\ 72. FRUITLESS ATTEMPTS AT REUNION. 321
and the appointment by the pope of Latin bishops in Greek sees.1 Although this artificial empire lasted only half a century (1204-1261), it left a legacy of burning hatred in the memories of horrible desecrations and innumerable insults and outrages, which the East had to endure from the Western barbarians. Churches and monasteries were robbed and desecrated, the Greek service mocked, the clergy persecuted, and every law of decency set at defiance. In Constantinople " a prostitute was seated on the throne of the patriarch ; and that daughter of Belial, as she is styled, sung and danced in the church to ridicule the hymns and processions of the Orientals." Even Pope Innocent III. accuses the pilgrims that they spared in their lust neither age nor sex, nor religious profession, and that they committed fornication, adultery, and incest in open clay (in oculis omnium), " abandoning matrons and virgins dedicated to God to the lewdness of grooms." And yet this great pope in sulted the Eastern church by the establishment of a Latin hier archy on the ruins of the Byzantine empire.2
§ 72. Fruitless Attempts at Reunion. The Greek emperors, hard pressed by the terrible Turks, who
1 Cardinal Ilergenrother (Kirchengrxch. I. 903} admits that it was largely (he ought to say, chiefly) through the guilt of the Latin conquerors (" grossentheils durch Schufd der ktteinischen Eroberer") that "the hatred of the Greeks at the conquest of Constantinople, 1204, assumed gigantic dimensions."
? See Gibbon's graphic description (in ch. LX.) of the horrors of the sack of Constantinople, gathered from the concurrent accounts of the French marshall Villehardouin (who does not betray a symptom of pity or remorse) and the Byzantine senator Nicetas (one of the sufferers). On the barbarities pre viously committed at Thessalonica by the Normans in 11SP>, see Eustathius De capta Thessalonica (ed. Bonnrc 1842, quoted by Gieseler II. 609); on the barbarities in the island of Cyprus after its delivery by Richard to Guy, king of Jerusalem, in 1192, see the anonymous account in Al latins, De cccl>s. acci dent, et orient, prrpet. contens. 1. II. c. XIII. 693 sq. Leo Allatius was a Greek convert to the Roman church, and found no fault with these cruelties against the church of his fathers; on the contrary he says: " Opus erat, effnencs propriceque jldei rcbdlc* et vcrifatis oppugnatores non exilio, se<l fcrro et igne in ' saniorem mentem reducere. JLrrctici proscribendi sunt, exterminandi zunt, puniendi sunt ef pertinaces occidendi, crcmnndi. Ita leges sanciunt, ita observavit antiquitas, nee alias mos est recentioris ecdesiae turn Graecce, turn Latince.''
322 FOUKTH PERIOD. A.D. 590-1049.
threatened to overthrow their throne, sought from time to time by negotiations with the pope to secure the powerful aid of the West. But all the projects of reunion split on the rock of papal absolutism and Greek obstinacy.
T/ie Council of Lyons. A. D. 1274.1
Michael Palseologus (1260-1282), who expelled the Latins from Constantinople (July 25, 1261), restored the Greek patriarchate, but entered into negotiations with Pope Urban IV. to avert the danger of a new crusade for the reconquest of Constantinople. A general council (the 14th of the Latins) was held at Lyons in 1273 and 1274 with great solemnity and splendor for the purpose of effecting a reunion. Five hundred Latin bishops, seventy abbots, and about a thousand other ecclesiastics were present, together with ambassadors from England, France, Germany, and other countries. Palseologus sent a large embassy, but only three were saved from ship wreck, Germanus, ex-patriarch of Constantinople, Theophanes, metropolitan of Mcsea, and the chancellor of the empire. The pope opened the Synod (May 7, 1274) by the celebration of high mass, and declared the threefold object of the Synod to be : help for Jerusalem, union with the Greeks, and reform of the church. Bonaventura preached the sermon. Thomas Aquinas, the prince of schoolmen, who had defended the Latin doctrine of the double procession,2 was to attend, but had died on the journey to Lyons (March 7, 1274), in his 49th year. The imperial delegates were treated with marked courtesy, abjured the schism, submitted to the pope and accepted the distinctive tenets of the Roman church.
But the Eastern patriarchs were not represented, the people of Constantinople abhorred the union with Rome, and the death of the despotic Michael Palseologus (1282) was also the
1 See a full account of it in the sixth volume of Hefele's Conciliengeschichte, p. 103-147.
8 In his book Contra errores Grcecorum.