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This vocation became plain to him when, in the year 1204, he went to France and saw the terrible devastation which the prevailing heresies had wrought against the Church of Christ. The sight of this disaster nearly broke his heart. The poison of heresy had spread among the faithful with great rapidity, and principally in southern France.

I think there can be no reasonable doubt that the lean of the Tower is due to some terrible accident which befell it after the third gallery had been built, for the fourth gallery, added in 1204 by Benenabo, begins to rectify the sinking; the rest, built in 1260, continues to throw the weight from the lower to the higher side.

It is said that the cathedral begun in 1185 or 1186 was dedicated in 1204, so it must have been still incomplete when Yakub's successful invasion took place, and only finished after the Christians had again recovered the town, though it is difficult to see how the church can have been dedicated in that year as the town remained in Moorish power till after Dom Sancho's death in 1211.

Sophia's, and, rushing into that magnificent temple, which could with ease contain twenty thousand persons, they performed deeds of plunder and violence not unlike the scenes which the crusaders had enacted in the same spot in 1204.

Precedents for taxation of this sort had been made in various crusading levies, in the expedients adopted for raising Richard's ransom, and in the seventh demanded by John in 1204, which was exacted from at least a part of the clergy, but these were all more or less exceptional cases, and there was no precedent for such a tax as a means of meeting the ordinary expenses of the state.

He sent his son Philip to Venice as security for a debt; he borrowed at enormous interest of the merchants of Italy; and when all else failed, and the money which he had raised at such ruinous sacrifices had melted away, and his soldiers were clamoring for pay, he remembered the holy relics yet remaining to the city, in spite of the cartloads carried off during the great sack of 1204, and resolved to raise more money upon them.

The Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights to the age of written legislation, of parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come." King John of England, although compelled to submit to the loss of his French provinces in 1204, never after lost sight of plans for the renewal of the war with France.

On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later times, probably had their children taught French because it was considered aristocratic. Until 1204 a knowledge of French was an absolute necessity to the nobles, as they frequently went back and forth between their estates in Normandy and in England.

In a tomb recently opened at Canterbury Cathedral, a for the purpose of discovering what Archbishop's body it contained, the corpse was of an extremely offensive and sickening odor, unmistakably that of putrefaction. The body was that of Hubert Walter, who died in 1204 A.D., and the decomposition had been retarded, and was actually still in progress, several hundred years after burial.

Founded, May 16th, 1204, in the person of Baldwin IX., Count of Flanders, the Latin empire of the East existed for seventy years, in the teeth of many a storm, only to fall once more, in 1273, into the hands of the Greek emperors, overthrown in 1453 by the Turks, who are still in possession.