about the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula.  Raids across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade.  The crusaders assembled at Constantinople, and the Imperial Government was relieved when the flood rolled on and spent itself further east.  But one wave was followed by another, and the Empire itself succumbed to the fourth.  In A.D. 1204, Constantinople was stormed by a Venetian flotilla and the crusading host it conveyed on board, and more treasures of Ancient Hellenism were destroyed in the sack of its hitherto inviolate citadel than had ever perished by the hand of Arab or Slav.

With the fall of the capital the Empire dissolved in chaos, Venice and Genoa, the Italian trading cities whose fortune had been made by the crusades, now usurped the naval control of the Mediterranean which the Empire had exercised since Nikiphoros pacified Krete.  They seized all strategical points of vantage on the Aegean coasts, and founded an ‘extra-territorial’ community at Pera across the Golden Horn, to monopolize the trade of Constantinople with the Black Sea.  The Latins failed to retain their hold on Constantinople itself, for the puppet emperors of their own race whom they enthroned there were evicted within a century by Romaic dynasts, who clung to such fragments of Anatolia as had escaped the Turk.  But the Latin dominion was less ephemeral in the southernmost Romaic provinces of Europe.  The Latins’ castles, more conspicuous than the relics of Hellas, still crown many high hills in Greece, and their French tongue has added another strain, to the varied nomenclature of the country.[1] Yet there also pandemonium prevailed.  Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east.  To complete the anarchy, the non-Romaic peoples in the interior of the Balkan peninsula had taken the fall of Constantinople as a signal to throw off the Imperial yoke.  In the hinterland of the capital the Bulgars had reconstituted their kingdom.  The Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the Thessalian plains.  The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the Adriatic had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only less common than Slavonic.  South-eastern Europe was again in the throes of social dissolution, and the convulsions continued till they were stilled impartially by the numbing hand of their ultimate author the Turk.