How could the Crusaders possibly be a match for the Song army today?

Not to mention the invincible cavalry of the Song army, even the infantry could defeat the Crusaders so badly that they wouldn't even recognize their own mothers.

Not to mention muskets and cannons.

In May of the nineteenth year of the Jingkang era, Zhao Huan received another battle report: King Louis VI of France and King Condra III of the Holy Roman Empire had been captured, and the Crusaders had been defeated.

The two kings are already on their way back to Middle-earth.

The Second Crusade, which was originally scheduled to last for two years, ended in just six months, with Yue Fei having emptied out all military forces in West Asia.

In September of the nineteenth year of the Jingkang era, Yue Fei's army was already facing Constantinople across the sea.

This shocked the entire Western world, and people realized that a very terrible enemy had arrived.

The Pope of the Holy See wrote a letter to Emperor Manuel of the Roman Empire, implying that the two sides should unite to fight against their common enemy.

The Roman emperor and his ministers in Constantinople unanimously felt that the shameless pope was once again using Constantinople as cannon fodder.

In the past, this would have been a different story; the emperor of Constantinople and the ministers of the empire would have thought the Papacy was right.

But after the two Crusades, everyone knew what those charlatans in Rome and those savage kings in the rural West Europe were really up to.

In this era, the wealthiest place in Europe was undoubtedly Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire.

Centuries ago, the Western Roman Empire was ravaged by the iron cavalry of barbarians, the emperor died amidst the howling of the barbarians, and the city of Rome changed hands.

As the legitimate successors of the ancient Roman Empire, the emperors of Constantinople and the Holy See of Rome were always in opposition to each other.

One was a secular empire that combined theocracy and religion, and the other was a supreme divine kingdom that ruled by theocracy and had absolute control over Western Europe.

The two sides have been arguing for a long time.

But Constantinople, which inherited the legacy of ancient Rome, was the economic and political center of Europe, and its wealth made the Pope drool.

Therefore, the very purpose of the Crusades was to plunder money from the east, including looting the Eastern Roman Empire.

At this point, how could the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire still believe the pope's true colors?

So what did he do next?

He wrote a letter to Yue Fei to negotiate peace.