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Rh the Bulgarians. His brother Henry, who succeeded him and reigned for ten years, stayed the persecution of the Greeks and permitted them to practise their religious rites at Constantinople. Here was a gleam of hope for a settlement; but it vanished with the death of the liberal-minded "emperor." Peter, who followed, had only reigned for two years when he was lost among the mountains of Epirus, and nothing more was ever heard of him. Things went from bad to worse with the usurpation; a blight had seized it from the first; the doom of heaven was over it. The people fled from its hard taxation; fields were left untilled; trade died down; abject poverty was the fate of the city and its rulers. The barons tore the copper off the domes of the churches in order to coin money. They sold the most sacred relics, chief among which was the crown of thorns, which went to St. Louis of France. The last "emperor" even pawned his own brother to some Venetian nobles as a pledge for a loan. This pitiable pretender to the throne of the Cæsars spent most of his time in Europe, travelling from court to court and begging aid in money and men to defend his city.

Meanwhile the real empire was partially pulling itself together again. When the Crusaders took Constantinople they seized the head. The limbs then broke off and organised themselves as three separate governments at Trebizond, at Thessalonica, and at Nicæa. The latter was the chief centre, and by degrees it extended its power and territory, till at last most of the Byzantine Empire as this had existed when Constantinople fell had been gathered under its rule. At the same time the Greek Church in the provinces went on in its accustomed way as though there were no Latin Empire at Constantinople, no Latin patriarch, no union with the West, no submission to the papacy. These things were confined to the brigands who occupied the city; and those brigands, as we have seen, were being literally starved out.

Such was the condition of affairs when in the year 1261 some Greeks in the army of Michael Palæologus