Its monarch resumed his habitual mendicant tours in Western Europe, and never ceased to besiege the ears of popes and kings with demands for aid to recover his lost realm. At last Baldwin passed away: his sole memorial is the fact that he made a distressed and itinerant emperor in search of a champion, one of the stock figures in the Romances of his day. No one in Western Europe was ignorant of his tale, and he survives as the prototype of the dispossessed sovereigns of fifty legends of chivalry. XXIV. DECLINE AND DECAY. (1261-1328.) There was now once more a Byzantine empire, and to an unobservant reader the history of the reigns of the Paleologi looks like the natural continuation and sequel of the history of the reigns of Isaac Angelus and his brother. If the annals of Michael VIII. and his son were written on to the end of that of Alexius Angelus, the intervening gap of the Latin Conquest might almost pass unperceived, and the reader might imagine that he was investigating a single continuous course of events. The Frank dominion at Constantinople, and the heroic episode of the Empire of Nicaea, would pass equally unnoticed. We need not insist on the perniciousness of such a view. Great as may seem the similarity of the Byzantine Empire of 1204, and that of 1270, it had really suffered an entire transformation in that period. To commence by the most obvious and external sign of change, it will be observed that the lands subject to Michael Paleologus were far more limited in extent than those which had obeyed Alexius Angelus. The loss in Asia was less than might have been expected: Theodore Lascaris and John Ducas had kept back the Turk, and only two districts of no great extent had fallen into Moslem hands—the Pisidian coast with the seaport of Adalia on the south, and the Paphlagonian coast with the seaport of Sinope on the north. Besides these the distant Pontic province had now become the empire of Trebizond. In Europe the loss was far more serious: four great blocks of territory had been lost for ever. The first was a slip along the southern slope of the Balkans, in Northern Thrace and Macedonia, which had fallen into the hands of the Bulgarians, and become completely Slavonized. The second was the district which is represented by the modern land of Albania. When the Angeli of Thessalonica fell before John Ducas, a younger member of the house retired to the original mountain house of the dynasty, and preserved the independence of the “Despotate of Epirus.” Here the Angeli survived for some generations, maintaining themselves against the Emperors of Constantinople by a strict alliance with the Latin princes of Southern Greece.