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Rh claimants to the See of Constantinople, and that one of them was very angry with the Pope. Neither fact was in any way a new one. Eventually, of course, they all sided with Constantinople. But, indeed, these Melkite Patriarchs were rather poor creatures. They had lost nearly all their sheep long ago. They all sat under the tyranny of the Moslem; the only great Christian lord they knew anything about was the Eastern Roman Emperor. They were already not much more than vassals of him and of his Patriarch. Soon they even came to live at Constantinople, as idle ornaments of a dying Court. The real chiefs of the Christian populations of Egypt and Syria were the Copt and the Jacobite. And they, as we have seen, had already for centuries been cut off from both Old and New Rome and had nothing whatever to do with this business, unless perhaps they took an unholy joy in seeing the persecuting Melkites at last fall foul of one another.

Photius, then, had won along the whole line. In spite of the Pope he sat firm on the patriarchal throne; the Court was all for him, no one could touch him, and he had punished the Latins for not recognizing him by excommunicating them. If the Pope had deposed him, he had answered by deposing the Pope. Suddenly there came what was the most dramatic change in Church history. In the midst of his triumph he fell. Ignatius came out of his prison back to the Hagia Sophia, and Photius had to taste the very punishment he had given to Ignatius. It was no just or loyal movement that brought about this crisis. It was only one of the endless sordid and bloody Palace revolutions that fill up Byzantine history. The Imperial Equery, Basil the Macedonian, was a clever and ambitious fellow, and just as great a rogue as all the other courtiers. He succeeds first in murdering the Cæsar, Bardas (866), and becomes Cæsar himself. This was not enough for him; so in 867 the wretched Michael III ended his career by being murdered too. It was after supper on September 23rd when he was, as usual, drunk, that one of Basil's servants stabbed him to death.