He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her eastern colonies and treated them accordingly. In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished and tactful person. The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to comply with the papal wishes. Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV (known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of Trondhjem. And so it went. The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England, certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta. From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.