As the Moskovites settled down to their long-estranged placidity, rumours reached them of the terrible thing which had befallen the city of the Caesars; rumours which soon grew into creditable news and made them doubt but that the bottom of their world had fallen out. Little fruit had been born of the vaunted Council of Florence; the Churches were as far apart as ever. In vain might the Byzantine Emperor and the Greek hierarchy conform with the decisions of the act of union; the lower clergy and the bulk of the populace would have no dealings with the unholy ordinance. “Better Turkish than Papish,” the motto of the Water-Beggars in a later age, would fitly have described the sentiments of the people of Constantinople at this period. Thus they fought and squabbled over their beloved dogmas, while the enemy was slowly gathering his toils around the doomed city. The Pope, mortified at the miscarriage of his plans, sent no legions rolling across Europe to the assistance of the last of the Constantines; his legate, indeed, was on the scene, arguing and expostulating, with the rhetoric which gained him applause in the council-chamber at Florence, but failed him in the cold, grim Church of the Virgin in the Kreml--for this plausible Roman cardinal is no other than Isidor, sometime Metropolitan of Moskva. But while the Pope hesitates the Sultan acts. On every side the city is beset by an army that blackens the face of the earth. Cannon and ram and scaling-ladder are plied against the massive walls and heavy gates. Day after day the assault is urged; the city is bravely defended, for the most part by foreigners--for the greater proportion of the citizens are in the churches praying for deliverance from the unbelievers. [Sidenote: 1453] But the wonder-working Virgin, weary of well-doing, or recognising the superior insistency of the attackers, makes no move to save the holy city; the faltering wail of “kyrie eleison” is drowned by the fierce roar of “Il Allah illah Allah,” the scarlet banner of the Yeni-Tscheri[89] waves in the breach at the Gate of Romanos, the young Sultan Mahomet II. bursts in upon his prey, and Constantine Paleologus, wounded and trampled on in the rush of the victors, dies amid the ruin of his empire. The purple and gold of old Byzantium are lost in the pall of night, and the rising moon salutes another crescent that gleams forth upon the dome of S. Sophia. The cry of the muezzins peals through the startled city; the eternal speculations upon the economy of self-begetting Trinities dies away before the new dogma, “There is one God and Mahomet is His prophet.” This is the end of the Crusades; this is the fall of the Tzargrad.[90]