A fleet of nearly five hundred vessels sailed from Venice accordingly (Oct., 1202), and Zara was taken after a siege of six days, although the inhabitants tried to soften the feelings of the besiegers by displaying crosses and sacred pictures from the walls, as tokens of their brotherhood in Christ. After this success, the Crusaders were bound by their engagement to go on to Egypt or the Holy Land; but a young Greek prince, named Alexius, entreated them to restore his father, who had been dethroned by a usurper, to the empire of the East; and, although the French were unwilling to undertake any work that might interfere with the recovery of the Holy Land, the Venetians, who cared little for anything but their own gain, persuaded them to turn aside to Constantinople. When the Crusaders came in sight of the city, they were so astonished at the beauty of its lofty walls and towers, of its palaces and its many churches, that (as we are told) the hearts of the boldest among them beat with a feeling which could not be kept down, and many of them even burst into tears. They found the harbour protected by a great chain which was drawn across the mouth of it; but this chain was broken by the force of a ship which was driven against it with the sails swollen by a strong wind. The blind old doge, Henry Dandolo, stood in the prow of the foremost ship, and was the first to land in the face of the Greeks who stood ready to defend the ground. Constantinople was soon won, and the emperor, who had been deposed and blinded by the usurper, was brought from his dungeon, and was enthroned in the great church of St. Sophia, while his son Alexius was anointed and crowned as a partner in the empire. But quarrels soon arose between the Greeks and the Latins. Alexius was murdered by a new usurper; his father died of grief: and the Crusaders found themselves drawn on to conquer the city afresh for themselves. This conquest was disgraced by much cruelty and unchecked plunder; and the religion of the Greeks was outraged by the Latin victors as much as it could have been by heathen barbarians. The Crusaders set up an emperor and a patriarch of their own, and the Greek clergy were forced to give way to Latins. The pope, although he was much disappointed at finding that his plan for the recovery of the Holy Land had come to nothing, was yet persuaded by the greatness of the conquest to give a kind of approval to it. But the Latin empire of the East was never strong; and after about seventy years it was overthrown by the Greeks, who drove out the Latins and restored their own form of Christian religion. Innocent did not give up the notion of a crusade, and at a later time he sent about preachers to stir up the people of the West afresh; but nothing had come of this when the pope died. I must, however, mention a strange thing which arose out of this attempt at a crusade.