violence and blood; his cooler policy watched the rising discontent of the Greeks; affected a tender concern for their sufferings; and promised that their first struggles for freedom should be supported by his person and kingdom. The conspiracy was propagated by national hatred, the firmest band of association and secrecy; the Greeks were impatient to sheath their daggers in the breasts of the victorious strangers; but the execution was prudently delayed, till Henry, the emperor's brother, had transported the flower of his troops beyond the Hellespont. Most of the towns and villages of Thrace were true to the moment and the signal; and the Latins, without arms or suspicion, were slaughtered by the vile and merciless revenge of their slaves. From Demotica, the first scene of the massacre, the surviving vassals of the count of St. Pol escaped to Adrianople; but the French and Venetians, who occupied that city, were slain or expelled by the furious multitude; the garrisons that could effect their retreat fell back on each other towards the metropolis; and the fortresses that separately stood against the rebels were ignorant of each other's and of their sovereign's fate. The voice of fame and fear announced the revolt of the Greeks, and the rapid approach of their Bulgarian ally; and Calo-John, not depending on the forces of his own kingdom, had drawn from the Scythian wilderness a body of fourteen thousand Comans, who drank, as it was said, the blood of their captives, and sacrificed the Christians on the altars of their gods.*

Alarmed by this sudden and growing danger, the emperor dispatched a swift messenger to recall count Henry and his

complaints (Gesta Innocent. III. c. 108, 109): he was cherished at Rome as the prodigal son.

* The Comans were a Tartar or Turkman horde, which encamped in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the verge of Moldavia. The greater part were Pagans, but some were Mahometans, and the whole horde was converted to Christianity (A.D. 1370), by Lewis king of Hungary. [These were no other than the Cumans, already noticed in ch. 55, vol. vi. p. 273. Large bodies of them were allowed to settle in Hungary, where their conversion to Christianity began in 1229 under Bela IV. and was completed in 1279 by Ladislas IV. Kruse, Tab. xix. These were detached portions of the large horde which from the eleventh to the thirteenth century over-ran the steppes between the Volga and the Danube. In May, 1224, they were completely broken and dispersed by the Mongols in a bloody battle on the river Kalka, after which they never rose again to independence. Koeppen, p. 97.-ED.].

troops; and had Baldwin expected the return of his gallant brother, with a supply of twenty thousand Armenians, he might have encountered the invader with equal numbers, and a decisive superiority of arms and discipline. But the

spirit of chivalry could seldom discriminate caution from cowardice; and the emperor took the field with a hundred and forty knights, and ther train of archers and sergeants. The marshal, who dissuaded and obeyed, led the vanguard in their march to Adrianople; the main body was commanded by the count of Blois; the aged doge of Venice followed with the rear; and their scanty numbers were increased from all sides by the fugitive Latins. They undertook to besiege the rebels of Adrianople; and such was the pious tendency of the crusades, that they employed the holy week in pillaging the country for their subsistence, and in framing engines for the destruction of their fellow-Christians. But the Latins were soon interrupted and alarmed by the light cavalry of the Comans, who boldly skirmished to the edge of their imperfect lines; and a proclamation was issued by the marshal of Romania, that on the trumpet's sound, the cavalry should mount and form; but that none, under pain of death, should abandon themselves to a desultory and dangerous pursuit. This wise injunction was first disobeyed by the count of Blois, who involved the emperor in his rashness and ruin. The Comans, of the Parthian or Tartar school, fled before their first charge; but after a career of two leagues, when the knights and their horses were almost breathless, they suddenly turned, rallied, and encompassed the heavy squadrons of the Franks. count was slain on the field; the emperor was made priThe soner; and if the one disdained to fly, if the other refused to yield, their personal bravery made a poor atonement for their ignorance or neglect of the duties of a general.*

Proud of his victory and his royal prize, the Bulgarian advanced to relieve Adrianople, and achieve the destruction of the Latins. They must inevitably have been destroyed, if the marshal of Romania had not displayed a cool courage and consummate skill; uncommon in all ages, but most

*Nicetas, from ignorance or malice, imputes the defeat to the cowardice of Dandolo (p. 383); but Villehardouin shares his own glory with his venerable friend, qui viels home ére et gote ne vecit, mais mult ére sages et preus et vigueros (No. 193).

uncommon in those times, when war was a passion, rather than a science. His grief and fears were poured into the firm and faithful bosom of the doge; but in the camp he diffused an assurance of safety, which could only be realized by the general belief. All day he maintained his perilous station between the city and the Barbarians; Villehardouin decamped in silence, at the dead of night; and his masterly retreat of three days would have deserved the praise of Xenophon and the ten thousand. In the rear the marshal supported the weight of the pursuit; in the front he moderated the impatience of the fugitives; and wherever the Comans approached, they were repelled by a line of impenetrable spears. On the third day, the weary troops beheld the sea, the solitary town of Rodosto,* and their friends, who had landed from the Asiatic shore. They embraced, they wept; but they united their arms and councils; and, in his brother's absence, count Henry assumed the regency of the empire, at once in a state of childhood and caducity.t If the Comans withdrew from the summer heats, seven thousand Latins, in the hour of danger, deserted Constantinople, their brethren, and their vows. Some partial success was overbalanced by the loss of one hundred and twenty knights in the field of Rusium; and of the imperial domain, no more was left than the capital, with two or three adjacent fortresses on the shores of Europe and Asia. The king of Bulgaria was resistless and inexorable; and Calo-John respectfully eluded the demands of the pope, who conjured his new proselyte to restore peace and the emperor to the afflicted Latins. The deliverance of Baldwin was no longer, he said, in the power of man; that prince had died in prison; and the manner of his death is variously related by ignorance and credulity. The lovers of a tragic legend will be pleased to hear, that the royal captive was tempted by the amorous queen of the Bugarians; that his chaste refusal exposed him to the falsehood of a woman and the jealousy of

The truth of geography, and the original text of Villehardouin (No. 194), place Rodosto three days' journey (trois journées) from Adrianople; but Vigenere, in his version, has most absurdly substituted trois heures; and this error, which is not corrected by Ducange, has entrapped several moderns, whose names I shall spare. [Rodosto is on the Propontis, or Sea of Marmora. Benjamin of Tudela made it two days' journey from Constantinople. Travels, p. 76, edit. Bohn. -ED.]

The reign and end of Baldwin are related

a savage; that his hands and feet were severed from his body; that his bleeding trunk was cast among the carcasses of dogs and horses; and that he breathed three days before he was devoured by the birds of prey.* About twenty years afterwards, in a wood of the Netherlands, a hermit announced himself as the true Baldwin, the emperor of Constantinople, and lawful sovereign of Flanders. He related the wonders of his escape, his adventures, and his penance, among a people prone to believe and to rebel; and, in the first transport, Flanders acknowledged her longlost sovereign. A short examination before the French court detected the impostor, who was punished with an ignominious death; but the Flemings still adhered to the pleasing error; and the countess Jane is accused by the gravest historians of sacrificing to her ambition the life of an unfortunate father.†

In all civilized hostility, a treaty is established for the exchange or 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 vacancy, 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

by Villehardouin and Nicetas (p. 386-416); and their omissions are supplied by Ducange in his Observations, and to the end of his first book. * After brushing away all doubtful and improbable circumstances, we may prove the death of Baldwin, 1. By the firm belief of the French barons (Villehardouin, No. 230). 2. By the declaration of Calo-John himself, who excuses his not releasing the captive emperor, quia debitum carnis exsolverat cum carcere teneretur. (Gesta Innocent. III. c. 109.) See the story of this

impostor from the French and Flemish writers in Ducange, Hist. de C. P. 3. 9; and the ridiculous fables that were believed by the monks of St. Alban's, in Matthew Paris, Hist. Major, p. 271, 272. [See Bohn's edit. of Roger of Wendover, vol. ii. p. 455. ED.]

VOL. VII.

C

empire, Henry was gradually left without an associate, as the heroes of the crusade retired from the world or from the war. The doge of Venice, the venerable Dandolo, in the fulness of years and glory, sank into the grave. The mar quis of Montferrat was slowly recalled from the Peloponnesian war to the revenge of Baldwin and 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 Calo-John, who enjoyed the honours, without the merit, of victory. It is here, at this melancholy event, that the pen or the voice of Jeffrey of 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.† The character of Henry was not un

* Villehardouin, No. 257. I quote, with regret, this lamentable conclusion, where we lose at once the original history, and the rich illustrations of Ducange. The last pages may derive some light from Henry's two epistles to Innocent III. (Gesta, c. 106, 107.)

+ The marshal was alive in 1212, but he probably died soon afterwards without returning to France. (Ducange, Observations sur Villehardouin, p. 238.) His fief of Messinople, the gift of Boniface, was the ancient Maximianopolis, which flourished in the time of Ammianus Marcellinus, among the cities of Thrace (No. 141). [This city was the Porsulæ of earlier times. It was situated on the northern side of the Lacus Bistonis, now Lake Burnu, and appears in the Itin. Antonini (p. 21, Per Macedoniam usque Constantinop.) as Impara sive Pyrsoalis nunc Maximianopolis. Prof. Koeppen (p. 114) ranks it, under the name of Mysonopolis, among the most remarkable cities in the Latin empire of Romania; but in 1433, Brocquière, who calls it Missy, found it desolate and uninhabited. (Travels, p. 344, edit. Bohn.) Reichard (Tab. vi.) assigns to it the modern appellations of Gumurdsjina and Komulds Egjina. Villehardouin is said to have died there in 1213. He has been confounded by some writers with his nephew, who was