reigned at Nicaea, in 1235. This daughter, after being sought in marriage
by the French barons at Constantinople as a wife for the Emperor Baldwin
II, a minor, was then summarily rejected in favour of the daughter of the
King of Jerusalem; this affront rankled in the mind of John Asen II and
threw him into the arms of the Greeks, with whom he concluded an alliance
in 1234. John Asen II and his ally, the Emperor John III, were, however,
utterly defeated by the French under the walls of Constantinople in 1236,
and the Bulgarian ruler, who had no wish to see the Greeks re-established
there, began to doubt the wisdom of his alliance. Other Bulgarian tsars
had been unscrupulous, but the whole foreign policy of this one pivoted on
treachery. He deserted the Greeks and made an alliance with the French in
1237, the Pope Gregory IX, a great Hellenophobe, having threatened him
with excommunication; he went so far as to force his daughter to
relinquish her Greek husband. The following year, however, he again
changed over to the Greeks; then again fear of the Pope and of his
brother-in-law the King of Hungary brought him back to the side of Baldwin
II, to whose help against the Greeks he went with a large army into Thrace
in 1239. While besieging the Greeks with indifferent success, he learned
of the death of his wife and his eldest son from plague, and incontinently
returned to Tirnovo, giving up the war and restoring his daughter to her
lonely husband. This adaptable monarch died a natural death in 1241, and
the three rulers of his family who succeeded him, whose reigns filled the
period 1241-58, managed to undo all the constructive work of their
immediate predecessors. Province after province was lost and internal
anarchy increased. This remarkable dynasty came to an inglorious end in
1258, when its last representative was murdered by his own nobles, and
from this time onwards Bulgaria was only a shadow of its former self.