Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/411

Rh churches in Constantinople, had been made, not only without consulting Innocent, but in a way which Dandolo know would be in defiance of what the pope regarded as his rights. Innocent rejected Morosini, and declared his election by the Venetian canons of Hagia Sophia null and void, on the ground that laymen had no right to appoint an ecclesiastic to so high an office, and that the canons had not themselves been regularly appointed. The objection was not to the person, for Innocent at once named Morosini to the patriarchal see. Innocent declared that they had added to their offence the pillage of the temples and the iniquitous diversion of the ecclesiastical possessions. He continued even to refuse the request made by the Venetians to appoint the archbishop they had named to Zara. "It is you," he wrote, " who have led the army of the Lord into a wicked path. Instead of fighting the Saracens, you have made war on Christians. You have despised the legate, treated the excommunication with contempt, broken the vow of the Cross, sacked the treasures and the Church possessions at Constantinople. You have done your best to appropriate and make hereditary among you the Lord's Church by means of lawless treaties. Tell me yourselves how you can make up for the harm you have done to the Holy Land, since you have turned to your profit an army of Christians, so great, so noble, and so numerous, which had been brought together with so much pain and expense, and with which not only Jerusalem, but even a part of Babylon might have been conquered. For if it succeeded in taking possession of Constantinople and Greece, a fortiori it could have snatched Alexandria and the Holy Land from the pagans. . . . Not only earthly might, but the will of Heaven, would have placed the two cities in your power. . . . Christianity was scandalized by your conduct towards Zara, and we cannot scandalize the whole Church by giving the pallium to the archbishop without having received satisfaction from you." As late as 1213 he reproached them with the crime of Zara.

Innocent refused the request made to him to exclude Dan-