Blessed Henry of Asti

Henry of Asti (Enrico d'Asti, also seen as Enrico Comentina; died 17 January 1345) was the titular Latin Catholic patriarch of Constantinople from 1339 and bishop of Negroponte in Frankish Greece. His fame rests on his leadership of the first Smyrniote crusade (1342–45), on which he died. In February 1341, Pope Benedict XII ordered him to receive some procurators representing the Catalan Grand Company, which wished to return to "the bosom of the mother Church". In 1342, Henry negotiated an alliance between King Hugh IV of Cyprus and the Knights Hospitaler against the Turkish ruler Umur Beg of Aydin. On 2 November 1342, he delivered a papal letter to the doge of Venice, Bartolomeo Gradenigo, asking him to join the league and appointing Cardinal Guillaume Court apostolic legate to Venice. On 31 August, Pope Clement VI officially named Henry his legate for the upcoming crusade against Smyrna, "because of the great and important business [he conducted] in Greece". He was to travel, as commander-in-chief, with the Genoese fleet under Martino Zaccaria, who was named captain-general, but whom Henry had authority to remove if need be. In the summer of 1343, the Duke John I of the Archipelago informed Henry in a letter that he wished to supply a galley to the expedition. On 21 October 1343, Henry was charged with keeping the peace in the Duchy of Athens between the ducal claimant Count Walter VI of Brienne and the occupying forces of the Catalan Company, with whom he had previous experience from 1341. As the crusade dragged on into 1344, Henry wrote to the pope describing its "fortunate progress" and the pope responded, in a letter dated 25 July, by thanking the Hospitaler grand master, Hélion de Villeneuve, for the assistance he was giving the crusade. On 18 September the pope ordered Henry to prevent Zaccaria from re-conquering the Lordship of Chios, which his family had lost to the Byzantines after an internal rebellion.