At length, in the year 1202, the Empire passed into the penumbra of its great tragedy. Isaac II., the younger brother whom Alexis had displaced and blinded, had lived in Constantinople, in a humble mansion near the shore, during the seven years that followed his deposition, and was regarded with so little concern that no watch was kept upon his movements. It was not noticed that the Latin soldiers who lived in, or constantly passed through, Constantinople were frequent visitors at his house, and it was not known that the letters he wrote to his daughter Irene, who had married Philip of Germany, were treasonable in their import. But the blind and neglected brother was dreaming of a return to his imperial debauches. It is probable that Maria, who would now be a comely young woman of sixteen, lived with him, but of that we are not assured; she was somewhere in Constantinople. At length the time seemed ripe for his effort, and he sent his son Alexis, a youth as ardently and unscrupulously bent on returning to power as he, to the Court of Philip and Irene in Sicily. It was the eve of the fourth Crusade, and the knights of the West were gathering for a fresh effort to break the power of the Turk, and to gather loot by the way. To these noble buccaneers the Emperor Philip introduced the young Alexis and proposed that they should restore him and his father to their throne. Neither East nor West attracts our sympathy for a moment. The Angeli brothers were squabbling for the right to indulge their sordid tastes on an imperial scale, and the younger Alexis had no more serious ideal. The Venetians, who had an important voice in the matter, sought their own profit and a discharge of their debts, and there can be little doubt that the Western knights, as a body, were allured by the vague hope of plundering, in one way or another, the richest and most splendid city in Europe. An infamous bargain was struck. The princes of Western chivalry did not hesitate to accept from the frivolous and irresponsible youth a promise of the payment of 200,000 silver marks, a year’s supply of provisions to their troops and other preposterous rewards for dethroning Alexis. Even the papacy had its share in the sordid bargain; the Greek Church was to be forced to submit to the Vatican.