Venetian leaders, in 1206, forcibly broke into the Church of St. Sophia and carried off a picture of the Virgin, said to have been painted by St. Luke, in which popular superstition imagined her to reside, and kept it in spite of excommunication and interdict launched against them by the patriarch and confirmed by the papal legate. Fairly illustrative of this belief is a story told of a merchant of Groningen who in one of his voyages coveted the arm of St. John the Baptist belonging to a hospital, and obtained it by bribing heavily the mistress of the guardian, who induced him to steal it. On his return the merchant built a house and secretly encased the relic in a pillar forming part of the structure. Under its protection he prospered mightily and grew wealthy, till once in a conflagration he refused to take measures to save the house, saying that it was under good guardianship. The house was not burned, and public curiosity was so much excited that he was forced to reveal his talisman, when the people carried it off and deposited it in a church, where it worked many miracles, while the merchant was reduced to poverty. It was a superstition even less rational than that which led the Romans to conjure into their camp the tutelary deity of a city which they were besieging; and the universal wearing of relics as charms or amulets had in it nothing to distinguish it from the similar practices of paganism. Even the images and portraits of saints and martyrs had equal virtue. A single glance at the representation of St. Christopher, for instance, was held to preserve one from disease or sudden death for the rest of the day-- "Christophori sancti speciem quicumque tuetur Illo namque die nullo languore tenetur-- and a huge image of the gigantic saint was often painted on the outside of churches for the preservation of the population. The custom of selecting a patron saint by lot at the altar is another manifestation of the same blindness of superstition.[37]