People afterward called to mind many prophecies and omens given during that year: one night, for example, the heavens suddenly appeared as if dyed with blood; on the streets and in the houses each object seemed blood-covered. Men saw how stars torn from the sky fell to the earth. This phenomenon terrified all who witnessed it. People thought that the end of life was approaching. It seemed now that the destruction of Kief had been foretold by those heavenly wonders. “It might have been so, for what could be more awful than the ruin of Kief by its own princes. Had such a crime ever been heard of in the world till that day?” But the words describing its terrors had not ceased to sound among people, when they were drowned by an outcry still more terrible. A tale came from afar giving an account of a new and dreadful woe to all people of the Orthodox world. Tsargrad had been taken by the Latins. The Western Crusaders had seized the capital of the Emperors, had plundered it to the last object, and had robbed and slaughtered people too numerous for reckoning. They had entered Holy Sophia, had torn off the door, and cut in pieces the ambo covered with silver; they had stripped the wonderful altar, had taken all the precious stones and candlesticks, the Gospels bound in gold and silver, the holy crosses and the priceless images. Other churches without number in the city and outside the city and the monasteries they had stripped naked. “The number of these and their beauty could not be recounted or described by any man.” Thus had fallen the God-preserved city of Tsargrad, the capital of the empire and of the land of the Greeks. These two deeds, the capture of Kief by Rurik and the Polovtsi, and the capture of Tsargrad by the Latins, happened in the same year, 1204. Rurik, chief destroyer of Kief, not daring to set foot in the capital, went back to Ovrutch. Ingvar buried himself for the rest of his life in Volynia.