WEAKENING OF TUE EMPIRE BY THE CRUSADES. 135

cia]lj during the last twenty years of the twelfth century, to detach from Constantinople the various churches which had hitherto acknowledged the authority of its patriarch. Con- siderable success had rewarded these efforts so far as the Ar- menians were concerned. Innocent the Third continued them with the energy which he threw into everything which lie undertook. In 1199 he had induced a provincial council in Dalmatia to accept the Roman rite by promising aid against the King of IIungar3 In the same year he had sent a legate to Constantinople and an agent to John of Bulgaria, to nego- tiate the establishment of a patriarchate, and to give that pre- tender the crown which the emperor denied. Two years later he sent an embassy to Servia to detach the Servians from Constantinople. Like his predecessors, he too made many at- tempts at Constantinople to persuade its rulers to accept the authority of the Elder Rome. All these various attempts show how great was the importance attached to this question by the popes. The feeling of irritation at their non-success found expression among the Crusaders in bitter hatred for the schismatics. It would be easy to give illustrations of this bit- terness. No acts done by Protestants against Roman Catho- lics, or vice versa, exceed in barbarity the treatment of the Greek priests and their worship as described b} Eustathius of Salonica, and these acts can only be attributed to religious hatred. Thus it came about that having in the third crusade begun by cordially hating the members of an heretical church, they ended by attributing their own blunders, failures, and crimes to the interference of those whom they thus hated. This feeling bore bitter fruit when almost immediately after- wards the fourth crusade was organized, and was undoubtedly one of the principal causes which, as we shall see, enabled its leaders to divert the expedition from its lawful and intended purpose into an attack upon a Christian cit3 In another manner the crusades contributed directly to the capture of Constantinople. They had shown to the West how greatly the power of the Byzantine empire had been lessened. Constantinople was still a city which had never been captured, but the weakness of its emperors, the ease with