Ten further years of warfare occupy the chronicles, and leave no room for the mention of princesses and Empresses. Then the tireless and restless monarch begins to show signs of age, and we prepare for the crisis which so frequently brings the imperial women more prominently before us. Manuel’s last campaign had been overcast by grave disasters; he had lost the vigour of youth and had never possessed any large and orderly power of controlling events. Weary and saddened, he concluded an indecisive peace with the Turk, and returned to ensure the succession to the throne. His legitimate son Alexis was now, in the year 1180,[31] turned twelve years old, and therefore, in view of the political circumstances and the lax feeling of the time, fit for marriage. Some years before Manuel had learned from one of the Crusaders that Louis of France had a beautiful young daughter, and legates were sent to ask her hand for Alexis. One reads with strange feelings that the child was only seven years old when, in the spring of 1180, she was wedded to Alexis in the ancient palace of Daphne. We shall see to what a sordid fate this premature marriage to a helpless boy exposed her. From the Latin writers we learn that her name was Agnes, but it seems to have been changed to Anna (as the Greeks always call her) at her marriage. She at once received the imperial title, and must have seemed a strange young figure in the stiff gold-cloth garments and rich jewels of a Byzantine Empress. It is interesting to notice that the thought of matrimony reminded Manuel of his “celibate and sad” daughter Maria. She was now in her thirty-first year. A spouse was found for her in a handsome seventeen-year-old Western youth, Reyner, son of the Marquis of Montferrat, and they were married with pomp at the Blachernæ palace. But the character of Maria will presently become clearer to us, and we shall see that it does not call for sympathy.