The great commerce which entered the capital brought commerce with it much of the liberality which is due to the intercourse with foreign nations. Arab traders practice. were allowed to live within the city, and foreigners from the West were scandalized to see that the Saracens were permitted to build a new mosque and to practice in a Christian city the rites of Mahometanism. "It would have been even right to have razed the city to the ground," says a chronicler of the Latin conquest, "for, if we believe report, it was polluted by new mosques, which its perfidious emperor allowed to be built that he might strengthen the league with the Turks."

Manuel wished to remove an anathema from the catechism against the Mahometan conception of God.3 Italian merchants, Armenians, Chaldeans, and others not in union with the Orthodox Church were yet allowed the exercise of their religion. Hot only had the Italian colonists their own churches, but the chief of their communities had official seats allotted to them in the Great Church. Even the Jews, who have always in the East been the object of the aversion of the Orthodox Christians, were on the whole fairly well treated.

When we remember that we are dealing with the period of the massacre of Jews in York, Lincoln, and elsewhere in England, it is satisfactory to know that Benjamin of Tudela finds, among the greatest hardships his countrymen had to bear, that they were not allowed to ride on horseback, and that they were defiled, according to their law, because the tanners who lived near their quarters were permitted to pour out their polluted water in the streets. This writer has to admit that the Jews were comfortably off, that many were manufacturers, many merchants, and several extremely rich.

Flowed into the capital

In addition to the riches which had flowed into the capital from the fact that it was the seat of government and the greatest emporium of trade, Constantinople had, in the twelfth city was century, amassed wealth because during many centuries it had been the treasure-house of the lower East* empire. Men who had gathered wealth elsewhere flocked to Constantinople to spend, to invest, or to hoard it.

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