at of the foreign
clergy, which amounted to 60,000 marks a year, (Matthew Paris, p. 451
Hume's Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 170.)]

In this great revolution we enjoy the singular felicity of comparing the
narratives of Villehardouin and Nicetas, the opposite feelings of the
marshal of Champagne and the Byzantine senator. [91] At the first view it
should seem that the wealth of Constantinople was only transferred from
one nation to another; and that the loss and sorrow of the Greeks is
exactly balanced by the joy and advantage of the Latins. But in the
miserable account of war, the gain is never equivalent to the loss,
the pleasure to the pain; the smiles of the Latins were transient and
fallacious; the Greeks forever wept over the ruins of their country;
and their real calamities were aggravated by sacrilege and mockery.
What benefits accrued to the conquerors from the three fires which
annihilated so vast a portion of the buildings and riches of the city?
What a stock of such things, as could neither be used nor transported,
was maliciously or wantonly destroyed! How much treasure was idly wasted
in gaming, debauchery, and riot! And what precious objects were bartered
for a vile price by the impatience or ignorance of the soldiers, whose
reward was stolen by the base industry of the last of the Greeks!
These alone, who had nothing to lose, might derive some profit from the
revolution; but the misery of the upper ranks of society is strongly
painted in the personal adventures of Nicetas himself His stately palace
had been reduced to ashes in the second conflagration; and the senator,
with his family and friends, found an obscure shelter in another house
which he possessed near the church of St. Sophia. It was the door of
this mean habitation that his friend, the Venetian merchant, guarded
in the disguise of a soldier, till Nicetas could save, by a precipitate
flight, the relics of his fortune and the chastity of his daughter. In
a cold, wintry season, these fugitives, nursed in the lap of prosperity,
departed on foot; his wife was with child; the desertion of their slaves
compelled them to carry their baggage on their own shoulders; and their
women, whom they placed in the centre, were exhorted to conceal their
beauty with dirt, instead of adorning it with paint and jewels Every
step was exposed to insult and danger: the threats of the strangers were
less painful than the taunts of the plebeians, with whom they were
no