CONSTANTINOPLE AND CAIRO
In recent years, however, signs of a better understanding had
appeared, and effective military co-operation between the
Franks and the Byzantines had become a possibility.
Now that the Latins held Constantinople, the fear of
treachery on the part of Byzantium was removed, but so also
was the hope of a campaign in which the Saracens would be
faced with a united army of Franks and Byzantines. Bald-
win of Flanders and his successors who ruled in Constantinople
for the next half a century were always in a precarious
position. Far from giving aid to Palestine, they themselves
had to seek it to maintain their empire against attack. The
princes of Europe were already wearied by the repeated
appeals from the Holy Land for reinforcements; now appeals
for men to support the Latins in Constantinople began to grow
as monotonous, and the emissaries of Byzantium and Palestine
competed with one another for the favour of the courts of the
West.
In the past the Holy Land had been the magnet which
drew the Westerners who sought adventure overseas. After
the Latin occupation of Constantinople, however, many of the
adventurous made for the Byzantine Empire, where the need
for their services was no less great and the rewards held out
to the daring were even greater. Nor was it only by going
to the Holy Land that a man could have the privileges,
granted by the Church and respected by the secular
authorities, extended to those who took part in a Crusade.
Rome professed to be shocked that Boniface of Montferrat
had diverted the expedition to Constantinople, but the Holy
See, which had so often and so anxiously tried to make the
Byzantines subject to its authority, nevertheless hastened to
take advantage of this opportunity to install a Latin patriarch
in the capital and proclaim the Empire as under the ecclesias-
tical government of the Church of Rome, The Pope's belief
that the Greek Church would accept his authority was,
however, disappointed j for though the Latins were in power