After private plunder had reigned unchecked for three days, the leaders of the Crusaders collected such valuables as could be found for public division. Though so much had been stolen and concealed, they were able to produce no less than £800,000 in hard gold and silver for distribution. The sum was afterwards supplemented by the use of a resource which makes the modern historian add a special curse of his own to the account of the Crusaders. Down to 1204 Constantinople still contained the monuments of ancient Greek art in enormous numbers. In spite of the wear and tear of 900 years, her squares and palaces were still crowded with the art-treasures that Constantine and his sons had stored up. Nicetas, who was an eyewitness of all, has left us the list of the chief statues that suffered. The Heracles of Lysippus, the great Hera of Samos, the brass figures which Augustus set up after Actium, the ancient Roman bronze of the Wolf with Romulus and Remus, Paris with the Golden Apple, Helen of Troy, and dozens more all went into the melting-pot, to be recast into wretched copper money. The monuments of Christian art fared no better; the tombs of the emperors were carefully stripped of everything in metal, the altars and screens of the churches scraped to the stone. Everything was left bare and desolate. Such was “the greatest conquest that was ever seen, greater than any made by Alexander or Charlemagne, or by any that have lived before or after,” as a Western chronicler wrote, while the Greeks grew hyperbolical in lamentation, as they saw “the eye of the world, the ornament of nations, the fairest sight on earth, the mother of churches, the spring whence flowed the waters of faith, the mistress of Orthodox doctrine, the seat of the sciences, draining the cup mixed for her by the hand of the Almighty, and consumed by fires as devouring as those which ruined the five Cities of the Plain.”