Other chroniclers and historians deny this story, pointing out that the Count was, in fact, happily married to Marie of Champagne and that it was the beautiful French Countess and no princess of satanic origin who bore his two daughters, Jeanne and Margaret. This, in truth, was the case, but many of the superstitious Flemings believed the tale about the devil none the less, and the Count's brilliant but tragic later career caused the story to be repeated and handed down for many generations. Only five years after coming to the throne Count Baldwin announced his intention of going on a crusade, and in the presence of a vast throng both he and Marie took the cross in the church of St. Donatian at Bruges. This was in 1199, but the Count was not able to leave his dominions at once and in the following year he and Marie came to Ypres to dedicate the foundation stone of the great Cloth Hall. He finally set out in 1203, but the Venetians compelled the crusaders, in payment for their passage, to make a campaign which resulted in the capture of Constantinople, the founding of the Latin Empire, and the election of Count Baldwin as the first Emperor. Marie, meanwhile, had gone to Syria by another route and there she died of the plague, only learning in her last hour that her husband had become an Emperor and that she was an Empress. Her death was the first of the reverses of fortune in Baldwin's meteoric career. A year later, in 1205, he fell wounded in a battle before the walls of Adrianople--or, perhaps, slain. Certain it is that he disappeared from the world of men and for a space of twenty years was heard of no more. Then, in the heart of the great forest that in those days stretched from Tournai to Valenciennes, some wood-cutters found a long bearded, white-haired old man, his face covered with scars, living the life of a hermit in a hut none of them remembered ever having seen before. Gradually this wonder attracted more and more of the people thereabout to see the stranger, and men began to say that he resembled the good Count Baldwin. Some of the nobles who had known the Count heard of it, visited the hut in the forest, and declared that this was indeed Count Baldwin and the Emperor.