reign lasted for ten years only. It was a reign of successful, brave,
and prudent administration in things military, civil, and
ecclesiastical Its success was greatly assisted by the fact that very
early in his reign the Greeks discovered the mistake they had made in
changing the rule of the Latins for the rule of the Bulgarians.

The first were hard masters, with rough, rude ways, and little
sympathy with the culture of the Byzantines; but the latter proposed,
as soon as the Latins were driven south, to exterminate the population
of Thrace, or at least to transplant the Greeks beyond the Balkans.
They called upon the Emperor to forgive them and to help them. Henry,
with a little army of eight hundred knights, with archers and
men-at-arms, perhaps five thousand in all, made no scruple of going
out to attack this disorderly mob of forty thousand Bulgarians. As no
mention is made of the Comans, it is presumable that these had gone
home again with their booty. At the siege of Thessalonica King John
was murdered--slain by no less a person than St. Demetrius himself,
said the Greeks--and a peace was concluded between his successor and
Henry.

The last years of this exemplary monarch's life were spent in wise
administration. He checked the zeal of the Pope's legate, and would
not countenance persecution about the double procession and other
controverted dogmas. He checked the pretensions of the clergy, by
placing his throne on the same level with that of the Patriarch,
whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation
of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to
the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a
college of priests. When he died, childless, the next heir to the
empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay,