a one-year truce with the Latin Emperor Baldwin II that August. Realizing that he needed a navy to effectively besiege Constantinople, Michael concluded the Treaty of Nymphaeum with Genoa in March of the following year. Genoese help proved to be unneeded when Michael VIII's general Alexios Strategopoulos captured Constantinople from Baldwin II through treachery on 25 July 1261. News of the captured city first reached Michael's sister Eulogia Palaiologina, who awoke her brother at dawn. He was not convinced until a messenger arrived from Strategopoulos bearing the crown and sword Baldwin had abandoned in his flight from his palace. Michael VIII entered the city on 15 August and had himself crowned emperor. Once in control of Constantinople, Michael abolished all Latin customs and reinstated most Byzantine ceremonies and institutions as they had existed before the Fourth Crusade. He repopulated the capital, building its population from when he took power to by the end of his reign, and restored damaged churches, monasteries, and public buildings. He was acutely aware of the danger posed by the possibility that the Latin West, particularly his neighbors in Italy, would unite against him and attempt the restoration of Latin rule in Constantinople. John IV had remained at Nicaea, largely eclipsed by Michael. According to Akropolites, the public had never really viewed John as emperor - his name was virtually stricken from government business after the death of his father Theodore II, and he had not featured in Michael’s coronation ceremony as co-ruler. In December 1261 Michael VIII took the final step of having John blinded and relegated to a monastery, rendering him permanently ineligible for the throne. Michael quickly married off John's sisters to two Italians and a Bulgarian noble, so their descendants could not threaten his own children's claim to the imperial succession. Michael tried to keep the blinding of John a secret, keeping up a pretense that the boy’s formal coronation had merely been postponed. Eventually the news leaked out, and Patriarch Arsenios Autoreianos excommunicated Michael VIII. This ban was not lifted until six years later (1268) on the appointment of patriarch Joseph I. Diplomacy and conquest In the words of Geanaklopos, "With the fall of Constantinople, the papacy suffered not only a loss of political prestige but severe damage to its spiritual authority as well. For the Greeks had now effectively reasserted their right to a church divorced from Rome. Thus it