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During the century preceding the reign of Andrew II, King of Hungary, which began in 1205, that country had been engaged in frequent wars with Venice over the possession of Dalmatia, but no event of recent years had given much importance to Hungarian history.

From 1205 we find Venice supreme, and she remained so for nearly a hundred and fifty years, with an interval of Byzantine rule. It was the headquarters of effort for the conversion of the Slavs, which explains the gifts made to its churches by Servian kings and nobles.

The title of Earl of Ulster, created for de Courcy in 1181, was transferred in 1205, by royal patent, to Walter de Lacy, whose only daughter Maud brought it in the year 1264 to Walter de Burgh, lord of Connaught, from whose fourth female descendant it passed in 1354, by her marriage with Lionel, Duke of Clarence, into the royal family of England.

Probably after his return to England he served for a brief period on the staff of Archbishop Hubert Walter, after whose death in 1205, but at an unknown period, Gilbert returned once more to the Continent, where it seems probable he spent the remainder of his life.

Two only remained in the end, both devoted more to the king than to the Church; John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, employed during most of the time in secular business in Ireland, and Peter des Roches, appointed Bishop of Winchester in 1205, destined to play a leading part against the growing liberties of the nation in the next reign, and now, as a chronicler says, occupied less with defending the Church than in administering the king's affairs.

The account we have says that many took the cross, such was the effect of his words, more likely of the man and what he was and had been in the sight of them all throughout his long life. To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205 a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that country.

Already the leaders of the crusade, who only three years before had set sail so proudly from Venice, were dead or on the point of death: Baldwin murdered in captivity; the Count of Blois killed on the field of battle; Dandolo dead, at the age, say some writers, of a hundred, in the year 1205; the Marquis of Montferrat about to be slain in an obscure skirmish with the barbarous Bulgarians.

The family of Zeno, in Venice, was very ancient, and not only of the highest rank of nobility, but celebrated for the performance of great actions, and the highest offices of the state had been filled from time immemorial by persons of the family. About the year 1200, Marin Zeno assisted in the conquest of Constantinople, and he was Podesta, or governor of that city, about 1205.

Bale, Pits and Leland, the earliest English biographers, tell us that Gilbert, after the completion of his studies in England, proceeded to the Continent to enlarge his education, and finally became physician to the great Justiciar, Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, who died in the year 1205. This would place him under the reign of King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century.

The democratic party even drove the Pope from the city for a time; but by 1205, Innocent, by apparent concessions and the use of bribery, had won his end. Meanwhile an even more important movement had been accomplished. The centre of the peninsula outside the Patrimony of St. Peter was in the hands Of Henry VI's German followers.