While the electors deliberated the crowd without waited with anxiety. At midnight, May 9th, the doors of the church were opened. The Bishop of Soissons announced the decision: “This hour of the night, which saw the birth of God, sees also the birth of a new empire. We proclaim as emperor Earl Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut.” The successful candidate was raised upon a shield and carried into the church, where he was vested with the vermilion buskins. A week later he was solemnly crowned in St. Sophia. At the coronation Boniface attended his rival, carrying in the procession the royal robe of cloth of gold. But Boniface’s loyalty scarcely endured the strain put upon it. He soon exchanged the dominion of the Peloponnesus and Asia Minor, which had been assigned to him by the electors’ agreement, for that of Salonica. Over this he and Baldwin incessantly quarrelled. This strife between the leaders was the indication of the dissensions everywhere among the Latins in their greedy division of the estates of the new realm. The chief actors in that stirring drama soon passed off the scene. Baldwin was captured, and probably murdered, by the Bulgarians before Adrianople in 1205, and was succeeded by his brother Henry. Dandolo, having acquired the title “Lord of a Quarter and a Half of all the Roman World,” died June, 1205. A slab recently discovered in St. Sophia is inscribed, “Henrico Dandolo,” and probably marks his grave. With all his faults, the modern Venetian might well cry with Byron: “Oh, for one hour of blind old Dandolo, The octogenarian chief, Byzantium’s conquering foe!” Boniface two years later was mortally wounded in a fight with the Bulgarians in the Rhodope Mountains. Mourtzouphlos was soon taken prisoner and hurled headlong from the column of Theodosius, thus fulfilling a local prophecy relative to the column, that it should witness the destruction of some perfidious ruler. It is not within our scope to narrate the history of the Latin empire thus established. For fifty-seven years it maintained a precarious existence, and finally fell again into the hands of the Greeks, who had constantly menaced it from their opposing capital of Nicæa (1264).