ife being King
John's queen. Nothing was too wild to be believed about him. Twenty
years later a hermit of the Netherlands thought it would be possible
to pass himself off as the real Baldwin, who had escaped from
captivity and was thus expiating his early sins.

He obtained the fate from justice and the sympathy from the vulgar
which have commonly been the lot of pretenders. Whatever the real end
of this Emperor, King John wrote a year later to the Pope, calmly
informing him that his intercession for Baldwin was no longer of any
use, because he was no longer living. Then it was, and not till then,
that his brother, Henry of Flanders, consented to assume the title of
Emperor. Already the leaders of the crusade, who only three years
before had set sail so proudly from Venice, were dead or on the point
of death: Baldwin murdered in captivity; the Count of Blois killed on
the field of battle; Dandolo dead, at the age, say some writers, of a
hundred, in the year 1205; the Marquis of Montferrat about to be slain
in an obscure skirmish with the barbarous Bulgarians.

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 t