Yet what, I say, was the reception which the cowardly suppliants had given to their avengers and protectors? From the very first, they threw difficulties in the way of their undertaking. When the heroic Godfrey and his companions in arms arrived in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, they found themselves all but betrayed into a dangerous position, where they might either have been starved, or been easily attacked. When at length they had crossed over into Asia, the Crusaders found themselves without the means of sustenance. They had bargained for a fair market in the Greek territories; but the Imperial Court allowed the cities which they passed by to close their gates upon them, to let down to them from the wall an insufficient supply of food, to mix poisonous ingredients in their bread, to give them base coin, to break down the bridges before them, and to fortify the passes, and to mislead them by their guides, to give information of their movements to the Turk, to pillage and murder the stragglers, and to hang up their dead bodies on gibbets along the highway. The Greek clergy preached against them as heretics and schismatics and dogs; the Patriarch and the Bishops spoke of their extermination as a merit, and their priests washed and purified the altars where the Latin priests had said mass. Nay, the Emperors formed a secret alliance with Turks and Saracens against them, and the price at which they obtained it, was the permission of erecting a mosque in Constantinople. As time went on, they did not stop even here. A number of Latin merchants had settled at Constantinople, as our own merchants now are planted all over the cities of the Continent. The Greek populace rose against them; and the Emperor did not scruple to send his own troops to aid the rioters. The Latins were slaughtered in their own homes and in the streets; their clergy were burned in the churches, their sick in the hospitals, and their whole quarter reduced to ashes; nay, 4,000 of the survivors were sold into perpetual slavery to the Turks. They cut off the head of the Cardinal Legate, and tied it to the tail of a dog, and then chanted a _Te Deum_. What could be said to such a people? What could be made of them? The Turks might be a more powerful and energetic, but could not be a more virulent, a more unscrupulous foe. It did not seem to matter much to the Latin whether Turk or Greek was lord of Constantinople; and the Greek justified the indifference of the Latin by declaring that he would rather have the Turban in Constantinople than the Tiara.