The carnage being over, and the spoil distributed, six persons were chosen
from among the Franks and six from among the Venetians, who were to meet
and elect an emperor, previously binding themselves by oath to select the
individual best qualified among the candidates. The choice wavered between
Baldwin count of Flanders and Boniface marquis of Montferrat, but fell
eventually upon the former. He was straightway robed in the imperial
purple, and became the founder of a new dynasty. He did not live long to
enjoy his power, or to consolidate it for his successors, who, in their
turn, were soon swept away. In less than sixty years the rule of the
Franks at Constantinople was brought to as sudden and disastrous a
termination as the reign of Murzuphlis: and this was the grand result of
the fifth Crusade.

Pope Innocent III., although he had looked with no very unfavourable eye
upon these proceedings, regretted that nothing had been done for the
relief of the Holy Land; still, upon every convenient occasion, he
enforced the necessity of a new Crusade. Until the year 1213, his
exhortations had no other effect than to keep the subject in the mind of
Europe. Every spring and summer detachments of pilgrims continued to set
out for Palestine to the aid of their brethren, but not in sufficient
numbers to be of much service. These periodical passages were called the
_passagium Martii_, or the passage of March, and the _passagium Johannis_,
or the passage of the festival of St. John. These did not consist entirely
of soldiers, armed against the Saracen, but of pilgrims led by devotion,
and in performance of their vows, bearing nothing with them but their
staff and their wallet. Early in the spring of 1213 a more extraordinary
body of Crusaders was raised in France and Germany. An immense number of
boys and girls, amounting, according to some accounts, to thirty thousand,
were incited by the persuasion of two monks to undertake the journey to
Palestine. They were no doubt composed of the idle and deserted children
who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured in vice and daring, and
ready for any thing. The object of the monks seems to have been the
atrocious one of inveigling them into slave-ships, on pretence of sending
them to Syria, and selling them for slaves on the coast of Africa.[19]
Great numbers of these poor victims were shipped at Marseilles; but the
vessels, with the exception of two or three, were wrecked on the shores o