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FROM this period the most zealous of the people guarded John
alternately, stationing themselves about the episcopal residence by
night and by day. The bishops who had condemned him complained of this
conduct as a violation of the laws of the Church, declared that they
could answer for the justice of the sentence that had been enacted
against him, and asserted that tranquillity would never be restored
among the people until he had been expelled from the city. A messenger
having conveyed to him a mandate from the emperor enjoining his
immediate departure, John obeyed, and escaped from the city,
unnoticed by those who had been appointed to guard him. He made no
other censure than that, in being sent into banishment without a legal
trial or any of the forms of the law, he was treated more severely than
murderers, sorcerers, and adulterers. He was conveyed in a little
bark to Bithynia, and thence immediately continued his journey. Some
of his enemies were apprehensive lest the people, on hearing of his
departure, should pursue him, and bring him back by force, and
therefore commanded the gates of the church to be closed. When the
people who were in the public places of the city heard of what had
occurred, great confusion ensued; for some ran to the seashore as if
they would follow him, and others fled hither and thither, and were in
great terror since the wrath of the emperor was expected to visit them
for creating so much disturbance and tumult. Those who were within the
church barred the exits still further by rushing together upon them,
and by pressing upon one another. With difficulty they forced the
doors open by the use of great violence; one party shattered them with
stones, another was pulling them toward themselves, and was thus
forcing the crowd backward into the building. Meanwhile the church was
suddenly consumed on all sides with fire. The flames extended in all
directions, and the grand house of the senatorial council, adjacent to
the church on the south, was doomed. The two parties mutually accused
each other of incendiarism. The enemies of John asserted that his
partisans had been guilty of the deed from revenge, on account of the
vote that had been passed against him by the council. These latter,
on the other hand, maintained that they had been calumniated, and that
the deed was perpetrated by their enemies, with the intention of
burning them in the church. While the fire was spreading from late
afternoon until the morning, and creeping forward to the material which
was still standing, the officers who held John in custody conveyed him
to Cucusus, a city of Armenia, which the emperor by letter had
appointed as the place of residence for the condemned man. Other
officers were commissioned to arrest all the bishops and clerics who had
favored the cause of John, and to imprison them in Chalcedon. Those
citizens who were suspected of attachment to John were sought out and
cast into prison, and compelled to pronounce anathema against him.
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