From respect to the laws of succession, the crown was thereupon offered to Peter de Courtenay, son of Elizabeth de Courtenay and Peter of France, who had married Yolande, daughter of the Count of Hainault, and sister to both the late Emperors, Baldwin and Henry. The proffered honour, doubtless, was great, yet the accession to the Imperial purple proved the precursor of heavy calamities to the unfortunate Emperor and his descendants. Peter de Courtenay, it is true, bore the reputation of a valorous knight and a courageous warrior. He served with distinction in the Crusade against the Albigenses, prompted, perhaps, by a desire to merit the forgiveness of the Church, whose servants in his own domain he had, if the chroniclers are to be believed, treated with the haughty intolerance characteristic of the arrogant seigneur of the period. But at that critical time in the history of the Eastern Empire, the wearer of the Imperial Crown required not only courage, but talents and diplomacy of the highest degree, such as Peter neither possessed nor found opportunity of acquiring. Arriving at Rome in company with his wife, Yolande, and his children, Pope Honorius, after some pressure, was induced to crown him and his consort; but, as Gibbon hints, performed the ceremony in the Church of St. Lawrence, without the walls, lest by the act itself any right of sovereignty over the ancient city should be bestowed or implied. In pursuance of a promise to the Venetians, the Emperor Peter, having first sent his wife and children by sea to Constantinople, directed his forces against the Kingdom of Epirus, then under the rule of Theodore Comnenus. Failing in his object, he fell, either by force or fraud, into the hands of the Greek despot, and died, by assassination or in prison, without having entered his Imperial dominions. With a discretion rare, indeed, in those days, Philip, his eldest son, refused the honour of the purple, contenting himself with the Marquisate of Namur, his paternal fief; whereupon Robert, the younger brother, accepted the burden of the crown, and having, with due precaution, journeyed to Constantinople, was there crowned by the Patriarch Matthew, with all pomp and circumstance, in the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. But in the grandeur of his coronation consisted the only splendour of his reign. All historians combine in representing Robert as deficient in every quality requisite for the high station he occupied and the necessity of the realm he had been chosen to rule; even Bouchet, self-appointed laureate to La Maison Royale de Courtenay, after describing the death of the Emperor on his return journey from Rome, whither he had gone to solicit against his own rebellious subjects the thunders of the Pope, is constrained to admit that to the weakness of this ruler may justly be attributed the disgraces which occurred in the reign of his successor.