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 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 800 knights, with archers and men-at-arms, perhaps 5,000 in all, made no scruple of going out to attack this disorderly mob of 40,000 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 this exemplary monarch's life were spent in wise administration. He checked the zeal of the pope's legate, and would not countenance persecution about the double procession and other controverted dogmas. He checked the pretensions of the clergy, by placing his throne on the same level with that of the patriarch, whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a college of priests.

When he died childless, the next heir to the empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, a member of that princely house which still survives in the line of the English earls