, as she is styled, sang and danced in the church, to ridicule the hymns and processions of the Orientals. Nor were the repositories of the royal dead secure from violation; in the church of the Apostles, the tombs of the emperors were rifled; and it is said, that after six centuries the corpse of Justinian was found without any sign of decay or putrefaction. In the streets the French and Flemings clothed themselves and their horses in painted robes and flowing head-dresses of linen; and the coarse intemperance of their feasts insulted the splendid sobriety of the East. To expose the arms of a people of scribes and scholars, they affected to display a pen, an inkhorn, and a sheet of paper, without discerning that the instruments of science and valour were useless in the hands of the modern Greeks.
Their reputation and their language encouraged them, however, to despise the ignorance, and to overlook the progress of the Latins. In the love of the arts, the national difference was still more obvious and real; the Greeks preserved with reverence the works of their ancestors, which they could not imitate; and, in the destruction of the statues of Constantinople, we are provoked to join in the complaints and invectives of the Byzantine historian. The brass statues were broken and melted by the unfeeling avarice of the crusaders; the cost and labour were consumed in a moment; the soul of genius evaporated in smoke; and the remnant of base metal was coined into money for the payment of the troops. Bronze is not the most durable of monuments; from the marble forms of Phidias and Praxiteles, the Latins might turn aside with stupid contempt; but unless they were crushed by some accidental injury, those useless stones stood secure on their pedestals. The most enlightened of the strangers, above the gross and sensual pursuits of their countrymen, more piously exercised the right of conquest in the search and seizure of the relics of the saints.[h]
FOOTNOTES
[64] Leo Diaconus[b] calls his murderers Germans, meaning doubtless Northmen.
[65] These numbers are given by Leo Diaconus.[b] Cedrenus[c] gives five thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry; Zonaras,[d] the same number. The proportion affords some insight into the constitution of Byzantine armies at this period of military glory. The cavalry served as the model for European chivalry, but the sword of the legionary could still gain a battle.
[66] Leo Diaconus[b] calls the larger vessels triremes, though they certainly had not more than two tiers of oars.
[67] The Russians then wore armour similar to that worn by the Normans in western Europe at a later period, according to Leo Diaconus.[b]
[69] Cruelty similar to that of Basil was perpetrated on a smaller scale by Richard Cœur-de-Lion, though of course it is not necessary to place strict reliance on the numbers reported by the Byzantine historians. Richard, to revenge the loss of a body of men, ordered three hundred French knights to be thrown into the Seine, and put out the eyes of fifteen, who were sent home blind, led by one whose right eye had been spared. Philip Augustus, nothing loath, revenged himself by treating fifteen English knights in the same way.—Putting out men’s eyes was, for several centuries, a common practice all over Europe, and not regarded with much horror. As late as the reign of Henry IV. 1403 A.D., an Act of Parliament was passed, making it felony for Englishmen to cut out one another’s tongues, or put out their neighbours’ eyes.
[70] [He was utterly defeated by the Saracens at Agaz in 1030; the fleets, however, won two victories.]