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.