Unfortunately, it was not the only one. When Caesarea was taken in 110 |. the (rOOPS Were Given Hermission to sack it as they pleased, and all the Moslem inhabitants were killed in the Great Mosque: there was a similar massacre at Beirut. Such episodes punctu ated the crusades from start to finish. In 1168, during the Frankish campaign in Egypt, there were systematic massacres; those killed included many Christian Copts, and the effect was to unite Egyptians of all religions (and races) against the crusaders. Of course, the crusading animus was chiefly directed against the Moslemsin 1182 there were even raids on the Moslem Red Sea pilgrim routes, in which, to the horror of Islam, a crowed pilgrim ship was sunk with all aboard. But from the start the crusaders learnt to hate the Byzant ines almost as much, and in 1204 they finally attacked and took Constantinople, 'to the honor of God, the Pope and the empire’. The soldiers were told they could pillage for three days. In St Sophia; the hangings were torn down, and the great silver iconostasis was wrenched into pieces and pocketed. A prostitute was put upon the Patriarch's throne and Sang a rude French song. Sacred books and icons were trampled under foot, nuns were raped and the soldiers drank the altar wine out of the chalices. The last of the great international crusades, in 1365, spent itself on a pointless sacking of the predominantly Christian city of Alexandria: native Christians were killed as well as Jews and Moslems, and even the Latin traders had their houses and stores looted. The racial ism of the crusaders vented itself particularly against any sign of alien culture. When Tripoli fell to them, in 1109, the Genoese sailors destroyed the Banu Ammar library, the finest in the Moslem world. In general, the effect of the crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of a peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture. They also did incalculable damage to the eastern churches, whether Orthodox or Monophysite. One of the first acts of the crusaders after the taking of Jerusalem was to expel the Orthodox and members of other non-Latin Christian sects, and Orthodox priests were tortured to force them to reveal the fragments of the True Cross. No attempt was made to reach an accommodation with Christians who did not acknowledge Rome fully. They lost their churches and their property, they were displaced from their bishoprics and patriarchates, and at best they were tolerated; even the Maronite Christians, who were in communion with Rome, were treated as second-class citizens in the states the Latins created in the twelfth century. All the Christian's clergy of any importance were recruited direct from the West. Even among the Latins, native birth was a bar to clerical promotion, chiefly because none except elementary schools were established, and schools run by non-Latin sects were not acknowledged. The only exception was William, Bishop of Tyre, the historian. He got a bishopric despite the fact he was born in Outremer, as the crusader states were called: but this was because he had studied in France and Italy for twenty years. Above all, no attempt was made to convert the Moslems. The Latin Christians governed a conquered population like a colonialist elite. In one sense, the experiment disproves the theory that medieval Christianity was ruined by clericalism. For the Latin states, which were projections of the total Christian society across the seas, were run by laymen. There were, at anyone time, about 300 Latin clerks there, but though well-endowed they had little power and were completely under the control of the lay lords. The great mistakes were all made by laymen. But the attitude of the Church did not help to establish a viable Latin society out in the East. Laymen were far more willing than clerics to adopt eastern customs and dress, to learn the language, and to integrate themselves with the natives. It was the popes who forbade Christian knights to marry Moslems, even if the children were brought up Latin Christians. This was fatal in the end. The chief reason why the crusaders failed to expand in the twelfth century, and had their kingdom reduced to an insignificant rump in the thirteenth, was that there were too few of them. In the first decade of the crusades, 1095~1105, about 100,000 people of all ages, classes and sexes went to the Holy Land; ten years later nearly all of them were dead. They left very few children. There is some evidence that childbirth was less risky in Outremer than in Western Europe. But Frankish children did not live long, and the death78