the hippodrome, and thence, through lines of corpses, to the arsenal. There he was put on board the ship of a pirate, who demanded 4000 gold pieces as his ransom. As the archbishop pleaded poverty, he was next day escorted to the presence of Alexios himself, and thence to Counts Aldoin and Richard of Acerra, by whom he was at last restored to his palace, where he took refuge in a tiny bathroom in the garden. Meanwhile, the Normans had shown no respect for the churches of the city. They danced upon the altars; they used the sacred ointment which flowed from the tomb of St Demetrios as boot-polish; they interrupted the singing by their obscene melodies and imitated the nasal intonation of the eastern priesthood by barking like dogs. But it is best to pass over the revolting details of the sack, for which the only excuse was the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople three years earlier. Eustathios, by his influence with Count Aldoin, was able to mitigate some of the tortures of his flock; he describes the miserable plight of these poor wretches, robbed of their houses and almost stark naked, and the strange appearance which they presented (like the Messina refugees after the earthquake of 1908) in their improvised hats and clothes. More than 7000 of them had perished in the assault, but the archbishop notes with satisfaction that the Normans lost some 3000 from their excessive indulgence in pork and new wine. Vengeance, too, soon befell them. A Greek army under Alexios Branas defeated them on the Struma, and in November they evacuated Salonika[440]. But their treatment of Salonika embittered the hatred between Latins and Greeks, and prepared the way for the Fourth Crusade. Barely twenty years after the Norman capture, Salonika became the capital of a Latin kingdom. Boniface, marquess of Montferrat, was the leader of the crusaders who, with the help of the Venetians, overthrew the Greek empire in 1204, and partitioned it into Latin states. Of these the most important after the Latin empire, of which Constantinople became the capital, was the so-called Latin kingdom of Salonika, of which Boniface was appointed king, and which, nominally dependent upon the Latin Emperor, embraced Macedonia, Thessaly, and much of continental Greece, including Athens. Of all the artificial creations of the Fourth Crusade, which should be a warning to those who believe that nations can be partitioned permanently at congresses of diplomatists, the Latin kingdom of Salonika was the first to fall. From the outset its existence was undermined by jealousy between its king and the Latin Emperor, whose suzerainty he and his proud Lombard nobles were loath to acknowledge. For this reason Boniface, whose wife, Margaret of Hungary, was widow of the Greek Emperor, Isaac II, endeavoured to cultivate his Greek subjects. But, in 1207, he was killed by the Bulgarians, who would have taken Salonika, had not a traitor (or, as the pious believed, St Demetrios) slain their tsar.