The fall of Adrianople and of Philippopolis should have been a warning to Urban. He read in it, however, not a glorious opportunity to demonstrate the solidarity of Christendom by driving the Moslems out of Europe and rescuing fellow Christians from apostasy, slavery, and death, but an occasion to force the schismatic Greeks to return to the Roman communion. Of the popes of the fourteenth century, Urban had the greatest chance to prove himself a worthy champion of Christ and civilization. For it was during his reign that the Osmanlis began their conquests and their proselytizing in Europe. At the beginning they could easily have been checked. But it never occurred to Urban that there was a common interest of Christendom higher than and outside of the Roman Church. The fault lay not wholly with Urban and with Gregory. They reflected the spirit of their age. But it does no credit to their personal character nor to the high position which they held to say that they were the victims, rather than the masters, of the prevailing bigotry and ignorance of their generation. In the fourteenth century, the West had already begun to try to impose its commerce, its customs, its laws, and its religion upon the East. There was not, nor has there ever been since, a sympathetic ‘give and take’ between Occident and Orient. In a mint, if the coin when stamped does not correspond exactly to the mould, it is rejected. Similarly the West, when it tries to put every eastern people through its mould and finds no exact correspondence, rejects. Hence, on the one side, the scorn of the ‘I am better than thou’: on the other side, a hatred born not only of fear and of conviction of inferiority, but of a sense of injustice which is none the less vital from a knowledge that the wrong is not, and will not be, righted. Amadeo of Savoy, uncivilized, fanatical through ignorance, the fertile breeding-ground of fanaticism, true and unchanged descendant of the Fourth Crusaders, was a prophetic figure at Constantinople in 1366. He represented the only possible type of deliverer for Byzantium. But deliverance on his terms the Greeks would not accept. Death or Islam were preferable. And who can blame them? Two years before Amadeo’s expedition, the Greeks of Crete had risen in rebellion against their Venetian overlords because an attempt had been made to impose upon them the Latin faith and rites.[285] When they were hunted down and massacred for refusing to worship after the western fashion, not only Pope Urban, but also Petrarch, wrote to the Doge congratulating him upon his valiant and successful efforts to save the Church of Christ in Crete![286]