Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/451

OF THE EOMAIS^ EMPIEE 429 in a superstitious age, the pride and avarice of the clergy. In the cathedral of St. Sophia, he presumed to place his throne on the right hand of the patriarch ; and this presumption excited the sharpest censure of pope Innocent the Third.^i By a salu- tary edict, one of the first examples of the laws of mortmain, he prohibited the alienation of fiefs ; many of the Latins, desirous of returning to Europe, resigned their estates to the church for a spii'itual or temporal reward ; these holy lands were immediately discharged from military service ; and a colony of soldiers would have been gradually transformed into a college of priests. ^^ The virtuous Henry died at Thessalonica, in the defence of Peter of that kingdom, and of an infant, the son of his friend Boniface, emperor of In the two first emperors of Constantinople, the male line of the nopie. a.d. -F- 1217 ADril 9 counts of Flanders was extinct. But their sister Yolande was the wife of a French prince, the mother of a numerous progeny ; and one of lier daughters had married Andrew, king of Hungary, a brave and pious champion of the cross. By seating him on the Byzantine throne, the barons of Romania would have acquired the forces of a neighbouring and warlike kingdom ; but the pru- dent Andrew revered the laws of succession ; and the princess Yolande, Avith her husband, Peter of Courtenay, count of Auxerre, was invited by the Latins to assume the empire of the East. The royal birth of his father, the noble origin of his mother, recom- mended to the barons of France the first-cousin of their king. His reputation was fair, his possessions were ample, and in the bloody crusade against the Albigeois the soldiers and the priests had been abundantly satisfied of his zeal and valour. Vanity might applaud the elevation of a French emperor of Constanti- nople ; but prudence must pity, rather than envy, his treacherous and imaginary greatness. To assert and adorn his title, he was reduced to sell or mortgage the best of his patrimony. By these expedients, the liberality of his royal kinsman, Philip Augustus, and the national spirit of chivalry, he was enabled to pass the Alps at the head of one hundred and forty knights and five thousand five hundred Serjeants and archers. After some hesi- tation, pope Honorius the Third was persuaded to crown the successor of Constantine ; but he performed the ceremony in a ■•^ [The dispute with Innocent was compromised at a parliament which Henry held at Ravennika in northern Greece (near Zcituni?) on May 2, 1210.] ••^See the reign of Henky, in Ducange (Hist, de C. P. 1. i. c. 35-41, 1. ii. c. 1-22), who is much indebted to the Epistles of the Popes. Le Beau (Hist, du Bas Empire, torn. xxi. p. 120-122) has found, perhaps in Doutreman, some laws of Henry, which determined the service of fiefs and the prerogatives of the emperor.