THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGES 109

and a patriotic Byzantine 'metropolitan1 (jro^Lrris) in the age of the Mace-
donian and Comnenian dynasties could, and would, have pointed out,
to any Helladic provincial who had ventured to challenge 'the City's*
claim to her title, that Constantinople's heritage from Athens was 'an
enduring substance'1 and not an empty name. From the days of Con-
stantine the Great onwards the later Roman Emperors who had reigned
at Constantinople had collected there the surviving masterpieces of Hel-
lenic visual art; and these original monuments of the Hellenic culture,
together with the Constantinopolitan collections of manuscripts repro-
ducing the surviving masterpieces of Hellenic literature, were visible
proofs that Constantinople's assumption of Athens' proud title had been
no unwarrantable usurpation.

It was, indeed, true that from the year A.D. 529, in which Justinian had
closed the University of Athens,2 to the year A.D. 1203, in which Con-
stantinople was captured for the first time by the Prankish perpetrators
of 'the Fourth Crusade', an imperial city which, down to the latter of
those two dates, had never seen an alien conqueror within her walls, had
justified her claim to be called 'the City' by being the unique sanctuary
of Hellenism, of which the like was not to be found in Hellas or any-
where else. This hitherto inviolate treasury stored with choice works of
Hellenic literature and visual art was under Western Christian military
occupation from A.D. 1204 to A.D. 1261; and there could be no more con-
clusive proof of the Crusaders' indifference to a Hellenistic Western
Christian Civilization's cultural birthright than their almost- complete
failure to turn to any cultural account their fifty-seven-years-long ten-
ancy of Hellenism's Constantinopolitan store-house. When these thir-
teenth-century Western French and Venetian barbarians broke into 'the
City', they found it adorned with masterpieces of the classical Hellenic
sculptors; and any fifteenth-century Italian pope or despot would have
sjone and sold all that he had3 if he had ever been offered the chance of
Buying a single one of these treasures; yet these Humanists' thirteenth-
;entury forebears, who held the whole priceless collection in their grasp,
:ould think of no better way of turning Hellenic bronzes to account than

0 break them up and melt the base metal down for coinage into petty
;ash.

A record of some of the masterpieces that fell victims to these atavistic
^rankish acts of Vandalism was made, for the information of Posterity,
»y a contemporary Greek historian.4 It is astonishing that French men-
t-arms should have had no eye for the beauty of these Hellenic statues

1 a century in which figures of comparable aesthetic merit in their own
tyle were being carved by French sculptors. It is perhaps still more
stonishing that, among the Western Christian clerics who accompanied
le Frankish expeditionary force and who wielded, for good or evil,

ay and had been given the answer in a phrase surviving from the locally prevalent
alect of Ancient Greek.

* Heb. x. 34.

* See IV. iv. 372-3; V. vi. ris and 223-4.
3 Matt. xiii. 46.

+ Nikf tas Khoni5tis' memorandum on Hellenic works of art destroyed by the Frankish
>nquerors of Constantinople is printed on pages 854-68 of I. fiekker's edition of
ikftas* Khronikl Dhiiyisis (Bonn 1835, Weber).