Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/453

 OF THE EOMAN EMPIEE 431 ren. The first of these, Philip of Courtenay, who derived from his mother the inheritance of Namur, had the wisdom to prefer the substance of a marquisate to the shadow of an empire ; and on his refusal, Robert, the second of the sons of Peter and Yo- lande, was called to the throne of Constantinople. Warned by his father's mischance, he pursued his slow and secure journey through Germany and along the Danube ; a passage was opened by his sister's marriage with the king of Hungary ; and the emperor Robert was crowned by the patriarch in the cathedral of St. Sophia. But his reign was an aera of calamity and disgrace ; and the colony, as it was styled, of New France yielded on all sides to the Greeks of Nice and Epirus. After a victory, which he owed to his perfidy rather than his courage, Theodore An- gelus entered the kingdom of Thessalonica, expelled the feeble [^.d. 1222] Demetrius, the son of the marquis Boniface, erected his standard on the walls of Hadrianople, and added, by his vanity, a third or fourth name to the list of rival emperors. The relics of the Asiatic province were swept away by John Vataces, the son-in- law and successor of Theodore Lascaris, and who, in a triumphant reign of thirty-three years, displayed the virtues both of peace and war. Under his discipline, the swords of the French mer- [ad. 1222-54] cenaries were the most effectual instrument of his conquests, and their desertion from the service of their countn,- was at once a symptom and a cause of the rising ascendant of the Greeks. By the construction of a fleet he obtained the command of the Hellespont, reduced the islands of Lesbos and Rhodes,'*'' attacked the Venetians of Candia, and intercepted the rare and parsi- monious succours of the West. Once, and once only, the Latin emperor sent an anmy against Vataces ; and, in the defeat of that armv, the veteran knights, the last of the original conquerors, [Battle of were left on the field of battle. But the success of a foreign -^d- 1224] enemy was less painful to the pusillanimous Robert than the in- solence of his Latin subjects, who confounded the weakness of the emperor and of the empire. His personal misfortunes will prove the anarchy of the government and the ferociousness of the times. The amorous youth had neglected his Greek bride, the daughter of Vataces, to introduce into the palace a beautiful maid, of a private, though noble, family of Artois ; and her mother had been tempted by the lustre of the purple to forfeit ■*^ [When the empire was overthrown by the crusaders, Leo Gabalas made him- self master of Rhodes. In 1233 John Vatatzes compelled him to acknowledge his supremacy, but left him in possession. The island was conquered by the knights of St. John in 1310.]