the fleet himself. When he had got the money, he allowed the ships to rot in harbour. Not content with ruining his navy, he proceeded to abandon the central system of army administration, by means of which his father had rendered the military force of the Eastern empire the strongest in the world. He distributed his troops in cities and provinces far apart, where they lost their discipline and their confidence. We need not attempt to follow this prince through a career full of strange vicissitudes. He fought with Raymond of Antioch, with Roger of Sicily, with the Venetians, with the Slavonian princes of Servia and Dalmatia, and with the Hungarians. He joined King Amaury of Jerusalem in his mad project to realise a Christian caliphate in Cairo. He was totally and shamefully defeated by the Turks at Myriokephalon, near Laodicea.
The great defect of his reign is that to which all despots and monarchies are especially liable. It was impossible for him personally to superintend everything. His servants were corrupt; the prodigality of his court, which he did not create, but inherited, was far beyond the resources of the empire; and Manuel was unable to see that by immediate and sweeping reforms alone could this great unwieldy structure, already tottering, be saved from failing.
Manuel's son, Alexius II., was only thirteen years of age when his father died. For the first two years of his reign the court was troubled by the perpetual intrigues of the cousins and relations of the emperor for the post of protosebastos. Nor were the intrigues confined only
