their treaty and had made common cause openly with the emperor from the first; but to have done so would have been to risk the capture of Galata. Their policy was not a lofty one. Looked at by the light of subsequent events, it was not merely selfish but fatal; but it was no more treacherous than the policy of neutrals generally is. It is not improbable that the various dissensions between the citizens and the foreigners and between the latter themselves tended to make some of the Greeks lukewarm in their defence of the city. They were not going to fight for papists and heretics, or even for an emperor who had gone over to the papists. Leonard asserts that there were many defections; that during the siege men who ought to have been at the walls tried to desert the city, pretended that they could not fight, that they wanted to attend to their fields and vineyards; that others with whom he spoke urged that they must earn their bread, and that, in answer to his urging them to fight not only because of their duty to aid all Christians but because their own fate was at stake, they replied, ‘What does the capture of the city matter to us if our families die of starvation?’[356] His statement that many men left the city is not sufficiently supported by other evidence to cause it to be accepted without hesitation. [Sidenote: Witnesses against Greeks are nearly all Latins.] In reading the charges brought against the Greek citizens by Leonard, it must be noted that he himself was a Genoese and a Latin archbishop. Unfortunately, almost all our accounts of the siege come either from Western writers or from Greek converts who are imbued with the usual bitterness against the professors of the faith which they have abandoned. Barbaro and Pusculus were Latins. Phrantzes and Ducas belonged to the Catholic party. The reports of the Podestà of Galata, of Cardinal Isidore, and other documents emanating from Latin sources all help to give a version unfavourable to the Greeks. Indeed Critobulus almost stands alone as the representative of the larger party in the Orthodox Church. When, however, we get the account of an independent Western soldier, as in the case of Tetaldi, the charges against the Greek population disappear. In the whole of his clear and concise narrative, as well as in his estimate of how Europe might defeat the Turks, he has not a word to say against the conduct of the besieged. While praising the courage of the Turks highly as that of men who in the perils and hazards of war attach hardly any value to their lives, he yet judges that the Greeks with European help could defeat them.[357] These and other facts are at least sufficient to cause us to regard with suspicion attacks upon the loyalty towards the city and the emperor of the members of the Orthodox Church. Gibbon, influenced by the writers of the Latin Church--the only ones available to him--remarks ‘that the Greeks were animated only by the spirit