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 378 DESTEUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIEE destruction. The churches, crypts, coffins, cellars, every place and every thing was ransacked or broken into in search of plunder. 1 Mahomet, according to the same writer, wept as he saw the ravages his soldiers had wrought, and expressed his amazement at the ruins of the city which had been given over to plunder and had been made a desert. 2 All the Turks who first entered the city became rich, says the Superior of the Franciscans. 3 Captives were sent in great numbers to Asia Minor either for sale or to the homes of the armed population who had taken part in the siege. Only a miserable remnant remained in Constantinople. Affection The reader of the accounts of the siege, and indeed of its stantino- history generally before 1453, cannot but be struck with For their the attachment shown by its inhabitants towards their city. c%. p or them it is the Queen of Cities, the most beautiful, the most wealthy, the most orderly, and the most civilised in the world. There the merchant could find all the produce of the East, and could trade with buyers from all countries. There the student had access to the great libraries of philosophy, law, and theology, the rich storehouse of the writings of the Christian Fathers, and of the great classics of ancient Greece. In quietness and security, generations of monks had copied the manuscripts of earlier days free from the alarms which in Western and Eastern countries alike disturbed the scholar. The Church, the lawyers and scholars had kept alive a knowledge of the ancient language in a form in all its essential features like that which existed in the days of Pericles. Priests and laymen were proud to be inheritors and guardians of the writings of classical times and to consider themselves of the same blood as their authors. Though often almost as intolerant towards heretics as the great sister Church of the West, they did not and could not regard Aristotle and Plato, Leonidas and Peri- cles, and the rest of their glorious predecessors as eternally lost because they had not known Christ, and their sense of 1 Crit. lxiii and lxvii. 2 Ibid, lxvii. 3 Eeport, p. 940. The houses were empty and bore the marks of the reck- less ravages of a savage horde.