Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/141

 THE BYZANTINES. I I9 In 1068 the Turks invaded the provinces of the empire and took the emperor, Romanus II., prisoner. Twenty years later they conquered Asia Minor and expelled the caliphs from Jeru- salem. The capture of the Holy City by the Turks was the cause of the crusades, which, instead of achieving the permanent deliverance of the holy places, effected the impoverishment and ruin of the Byzantine Empire. The struggle between the empire and the Ottoman Turks lasted for four hundred years. The effort of the Turks was, by continued and violent incursions, to exterminate, if possible, the Christian inhabitants of the country, and thus weaken it, with a view to ultimate conquest. As a matter of fact, by dint of habitually mas- sacring the peasantry, making slaves of the sur- vivors, and reducing the cultivated tracts to a wilderness, they succeeded after a while in ex- tinguishing the Greek population and doing away with the Greek language in the interior of Asia Minor. The imperial armies, ever becom- ing feebler, strove in vain to repel these sudden invasions and to protect the territory and sub- jects of the empire. Nevertheless, the internal dissensions among the Turks were so serious.