Alexius Ducas, in despair at being unable to make his men fight, left the city by night. He was soon followed by the last Greek officer who kept his head, the general Theodore Lascaris, who endeavoured to make one final attack on the Crusaders even after his master had departed. Next morning the Franks found themselves in full possession of the city, though they had been expecting to face a hard day of street-fighting before this end could be attained. In cold blood, twelve hours after all fighting had ended, the Crusaders proceeded with great deliberation to sack the place. The leaders could not or would not hold back their men, and every atrocity that attends the storm of a great city was soon in full swing. Though no resistance was made, the soldiery, and especially the Venetians, took life recklessly, and three or four thousand unarmed citizens were slain. But there was no general massacre; it was lust and greed rather than bloodthirstiness that the army displayed. All the Western writers, no less than the Greeks, testify to the horrors of the three days’ carnival of rape and plunder that now set in. Every knight or soldier seized on the house that he liked best, and dealt as he chose with its inmates. Churches and nunneries fared no better than private dwellings; the orgies that were enacted in the holiest places caused even the Pope to exclaim that no good could ever come out of the conquest. The drunken soldiery enthroned a harlot in the patriarchal chair in St. Sophia, and made her rehearse ribald songs and indecent dances before the high altar. There were plenty of clergy with the Crusading army, but instead of endeavouring to check the sacrilegious doings of their countrymen, they devoted themselves to plundering the treasuries of the churches of all the holy bones and relics that were stored in them. “The Franks,” remarked a Greek writer who saw the sack of Constantinople, “behaved far worse than Saracens; the infidels when a town has surrendered at any rate respect churches and women.”