Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/260

238 with Catholic Latins, for the first time since the original schisms. The relations were not happy. The Latin knights knew very little of the native Christians, except that they were stubborn heretics out of communion with the Pope. So on the whole they ignored them, or even persecuted them. In many cases they took away the churches, which even the Moslem had spared. They set up Latin hierarchies wherever they had the power, and tried to harry the Easterns into reunion. It is a question whether they would not have had more success if they had from the beginning proclaimed themselves champions of all Christians against Islam, if they had left theological issues alone for the time, and had respected the ecclesiastical state of things they found, while stirring up a general insurrection of Christians throughout Palestine and Egypt. There were still enormous numbers of these. On the other hand, the native Christians, accustomed to tremble before their Moslem masters for centuries, showed a capacity for bearing persecution meekly, which did not argue much fighting-power on their part. Perhaps the only result of such an appeal from the Crusaders would have been a general, unresisted massacre of Christians throughout the Moslem States. Another point to remember is that these Eastern Christians were divided among themselves into bitterly hostile sects. It would have been difficult to unite Nestorians, Monophysites and Orthodox, difficult to persuade them that the Latins, whom they all abhorred, were the friends of all. So during the Crusades the Copts, as the other Eastern sects, sit quiet at home and watch the fight between their masters and these strangers. The only results, as far as they are concerned, are an increased tendency to persecute among Moslems and a further complication of the ecclesiastical position by the establishment of Latin Patriarchs and bishops in the East. However, there was eventually one permanent result. In spite of all, the Crusaders were not always