The old Flemish chroniclers linger lovingly over the story of Baldwin of Constantinople, the last representative in the direct male line of the house of Baldwin of the Iron Hand, and the last Fleming who ruled over Flanders. They like to represent him as a prince of unblemished character, devout, austere, and adorned with all the virtues befitting his state. His figure is undoubtedly a picturesque and an interesting one. He was a man of brilliant parts--shrewd, quick-witted, eager, possessed of no ordinary mental activity and of a wonderful aptitude for business. During the short period of his reign he found time to reform the criminal procedure of his own patrimony--Hainault; to readjust the tolls and custom tariffs of Ghent and of Bruges; to abrogate in the latter city the iniquitous law '_de vino Comitis_,' which ordained that the town should furnish wine for the Count's household at a fixed price, often below the market value; to concede to Bruges, on August 14, 1200, the right to annually hold, during the month of May, a fair--a greater boon in those days than it is now; to busy himself with compiling sundry histories--really the chronicles of his native land--which afterwards went by the name of _Histoires de Baudouin_; to abolish many abuses; to cut the claws of usurers, and to purge, alas! by fire, his domain of heresy. He was not only a lover of learning and of learned men, but a ready writer himself, as witness the letters he addressed from Constantinople to the King of France and to the Pope--letters replete with valuable information concerning the Latin Conquest of that city. His career as a soldier, too, was not inglorious. He made successful war on the French King and wrested from him the greater part of the province of Artois, and his brilliant action in the East led to the fall of Constantinople and to his own election to the throne of the Greek Empire; but the glory of his purple robe, and the glory of his sword, and the glory of his achievements as a citizen and a prince, pale before the weird legend of love and crime and Nemesis which chronicles his latter days. It reads like a fairy tale and comes to us on the authority of the last and greatest of our monastic historians: Matthew Paris, the famous scribe of St. Alban's.