At this period, several Christian powers were at war with each other: the continuator of Baronius remarks on this subject, that the soldiers who then perished in battles fought in the bosom of Christendom, would have been sufficient to disperse the Turks, and drive them back to the outward verge of Asia. But if history, on this occasion, accuses the nations of the West of indifference, what ought it to say of that of the Greeks for their own defence? The efforts of Constantine to unite the two Churches had weakened the confidence and zeal of his subjects, who prided themselves upon being orthodox. Among the Greeks, some, in order to owe nothing to the Latins, declared that God himself had undertaken to save his people, and upon the faith of some prophecies they had made, they awaited in inaction a miraculous deliverance. Others, more dark in their scholastic reveries, were not willing that Constantinople should be saved, because they had predicted that the empire must perish to expiate the crime of the union. Every hope of victory had in their eyes something impious and contrary to the will of Heaven. When the emperor spoke of the means of safety that still remained, and of the necessity for taking arms, these atrabilarious doctors drew back with a kind of horror, and the multitude they had misled ran after the monk Genadius, who, from the depth of his cell, cried out constantly to the people, that there was nothing to be done, and that all was lost. When we study the whimsicalities of the human mind, that which most affects the enlightened observer is, to see there are men whose passion is words, whom self-love attaches to vain subtleties, and for whom the ruin of the world would be a less painful spectacle than the triumph of an opinion they have opposed. On the eve of the greatest perils, Constantinople was filled with people whom hatred for the Latins made forgetful of even the approach and menaces of the Turks. The grand duke Notares went so far as to say that he would like better to see in Byzantium the turban of Mahomet than the tiara of the pontiff of Rome. It is not useless to remind our readers here, that in all these debates there was no question that affected the truths of Christianity,—nothing but some points of ecclesiastical discipline: celebrating the mass in the Latin tongue, consecrating unleavened bread, mixing some cold water in the chalice, communicating with Azymites—these were things that were to be hated, things that were to be feared much more than Islamism. Such were the motives for which the Greeks repulsed the Franks, their natural allies, loaded them with anathemas, and invoked the maledictions of Heaven upon their own city.