to mention.]

The carnage being over, and the spoil distributed, six persons were
chosen from among the Franks and six from among the Venetians, who were
to meet and elect an Emperor, previously binding themselves by oath to
select the individual best qualified among the candidates. The choice
wavered between Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and Boniface, Marquis of
Montferrat, but fell eventually upon the former. He was straightway
robed in the imperial purple, and became the founder of a new dynasty.
He did not live long to enjoy his power, or to consolidate it for his
successors, who, in their turn, were soon swept away. In less than
sixty years the rule of the Franks at Constantinople was brought to as
sudden and disastrous a termination as the reign of Murzuphlis: and
this was the grand result of the fifth Crusade.

Pope Innocent III, although he had looked with no very unfavourable eye
upon these proceedings, regretted that nothing had been done for the
relief of the Holy Land; still, upon every convenient occasion, he
enforced the necessity of a new Crusade. Until the year 1213, his
exhortations had no other effect than to keep the subject in the mind
of Europe. Every spring and summer, detachments of pilgrims continued
to set out for Palestine to the aid of their brethren, but not in
sufficient numbers to be of much service. These periodical passages
were called the passagiuum Martii, or the passage of March, and the
passagium Johannis, or the passage of the festival of St. John. These
did not consist entirely of soldiers, armed against the Saracen, but of
pilgrims led by devotion, and in performance of their vows, bearing
nothing with them but their staff and their wallet. Early in the spring
of 1213 a more extraordinary body of crusaders was raised in France and
Germany. An immense number of boys and girls, amounting, according to
some accounts, to thirty thousand, were incited by the persuasion of
two monks to undertake the journey to Palestine. They were, no doubt,
composed of the idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great
cities, nurtured in vice and daring, and ready for anything. The object
of the monks seems to have been the atrocious one of inveigling them
into slave ships, on pretence of sending them to Syria, and selling
them for slaves on the coast of Africa. [See Jacob de Voragine and
Albericus.] Great numbers of these poor victims were shipped at
Marseilles; but the vessels, with the exce