The great combined efforts of the West to break the Ottoman power and, incidentally, to save Constantinople had failed disastrously. Nor are the reasons for such failure difficult to understand. They are mainly two: underestimating the power of the enemy, and dividing their own forces. First and above all, neither the pope nor the statesmen of Europe had realised the enormous number of fighting men which the Turk could bring into the field. They knew that the empire of Constantinople had been dismembered by Turkish armies, but they attributed this loss to secondary causes, and do not appear to have realised that Turkish armies beaten again and again constantly reappeared. The empire’s loss, in their opinion, was due to the incapacity of some of its emperors, to civil war, to the pressure of Serbia and Bulgaria, and to the judgment of Heaven upon the Greeks for having refused to come within the one Christian fold, and to acknowledge the one shepherd. The Turks were the instruments of divine justice to punish schismatics, but, having done their work against the empire, they would, now that they ventured to attack Catholic states, no longer be permitted to make further encroachments. The failure of the men of the West was largely due to the fact that they despised the common enemy. They were under the curious delusion that the Turk was not a fighting man; that, though he had been successful in beating Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians, he was no warrior, and that he had thus far succeeded because he had never encountered European soldiers. This delusion lasted for at least two centuries after the capture of the city. Almost every Western writer who visited Constantinople spoke of the defeat of the Turks as a task well within the power of a European state. That such a blunder influenced the men of the West before the capture of the city, may be illustrated by the statement of two contemporaries. In an oration by Aeneas Sylvius, who afterwards became Pope Pius the Second, delivered at Rome in 1452, before Pope Nicholas, King Ladislaus, and a number of cardinals, the orator appealed to the knowledge of his audience to recognise that the Turks were ‘unwarlike, weak, effeminate, neither martial in spirit nor in counsel; what they have taken may be recovered without difficulty.’[160] A like testimony is given by La Brocquière in 1438, but with much more caution, since he had been through Asia Minor and had seen the Turks. Nevertheless, this Western traveller states that, though he would not depreciate them, he is ‘convinced that it would be no difficult matter for troops well mounted and well led to defeat them,’ and, in regard to himself, he adds, ‘I declare that with one half of their numbers I should never hesitate to attack them.’[161] He fully realised, as he explains again and again, that their victories had been gained by their enormous superiority in numbers, but though he was very far from despising them as soldiers, he regards them