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 was the progress and conquests of the Turks. It was becoming evident that against this new power the empire would not be able to hold its own without vigorous support from the West. It was the anxious endeavour of some of the last emperors to procure a union between East and West, and one of them, Manuel, even visited France, Germany, and England, as a suppliant, pleading in the name of a common Christianity for resistance to the arms of the "infidel."

It was in the July of 1261, just as Baldwin and the Latins were on the point of flight, that we may say that Michael began his reign as a Byzantine emperor. He had indeed been crowned two years before at Nicæa, but now he was to enter the capital of his empire in triumph, and to hear from Greeks and Genoese the shout, "Long life and victory to Michael and John, the august emperors of the Romans!" John, the son of the late Emperor Theodore Lascaris, was at the time a boy of about eleven years of age. In the course of a few months he passed away into oblivion, his sight having been first destroyed by the singular device of confronting his eyes with the blinding glare of red-hot metal. For three years Michael lay under a sentence of excommunication from the patriarch of Constantinople, Arsenius, who, as the young prince's guardian, resented the crime, and, as a man with a strong sense of duty, thus publicly denounced it. In vain the emperor begged for absolution. He could only get Arsenius removed, and an obsequious monk elected in his room. Arsenius was respected both by people and clergy, and a prolonged schism was the result of his unjust treatment.