Arriving at Rome in company with his wife, Yolande, and his children, Pope Honorius, after some pressure, was induced to crown him and his consort; but, as Gibbon hints, performed the ceremony in the Church of St. Lawrence, without the walls, lest by the act itself any right of sovereignty over the ancient city should be bestowed or implied.
In pursuance of a promise to the Venetians, the Emperor Peter, having first sent his wife and children by sea to Constantinople, directed his forces against the Kingdom of Epirus, then under the rule of Theodore Comnenus. Failing in his object, he fell, either by force or fraud, into the hands of the Greek despot, and died, by assassination or in prison, without having entered his Imperial dominions.
With a discretion rare, indeed, in those days, Philip, his eldest son, refused the honour of the purple, contenting himself with the Marquisate of Namur, his paternal fief; whereupon Robert, the younger brother, accepted the burden of the crown, and having, with due precaution, journeyed to Constantinople, was there crowned by the Patriarch Matthew, with all pomp and circumstance, in the Cathedral of Saint Sophia.
But in the grandeur of his coronation consisted the only splendour of his reign. All historians combine in representing Robert as deficient in every quality requisite for the high station he occupied and the necessity of the realm he had been chosen to rule; even Bouchet, self-appointed laureate to La Maison Royale de Courtenay, after describing the death of the Emperor on his return journey from Rome, whither he had gone to solicit against his own rebellious subjects the thunders of the Pope, is constrained to admit that to the weakness of this ruler may justly be attributed the disgraces which occurred in the reign of his successor.
Robert dying childless, the crown descended to his brother, Baldwin, the infant son of Yolande, born during his father’s captivity. The impossibility of an empire in the throes of dissolution being governed by a child of seven years, compelled the barons of the realm to invite John of Brienne, the old King of Jerusalem, to bring his wisdom and experience to their aid; but the seeds of disintegration had too long been sown. Notwithstanding a two-fold victory against the invader, on the death of the veteran in 1237, the Latin supremacy in the East well nigh vanished.
The youthful Baldwin de Courtenay, during the life of John of Brienne, visited many European courts in the vain hope of obtaining aid, military or pecuniary, for the defence of his forlorn dominions, and in the subsequent five and twenty years of his reign these visits were more than once repeated, each time with less result, and though, in fruitless efforts to raise men and money, he alienated his own patrimony of Namur and Courtenay, although in desperation he sold the sacred treasures of his capital—the Crown of Thorns and other relics reputed equally holy—yet his utmost efforts could in no wise avert the doom which threatened the Empire, but only availed to postpone for a while the final catastrophe.
At last the determination of Michael Palæologus brought the struggle to an end. Constantinople was invested and taken by the Greeks, the last remnant of Latin sway, in the person of the Emperor Baldwin and his family, taking refuge on board the Venetian fleet, which lay anchored in the Bosphorous.
With Baldwin and his son Philip, titular Emperor of Constantinople, ended the elder branch of the Courtenay family, for the latter left one daughter only, who married Charles of Valois, a prince aptly described as “son of a King, brother of a King, uncle to a King, and father to a King, but yet himself no King.”
The elevation of three of its members to the Imperial throne undoubtedly conferred great honour on the House of Courtenay, but the after results most adversely affected the surviving members. While other families connected with the French monarchy increased in wealth and influence, the severe struggles made by three generations to maintain their Imperial dignity so impoverished the ancestral domains that the successive holders, though undeniably of Royal descent and near relationship to the reigning dynasty, were not esteemed, and could not obtain recognition of their claims to be considered as Princes of the Blood Royal. It is true, however, that much doubt exists as to whether in the early days of the French nobility, kinship with the King implied any superiority of rank over others nobly born.
Le Comte Boulainvilliers, to whose family the Seigneurie of Courtenay, after its alienation, had been given as a royal fief, declares, in his “Dissertation sur la Noblesse de France”: “The French knew nothing of Princes among themselves; consanguinity (parenté) to Kings gave no rank the same as if descended in the male line. This is evident by the examples of the Houses of Dreux, of Courtenay, and the junior branches of the House of Bourbon.”