But there was a reverse to this picture of orderly magnificence. Like so many states which had preceded it, like the Elder Rome, whose name and prestige it had inherited, Constantinople was suffering from the decay of age, and this decay was working from the top downwards. With the tightening of the Imperial power and the relaxation of the supervision of the Senate, the way had been made easy for the despot. If an able Emperor assumed the purple buskins, the Empire prospered. If a sot, a degenerate, a fool or a selfish man won the Imperial dignity, the Empire crumbled. For several centuries now Byzantium had been crumbling. An Emperor occasionally arrested the slow deterioration, but the dry rot of over-centralised authority was spreading its contamination with inexorable virulence. The Empire was dying, slowly but surely. The hammer-blows of the Saracen states on the East were driving in its boundaries in Asia Minor and blotting out the sturdy peasantry, who had been the mainstay of armies that had upheld the traditions of the Roman legions for centuries after the Roman Eagles had given way to the Cross. The line of the northern frontier, fixed by Trajan at the Danube, long since had receded to the Rhodopes, and year by year the vigorous Slav peoples pushed farther and farther into the domains of the Empire. On the shores of the Marmora and in the surrounding country in Europe and Asia Minor there still remained a belt of prosperous towns and farming communities. And no amount of misgovernment and incapacity could take away from Constantinople itself the commercial supremacy which came from its situation at the juncture of the trade routes between Asia and Africa and Europe. But this Empire, against which was launched the comparatively feeble forces of the Fourth Crusade, was a husk, a sham, a thing of empty pomp, massive and imposing to outward seeming, inwardly a rotten core ready to fall to pieces at the first vigorous push which pierced the exterior covering. It seemed incredible that such could be the case. The knights and soldiers of the host experienced the same dumb awe which gripped the Crusaders of Godfrey de Bouillon and Frederick Barbarossa. As the vast skyline of the city loomed clearer and clearer over the water, their astonishment was changed to fear. For the first time they appreciated the full extent of their undertaking. "St. Cuthbert be my guardian, Messer Hugh!" gasped Ralph. "But that is no city! It is a whole country by itself!" "Ay, Ralph, never saw I the like!" assented Hugh. "Venice is but a village compared to this. There must be as many people in it as in all England." "You say truth, Hugh," said Matteo, beside them. "I doubt if England--ay, or Northern France, holds more souls than you could count in Constantinople and its suburbs."