of Constantinople consent to
give up all the differences with the Roman Catholic Church, and own the
Pope as superior to him. This made the Greeks angry, and they could not
bear to see their young emperor so familiar with the French knights, whom
they looked on as barbarians. One day he was seen with a Frenchman's cap
on his head, and his own crown lying on the ground at his feet. In great
anger the people of Constantinople rose, under a man named Alexius Ducas,
called "Black-brows," murdered the two emperors, and set up this new one;
but he did not reign long, for the French and Venetians were close at
hand. There was a second siege, and when the city was taken they
plundered it throughout, stripped it of all the wealth they could
collect, and set up Baldwin, Count of Flanders, to be emperor, with a
Latin Patriarch; while the Venetians helped themselves to all the
southern part of the empire, namely, the Peloponnesus and the Greek
islands; and a French nobleman named Walter de Brienne was created Duke
of Athens, under the Flemish emperor.

[Picture: Promontory of Actium]

It was then that so many of the old Greek places took the names we now
see them called by in the map, and which were mostly given by the
Venetian seamen. They called the Peloponnesus the Morea, or
Mulberry-leaf, because it was in that shape; they called the island of
Euboea, Negropont, or Black-bridge; the AEgean Sea, the Archipelago, or
Great Sea; and the Euxine, the Black Sea, because it is so dangerous.
The Greeks hated their new masters very much, and would not conform to
the Roman Catholic Church. A new Greek empire was set up in Asia Minor,
at Nicea; and after the Latin emperor Baldwin had been lost in a battle
with the Bulgarians, and great troubles swept away his successors, the
emperors returned to Constantinople, under Michael Palaeologus, in 1261,
and drove out all the Franks, as the Greeks called the Western people,
chiefly French and Italians, who had come to settle in their cities.

But the Venetians still held the cities in the greater part of the Morea,
and some of the islands, and traded all over the East and West, though
their Greek subjects were only kept under by main force, still held to
their own Greek Church, and looked to the Roman Emperor of the East, as
they called the Palaeologus at Constantinople, as their head; nor was it
easy to overpower people who had so many mountain fastnesses, nor to tame