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This remarkable dynasty came to an inglorious end in 1258, when its last representative was murdered by his own nobles, and from this time onwards Bulgaria was only a shadow of its former self. The Serbian Supremacy and the Final Collapse, 1258-1393
From 1258 onwards Bulgaria may be said to have continued flickering until its final extinction as a state in 1393, but during this period it never had any voice in controlling the destinies of the Balkan peninsula.
The ten years from 1248 to 1258 saw the continuance of the misgovernment, discontent, and futile opposition which have already been sufficiently illustrated. The history of those years must be sought not so much in the relations of the king and his English subjects as in Gascony, in Wales, in the crusading revival, and in the culmination of the struggle of papacy and empire.
Possessing peculiar gifts as a versatile liar and boneless coward, and being entirely free from the milk of human kindness or bowels of compassion, his remains were eagerly sought after and yearned for by scientists long before he decided to abandon them. Again, in 1258, he was required to submit to the requests of the barons; but they required too much this time, and a civil war followed.
These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.
The French championship of Alfonso against Richard achieved the double end of checking English pretensions, and cooling the friendship between England and Castile. St. Louis, however, was always ready to treat for peace, while the revolution of 1258 made all parties in England anxious to put a speedy end to the unsettled relations between the two realms.
In the summer of 1258, while the great change was going on, a thunderstorm drove the king as he passed along the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no fear of the storm. The king refused with petulant wit. "If I fear the thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world."
At this point the rigid conceptions of the triumphant oligarchy stood in the way of a wide national policy. Since the reign of John the custom had arisen of consulting the representatives of the shire-courts on matters of politics and finance. In 1258 there is not the least trace of a suggestion that parliament could ever include a more popular element than the barons and prelates.
He had filled his castle with free lances, whose very presence forced him to a life of brigandage, for they must be paid, and work must be found them, or he could not hold them in hand. He had a squire after his own heart, named Raoul of Blois, who had come to England in the train of one of the king's foreign favourites, and escaped the general sentence of expulsion passed at Oxford in 1258.
But little use, however, seems to have been made of this, for Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, when on a visit to Roger Bacon in 1258, states that the friar had shown him the magnet and its properties, but adds that, however useful the discovery, "no master mariner would dare to use it, lest he should be thought to be a magician."
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