took on a Turkish name, and a new
nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which
nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the
supreme enemy, of the race.

This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire's doom. Robbed of its Anatolian
governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be
self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at
least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal regime of the Turks
in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in
Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded
by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government
as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers, about
the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula. Raids
across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of
Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before
the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring
expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade. The
crusaders assembled at Constantinople, and the Imperial Government was
relieved when the flood rolled on and spent itself further east. But one
wave was followed by another, and the Empire itself succumbed to the
fourth. In A.D. 1204, Constantinople was stormed by a Venetian flotilla
and the crusading host it conveyed on board, and more treasures of Ancient
Hellenism were destroyed in the sack of its hitherto inviolate citadel
than had ever perished by the hand of Arab or Slav.

With the fall of the capital the Empire dissolved in chaos, Venice and
Genoa, the Italian trading cities whose fortune had been made by the
crusades, now usurped the naval control of the Mediterranean which the
Empire had exercised since Nikiphoros pacified Krete. They seized all
strategical points of vantage on the Aegean coasts, and founded an
'extra-territorial' community at Pera across the Golden Horn, to
monopolize the trade of Constantinople with the Black Sea. The Latins
failed to retain their hold on Constantinople itself, for the puppet
emperors of their own race whom they enthroned there were evicted within a
century by Romaic dynasts, who clung to such fragments of Anatolia as had
escaped the Turk. But the Latin dominion was less ephemeral in the
southernmost Romaic provinces of Europe. The Latins' castles, more
cons