The Venetians, alarmed to find that Michael had transferred their privileges to their Genoese rivals, joined with the Franks of the Peloponnesus in raising a cry for a Crusade against the victorious Greeks, which was further preached by Pope Urban IV. Charles of Anjou, who became King of Naples and Sicily in 1265, was willing, and seemed eminently fitted, to carry out the old aggressive policy of the Guiscards. But, though the proposal that he should lead a new Crusade against the Orthodox frightened Michael into insincere proposals to buy off Western opposition by ending the Greek schism, his submission had no permanent result when the fear of a Crusade was removed. Michael never ruled with the authority of the Macedonians or the Comneni, but his careful measures of reforms, and his warlike capacity, started the Greek Empire on the last stage of its career, which gave it nearly two centuries more of existence before it succumbed to the Ottoman Turks. [Sidenote: The Latins in Peloponnesus.] The Latin power still partly continued in the islands and in the Peloponnesus. Not only did the Venetians retain their grip on the Archipelago and the coast, but the proximity of the sea enabled some of the Franks of Southern Greece to continue to rule their principalities, after Baldwin II. had been driven from his throne. They had as their code of law the Assizes of Romania, a free adaptation of the famous Assizes of Jerusalem. They even effected some sort of partial amalgamation with their native subjects. Their churches and fortresses long remained, as in Cyprus and Syria, the strongest witnesses of their power. It was not till 1310 that the Dukes of Athens, of the house of Brienne, succumbed, not to the Greeks, but to their own Catalan mercenaries. The Princes of Achaia reigned even longer. The Venetians saved both the Ionian islands and Crete alike from the Greeks and from the Turks. To the end of the Middle Ages, titular dukes, princes, and emperors of the Eastern world kept up the memory of one of the strangest and most daring of Western conquests, but one which was useless to the West, and only weakened the Christian East, at a time when the rise of the Ottoman Turks required every effort to be made to stem the tide of that barbarian conquest which was soon to prove fatal to Latin and Greek alike. GENEALOGY OF THE COMNENI AND ANGELI.