Henry stood alone, save for the faithful Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, who, though his narrative ceases at this point, is believed to have remained with the new Emperor. His reign lasted for ten years only. It was a reign of successful, brave, and prudent administration in things military, civil, and ecclesiastical Its success was greatly assisted by the fact that very early in his reign the Greeks discovered the mistake they had made in changing the rule of the Latins for the rule of the Bulgarians.
The first were hard masters, with rough, rude ways, and little sympathy with the culture of the Byzantines; but the latter proposed, as soon as the Latins were driven south, to exterminate the population of Thrace, or at least to transplant the Greeks beyond the Balkans. They called upon the Emperor to forgive them and to help them. Henry, with a little army of eight hundred knights, with archers and men-at-arms, perhaps five thousand in all, made no scruple of going out to attack this disorderly mob of forty thousand Bulgarians. As no mention is made of the Comans, it is presumable that these had gone home again with their booty. At the siege of Thessalonica King John was murdered—slain by no less a person than St. Demetrius himself, said the Greeks—and a peace was concluded between his successor and Henry.
The last years of this exemplary monarch's life were spent in wise administration. He checked the zeal of the Pope's legate, and would not countenance persecution about the double procession and other controverted dogmas. He checked the pretensions of the clergy, by placing his throne on the same level with that of the Patriarch, whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a college of priests. When he died, childless, the next heir to the empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, a member of that princely house which still survives in the line of the English earls of Devon.
It was an unfortunate day for that prince when he accepted the crown which had already in ten years carried off two of his brothers. Yet the chance was splendid. What count or duke or knight of these days but would seize a crown thus offered, however great the peril? He accepted the crown, then, and, to make a worthy appearance on entering into possession, he either mortgaged or sold the best part of ten estates, and raised, with the help of Philip Augustus, an army of one hundred and forty knights and five thousand five hundred men-at-arms and archers. He persuaded the pope Honorius III to crown him, it being understood that, as Emperor of the East, he had no claim to jurisdiction or right over Rome, and, following the example of Baldwin, engaged the Venetians to convey him and his army to Constantinople. They would do so on similar terms and for a consideration—let him first recover for them the port of Durazzo from the Despot of Epirus; this was no longer Michael, the founder of the kingdom, but his brother Theodore. The Emperor delivered his assault on Durazzo, and was unsuccessful. Then the Venetians refused the transport. Peter thereupon made an agreement with the despot Theodore, by which the latter undertook to convey him and his army safely to his dominion overland. It is another story of Greek treachery. The Emperor, with his troops, while in the mountains, was attacked by Greeks of Theodore's army. Such of his men as did not surrender were cut to pieces. He himself was taken prisoner, detained for two years, and then put to death in some mysterious way.
Yolande, the Empress, while yet she was uncertain of the fate of her lord, gave birth to a son, the most unfortunate Baldwin. The eldest of Yolande's sons, Philip de Courtenay, had the singular good-sense and good-fortune to decline the offered crown. He found plenty of fighting in Europe of an equally adventurous kind, and less treacherous than that among the Greeks. The second son, Robert, accepted the responsibilities and dangers of the position. For seven years he held the sceptre with a trembling hand amid all kinds of disasters. The Despot of Epirus, the treacherous Theodore, swept across the country as far as Adrianople, where he raised his standard and called himself emperor. Vatatces, the successor of Theodore Lascaris, seized upon the last relics of the Asiatic possessions, intercepted western succor, actually persuaded a large body of French mercenaries to serve under him, constructed a fleet, and obtained the command of the Dardanelles.
A personal and private outrage of the grossest kind, offered to the unfortunate Emperor by an obscure knight, drove him in rage and despair from the city. He sought refuge in Italy, but was recalled by his barons, and was on his way back to Constantinople when he was seized with some malady which killed him. It is a miserable record of a weak and miserable life. On his death, his brother Baldwin being still a boy, the barons looked about them for a stronger hand to rule the tottering State. They found the man they wanted in gallant old John de Brienne, the last of those who raised themselves from simple knightly rank to a royal palace.
Gauthier de Brienne was King of Sicily and Duke of Apulia. John himself, one of the last specimens of the great crusading heroes, was titular King of Jerusalem, having married Constance, daughter of Isabelle and granddaughter of Amaury.
Philip Augustus himself selected John de Brienne as the most worthy knight to become the husband of Constance and the King of Jerusalem. He was now an old man of more than seventy years. His daughter, Yolande, was married to Frederick II, who had assumed the title of King of Jerusalem, but old as he was he was still of commanding stature and martial bearing. His arm had lost none of its strength, nor his brain any of its vigor. He accepted the crown on the understanding that the young Baldwin, then eleven years of age, should join him as emperor on coming of age. Great things were expected from so stout a soldier. Yet for two years nothing was done. Then the Emperor was roused into action.
It was understood at Constantinople that Vatatces, the successor of Theodore Lascaris, was on the point of concluding an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Agan, King of the Bulgarians and successor of John. The alliance could have but one meaning, the destruction of the Latin empire.
It must be remembered that the vast Roman Empire of the East was shrunken in its dimensions to the city of Constantinople and that narrow strip of territory commanded by her walls, her scanty armies, and her diminished fleets. Of territory, indeed, the Latin empire had none in the sense of land producing revenue. What it held was held with the drawn sword in the hand ready for use. The kingdom of Thessalonica was gone; and though the dukedoms, marquisates, and countships of Achaia, Athens, Sparta, and other independent petty states were still held by the emperors or their sons, they were like the outlying provinces of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem—Edessa, Tripoli, and the rest—a source of weakness rather than of strength. Little help, if any, could be looked for from them.