Coming to the first attempts at organized effort to save children by the Church we find that Article 70 of the Council of Nicaea instructed the bishop to establish in each city a place to which travellers, the sick and the poor, might appeal for aid and shelter. The _Xenodocheion_, as it was called, is to this day the word for “hotel” in modern Greece, where the traveller in Europe will conclude there is little evidence of improvement since the ecclesiastical foundation. These places were also used as the asylums for children, a fact that led them to be called _Brephotrophia_.[412] In the West a similar movement sprang up, and in the life of Saint Gour, contemporary of Childebert, it is said that at Trèves there was something like a systematic endeavour to protect children. A great obscurity hangs around this foundation, and it is equally difficult to determine positively what is the exact character of the institution ascribed to Saint Marmbœuf, who died in Angers in 654. Of the efforts of Datheus, however, there are no doubts, though interesting is the fact that no biographical encyclopædia contains even his name. He was Archbishop of Milan, and the first institution to take care of helpless children was founded by him in 787. “An enervating and sensual life,” declared Datheus in founding the asylum, “leads many astray. They commit adultery and do not dare show the fruits in public and therefore put them to death. By depriving the children of baptism they send them to hell. These horrors would not take place if there existed an asylum where the adulterer could hide her shame, but now they throw the infants in the sewers or the rivers and many are the murders committed on the new-born children as the result of this illicit intercourse. “Therefore, I, Datheus, for the welfare of my soul and the souls of my associates, do hereby establish in the house that I have bought next to the church, a hospital for foundling children. My wish is that as soon as a child is exposed at the door of a church that it will be received in the hospital and confided to the care of those who will be paid to look after them.... These infants will be taught a trade and my wish is that when they arrive at the age of eight years they will be free from the shackles of slavery and free to come or go wherever they will.”[413] In 1380 a similar institution was opened in Venice, and in Florence in 1421. There is no doubt that similar institutions were most frequent in the fifteenth century. Pontanus, a writer of that age, speaks of having seen nine hundred children in the one at Naples, and openly expresses his admiration for the liberal education that they received and the care bestowed on them by their teachers.[414]