city that would have them, usually living together as neighbors in protected quarters, where they were allowed to observe their own religious rites, use their own weights and measures, and claim immunity from a raft of local taxes and tolls. Their favored status and insular expatriate lifestyle did not always win them friends, and murderous riots against Italian merchants were a regular event throughout the later Middle Ages. In 1182 Constantinople witnessed the dreadful Massacre of the Latins, when tens of thousands of Italian merchants were murdered or enslaved, in a frenzy of anti-western
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