He obtained the fate from justice and the sympathy from the vulgar which have commonly been the lot of pretenders. Whatever the real end of this Emperor, King John wrote a year later to the Pope, calmly informing him that his intercession for Baldwin was no longer of any use, because he was no longer living. Then it was, and not till then, that his brother, Henry of Flanders, consented to assume the title of Emperor. Already the leaders of the crusade, who only three years before had set sail so proudly from Venice, were dead or on the point of death: Baldwin murdered in captivity; the Count of Blois killed on the field of battle; Dandolo dead, at the age, say some writers, of a hundred, in the year 1205; the Marquis of Montferrat about to be slain in an obscure skirmish with the barbarous Bulgarians. Henry stood alone, save for the faithful Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, who, though his narrative ceases at this point, is believed to have remained with the new Emperor. His reign lasted for ten years only. It was a reign of successful, brave, and prudent administration in things military, civil, and ecclesiastical Its success was greatly assisted by the fact that very early in his reign the Greeks discovered the mistake they had made in changing the rule of the Latins for the rule of the Bulgarians. The first were hard masters, with rough, rude ways, and little sympathy with the culture of the Byzantines; but the latter proposed, as soon as the Latins were driven south, to exterminate the population of Thrace, or at least to transplant the Greeks beyond the Balkans. They called upon the Emperor to forgive them and to help them. Henry, with a little army of eight hundred knights, with archers and men-at-arms, perhaps five thousand in all, made no scruple of going out to attack this disorderly mob of forty thousand Bulgarians. As no mention is made of the Comans, it is presumable that these had gone home again with their booty. At the siege of Thessalonica King John was murdered--slain by no less a person than St. Demetrius himself, said the Greeks--and a peace was concluded between his successor and Henry. The last years of this exemplary monarch's life were spent in wise administration. He checked the zeal of the Pope's legate, and would not countenance persecution about the double procession and other controverted dogmas. He checked the pretensions of the clergy, by placing his throne on the same level with that of the Patriarch, whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a college of priests. When he died, childless, the next heir to the empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, a member of that princely house which still survives in the line of the English earls of Devon.