THE FOURTH CRUSADE
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on the throne, that he would maintain the army for a year, pay 200,000 marks of silver, accompany the Crusade in person when it eventually directed its arms to the Holy Land, and furnish five hundred knights at his own expense, to be dedicated to the perpetual defence of Jerusalem. As a decisive inducement to the Church party he further declared that he would renounce the Eastern heresy and would place the Eastern Church under the authority of Rome. His handsome person, his vast promises, his subtle argument that the road to Jerusalem lay through Constantinople and that the surest way to recapture the Holy Places was to establish a friendly basis in the capital of the Eastern Empire, coupled with the cupidity of the Venetians—who desired to seize the banks of their commercial rivals, the Genoese and Pisans, in Constantinople—and the rising hope of the clergy to secure the supremacy of Rome, carried the day by an irresistible combination. And so, in the little harbour of Zara, was settled the diversion of the Fourth Crusade, which caused the sack of Constantinople, with all its accumulations of art and culture, the destruction °f the Eastern Empire, which led in turn to the advance of the Turk, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Moslem menace to Christendom, the
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