HENRY OF HAINAULT

[1206-1207 A.D.]

In all civilised hostility a treaty is established for the exchange of ransom of prisoners; and if their captivity be prolonged, their condition is known, and they are treated according to their rank with humanity or honour. But the savage Bulgarian was a stranger to the laws of war; his prisons were involved in darkness and silence; and above a year elapsed before the Latins could be assured of the death of Baldwin, before his brother, the regent Henry, would consent to assume the title of emperor. His moderation was applauded by the Greeks as an act of rare and inimitable virtue. Their light and perfidious ambition was eager to seize or anticipate the moment of a vancancy, while a law of succession, the guardian both of the prince and people, was gradually defined and confirmed in the hereditary monarchies of Europe.

In the support of the Eastern Empire, Henry was gradually left without an associate, as the heroes of the Crusades retired from the world or from the war. The doge of Venice, the venerable Dandolo, in the fullness of years and glory, sank into the grave. The marquis of Montferrat was slowly recalled from the Peloponnesian War to the revenge of Baldwin and the defence of Thessalonica. Some nice disputes of feudal homage and service were reconciled in a personal interview between the emperor and the king: they were firmly united by mutual esteem, and the common danger; and their alliance was sealed by the nuptials of Henry with the daughter of the Italian prince. He soon deplored the loss of his friend and father.

At the persuasion of some faithful Greeks, Boniface made a bold and successful inroad among the hills of Rhodope; the Bulgarians fled on his approach, they assembled to harass his retreat. On the intelligence that his rear was attacked, without waiting for any defensive armour, he leaped on horseback, couched his lance, and drove the enemies before him; but in the rash pursuit he was pierced with a mortal wound; and the head of the king of Thessalonica was presented to Joannice, who enjoyed the honours, without the merit, of victory. It is here, at this melancholy event, that the pen or the voice of Geoffrey de Villehardouin seems to drop or to expire; and if he still exercised his military office of marshal of Romania, his subsequent exploits are buried in oblivion.1

The character of Henry was not unequal to his arduous situation: in the siege of Constantinople, and beyond the Hellespont, he had deserved the fame of a valiant knight and skilful commander; and his courage was tempered with a degree of prudence and mildness unknown to his impetuous brother. In the double war against the Greeks of Asia and the Bulgarians of Europe, he was ever the foremost on shipboard or on horseback; and though he cautiously provided for the success of his arms, the drooping Latins were often roused by his example to save and to second their fearless emperor. But such efforts, and some supplies of men and money from France, were of less avail than the errors, the cruelty, and death of their most formidable adversary. When the despair of the Greek subjects invited Joannice as their deliverer, they hoped that he would protect their liberty and adopt their laws; they were soon taught to compare the degrees of national ferocity, and to execrate the savage conqueror who no longer dissembled his intention of dispeopling Thrace, of demolishing the cities, and of transplanting the inhabitants beyond the Danube. Many towns and

[1According to Finlay he "appears to have died about the year 1218."]

[1207-1216 A.D.]

villages of Thrace were already evacuated; a heap of ruins marked the place of Philippopolis, and a similar calamity was expected at Demotica and Hadrianopolis, by the first authors of the revolt. They raised a cry of grief and repentance to the throne of Henry; the emperor alone had the magnanimity to forgive and trust them. No more than four hundred knights, with their sergeants and archers, could be assembled under his banner; and with this slender force he fought and repulsed the Bulgarian, who, besides his infantry, was at the head of forty thousand horse. In this expedition, Henry felt the difference between a hostile and a friendly country; the remaining cities were preserved by his arms, and the savage, with shame and loss, was compelled to relinquish his prey.

The siege of Thessalonica was the last of the evils which Joannice inflicted or suffered; he was stabbed during the night in his tent; and the general, perhaps the assassin, who found him weltering in his blood, ascribed the blow with general applause to the lance of St. Demetrius.

After several victories, the prudence of Henry concluded an honourable peace with the successor of the tyrant, and with the Greek princes of Nicæa and Epirus. If he ceded some doubtful limits, an ample kingdom was reserved for himself and his feudatories; and his reign, which lasted only ten years, afforded a short interval of prosperity and peace. Far above the narrow policy of Baldwin and Boniface, he freely entrusted to the Greeks the most important offices of the state and army; and this liberality of sentiment and practice was the more seasonable, as the princes of Nicæa and Epirus had already learned to seduce and employ the mercenary valour of the Latins. It was the aim of Henry to unite and reward his deserving subjects of every nation and language; but he appeared less solicitous to accomplish the impracticable union of the two churches.

Pelagius, the pope's legate, who acted as the sovereign of Constantinople, had interdicted the worship of the Greeks, and sternly imposed the payment of tithes, the double procession of the Holy Ghost, and a blind obedience to the Roman pontiff. As the weaker party, they pleaded the duties of conscience, and implored the rights of toleration: "Our bodies," they said, "are Cæsar's, but our souls belong only to God." The persecution was checked by the firmness of the emperor; and if we can believe that the same prince was poisoned by the Greeks themselves, we must entertain a contemptible idea of the sense of gratitude in mankind. His valour was a vulgar attribute, which he shared with ten thousand knights; but Henry possessed the superior courage to oppose, in a superstitious age, the pride and avarice of the clergy. In the cathedral of St. Sophia he presumed to place his throne on the right hand of the patriarch; and this presumption excited the sharpest censure of Pope Innocent III. By a salutary edict, one of the first examples of the laws of mortmain, he prohib

[1216-1228 A.D.] ited the alienation of fiefs; many of the Latins, desirous of returning to Europe, resigned their estates to the church for a spiritual or temporal reward; these holy lands were immediately discharged from military service, and a colony of soldiers would have been gradually transformed into a college of priests.

The virtuous Henry died at Thessalonica (1216), in the defence of that kingdom, and of an infant, the son of his friend Boniface. In the first two emperors of Constantinople the male line of the counts of Flanders was extinct.f

PIERRE DE COURTENAI AND ROBERT OF NAMUR

Baldwin and Henry had a sister named Yolande, married to Pierre de Courtenai, count of Auxerre. This latter was elected emperor. He was then in France, and hastened to raise an army. He visited Honorius III at Rome, embarked for Durazzo, and from there followed the Egnatian road. Attacked by the Epirots in the gorges of Elbassan, his army was destroyed; the papal legate perished; the emperor was taken, and doubtless died in captivity.

He had left in the West ten children, of whom the eldest was Philippe of Namur. The empress, his wife, had come by sea to Constantinople, where a little son was born, afterwards to be Baldwin II. She took the regency for Philippe of Namur, renewed the treaties with the emperor of Nicæa, made him marry her stepdaughter, and died in 1219. Philippe of Namur having refused to leave his Meuse comté, his younger brother, Robert, was thereupon elected.

His reign marked the rapid decline of the empire. All the chiefs of the First Crusade Baldwin, Henry of Flanders, Boniface de Montferrat, Louis de Blois, Dandolo, and Villehardouin-were dead. The number of Latin warriors diminished unceasingly by combats or by returning to the West, and were not recruited by new arrivals. Robert had one of his sisters married to King Andrew of Hungary, one to Geoffrey of Achaia, and a third to the emperor of Nicæa. One of his nieces married John Asan II of Bulgaria; he himself was about to marry a daughter of Lascaris. But these family alliances gave him neither power nor security.

The despot of Epirus, Theodore, who never ceased taking land from the Latins, took advantage of the Thessalonican king being gone to seek help in the West to surprise his capital and finish conquering his provinces (1222). So perished the Lombard kingdom of Thessalonica.

In Nicæa, Joannes Vatatzes, successor to Lascaris, renewed war against the French, inflicted on them a bloody defeat at Pemanene (1224), and conquered nearly all Thrace. The Greeks had now two emperors, without counting the one at Trebizond, for the despot of Epirus had got himself crowned by the archbishop of Okhrida in Thessalonica. The forces of these two emperors, henceforth enemies, marched each on its own road to Hadrianopolis. The town at first yielded to the Nicæan troops, then drove them away and opened their gates to those of Epirus. Robert could not even interfere in the struggle, and nothing remained but to see which of the two Greek armies would be the first to enter Byzantium. In his own court a bloody drama showed how little respected and how weak was sovereign power. Robert was very much in love with a young Neuville lady, already engaged to a Burgundian cavalier; and the mother consented to get the first engagement broken off. The rejected cavalier gathered his relatives

[1228-1237 A.D.]

and friends and forced a way into the palace by night. He cut off the nose and lips of the young girl, and threw her mother into the Bosporus. Robert could obtain no redress from his barons for this cruel insult. went to seek help in the West and died on the journey (1228).c

He

JEAN DE BRIENNE

It was only in the age of chivalry that valour could ascend from a private station to the thrones of Jerusalem and Constantinople. The titular kingdom of Jerusalem had devolved to Mary, the daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat, and the granddaughter of Almeric or Amaury. She was given to Jean de Brienne, of a noble family in Champagne, by the public voice and the judgment of Philippe Auguste, who named him as the most worthy champion of the Holy Land. In the Fifth Crusade, he led a hundred thousand Latins to the conquest of Egypt; by him the siege of Damietta was achieved, and the subsequent failure was justly ascribed to the pride and avarice of the legate. After the marriage of his daughter with Frederick II, he was provoked by the emperor's ingratitude to accept the command of the army of the church; and though advanced in life, and despoiled of royalty, the sword and spirit of Jean de Brienne were still ready for the service of Christendom.

In the seven years of his brother's reign, Baldwin de Courtenai had not emerged from a state of childhood, and the barons of Romania felt the strong necessity of placing the sceptre in the hands of a man and a hero. The veteran king of Jerusalem might have disdained the name and office of regent; they agreed to invest him for life with the title and prerogatives of emperor, on the sole condition that Baldwin should marry his second daughter, and succeed at a mature age to the throne of Constantinople. The expectation, both of the Greeks and Latins, was kindled by the renown, the choice, and the presence of John de Brienne; and they admired his martial aspect, his green and vigorous age of more than fourscore years, and his size and stature, which surpassed the common measure of mankind.

But avarice and the love of ease appear to have chilled the love of enterprise; his troops were disbanded, and two years rolled away without action or honour, till he was awakened by the dangerous alliance of Vatatzes, emperor of Nicæa, and of Asan, king of Bulgaria. They besieged Constantinople by sea and land, with an army of one hundred thousand men, and a fleet of three hundred ships of war; while the entire force of the Latin emperor was reduced to 160 knights, and a small addition of sergeants and archers. Instead of defending the city, the hero made a sally at the head of his cavalry; and of forty-eight squadrons of the enemy, no more than three escaped from the edge of his invincible sword. Fired by his example, the infantry and the citizens boarded the vessels that anchored close to the walls; and twenty-five were dragged in triumph into the harbour of Constantinople. At the summons of the emperor, the vassals and allies armed in her defence, broke through every obstacle that opposed their passage; and, in the succeeding year, obtained a second victory over the same enemies. By the rude poets of the age, Jean de Brienne is compared to Hector, Roland, and Judas Maccabæus; but their credit and his glory receive some abatement from the silence of the Greeks. The empire was soon deprived of the last of her champions; and the dying monarch was ambitious to enter paradise in the habit of a Franciscan friar (1237).

BALDWIN II

[1237-1261 A.D.]

In the double victory of Jean de Brienne we cannot discover the name or exploits of his pupil Baldwin, who had attained the age of military service, and who succeeded to the imperial dignity on the decease of his adoptive father. The royal youth was employed on a commission more suitable to his temper; he was sent to visit the western courts of the pope more especially, and of the king of France; to excite their pity by the view of his innocence and distress; and to obtain some supplies of men or money for the relief of the sinking empire. He thrice repeated these mendicant visits, in which he seemed to prolong his stay, and postpone his return; of the five-and-twenty years of his reign, a greater number were spent abroad than at home, and in no place did the emperor deem himself less free and secure than in his native country and his capital.

By such shameful or ruinous expedients he returned to Romania with an army of thirty thousand soldiers, whose numbers were doubled in the apprehension of the Greeks. But the troops and treasures of France melted away in his unskilful hands; and the throne of the Latin emperor was protected by a dishonourable alliance with the Turks and Komans. To secure the former, he consented to bestow his niece on the unbelieving sultan of Cogni. To please the latter, he complied with their pagan rites; a dog was sacrificed between the two armies and the contracting parties tasted each other's blood, as a pledge of their fidelity. In the palace, or prison, of Constantinople the successor of Augustus demolished the vacant houses for winter fuel, and stripped the lead from the churches for the daily expense of his family. Some usurious loans were dealt with a scanty hand by the merchants of Italy; and Philippe, his son and heir, was pawned at Venice as the security of a debt. Thirst, hunger, and nakedness are positive evils; but wealth is relative, and a prince who would be rich in a private station may be exposed by the increase of his wants to all the anxiety and bitterness of poverty.

THE CROWN OF THORNS

But in this abject distress, the emperor and empire were still possessed of an ideal treasure, which drew its fantastic value from the superstition of the Christian world. The merit of the true cross was somewhat impaired by its frequent division; and a long captivity among the infidels might shed some suspicion on the fragments that were produced in the East and West. But another relic of the Passion was preserved in the imperial chapel of Constantinople; and the crown of thorns which had been placed on the head of Christ was equally precious and authentic. It had formerly been the practice of the Egyptian debtors to deposit, as a security, the mummies of their parents; and both their honour and their religion were bound for the redemption of the pledge. In the same manner, and in the absence of the emperor, the barons of Romania borrowed the sum of 13,134 pieces of gold [£7000 or $35,000] on the credit of the holy crown.

The success of this transaction tempted the Latin emperor to offer, with the same generosity, the remaining furniture of his chapela large and authentic portion of the true cross; the baby linen of the Son of God; the lance, the sponge, and the chain of his Passion; the rod of Moses; and part of the skull of St. John the Baptist. For the reception of these spiritual treasures, twenty thousand marks were expended by St. Louis on a stately