The Grand Prince’s Greek upbringing and possible Greek sympathies may have influenced the Russian hierarchy in the decision they were called upon to make during his reign between adherence to or desertion of the distressed Church of Constantinople. For evil times had fallen upon the Orthodox communion; since the eastern and western Christians had solemnly and bitterly quarrelled over the merits of the respective formulas “proceeding from the Father by the Son,” and “proceeding from the Father and the Son,”--the celebrated controversy of the _Filioque_,--the two Churches had drifted wider and wider apart, and the hatred existing between them found expression in the massacre of the Latin or Roman Catholic inhabitants of Constantinople in the year 1183, when young and old, sick and infirm of both sexes were indiscriminately slaughtered; when the head of the Pope’s Legate, severed from its legitimate body and tied to the tail of a dog, went bumping and thudding along the public streets to the accompaniment of hymns of praise and thanksgiving. Now (in the year 1204) it was the turn of the Latins to revenge themselves on the stronghold and headquarters of the rival religion; the French and Venetian Crusaders, turning aside from the pious object of their expedition, the rescue of the “Holy Land” from the infidels, had carried Constantinople by assault, replaced the fugitive Greek Emperor by a Latin prince, and sacked the Tzargrad with systematic thoroughness. The furniture and adornments of S. Sophia and other sacred buildings became spoil for the western soldiery, and the Lion of S. Mark waved triumphantly over the scene of pillage and desecration. Then did the head of the Roman Church, the splendid Lotario Conti (Innocent III.), beneath whose despotic sway chafed and trembled most of the princes of Christendom, follow up the triumph of the Latin arms by an attempt to draw the heretic Church of Russia into the Catholic fold. In a pastoral letter to the prelates and clergy of the Orthodox faith he pointed out the temporal ruin which had overtaken the heads of the schismatic religion, and invited the Russian Christians to attach themselves to the glories and benefits of Rome. The appeal fell on hostile ears, and the next Metropolitan was consecrated at Nicæa, where the dispossessed Emperor had established his court.