[1207-1216 A.D.]
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.
Helmet of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
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 prohibited 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
[1216-1228 A.D.]
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.