[Illustration:  The lust of the army spared neither maiden nor the virgin dedicated to God Painting by E. Luminais.]

[Illustration]

The lust of the army spared neither maiden nor the virgin dedicated to God.  Violence and debauchery were everywhere present; cries and lamentations and the groans of the victims were heard throughout the city; for everywhere pillage was unrestrained and lust unbridled.  The city was in wild confusion.  Nobles, old men, women, and children ran to and fro trying to save their wealth, their honor, and their lives.  Knights, foot soldiers, and Venetian sailors jostled each other in a mad scramble for plunder.  Threats of ill-treatment, promises of safety if wealth were disgorged, mingled with the cries of many sufferers.  These “pious brigands,” as Gunther aptly calls them, acted as if they had received a license to commit every crime.  Sword in hand, houses and churches were pillaged.  Every insult was offered to the religion of the conquered citizens.  Churches and monasteries were the richest storehouses, and were therefore the first buildings to be rifled.

Monks and priests were selected for insult.  The priests’ robes were placed by the crusaders on their horses.  The icons were ruthlessly torn down from the screens or were broken.  The sacred buildings were ransacked for relics or their beautiful caskets.  The chalices were stripped of their precious stones and converted into drinking-cups.  The sacred plate was heaped with ordinary plunder.  The altar cloths and the screens of cloth of gold, richly embroidered and bejewelled, were torn down, and either divided among the troops or destroyed for the sake of the gold and silver which were woven into them.  The altars of Hagia Sophia,[48] which had been the admiration of all men, were broken for the sake of the material of which they were made.  Horses and mules were taken into the church in order to carry off the loads of sacred vessels and the gold and silver plates of the throne, the pulpits, and the doors, and the beautiful ornaments of the church.  The soldiers made the chief church of Christendom the scene of their profanity.  A prostitute was seated in the patriarchal chair, who danced, and sang a ribald song for the amusement of the soldiers.

Nicetas, in speaking of the desecration of the Great Church, writes with the utmost indignation of the barbarians who were incapable of appreciating and therefore respecting its beauty.  To him it was an “earthly heaven, a throne of divine magnificence, an image of the firmament created by the Almighty.”  The plunder of the same church in 1453 by Mahomet II compares favorably with that made by the crusaders of 1204.