a thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire was the sword. Within three months after the conquest of Constantinople, the emperor and the king of Thessalonica drew their hostile followers into the field; they were reconciled by the authority of the doge, the advice of the marshal, and the firm freedom of their peers.*

Two fugitives, who had reigned at Constantinople, still asserted the title of emperor; and the subjects of their fallen throne might be moved to pity by the misfortunes of the elder Alexius, or excited to revenge by the spirit of Mourzoufle. A domestic alliance, a common interest, a similar guilt, and the merit of extinguishing his enemies, a brother and a nephew, induced the more recent usurper to unite with the former the relics of his power. Mourzoufle was received with smiles and honours in the camp of his father Alexius; but the wicked can never love, and should rarely trust, their fellow-criminals; he was seized in the bath, deprived of his eyes, stripped of his troops and treasures, and turned out to wander an object of horror and contempt to those who with more propriety could hate, and with more justice could punish, the assassin of the emperor Isaac and his son. As the tyrant, pursued by fear or remorse, was stealing over to Asia, he was seized by the Latins of Constantinople, and condemned, after an open trial, to an ignominious death. His judges debated the mode of his execution-the axe, the wheel, or the stake; and it was resolved that Mourzoufle† should ascend the Theodosian column, a pillar of white marble of one hundred and forty-seven feet in height. From the summit he was

*Their quarrel is told by Villehardouin (No. 146-158) with the spirit of freedom. The merit and reputation of the marshal are acknowledged by the Greek historian (p. 387), μέγα παρὰ τοῖς τῶν Λατί vwv dvvapivov orparεúμaoi; unlike some modern heroes, whose exploits are only visible in their own memoirs. [Dean Milman has connected this quarrel with circumstances quite foreign to it, and erroneously made Villehardouin himself, instead of his nephew, prince of Achaia. See Note, p. 18, 19.-ED.]

See the fate of Mourzoufle, in Nicetas (p. 393), Villehardouin (No. 141-145. 163), and Guntherus (c. 20, 21). Neither the marshal nor the monk afford a grain of pity for a tyrant or rebel, whose punishment, however, was more unexampled than his crime.

The column of Arcadius, which represents in basso-relievo his

cast down headlong, and dashed in pieces on the pavement, in the presence of innumerable spectators, who filled the forum of Taurus, and admired the accomplishment of an old prediction, which was explained by this singular event.* The fate of Alexius is less tragical; he was sent by the marquis a captive to Italy, and a gift to the king of the Romans; but he had not much to applaud his fortune, if the sentence of imprisonment and exile was changed from a fortress in the Alps to a monastery in Asia. But his daughter, before the national calamity, had been given in marriage to a young hero who continued the succession, and restored the throne of the Greek princes.† The valour of Theodore Lascaris was signalized in the two sieges of Constantinople. After the flight of Mourzoufle, when the Latins were already in the city, he offered himself as their emperor to the soldiers and people; and his ambition, which might be virtuous, was undoubtedly brave. Could he have infused a soul into the multitude, they might have crushed the strangers under their feet: their abject despair refused his aid, and Theodore retired to breathe the air of freedom in Anatolia, beyond the immediate view and pursuit of the conquerors. Under the title, at first of despot, and afterwards of emperor, he drew to his standard the bolder spirits who were fortified against slavery by the contempt of life; and, as every means was lawful for the public safety, implored without scruple the alliance of the Turkish sultan. Nice, where Theodore established his residence, Prusa and Philadelphia, Smyrna and Ephesus, opened their gates to their deliverer; he derived strength and reputation from his victories, and even from his defeats; and the successor of Constantine preserved a fragment of the empire from the victories, or those of his father Theodosius, is still extant at Constantinople. It is described and measured, Gyllius (Topograph. 4. 7), Banduri (ad lib. 1, Antiquit. C. P. p. 507, &c.), and Tournefort (Voyage du Levant, tom. ii. lettre 12, p. 231).

*The nonsense of Gunther and the modern Greeks concerning this columna fatidica, is unworthy of notice; but it is singular enough that fifty years before the Latin conquest, the poet Tzetzes (Chiliad, 9. 277) relates the dream of a matron who saw an army in the forum, and a man sitting on the column, clapping his hands, and uttering a loud exclamation. The dynasties of Nice, Trebizond, and Epirus (of which Nicetas saw the origin without much pleasure or hope), are learnedly explored and clearly represented, in the Familia Byzantine of Ducange.

banks of the Mæander to the suburbs of Nicomedia, and at length of Constantinople. Another portion, distant and obscure, was possessed by the lineal heir of the Comneni, a son of the virtuous Manuel, a grandson of the tyrant Andronicus. His name was Alexius; and the epithet of great was applied perhaps to his stature, rather than to his exploits. By the indulgence of the Angeli, he was appointed governor or duke of Trebizond ;* his birth gave him ambi

*

Except some facts in Pachymer and Nicephorus Gregoras, which will hereafter be used, the Byzantine writers disdain to speak of the empire of Trebizond, or principality of the Lazi; and, among the Latins, it is conspicuous only in the romances of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Yet the indefatigable Ducange has dug out (Fam. Byz. p. 192) two authentic passages in Vincent of Beauvais (1. 31, c. 144), and the protonotary Ogerius (apud Wading, A.D. 1279, No. 4). [Trapezus, afterwards Trebizond, was a colony from Sinope, Ol. vi. 1, B.C. 756 (Euseb. Chron. ap. Clinton, F. H. i. 156). It was, therefore, nearly coeval with the generally received era of Rome. It received its name from the trapezoid, or tabular form of the rocky coast on which the colonists fixed their settlement. Xenophon gave it early celebrity (Anab. v. 5. 3) as the point where he and his Greeks, during their memorable retreat, first reached the shore of the Euxine. The obscure mediæval empire of Trebizond has of late found its historians in Prof. Fallmerayer (Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt, München, 1827), and Geo. Finlay (History of Greece and Trebizond, p. 354-498), both founded on a recently discovered chronicle of Michael Panaretos. Prof. Koeppen of Franklin College, Pennsylvania, has also in his useful work, The World in the Middle Ages (p. 122. 206), given a clear compendious view of the subject, and more particularly collected from various discrepant accounts, the following narrative of the origin of this State. When Isaac Angelus overthrew the Comneni in 1185, Thamar, a daughter of Andronicus (probably one of his children by Theodora, the former queen of Jerusalem, see this History v. 351), escaped and conveyed to Colchis two young sons of Manuel Comnenus. They were hospitably received by the Greeks of that country; and after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 by the Latins, Alexius, one of these princes, then a handsome and spirited youth, was assisted by his Colchian friends, in conquering a narrow tract along the southern coast of the Euxine, as far as the river Sangarius, where he founded the Comnenian empire of Trebizond. On its subsequent fate, till its fall in 1461, the above-mentioned writers supply whatever Gibbon's imperfect authorities omitted or mis-stated. The open roadstead of Trebizond is a very insecure harbour; but its situation, at the eastern extremity of the Euxine, has made it in all commercial times a convenient medium of European intercourse with Armenia and Persia. We find this stated in the fourteenth century by Maundeville (Travels, p. 201, edit. Bohn), and in the present by Layard (N. and B. p. 7). The neighbouring port of Batoun is better sheltered; but this advantage is neutralized by the insalubrity of the air. Koeppen states the

tion, the revolution independence; and without changing his title, he reigned in peace from Sinope to the Phasis, along the coast of the Black Sea. His nameless son and successor is described as the vassal of the sultan, whom he served with two hundred lances ;* that Comnenian prince was no more than duke of Trebizond, and the title of emperor was first assumed by the pride and envy of the grandson of Alexius. In the West, a third fragment was saved from the common shipwreck, by Michael, a bastard of the house of Angeli, who, before the revolution, had been known as a hostage, a soldier, and a rebel. His flight from the camp of the marquis Boniface secured his freedom; by his marriage with the governor's daughter, he commanded the important place of Durazzo, assumed the title of despot, and founded a strong and conspicuous principality in Epirus, Ætolia, and Thessaly, which have ever been peopled by a warlike race. The Greeks, who had offered their service to their new sovereigns, were excluded by the haughty Latins + from all civil and military honours, as a nation born to tremble and obey. Their resentment prompted them to show that they might have been useful friends, since they could be dangerous enemies; their nerves were braced by adversity; whatever was learned or holy, whatever was noble or valiant, rolled away into the independent states of Trebizond, Epirus, and Nice; and a single patrician is marked by the ambiguous praise of attachment and loyalty to the Franks. The vulgar herd of the cities and the country would have gladly submitted to a mild and regular servitude; and the transient disorders of war would have been obliterated by some years of industry and peace. But peace was banished, and industry was crushed, in the disorders of the feudal system. The Roman emperors of population of Trebizond at this time to be 50,000. Malte Brun and Balbi (p. 649), make it only from 25,000 to 35,000.-ED.]

* [Alexius was succeeded by his son-in-law, Andronicus I. Finlay, p. 384. The title of "Faithful Emperor of the Romans" was from the first assumed by Alexius: after the recovery of Constantinople by the Greeks, his grandson, John II., styled himself "Emperor of all the East."-Ib. 370.-En.]

+ The portrait of the French Latins is drawn in Nicetas by the hand of prejudice and resentment: οὐδεν τῶν ἄλλων ἐθνῶν εἰς ̓́Αρεος ἔργα παρασυμβεβλῆσθαι σφίσιν ἠνείχοντο, ἀλλ ̓ οὐδέ τις τῶν χαρίτων ἢ τῶν μουσῶν παρὰ τοῖς βαρβάροις τούτοις ἐπεξενίζετο, καὶ παρὰ τοῦτο οἶμαι τὴν φύσιν ἦσαν ἀνήμεροι, καὶ τὸν χόλον εἴχον τοῦ λόγου προτρέχοντα,

Constantinople, if they were endowed with abilities, were armed with power for the protection of their subjects: their laws were wise, and their administration was simple. The Latin throne was filled by a titular prince, the chief, and often the servant, of his licentious confederates; the fiefs of the empire, from a kingdom to a castle, were held and ruled by the sword of the barons; and their discord, poverty, and ignorance, extended the ramifications of tyranny to the most sequestered villages. The Greeks were oppressed by the double weight of the priest, who was invested with temporal power, and of the soldier, who was inflamed by fanatic hatred; and the insuperable bar of religion and language for ever separated the stranger and the native. As long as the crusaders were united at Constantinople, the memory of their conquest, and the terror of their arms, imposed silence on the captive land; their dispersion betrayed the smallness of their numbers and the defects of their discipline; and some failures and mischances revealed the secret, that they were not invincible. As the fear of the Greeks abated, their hatred increased. They murmured; they conspired; and before a year of slavery had elapsed, they implored, or accepted, the succour of a barbarian, whose power they had felt, and whose gratitude they

trusted.*

The Latin conquerors had been saluted with a solemn and early embassy from John, or Joanice, or Calo-John, the revolted chief of the Bulgarians and Wallachians. He deemed himself their brother, as the votary of the Roman pontiff, from whom he had received the regal title and a boly banner; and in the subversion of the Greek monarchy, he might aspire to the name of their friend and accomplice. But Calo-John was astonished to find that the count of Flanders had assumed the pomp and pride of the successors of Constantine; and his ambassadors were dismissed with a haughty message, that the rebel must deserve a pardon, by touching with his forehead the footstool of the imperial throne. His resentment + would have exhaled in acts of

*I here begin to use, with freedom and confidence, the eight books of the Histoire de C. P. sous l'Empire des François, which Ducange has given as a supplement to Villehardouin, and which, in a barbarous style, deserves the praise of an original and classic work.

+ In Calo-John's answer to the pope, we may find his claims and