OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

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naia. Bessarion , in the first debates, had stoodforth the most strenuous and eloquent championof the Greek church; and if the apostate, thebastard, was reprobated by his country, 1 he ap-pears in ecclesiastical story a rare example of apatriot who was recommended to court-favourby loud opposition and well-timed compliance.With the aid of his two spiritual coadjutors, theemperor applied his arguments to the generalsituation and personal characters of the bishops,and each was successively moved by authorityand example. Their revenues were in the handsof theTurks, their persons in those of the Latins;an episcopal treasure, three robes and forty du-cats, was soon exhaustedthe hopes of theirreturn still depended on the ships of Venice andthe alms of Rome ; and such was their indi-gence, that their arrears, the payment of a debt,would be accepted as a favour, and might ope-rate as a bribe.* The danger and relief of Con-stantinople might excuse some prudent andpious dissimulation; and it was insinuated, thatthe obstinate heretics who should resist the con-sent of the East and West, would be abandoned

* See the polite altercation of Mark and Bessarion in Syropulns(p. 257), who never dissembles the vices of his own party, and fairlypraises the virtues of Ihe Latins.

" For the poverty of the Greek bishops, sec a remarkable passage ofDucas (c. 31). One had possessed, for his whole property, three oldgowns, &c. By teaching one-and-twenty years in his monastery, Bes-sarion himself had collected forty gold florins ; but of these, the arch-bishop had expended twenty-eight in his voyage from Peloponnesus ,and the remainder at Constantinople (Syropulus, p. 127).

x Syropulus denies that the Greeks received any money before theyhad subscribed the act of union (p. 283) : yet he relates some suspi-cious circumstances; and their bribery and corruption are positivelyaffirmed by the historian Ducas.

CHAP.LX VI.