In the wars of Burgundy and France in the fifteenth century Catholics habitually plundered Catholic churches. At the siege of Saint-Denis in 1411 "the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons promised themselves the pillage of the church and the treasures of the abbey." [82] Later "the English, the Picards, and the Parisians ... entered the monastery ... pillaged the apartments of the inmates, and carried away the cups, the utensils, all the furniture." [83] At Soissons, in 1414, the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons were as so many wild beasts. The Comte d'Armagnac himself could not restrain them. After having pillaged the houses they set upon the convents and the churches, where the women had taken refuge. They could not escape the brutality of the men of war; the holy ornaments, the reliquaries, all was seized without respect; the hostia, the bones of the martyr, trodden under foot. Never had an army of Christians, commanded by such great seignors and formed of so many noble chevaliers, committed such horrors within the memory of man. [84] The historian is quite mistaken; the same horrors had been many times enacted, and even on a greater scale. At the sack of Constantinople by the Christian crusaders in 1204, the three Western bishops had strictly charged the crusaders to respect the churches and the persons of the clergy, the monks, and the nuns. They were talking to the winds. In the frantic excitement of victory all restraint was flung aside, and the warriors of the cross abandoned themselves with ferocious greed to their insatiable and filthy lewdness. With disgusting gestures and in shameless attire an abandoned woman screamed out a drunken song from the patriarchal chair in the church of Sancta Sophia.... Wretches blind with fury drained off draughts of wine from the vessels of the altar; the table of oblation, famed for its exquisite and costly workmanship, was shattered; the splendid pulpit with its silver ornaments utterly defaced. Mules and horses were driven into the churches [85] to bear away the sacred treasures; if they fell they were lashed and goaded till their blood streamed upon the pavement. While the savages were employed upon these appropriate tasks, the more devout were busy in ransacking the receptacles of holy relics and laying up a goodly store of wonder-working bones or teeth to be carried away to the churches of the great cities on the Rhine, the Loire, or the Seine. [86]