John Palaeologos was borne back triumphantly to Constantinople. But friction soon arose. When Amadeo urged upon his kinsman the necessity of paying the price of his rescue and of the continued support of the crusaders by fulfilling his promise to return to the Roman Church, he met with stubborn refusal on the part of emperor and patriarch alike. In wild rage, Amadeo withdrew to Pera, and began to fight the Greeks by sea and land. The Constantinopolitans were so frightened that ‘they did not dare to show their head out of doors’. Pressed on all sides by Osmanli and Bulgarian, as well as by his deliverers, the wretched John saw no other way out than to promise openly to abjure his errors and swear allegiance to the Pope. Having wrung this promise from those whom he had come to defend, Amadeo sailed away to Rome, where he reported to the Pope in full consistory ‘how at his request the emperor of Constantinople and his people desired to submit to the obedience and belief of the Holy Roman Church in hope that the Church would aid them against the infidels who were too strongly oppressing them’. Urban and the cardinals listened without great interest to the Count of Savoy’s recital of his success in preparing the ground for a reunion of the churches. The story was getting to be an old one. John’s overture was received with suspicion. Urban had got the same promise in the spring of 1366 in a letter from Louis, which reported the interview John had sought at Buda.[283] To the envoy of Louis, who had arrived in Avignon just as Urban was starting for Rome, the Pope gave a letter commanding the King of Hungary to put off his crusade until the union of the churches was actually accomplished.[284] VII What lay behind the eagerness of Urban, at the beginning of his reign, to revive the crusades? Was he burning with holy zeal to recover the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of the Moslems? Was his heart set on protecting Cyprus and Rhodes? Had he determined to leave no stone unturned to protect the Byzantines and other eastern Christians from the encroachment and persecution of Murad? His letters indicate that his chief interest was the recovery of the lost power and glory of the papacy. There is the same revelation in the letters of his immediate successor, Gregory XI. These two popes had no catholic vision. They tried to keep their position as arbiters between France and England and Spain at Avignon, and at the same time to inherit the temporal power of the decaying Holy Roman Empire by circumventing the Visconti of Milan. The great schism in the Western Church, which so aided Murad and Bayezid in laying solidly the foundations of an empire in Europe, was the outcome of the short-sighted and purely selfish policy of these two popes. How far from the truth it is to represent them as courageously, whole-heartedly, and persistently endeavouring to awaken the interest and attention of Europe in the peril from the East!