been promised to Venice could not be met. The leaders were divided as to the course to be adopted for the conduct of the expedition. None among them possessed either position or ability sufficient to indicate him as the leader. After considerable delay the leadership was offered to the Duke of Burgundy, and, on bis refusal, to Count Theobald of Bar, who also refused.
Appointment of Boniface, Marquis of Monteferrat as leader.
Then a parliament of the Crusaders met at Soissons, and Villebardouin proposed Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat. The proposal was finally, though reluctantly, accepted. From the first it was evident that Boniface bad not the confidence of the Crusaders, and bis election was the first severe blow given to the success of the expedition. Fulk himself affixed the cross to the shoulders of Boniface in the Curcy of Our Lady at Soissons, and, as the great preacher died in May, 1202, be disappears from this history.[1] The appointment of Boniface was in August, 1201. Two months later be was at the court of Philip of Swabia,[2] on the invitation of that sovereign.
His vist to Philip.
What was the object of bis visit may never be accurately known; His visit to but subsequent events raise the presumption that Philip. Philip either bad the design of an attack upon Constantinople before this visit, or formed such a design at, and in consequence of, his interview with Boniface. Philip, the head of the house of the Waiblings, or, as the name was now beginning to be spelled in Italy, Gbibelins, bad married the daughter of Isaac Angelos, the emperor of the New Rome, who was at this moment a prisoner in Constantinople, deprived of his eyesight, though allowed to go about the city of which be bad once been the ruler.[3] The son of Isaac and heir to the throne — whom we may conveniently call, after the fashion of the time, young Alexis, to distinguish him from the reigning usurper Alexis in Constantinople — bad made his escape[4] from the capital. He left the imperial city in the spring of 1201, arrived in Sicily, and sent messengers to Germany an-
