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CHAP. IV. the time they abandoned the real object for which they had assumed the cross, weakened his moral influence and now diminished his power. When he disapproved of the attack on Constantinople, and reprobated the array of a Christian army, with the cross shining on the breast of every soldier, against the largest city of Christendom, it was expected by the Crusaders that he would overlook their offence with the same facility with which he had pardoned the storming of Zara. Their anticipations were not false, for the Pope readily accepted their success as a proof that the will of Heaven had sanctified their act of injustice, and the Holy Father recommended the conquerors to retain possession of a country which God had delivered into their hands.1 He confirmed the relief from the excommunication under which he had himself placed the army, though it had taken place by his legate without his express order; and he thus gave a warrant even for churchmen to tamper with the papal authority in political matters.2 Innocent likewise tolerated the legate's absolution of the Crusaders from their vow to visit the Holy Land, on condition that they served an additional year against the Greeks; and he wrote to the archbishops of France, to recommend them to recruit the ranks, both of the clergy and the troops in the Latin empire, by promises of riches, and of absolution for their sins to the emigrants.3 These concessions of justice to policy, and the open deference shown by the head of the church to worldly success, were not unobserved by the conquerors. The Venetians viewed them as the time-serving policy of priestly ambition, while the more superstitious Franks received them as a guarantee that all their crimes were pardoned by heaven, on account of their zeal against the Greek heretics.

ECCLESIASTICAL CONVENTION.

119

Under the guidance of such principles, the disorders in the church soon became intolerable. The Venetians endeavoured to bind the Patriarch to appoint only Venetian priests to the vacant sees; the Frank clergy refused to receive the Venetian patriarch as their superior; and Morosini, on his arrival at Constantinople, commenced his functions by excommunicating half the clergy of the empire.1 Many priests, after receiving grants of fiefs, compelled the Greeks on these estates to purchase the rent or service due from the land, and, when they had collected the money, they abandoned the fief and returned to their native country with these dishonest gains.2 To these difficulties with the Pope, the Crusaders, the Venetians, and the Frank clergy, were added the embarrassments that arose in regulating the relations between the Latin clergy and the priests of the Greek church, who had united with the papal church, as well as the relations between the papal church and those Greeks who still denied the Pope's supremacy, and adhered to their national usages and to the doctrines of the orthodox church.

At length, in order to settle the ecclesiastical affairs of the empire, a convention was signed between the papal legate and the Latin patriarch on the one hand, and the emperor Henry and the barons, knights, and commons of the Crusaders on the other for the Venetians took no part in the act-in the month of March 1206. By this arrangement, a fifteenth of all the conquered lands and possessions was to be ceded to the Latin church, excepting, however, the property within the walls of Constantinople, and the town-dues of that city. All the Greek monasteries were to be surrendered to the papal power without being regarded as included in the fifteenth. Tithes were to be paid by the Catholics on all their

1 Gesta Innocentii III., c. 100.

? Epist. Innocentii III., lib. xiii. ep. 24, tom. ii. 421, edit. Baluzc.

3 Gesta Innoc., c. 101. Brequiny, lib. xi. ep. 142.

A. D. 1206.

CHAP. IV. revenues, whether derived from the fruits of the earth, $ 4. cattle, bees, or wool; and if the Greeks could be induced to pay tithes to the Latin clergy, the civil power was to offer no resistance. The clergy, the religious orders, and all monks and nuns, whether Latins or Greeks, the households of ecclesiastics, the churches, church property, and monasteries, with all their tenants, and all persons who might seek refuge in the sanctuaries, were to be exempted from the civil jurisdiction, as in France; reserving, however, in such cases, the authority of the papal see, and of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and the honour of the emperor and the empire. Thus a nation of ecclesiastics, living under their own peculiar laws and usages, and amenable neither to the imperial legislation nor to feudal organisation, was established in the heart of the empire of Romania. The Venetians, who were not included in this convention, obstinately refused to pay tithes to the church; nor did Innocent venture to proceed with vigour either against them or against the refractory Greeks, from the dread of causing a close alliance between the two.

The civil affairs of the empire were in as great confusion as the ecclesiastical, and presented even greater difficulties in the way of their ultimate arrangement. The nature of the conquest divided the inhabitants into two distinct classes of Greeks and Latins, whose separation was rendered permanent by the feudal system, as well as by national divergences of manners and religious opinions. The Franks formed a small dominant class of foreign warriors, many of whom were constantly returning to the lands of their birth, where they held ancestral estates and honours, while many died without leaving posterity. Their numbers consequently required to be perpetually recruited by new bodies of immigrants. From the hour of the conquest, too, the conquerors began to diminish in number, even from the operation of that law of population which devotes all privileged classes to

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a gradual decay. The Greeks, on the other hand, CHAP. IV. composed a numerous, wealthy, and organised society, dwelling in their native seats, perpetuating their numbers by the natural social amalgamation of classes, and increasing their strength by being compelled to abandon their previous habits of luxury and idleness, and turn their attention to imitating the warlike manners of their new masters. Other causes of discord existed, equally irremediable except by the slow progress of time, yet which called for immediate palliatives. The Crusaders and the Venetians had each their own political views and interests; while the Crusaders were incapable of complete union or harmonious action, from the variety of nations that brought their respective antipathies to the common stock. The Flemish, Italian, French, and German nobility had all their private grounds of alliance and offence. The position of the Greek landed proprietors, who were willing to become vassals of the empire, and to join the Latin church, and of the Greek citizens, cultivators, artisans, and labourers who adhered to their national church and usages, all required to be regulated by positive laws. The relations between the emperor of Romania, the king of Saloniki, the great feudatories and the lesser barons, though sufficiently defined by the feudal system, required to be strictly determined by express enactment; for the moral force of feudality, which prevented the progress of anarchy in western Europe, was wanting in the Eastern Empire. It was necessary, therefore, to frame a list of all the fiefs in the empire, like the Doomsday Book of England; and a code of feudal usages, like the Assize that had been framed for the kingdom of Jerusalem.1

1 The history of the Assize of Jerusalem, and an examination of the period of its introduction into the empire of Romania, will be found in the preface to the magnificent edition of the Assises de Jerusalem, by count Beugnot; but it must be observed that he attributes a degree of historical importance to the Chronicle of the Conquest of the Morea to which it has no claim.

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CHAP. IV. The Venetians, who possessed a large share of the empire, could not be subjected to the strict feudal regime of the Crusaders, nor to the precise rules of the Byzantine civil law. Yet, though living beyond the control of feudal usages, they arrogated to themselves the privileges of the dominant classes even while acting in professional rivality with the conquered. Other trading communities from every country, both of the East and the West, had companies of merchants established at Constantinople; and, whether they were Pisans, Catalans, Genoese, Flemings, Germans, Syrians, or Armenians, they all claimed to regulate the administration of justice among themselves, according to their respective laws and usages.

The subject Greeks had their own code, and their own judicial establishments organised with a degree of completeness that must have impressed the more enlightened members of the Crusading army with astonishment and admiration. The conquerors immediately felt the necessity of respecting the superior civilisation of the conquered. The laws of Justinian, as modified in the Greek compilation, called the Basilika, remained in full force, and entailed on the Crusaders the necessity of leaving the administration of justice and of the municipal affairs, with a considerable portion of the fiscal business of government, in the hands of the Greeks, on nearly the same footing as they had been under the last Byzantine emperors. The citizens preserved some local privileges; they elected magistrates to perform some few duties, they took part in framing the regulations and local bye-laws under which they lived, and to a certain extent they controlled the administration of the municipal revenues and communal property. In short, the Frank emperors of Romania, as far as the majority of their Greek subjects were concerned, occupied the position and exercised the authority of the Byzantine emperors they had displaced.1

1 The emperor Henry even admitted Greeks into his service, which Baldwin