promise of mercy and bread. The Vatican thundered; and the impious
Theodore was threatened with the vengeance of earth and heaven; but the
captive emperor and his soldiers were forgotten, and the reproaches of
the pope are confined to the imprisonment of his legate. No sooner
was he satisfied by the deliverance of the priests and a promise of
spiritual obedience, than he pardoned and protected the despot of
Epirus. His peremptory commands suspended the ardor of the Venetians and
the king of Hungary; and it was only by a natural or untimely death [36]
that Peter of Courtenay was released from his hopeless captivity. [37]

[Footnote 36: Acropolita (c. 14) affirms, that Peter of Courtenay died
by the sword, (ergon macairaV genesqai;) but from his dark expressions,
I should conclude a previous captivity, wV pantaV ardhn desmwtaV poihsai
sun pasi skeuesi. * The Chronicle of Auxerre delays the emperor's death
till the year 1219; and Auxerre is in the neighborhood of Courtenay.
Note: Whatever may have been the fact, this can hardly be made out
from the expressions of Acropolita.--M.]

[Footnote 37: See the reign and death of Peter of Courtenay, in Ducange,
(Hist. de C. P. l. ii. c. 22--28,) who feebly strives to excuse the
neglect of the emperor by Honorius III.]

The long ignorance of his fate, and the presence of the lawful
sovereign, of Yolande, his wife or widow, delayed the proclamation of
a new emperor. Before her death, and in the midst of her grief, she was
delivered of a son, who was named Baldwin, the last and most unfortunate
of the Latin princes of Constantinople. His birth endeared him to the
barons of Romania; but his childhood would have prolonged the troubles
of a minority, and his claims were superseded by the elder claims of his
brethren. The first of these, Philip of Courtenay, who derived from his
mother the inheritance of Namur, had the wisdom to prefer the substance
of a marquisate to the shadow of an empire; and on his refusal, Robert,
the second of the sons of Peter and Yolande, was called to the throne
of Constantinople. Warned by his father's mischance, he pursued his slow
and secure journey through Germany and along the Danube: a passage
was opened by his sister's marriage with the king of Hungary; and the
emperor Robert was crowned by the patriarch in the cathedral of St.
Sophia. But his reign was an aera of calamity and disgrace; and the
colony, as it was styled, of New France yielded on all sides