[Sidenote: _Attack on Constantinople, Palma, Giovane, Hall of the Great Council._]
I shall not attempt to describe the memorable events which followed. Here, as in many passages of his history, it may be said of Gibbon, as of Titian by Taine, that ‘he absorbed his forerunners and ruined his successors.’ It is enough to say that the city was fortified with double walls and four hundred towers, and that the garrison was estimated by Villehardouin at no less than four hundred thousand men. The resistance was obstinate, but the attack was irresistible. The French, judging at first that they could fight better on land, concentrated their strength against the northern wall; the Venetians, from their ships, scaled the fortifications that rose from the edge of the sea. The aged Dandolo led the general assault himself, twenty-five of the towers were captured, and the fall of Constantinople was a foregone conclusion. But the whole siege, with intermissions, lasted from June until the following April. During that time the deposed and imprisoned Emperor Isaac, surnamed Angelos, succeeded through his friends in organising a revolution in his favour, in regaining the throne, which he divided with his son Alexis, and finally in quarrelling with his liberators, the Venetians and the French crusaders, after considerable demonstrations of friendship, because he could not carry out the clause in the agreement relative to the subjection of the Greek Church to the popes. He, and even his son, the younger Alexis, though not to blame for this, seem to have been very little better than his brother, the elder Alexis, who had fled for safety, and the student is not sorry to learn that they were put to death by such patriots as remained in the corrupt capital before the final assault.
The besiegers, on their side, had made a treaty among themselves for the division of the spoil, with the following conditions:--
First, after the taking of Constantinople, a new emperor was to be elected from among the crusaders by a body consisting of six Venetians and six of the French barons.
Secondly, whichever nation should be the one from which the emperor was chosen was to leave to the other the church of Saint Sophia, with the right of designating the patriarch.