as a place of exile for the general and rebel Bardas Skleros, who unsuccessfully tried to oust Byzantine Emperor Basil II. Bardas and his brother Constantine died there in March 991. In winter 1100/01, Alexios I Komnenos allowed the Lombards of the Crusade of 1101 to resupply at the city. During the 12th century, members of the Petraliphas family are known to have lived in the city. On 24 November 1189, the city was captured and largely destroyed by the forces of the Third Crusade under Frederick VI, Duke of Swabia, who had captured Adrianople two days before. In the 1198 chrysobull granted to the Republic of Venice, Didymoteicho and Adrianople are mentioned as forming a single province. In 1205, French writer Geoffroi de Villehardouin wrote of the important of the city, referring to Didymoteicho “was the most powerful and one of the richest Romanic cities”. Following the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in April 1204, the new Latin Emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, garrisoned the city in summer, but it was soon after surrendered by a local Greek to Baldwin's rival, Boniface of Montferrat, who held it in ransom until his claims against Baldwin were satisfied. In the Partitio Romaniae the city belonged to the portion accorded to the individual Crusaders. The city was finally given as a fief to Hugh IV of Saint Pol. In February 1205, however, the locals rose up in revolt in Didymoteicho, Adrianople and other cities, evicted their Latin garrisons, and acknowledged the suzerainty of the Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan. Baldwin of Flanders responded by marching into Thrace and besieging Adrianople, but at the subsequent Battle of Adrianople (14 April 1205) the Latin army suffered a crushing defeat and Baldwin was taken prisoner. The city, effectively autonomous, served as a place of refuge for the local population fleeing the depredations of Kalojan following his victory. A Latin siege of the city was broken up in September 1205 due to a flood of the Evros (or the Erythropotamos), but after Kalojan's massacres of the inhabitants of the cities of Serres and Philippopolis, the Thracian cities turned to the new regent of the Latin Empire, Henry of Flanders (). Thus in early 1206 Didymoteicho and Adrianople submitted to the Greek lord Theodore Branas, who was in the Latin Emperor's service. Kalojan besieged Didymoteicho in early summer, and was on the point of taking the city when