While, however, the passage of vast armies in their pilgrimage to the Holy Land roused feelings of animosity between the two great sections of professing Christians, they very materially increased their commercial intercourse, and enlarged their knowledge without abating their religious prejudices. Constantinople proved, commercially, of great importance to the West, as the then chief entrepôt of exchange with the distant nations of the East, and as requiring for the wants of her own wealthy and luxurious people the productions of every climate. From her situation she invited the commerce of the world, and the art and labour of her numerous inhabitants, while it balanced the imports, afforded profitable employment to the number of foreign merchants resident at Constantinople, and to their ships in which her over-sea trade was chiefly conducted. After the decline of Amalfi, the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese, had introduced their factories and settlements into the capital of the empire, had acquired possession of land and houses, and had greatly increased in numbers, intermingling by marriage, and in all the social relations of life, with the natives. Constantinople was therefore largely indebted for her prosperity and wealth to the foreign merchants resident in, or frequenting her port; and, hence when these demanded the right of worshipping in accordance with the Latin forms of Christianity, the emperor, who had tolerated a Muhammedan mosque,[365] was unable to refuse the demand of the Christians of the West. [Sidenote: and on its fall.] But his good intentions, and those of his successor, Alexius, were stopped by a popular tumult, which ended in a terrible massacre of all the Latins whom the vengeance of a mob, headed and applauded by the Greek priesthood, could reach. Many, however, of the foreign merchants had escaped on the first alarm to their vessels, and in these they proceeded to the western ports to seek protection and redress for the wrongs inflicted upon themselves and their countrymen. [Sidenote: Power of Venice, A.D. 1202.]