UPON Philip’s death in 1191, without children, the country finally devolved on his sister Marguerite, who, as we have seen, had married Baldwin of Mons, the representative of the dynasty of Baldwin the Good. She only reigned three years, and was succeeded by her son Baldwin of Constantinople, who thus united the rival dynasties in his person.

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.

On the morrow of Ash Wednesday, 1199, a great multitude thronged the Church of St. Donatian’s at Bruges. Count Baldwin was to take the cross. The scene in the old church, old even in those days, was a solemn and a striking one. Within those walls which had witnessed so many tragedies and stirring deeds was gathered the Élite of Flanders—the flower of Flemish chivalry was there, the household of the sovereign and of his consort, Marie of Champagne, and a host of wealthy citizens in holiday attire. Ranged on each side of the altar stood the famous canons of Bruges, in their long white linen rochets and purple veils, in front of them two choirs of singing boys from St. Donatian’s school. The great bell tolled as if for a funeral, perhaps that same great bell which five centuries later fell from its lofty tower, and for fifty years lay buried beneath the dÉbris of the cathedral, and now sends forth its melodious voice from the steeple of Notre Dame.

Thus plaintively the first choir, and then with a shout of triumph the men and boys on the opposite side of the chancel made response:—

‘Receive this symbol,’ murmured the Archbishop of Tournai as he fastened to Baldwin’s breast a white linen cross embroidered with threads of gold, ‘receive this symbol in memory of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and of the cross on which He died.’ When Marie of Champagne besought the aged prelate to place also on her breast the Crusaders’ sign, a shout of admiration, and perhaps too of dismay, burst from the crowd. Marie was so tender and so beautiful, and the way of the Cross was so hard—pray God that her end be not like that of the ill-fated Countess Sybil.

Baldwin set out for the East in the spring of 1203, Marie, who was then laid by in childbed, followed towards the close of the month, but she never saw her husband again. It happened thus. That shrewd old fox, Dandolo of Venice, taking advantage of the poverty of the Crusaders, compelled them to undertake for him a campaign against Zara, by way of payment for their transport to Palestine. Then came the conquest of Constantinople and the founding of the Latin Empire, and the elevation of Baldwin himself to the imperial throne (April 9, 1204). Meanwhile Marie had gone on to Syria and was there awaiting her lord. Presently, with the summer heat, plague swept the land, and Marie herself fell sick. When she was lying at death’s door, the news of Baldwin’s good fortune reached the town, and it was perhaps in reply to some inquiry of hers as to the cause of his long tarrying, that her attendants informed her that the erst Count of Flanders was now Emperor of Rome, and then the end came.

Baldwin was now at the zenith of his glory. From a petty tributary chief of a tribe of semi-barbarians, he had been raised to the throne of a great and civilized empire; but the tide of fortune was soon to turn, and Marie’s death was the first drop in the bitter chalice that fate was mingling for him. In less than a year the discontent of the Greeks broke out in open rebellion. Joannice of Bulgaria had promised them help, and with a huge army, reinforced by a horde of Tartars, he laid siege to Adrianople. Baldwin marched to relieve the town, and fell wounded, perhaps slain, before its walls. Of what had actually befallen the Emperor nothing was certainly known. Some of his comrades were sure they had seen his dead body, others were equally sure that he had been taken alive. The Bishop of Soissons set out for France to gather funds for ransom. Henry of Flanders had recourse to the good offices of the Pope, who at once sent an embassy to Joannice to treat for Baldwin’s release. Vain request. ‘The Emperor,’ averred the King of the Bulgarians, ‘had paid Nature’s debt—debitum carnis exsoluerat.’

Twenty years later some wood-cutters of Plancques, a village in the heart of the great forest which in those days stretched from Tournai to Valenciennes, discovered in an unfrequented glade, by the banks of a stream, a rude hut of osiers, thatched with turf, which they were sure they had not seen there before. It was the home of a long-bearded, white-haired old man, with a face covered with scars. Of his antecedents they could learn nothing. ‘I am but a poor Christian,’ he said, ‘doing penance for my sins,’ but there was something in his voice and bearing which belied his words. Not a few of the Crusaders, on their return from the East, had put on the black robe of St. Benedict or the brown frock of the poor man of Assisi—some of them were known to have chosen a solitary life, and to have hidden themselves in forests or caves, and the village gossips, over their ale, whispered to one another that of these the mysterious hermit was surely one. The peasant folk from the neighbouring villages flocked out to visit him; some of them had in their youth set eyes on the hero of Constantinople, and these men were convinced that, in the garb of a poor recluse, they now beheld him again, and presently it was noised abroad that Baldwin had come back to Flanders. At length the rumour reached the ears of a former comrade-in-arms, a friend who had known him well, Everard de Montagne, the powerful Lord of GlanÇon. He at once set out for the hermit’s cell, saw the old man, and was convinced of his identity—so too Sohier of Enghien, Arnulph of Gavre, Bourchard d’Avesnes (the ill-fated husband of Baldwin’s daughter, the future Countess Marguerite), and a hundred others who had been intimate with him. But the hermit would vouchsafe no answer, and when they pressed him, returned only evasive replies. ‘Are ye, then, like the Breton folk,’ he said, ‘who still look for the coming of Arthur?’ Presently a deputation of citizens went out to the hermitage from Valenciennes; they greeted him with shouts of acclamation. ‘Thou art our Count, thou art our Count!’ they cried, and, in spite of the old man’s protest, they carried him back with them to the city. Then at last Baldwin declared himself. They had rightly divined his secret; he was indeed the Count of Flanders.

The story of his adventures is a strange one. Wounded at the siege of Adrianople and sick almost to death, he had been taken prisoner by the Bulgarians. During the early days of his captivity a lady of the Court chanced to see him, perhaps the King’s daughter herself. She was interested in his story, he was still young and handsome, and she gave him her heart. The Emperor feigned to reciprocate her passion, and her devotion knew no bounds; to save him, and, for his sake too, his comrades, she was ready to risk her life. A plan of escape was devised. By her aid it was successfully carried out and they all fled together.

Baldwin, however, did not marry the Bulgarian princess. The heroine who had rescued him was a Pagan woman, he was a disciple of Christ; but before they fled they had mutually plighted their troth—she to receive baptism at the first opportune moment, he, when this had been accomplished, to make her his wife.

When the time for fulfilling their pledges came, it found the infidel true to her vow, the Christian eager to be quit of his.

Was there no loophole? He took counsel with his Flemish friends. The Emperor was bound, they said, by his oath, but there was a gleam of hope; haply this Gentile woman would go the way of all flesh before she had accomplished hers.

Baldwin took the hint. On the eve of her intended baptism the hapless princess died. Retribution quickly followed. The murderer was presently entrapped by barbarians, who carried him off for a slave. Seven times he was sold from hand to hand, kicks and blows were his portion and indignities of every kind.

One day, when he was harnessed to a cart like some beast of burthen, he fell in with a company of German merchants who, learning his tale, had pity on him, and purchased his release. Filled with remorse at what he had done, he at once set out for Rome and confessed his sins to the Pope, who imposed on him a life-long penance. He then made his way back to his native land, and went and hid himself in the forest of GlanÇon.

Strange as it may seem, the knights and burghers of Valenciennes believed the old man’s tale, and stranger still, in their pity for his great misfortune, they forgot his great crime. They put on him a purple robe and thrust a sceptre into his hand, and called him father and chief. For them he was the hero of Constantinople, the sovereign who had showered blessings on them all, the Christian who had suffered long years of anguish at the hands of heathen men. In their eyes, the red aureole of martyrdom already glowed about his head, and they begged locks of his hair for relics, and treasured up the water in which he had bathed.

It was the same throughout the realm. The men of Flanders everywhere remembered that they had loved Baldwin and they all knew that they hated Jeanne, and now Baldwin the beloved was in the midst of them again. The evil days of his daughter had become as a tale that was told. Wherever he went he was greeted with wild demonstrations of joy. The great towns of Flanders received him with open arms. His journey from city to city was one long triumphal progress. Presently he reached Bruges, and here at Pentecost he held his Court, and, clad in imperial robes, with his own hands armed ten knights.

But this was not all. The neighbouring sovereigns acknowledged his claim. The ambassadors of the Duke of Limbourg and the Duke of Brabant waited on him in the capital, and Henry III. of England (April 11, 1225) sent to ‘his very dear friend Baldwin’ letters of greeting, of congratulation, and of sage advice. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that the King of France hath despoiled both the one and the other of us; let us therefore make a league together against him.’

If Baldwin had taken up the thread of his old policy, and allied himself with England, his course of action would probably have been crowned with the success of former days, but he was now a broken-down old man, cowed with long years of servitude and the memory of a great crime, he had neither the courage nor the energy to do so, but fatuously threw himself into the arms of the very man against whom Henry had warned him.

In the midst of the unlooked-for good fortune which had up to now attended the enterprise which the hermit of Plancques had been so loth to undertake, one circumstance was a cause of no little grief and disquietude; his daughter had refused to recognize him, and had fled to France, and though the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand, it presaged, he foresaw, a deluge which would perhaps sweep him away.

In his trouble and confusion he turned a willing ear to the false counsel of his sister the Lady of Beaujeu,[19] who urged him to take the wind out of Jeanne’s sails by himself confiding in the French King, who, thanks to her good offices, was disposed in his favour. Baldwin fell into the trap. Louis sent him a safe conduct, and towards the close of June he set out for PÉronne, where Louis was at that time holding his Court.

His entry into the city on the evening of July 4 was a vision of Eastern splendour. All glorious in purple and gold, with his crown on his head, and a white wand in his hand, they bore him aloft on men’s shoulders in a comely litter. Before him was carried the imperial cross, and a retinue of over a hundred gorgeously-attired knights followed in his train. At the palace gates Louis himself came out to greet him. ‘Welcome, sire,’ said the French King, ‘if thou art indeed mine uncle Baldwin, Count of Flanders.’ ‘Fair nephew,’ quavered the old man, ‘such in sooth am I, but my daughter doth not know me, and would fain take away mine heritage; prithee help me to keep it.’ Louis had already decided on the course he would pursue, and already agreed with Jeanne as to the price of his championship, but he deemed it prudent for the moment to disguise his intentions, and the Emperor was soon entertained at a sumptuous banquet, during which he again recited the story of his adventures, and with such good effect that many of those who heard him were moved to tears.

Presently the royal Council was summoned, and Baldwin was invited to plead his cause. He consented to do so, and it became clear that the solemn reception accorded him had been from the first a solemn farce. In inviting Baldwin to PÉronne, the French King had but one object in view—to separate him from his friends—and in now affecting the appearance of a serious examination of his claim, his only desire was to discredit it. At last, after having endured much brow-beating and hectoring speech, the Emperor refused to answer any more questions; the hour was late, he said, and he had that day been greatly fatigued; on the morrow he would be ready to converse again. But the wary old man had no intention of keeping his word; he now fully realized the danger of his position. In coming to PÉronne he had made a false move; his liberty, perhaps his life, was in peril, and he cast about him for some means of escape. Fortune was once more kind to him, and that very night he took horse and fled the city.

When he reached his own dominions he was greeted with the same wild demonstrations of joy which had at first hailed his coming. But if the great heart of the people still throbbed for Baldwin, the classes were no longer with him. He soon learnt that the sheriffs of Bruges and of other great towns had accepted Jeanne’s amnesty, and that even the picked knights who had accompanied him to PÉronne had played him false, and he lost heart. There was no peace for him in this world save in a life of penance. He had slain the woman who loved him, the woman who had risked her life for his sake, and her shade would assuredly drive him back to his hermitage or to the gallows.

The cause of this sudden volte-face in favour of Jeanne is difficult to surmise, but corruption had not unlikely something to do with it, for we find in a treaty concluded, at Bapaume a few days later the Countess of Flanders acknowledging that Louis, whose soldiers had not once drawn their swords in her behalf, had expended ten thousand livres in reinstating her in her dominions. Meanwhile Baldwin had disappeared. Some of the few who still clung to him affirmed that he had fled to Germany and had been received with hospitality by Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, who, they averred, had counselled him to go to Rome and lay his case before the Common Father of the faithful. Be this as it may, Baldwin was presently arrested by Baron Erard de Chastenay, at Rougemont in Burgundy, who sold him to Jeanne for four hundred silver marks, and she, filled with savage joy, hanged him in chains on a gibbet at Lille between two hounds.

‘Many of those who knew his story,’ comments Matthew Paris, in his delightful, gossiping way, ‘were convinced that this lot befell the Emperor in consequence of his sin.’ ‘And all those who had promoted it by their advice,’ he adds, ‘in like manner came to a terrible end.’ ‘One of these men, when he returned home to his wife, and had been recognized by her, was cast headlong into a well. She privily procuring the same because in her lord’s absence she had wedded another man, and had borne him children.’ ‘So too of the rest. By some mishap or other they all of them perished miserably, for the wrath of God, who willeth not that evil should be rendered for good, was fiercely enkindled against them.’