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 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 425 which could only be realised by the general belief. All day he maintained his perilous station between the cit}^ and the barba- rians : Villehardouin decamped in silence at the dead of night ; and his masterly retreat of three davs would have deserved the praise of Xenophon and the ten thousand. In the rear the Marshal supported the weight of the pursuit ; in the front he moderated the impatience of the fugitives ; and^ wherever the Comans approached, they were repelled by a line of impenetrable spears. On the third day, the weary troops beheld the sea, the solitary town of Rodosto,*^^ and their friends, who had landed from the Asiatic shore. They embraced, they wept ; but they united their arms and counsels ; and, in his brother" s absence, count Henry assumed the regency of the empire, at once in a state of childhood and caducity."^* If the Comans withdrew from the summer-heats, seven thousand Latins, in the hour of danger, deserted Constantinople, their brethren, and their vows. Some partial success was overbalanced by the loss of one hun- dred and twenty knights in the field of Rusium ; and of the Imperial domain no more was left than the capital, with two or three adjacent fortresses on the shores of Europe and Asia. The kinsj of Bulffai'ia was resistless and inexorable : and Calo- John respectfully eluded the demands of the pope, who con- jured his new proselyte to restore peace and the emperor to the afflicted Latins. The deliverance of Baldwin was no longer, he said, in the power of man: that prince had died in prison ; Death of the and the manner of his death is variously related by ignorance and credulity. The lovers of a tragic legend will be pleased to hear that the royal captive was tempted by the amorous queen of the Bulgarians ; that his chaste refusal exposed him to the falsehood of a woman and the jealousy of a savage ; that his hands and feet were severed from his body ; that his bleeding trunk was cast among the carcases of dogs and horses ; and that he breathed three days before he was devoured by the birds of pj.gy 2o About twenty years afterwards, in a wood of the Nether- •'3 The truth of geography and the original text of Villehardouin (No. 194 [366]) place Rodosto [Rhoedestus] three days' journey (trois jorn^es) from Hadrianople ; but Vigenere, in his version, has most absurdly substituted trois hciires ; and this error, which is not corrected by Ducange, has entrapped several moderns, whose names I shall spare. '^ The reign and end of Baldwin are rel.ated by Villehardouin and Nicetas (p. 386-416) ; and their omissions are supplied by Ducange, in his Observations, and to the end of his first book. ^ After brushing away all doubtful and improbable circumstances, we may prove the death of Baldwin : i. By the firm belief of the French barons (Villehar-